Ruaching All over the World | The Gifts of the Spirit – Part 2

I believe God is powerful and engages with us, exactly as we need, and in precisely the right way, but we don’t always get to say how that happens, because God is God, and we are not. I believe that God has given us mechanisms and systems that help us draw near to him, such as meditation and prayer, but I also think that God enables us to draw near through human creativity, and that people have been able to capture something of God, and in doing so have been able to lead others towards God, through their creativity, through music, art, poetry, literature, and even through the way we have built our churches, the architectural choices, and the way we run our services, through the liturgies we use, the songs we sing and the sermons we hear. They are all meant to point towards God, however, none of these define or dictate God, and we don’t get to control or put God in a box. God is God, and we are not. We are flawed humans who are weak and make mistakes, and with that in mind I think it is important that we are alert to how people misrepresent God, particularly in regard to the Spirit.

 

As I said right at the beginning of this chapter, when we talk about the Holy Spirit, we aren’t talking about God theoretically and intellectually, we are talking about God meeting with us personally, in the real world, and in our real lives, and sadly, people use this for their own selfish purposes, whether it’s fame, money, pride, impatience, or whatever else, and they manipulate supposed movements of the Holy Spirit. I have seen people do it, far too many times than I should’ve. I once went for prayer in a service and as the guy was praying for me, he was also trying to gently push me off balance, so I would be ‘slain’ in the Spirit. As I stood there being prayed for, I had to alter my stance, like you would if you were riding on the London Underground. He kept trying to push me but I wasn’t having it, but the more I resisted the harder he pushed. In the end he realised that I wasn't going to fall, and made his excuses and went to try and push someone else over, probably someone much skinnier than me. I have stood behind a pastor when leading worship, and watched him try and play the room, saying he could see the Spirit on people, and that it was beginning to move powerfully through the room, when actually nothing was happening. Perhaps this was done in an effort to encourage and assure people that they could lower their guards and open themselves to the Spirit, but to me, having seen entertainers like Derren Brown manipulate crowds of people through psychological techniques, it looked like he was trying to play on people’s suggestibility, saying something was happening, in order that people might begin to feel that something.

 

I’ve seen this happen in more than one church, so it must be a common enough technique. I’ve seen many church leaders whip up congregations into emotional frenzies, and try to pass that heightened emotional state off as a movement of the Spirit. I feel I’ve seen lots of different tricks, but I’ve rarely seen people in a church service, just silently waiting on the spirit.

 

I don’t know why people feel the need to do these things. Is God alone not enough, that we have to manufacture evidence of his divine power? Are certain pastors and ministry team personnel, secretly required to meet a quota for people they have healed or given prophecies to? Do certain people have a cub scout activity system in place, and that if they push someone over when they are praying for them, then the pastor will award them their ‘slaying somebody in the Spirit’ badge, which they can glue to the front of their Bible?

 

There are more examples and more extreme stories that I could share with you, but they kind of take us away from the point of all this, which is how do we know if something is the Spirit or not. I think this is hard to get to the bottom of, because some people will firmly believe that certain things that they see are works of the Holy Spirit, when actually they are the manipulations of human hands. Others will firmly believe that certain things that happen in the name of the Spirit, are tricks or can be explained as psychological, when actually they might be happening because of the Holy Spirit. It basically comes down to discernment, and we all discern things differently, even when it comes to the gift of discernment, given by the Holy Spirit, because Spirit filled Christians across the world, and throughout history, are apparently unable to agree on what the Holy Spirit says and does.

 

I used to worry about questioning the power of the Spirit and of questioning whether something was authentically the work of the Spirit or not. I was afraid that to do so would be to blaspheme the Holy Spirit, because of a warning that came from Jesus in Luke 12:10, which is also in the books of Matthew and Mark. The verse says,

 

Everyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but anyone who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven.

