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Andrew Permenter
Director of Institutional Effectiveness
Assistant Professor of Practical Theology
E-mail Professor Permenter

BA of geography, Georgia State University
MDiv, Oral Roberts University
DMin, Columbia Theological Seminary

Biography

Dr. Andrew Permenter brings 20 years of experience as a pastor and missionary to the religion classes he teaches at Southeastern.  Originally ordained in the United Methodist Church in 1986, he has also pastored in Assemblies of God, Presbyterian, and independent congregations, serving churches in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas.  Also, as Director of Missions for Global Servants, Inc., from 1995 to 2001, Dr. Permenter founded and built scores of churches and bible schools.  He has traveled, preached, and taught extensively throughout the United States, Latin America, Africa, and the Far East.

Dr. Permenter is interested in challenging students to apply the gospel to the context of their everyday lives, and he finds that modern evangelicalism has deemphasized the social context of the Gospel as a transforming agent in the world.  Faith, rather than being kept sealed up in the “religion” box, must be integrated into all aspects of life.

Dr. Permenter’s dissertation “The Pentecostal Movement and Ecumenism:  Origins and Trends” notes early Pentecostalism’s vitality as an experientially-based unity movement functioning outside the structures of organized Christianity.  Pentecostalism’s strength was in its trans-denominational, trans-ethnic, trans-gender, trans-socio-economic appeal. Dr. Permenter says that hierarchical structures and doctrinal imperatives soon permeated and overshadowed Pentecostalism’s original experiential ethos, but he is encouraged that that ethos has re-emerged in countless renewal movements over the last 100 years.  Dr. Permenter says that “the in-breaking voice of God always challenges the status-quo.”

Dr. Permenter teaches Christian Spirituality, and his research interests are in the social aspects of the gospel and Christian ecumenism.