I’m leaving my church.
More than that in fact, I’m also moving away from the charismatic movement in which I have spent the vast majority of my nine years as a Christian. This is a huge and scary shift for me, and it has happened for so many reasons and over such a long period of time that there’s way I can go into it all here. In fact I’m not sure I even understand it all myself, I think it’s one of those things I will understand and evaluate more fully many years from now. What follows are just a few snapshots and impressions from my time within the charismatic movement in general and New Frontiers International in particular. Although there are plenty of negatives in my experience, this is not a personal or bitter attack on the organisations involved.
It all started just over a year ago at the UK’s biggest annual charismatic knees-up known as Faith Camp. It was the sort of big, extravagant, super-meeting that I’d been to all my Christian life. The meetings were kind of a blur, there was lots of singing and shouting and much talk of ‘anointing’, ‘breakthrough’, ‘the next level’, ‘overflow’, and so on. There were also the annual flurry of prophecies predicting a coming revival, chastisement for those in the traditional churches who were blocking the current ‘move of God’ that was about to sweep the nation, and so on. I was sat in an arena with 7,000 other people listening to this, and whilst they were all on their feet cheering, applauding and Amen-ing for minutes on end, I remained sat in my seat, completely unmoved and (dare I say it?) BORED. I was thinking WHERE WAS GOD IN ALL THIS? WHY DO I FEEL SO ALIENATED FROM THE ENTHUSIASM AND PASSION EXHIBITED IN THOSE AROUND ME? For years I had considered this kind of behaviour and worship to be par for the course as an ‘on-fire’ Christian (and if you’ve been in charismatic circles for more than 5 minutes you’ll know what I mean by ‘on fire’) but now it just seemed, well, WEIRD. I’d been feeling a bit sure about those kind of things for a while, but that week at Faith Camp certainly seemed to mark a beginning of transition in my spiritual life.
This was something of a watershed for me and marked a change of direction in my discipleship that has now culminated in me leaving the church I’ve been at since I moved to Manchester. A few years ago I would have been to meetings like the one at Faith Camp and been the first one down at the front for prayer, and if there was even a tiny little sin I thought I might have committed I’d be sure to make a ‘recommitment’ just in case I died in my sleep that night and wound up in hell because I’d denied Jesus by not going down to the front to be prayed for at the end of every rousing sermon about the new thing that God was about to do in these last days, and so on. It’s crazy, but that’s how I lived and breathed my Christian life for a great many years, but now those days are behind me, and maybe for good too I think.
The evangelical-charismatic tradition I belong to unfortunately has a tendency to ignore two areas of supreme importance that I believe will cripple it in the long run. The first is almost complete and often wilful ignorance of anything that has happened in Church history. There is of course the oft-repeated mantra the charismatic church is attempting to ‘get back’ to the book of Acts (by which they mean the prominence of signs and wonders, speaking in tongues etc) and so there is a sense in which they have a sense of (very selective) historical continuity – but with a gap of about 2,000 years in between. In practice though, it is as if God did nothing inbetween the early church and the mid-twentieth century.
There is a hunger for the ‘latest move of God’ and ‘the NOW word of God’ in preaching, but almost never any reference to any of those who have gone before us, the struggles they faced in prayer and mission, the lessons they learned and the insights they offer, and so on.
WHAT ABOUT THE HISTORICAL CHURCH?
Following directly from this belief is an almost complete disregard for any other historical denominations. Other churches are viewed with suspicion as being ‘dead’ or ‘traditional’ (presupposing the ridiculous false dichotomy that where there is tradition, there cannot be spiritual vitality) and that while those who attend ‘traditional’ churches may not be damned entirely, their spirituality is certainly suspect and they are definitely not surfing along on the latest wave of God’s Spirit. My own decision to start attending a non-charismatic church will be (and already is) viewed by some as being tantamount to apostasy in what is a charismatic version of the old Roman Catholic dogma EXTRA ECCLESIUM NULLA SALUS (no salvation outside of the church) though it is infinitely less well-informed and in any case anyone who thinks they have a corner on where God’s Spirit is and isn’t working should read John 3 and think again. The cross of Christ, not the gifts of the Spirit, is the unifying point for Christians, and Christ’s own prayer that all his followers should be one refutes any attempt by those who follow him to divide from and decry other parts of the body of Christ.
THE IMPORTANCE OF INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT AS A PART OF FAITH IS OFTEN OVERLOOKED
The other extremely serious tendency of the charismatics is a profoundly felt anti-intellectualism. Intellectualism has not always benefited the church, but anti-intellectualism is a thousand times more damaging. So-called ‘head-knowledge’ is rejected and ‘heart-knowledge’ is preferred instead (the preference for inner feeling over objective revelation being purest liberalism of course!) I was once told by someone that I needed to have a ‘spirit of theology’ cast out of me (really) because intellectual study of the scriptures was detrimental to faith (tell that to Paul, or Augustine, or Luther…) and would surely lead to me to be afflicted by one of the many demons that seemingly hide behind every bush and inside every textbook. How do you respond to a leader who says that to you without so much as a hint of irony? How am I to worship God with all my mind as Jesus commands if there is a mentality in church which views the mind as an evil to be bypassed in favour of a more ‘supernatural’ wisdom and understanding?
I find it really hard that if I suggest that I don’t believe in a literal six-day creation on both biblical and theological grounds, my faith and ‘on-fireness’ are called into question, or that if I mention that not all the Gospels were written by eyewitnesses, people begin to question whether or not I ‘really believe the Bible’. Granted, you don’t have to be Karl Barth or a latter-day St. Paul to be a Christian, but I think that the majority of Christians in the ‘bible-believing’ churches are educated in Sunday School as children and intellectually their faith stays there throughout their whole adult life. I can hear grumbling after that last point, but please understand my heart here. I’m not belittling the ‘simple faith’ of the earnest Christian, but I would oppose wholeheartedly a simplistic faith that never asks any questions, never changes its mind and never bothers to learn anything beyond Bible ABC.
