Ruaching All over the World | The Gifts of the Spirit – Part 1

 

As I have already alluded to when talking about the Trinity, there is nothing more mysterious to Christians, than the Holy Spirit. We obviously believe in the Holy Spirit, because we are all good, Bible believing Christians, but we seem to have wildly different ideas and understandings of what, or who the Holy Spirit is. This isn’t surprising, by now it’s apparent that we have wildly different ideas about most faith related things, yet I feel that our beliefs about the Holy Spirit are different, because when we talk about the Holy Spirit, we aren’t talking about our theoretical and intellectual notions of God, we are talking about our real world, personal interactions with God. These individual experiences of the Spirit can be diverse, ranging from a vague sense of God’s presence being with people in some way, through to powerful movements of God, which affect people physically.

 

I have witnessed both extremes. I have been in churches where the leader has invited the Holy Spirit to come, and people have experienced the presence of God quietly resting on them as they have sat there silently in the room, and I have been in churches where the leader has invited the Holy Spirit to come, and people have experienced the presence of God in dramatic ways, causing them to fall over and thrash around on the floor, and laugh uncontrollably.

 

I’m not particularly interested in picking apart people’s individual spiritual experiences. If people believe that they have experienced God in a certain way, then I don’t really think it’s for me or anyone else to judge them, or to rationalise away their experiences. Neither am I interested in questioning the spiritual experiences of larger church communities. The Bible shows us that the Spirit of God is most often at work among larger communities, and so I don’t want to judge those collective spiritual experiences either. However, I am interested in how the Spirit seems to move corporately, on a wider church level.

 

Luke 11:13 says

 

“If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in Heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”.

 

I believe Jesus when he says this, and because of that I believe that when we ask for the Spirit, we receive it. I also believe that we don’t get the final say on how the Spirit of God moves, and where it goes. Sometimes people apparently experience the Spirit in a subtle, barely noticeable way, and others apparently experience it in more powerful or dramatic ways. I believe that God has different purposes for people, and I believe God interacts with them accordingly, and I’m happy to accept that as the way God works. However, I do have some questions, for instance, why does the Spirit always seem to move powerfully in some church denominations, but not in others? Why is a powerful movement of the Spirit almost guaranteed at an evangelical Christian Conference, but not so much in a small provincial parish church on a Sunday morning? Is the Spirit more powerful if there are more people in the room, or more willing to show if certain people are leading the service? Is the Holy Spirit selective in what it does, and will only show up powerfully, for particularly spiritual Christians?

 

My friends and I used to complain when we attended big church conferences, because we would see and feel the Spirit moving in the room in every single meeting we attended, but when we went back to our church, it wasn’t like that at all. We wanted the Spirit, we were broken, angst ridden teenagers who needed to feel that God was with us. I definitely needed to feel that God was with me, walking with me as I dealt with my difficult home life. I wanted a life changing encounter with the Holy Spirit, an encounter that might give me the assurance that I was loved, or that might even take away my aching anxiety. We needed and wanted to experience God, just as we done at these conferences. We were longing for it.

 

I was one of the worship leaders at our church and was involved in many of our services, and we did exactly what they did at conferences like Spring Harvest and Soul Survivor. We would spend time praying before the service and asked that God would meet with people, then during the service we would lead worship with great care and sensitivity towards the Spirit. We would repeat important choruses and refrains that we felt people should focus in on in preparation for the talk, or we would allow space for them to sit with the words they were singing, letting them reach out to God privately. We would hear the talk and then the vicar would invite the Holy Spirit to come, and we would have a time of response. We’d play some quiet instrumental music, I’d add some extra reverb and delay to my guitar, and the keys player would provide some soft string pad, and we would wait for the Holy Spirit to come. People would come to the front for prayer, and some would raise a hand or two, but nothing ever happened like it did at the big conferences. It was all very subdued and to the casual observer, it probably seemed as if nothing was happening. I never saw anyone spontaneously start speaking in tongues and I never saw anyone fall over. Weren’t we worthy of a movement of the Holy Spirit? Were the people in our church the wrong kind of people, Anglicans? Was there insufficient synth pad sound in the song we were playing? Did I need more reverb on my guitar?

 

I’ve been in other churches which seemed exactly the same as that Church, but where the Holy Spirit seemed to come at the drop of a hat, and moved in ways that was scarily powerful. I’ve been in ministry times at those churches where people have been weeping and wailing uncontrollably, yelling and screaming like they are demon possessed, falling over and thrashing on the floor, and even crawling around growling like animals, all apparently in the power of the Holy Spirit.

 

Now that I’m a bit older and wiser, I believe I have a better understanding of why the Spirit moves differently within different churches and denominations. I know that the Spirit moving isn’t dependent on the structure of your service, how you play the worship songs, or what type of effects you use on the instruments. Different churches experience the Spirit more powerfully, because they seek the Spirit more purposefully, and they are more open to the leading of the Holy Spirit. I know this is true for some churches, but I also know that some churches experience apparently powerful movements, which are in fact manipulations and tricks.

 

I don’t think every church that uses trickery to produce supposed manifestations of the Spirit, does so intentionally. I think many churches are in the practice of doing things which they have seen done elsewhere, which have produced results, and so are thought of as being the good and correct practices. I have already described how we tried to recreate the ministry times of the church conferences in our local home church. Like us, I expect many churches have adopted the now familiar worship/talk/ministry time format, from the large Spirit filled church conferences, because it seemed like a good and right way of doing things.

 

It seems appropriate to set apart a time at the end of the service and allow space for the Spirit to come, within a 15-minute window. It seems helpful to people, to get them in the mood and to focus on ministry time by playing soft music. It seems good for the pastor to utter words of prayer or encouragement for people to begin to open up, or to say “Come Holy Spirit” or “More of you Lord”. These can all be manipulations and tricks though. I’m not saying it isn’t important to allow space for the Holy Spirit in our lives, but I don’t think we can really timetable the Holy Spirit to come within a fifteen-minute window at the end of a church service. I doubt that is how the day of Pentecost went down.

 

I know that playing soft music or having everyone sing out songs and prayers, can help people focus and set the mood, but I also know that music is powerful, and having a room full of people singing and praying spontaneously can feel emotional, and these events can feel like a force or an energy in the room. I think that it can be useful to lead people in a time of ministry, to guide them where they might need to meet God, by making them conscious of the Holy Spirit, but I also know the power that words have over people if they are suggestive, and that by saying certain things or speaking in certain ways, can cause people to be led to believe things that aren’t happening, and those leading from the front become holy hypnotists. I say this because I worry the experiences of the Holy Spirit that we seek, lack authenticity and that people can be coerced into feeling something, rather than truly being given the space to find a genuine connection with the Spirit.

 

I do believe that we can experience the Holy Spirit, and I believe that I have genuinely felt the Spirit of God on a number of occasions, although none of those experiences have been within churches. They have always been at times and places where I have not expected it. One time was outside of the flat where I was living, sat in my battered old Ford Fiesta, after a tedious day of working in a call centre, which couldn’t be further away from some of the churches I have been to. I believe now that this is where I will most likely meet God and encounter the Spirit, when there is nothing to distract me, when I can empty my thoughts, and I can just be. I will most likely find God when I reach this place, and it may explain why I don’t find those places in church, because when I am in church there is too much human control and noise.

 

I know that people do find these kinds of spaces helpful, that they don’t feel manipulated, and they feel like they do encounter God, in the same way I feel the presence of God sat quietly in my garage or at night alone in my office. If that is your experience then that’s great, but for me I don’t get it. Maybe because I’ve been there and tried that, or that I’m aware of the scene setting, or I find it distracting, just words, sounds, and noise. That’s just me, and where I’m at right now, which is important to say, because as with everything else we have looked at so far, Christians are in disagreement around the experiences and manifestations of the Holy Spirit, and of what the Bible says about it all.

 

The doctrine of Cessationism believes that God still heals people and that the Spirit of God is still active, but that the Spiritual gifts given to believers ended with the apostolic age, from the time of the Book of Acts, through to the death of the last of the apostles, or through to the first three centuries of the early church, depending who you ask. Continuationism rose alongside Pentecostalism and Methodism in the 19^th Century, and challenged cessationists by saying that the apostolic gifts of the spirit, were still available to be practiced by Christians. They argued that there had been accounts of people practicing spiritual gifts throughout history, and with these movements came a wider church renewal of those gifts, with people speaking in tongues and experiencing healings. Over time these movements of the Holy Spirit became more widespread, and were renewed again and again.

 

We could get much deeper into this discussion, but it basically comes back to what we know to be true, and what we feel is right. I don’t know for certain how the Holy Spirit works, or if you can even talk about the Spirit of God in those terms, or in any terms. I don’t really know what to make of the debate. Maybe the spiritual renewals that took place in the last 200 years, happened exactly because people started seeking it, and it was God’s time for a revival, but I’m conscious that it could’ve just been people getting swept up in the hysteria of a cultural movement, and that they were suggestible enough, to cause them to act out in certain ways. I’d hesitate to call myself a cessationist, because I have heard testimonies to the Holy Spirit, from people who I trust, and who I believe. But I also wouldn’t be able to say I was a continuationist, because despite the amazing things I have seen and heard concerning the Holy Spirit, frankly, the water has been muddied by too many charlatans who have tried, and often succeeded in manipulating experiences of the Holy Spirit.

 

This is the best conclusion I can reach, and I am willing to be wrong.

 

Text taken from “Unanswerable: Exploring the Complexities of the Christian Faith and Biblical Truth”, which is available from Amazon, and from all good book shops. An audiobook is also available at https://mindmole.bandcamp.com/music