I am inherently curious and ask questions about everything, and I hope I always will. But I want to be in a church where I can ask questions too. I don’t mean the subversive and divisive questions that come from a prideful attitude, but ones that cause us to change and remould our faith and draw us closer to God. I feel as though I cannot ask these questions without being fobbed off or muffled, and when I’ve raised any suggestions and critique of the church I’m told that I have a problem in my relationship with God. I need to give more, pray more, go to more cell group meetings, and so on.
The end result is that over the last year or so I’ve had to develop a spirituality that is no longer sustaining me or supplementing my contribution to the church, my prayer life and fellowship is now having to help me to SURVIVE church, which should make it obvious that there is something severely wrong somewhere. I raised this issue with some church leaders but was told that I just needed to give more and get stuck into more activities, but if the truth be told, I have nothing to give because where I am now with God seems so very far removed from the church which I have been a part of for so many years. I feel as though I’m talking a different language, or that I’m from another time in history.
MIRACLESSSSSSSSSA!
There are of course many good things about the family of churches to which I belong. Notable bloggers Adrian Warnock and Mark Heath belong to the same group of churches, although I feel that in the long term where the charismatic movement is headed and where I am headed are not in the same direction. There are still many great things about the charismatic movement however. For instance, the openness and belief in God’s power to heal today, the readiness to speak and hear prophetic words, to speak and praise in tongues, and so on.
These practices are distinctive of the charismatic movement as it seeks to be in tune with the Holy Spirit, though funnily enough it is in this area where I have the most concern. There is much talk of the ‘supernatural’ and ‘miracles’, though these terms are actually quite misleading I think. In the Enlightenment, God became a remote god, a kind of absentee landlord who was ‘up there’ somewhere in heaven, far removed from events here in the ‘natural’ realm. There was scepticism about the reality of miracles, healings, and so forth. Miracles however proved the reality of the supernatural, and they proved that there definitely was a God. If you like, the ‘supernatural’ was a divine action plunging vertically out of eternity and into history before withdrawing back up to heaven.
The terminology ‘supernatural’ (as opposed to ‘natural’) originates out of this mindset, but it is not a biblical one. The Holy Spirit is not the power of eternity popping in and out of history to fix the otherwise unfixable, the Holy Spirit is a deposit guaranteeing what is to come, and a foretaste of the power of the AGE TO COME. What I mean is, the activity of the Holy Spirit is all eschatological activity, pointing to the coming Kingdom of God, pointing forwards. We are not flapping about in the present trying to get a taste of the ‘supernatural’ to ‘prove’ the other-wordly power of God, the healings, prophecies, and worship of the charismatics ought to be inseparably bound up with the proclamation, mediation and practice of the Kingdom which God has announced is coming. Pursuit of supernatural power without coupling this to the Kingdom of God is throwing away your roadmap to the future. This difference between natural-supernatural v eschatological might seem like hair-splitting, but let me continue in my concerns in this area…
THE WORK OF THE SPIRIT
Everywhere in scripture we see the Spirit of God working at every level of creation, whether it be the awesome sustaining power of the cosmos, or stirring prophets to speak out against godlessness, violence and injustice. The Holy Spirit is involved in every area of the life of the world, and also the whole life of the believer. Yet for all the triumphalism that the charismatics are the only growing church in the UK and are at the cutting edge of what the Spirit is doing, the charismatic movement has had ALMOST NO IMPACT ON THE LIFE OF THE NATION AS A WHOLE. In the life of the church it may be a big splash with dozens of prophetic conferences, special anointings, revival meetings, spiritual warfare seminars and so on, but outside of the church it is barely a drip. Is this what we should expect from the Holy Spirit? To withdraw inside the walls of the Church and have almost nothing to say about the outside world? Is God’s sole desire to take us the next level of ‘breakthrough’ and let the world rot? I do not think so. And yet so often this seems to be the case. The Sunday after the London bombings another ‘anointed’ speaker (there is no shortage of them around) came to preach to tell us all that the time of suffering was at an end, that we were headed for ‘breakthrough’ (they never define what that is, but I really want to know) and so on and so on, but no one uttered a word about the London bombings, or mentioned anything even remotely related to what the entire world was asking about and grieving over. No one has said anything about the Iraq War, or about how the environment is being destroyed, or about the perils facing a society that is so greedy and materialistic, yet I believe that these issues are important to God, and that part of being his church in the power of the Spirit means being involved in these things.
The Holy Spirit is not about MIRACLES and making sure everyone falls over on a Sunday morning. How does that bless the world? How is God glorified if his work in us is not impacting the world he created and loves?
I’m so tired of doing church this way. It is crushingly sterile.
I’m tired of prophetic words predicting a coming revival every week, I’m tired of the weirdos who see a demon hiding in every dark corner, I am weary of prayer meetings that degenerate into nothing more that commanding various unseen spirits to do this and that, of prayer that is nothing more than shouted declarations of victory and lacks any real content or passion. The truth is that I miss encountering God at church. That is not to say he is not there, but that he is made so inaccessible and alien. That worship of Jesus can be so loud and flashy and yet so often be so shallow and dull. It shouldn’t be.
I’m not sure where my story goes from here. I have started attending what may be termed a non-charismatic church, though in so many other ways it is infinitely more in step with the Spirit so many ‘Spirit-filled’ churches are. I may return to the charismatic movement one day, I do not know. I think I hope so, though I am not spiritually strong enough or wise enough to survive there at the time being.