 

The teaching I received on this, was that to question or speak against the Holy Spirit was unforgivable, and would mean a guaranteed place in Hell, no matter what else you did in your life. The verse was taken completely out of context though, and actually it’s the kind of thing a church leader would say if they were doing something underhand which they didn’t want you to question, and maybe that’s the point. It may feel wrong, disruptive and disrespectful to question if something is the Holy Spirit or not, but it’s important to ask it because church leaders and other people involved in ministry, need to be accountable for how they represent God, and for what they do in the name of God. They can’t be allowed to do what they want in the name of the Holy Spirit, ensuring that their actions and motives can’t be questioned.

 

Having heard debates over Cessationism and Continuationism, it’s clear that questioning the Spirit is not damnable, and I think we should be on guard against people falsifying works of the Spirit, because when they do so it’s often for selfish intentions, and it can be incredibly destructive. A church leader may wish to push and encourage their congregations toward the gifts of the Spirit, but to manipulate people into getting to that point is wrong. Leaders should be meeting their church where they are, and if they feel that God is calling the church to seek the Spirit, then they should be explaining that to people, and not shaming them into doing something that is fake, or putting on a show and passing it off as the Spirit.

 

The pastor who I saw trying to coerce a movement of the Spirit by telling people that it was moving, wasn’t a bad guy, he had many great qualities and was a good leader, but I knew he wanted the church to be more charismatic. Our church was part of a charismatic denomination and when we attended wider church conferences, the outpouring of the Spirit did involve people falling over, screaming and thrashing about, and it was uncomfortable, frightening and upsetting for many people in our church who were there. Our church might have been in a charismatic denomination, but we weren’t made up of people who were from a charismatic background. We were largely made up of students and ex-students, who had moved to the city from their home churches, and started coming to the church, simply because it was near where they lived, and it was a young, vibrant community. They didn’t choose it because it was part of a charismatic denomination. I don’t know if leaders higher up in the organisation wanted their churches to be more active in the movement of the Holy Spirit, because it was a core denominational belief for them, and they were filtering instructions down to churches on the ground, telling them to seek this, maybe they were. Perhaps that was why our pastor was trying to orchestrate movements of the Spirit, it was pressure from above. The time I was nearly pushed over was at one of those church conferences, and whilst my assailant could have been acting alone, it’s not implausible that the leaders had told people on the ministry team, that they should encourage people into being slain in the Spirit by gently pushing them.

 

I think it’s difficult to reach a conclusion on this topic because it ultimately relies on what people believe God is saying to them, and their experience and understanding of God. This is hard because most people will believe that truth has been revealed to them by God through the Holy Spirit. In terms of movements of the Spirit, if we come back to a continuationist and cessationist debate, then who can really say for certain that the gifts of the Spirit ended with the early church. It’s easy for a cessationist to say and believe that the renewal movements of the Holy Spirit in this modern era, are the result of hype, psychological conditioning, or communal hysteria, but continuationists do genuinely believe that the Spirit is moving, and they can tell amazing stories of things that the Holy Spirit has done. Some of the things I have described, which have been done in the name of the Spirit, might be dubious in my mind, but I am sure that the people who are on the other side of those things I have witnessed, will be certain in the knowledge that they were being led by the Spirit, and there was nothing underhand happening, and even that the Spirit was moving them to do things that were dubious.

 

It remains a mystery to me, and if I’m honest it feels like a bit of a mine field. Experience tells me that cessationists probably have it right for the most part. I believe that the Spirit still moves, and that it moves powerfully and in inexplicable ways, but I feel that genuine outpourings of the Spirit, probably don’t happen as often as we believe. When I do see presumed movements of the Spirit, I think that most often there are explanations for what is happening. Some of it probably is due to coercion and manipulation, but I think that those who are leading in those instances, probably don’t even realise they are causing certain things to happen. They are doing what they have seen others do, and follow those practices without thinking about what might actually be happening. I think in most cases, they honestly believe they are seeking the Spirit and seeing it at work. I also think that some of the manifestations of the Spirit, are down how people are made up psychologically, that isn’t to say that they’re making things up or deluding themselves into believing they are experiencing the Holy Spirit, but rather that they want it so badly, or they expect it so sincerely, that their minds cause them to react in ways which they can’t explain. This is my inarticulate theory, I know there is science and reasoning behind it, which I don’t understand, but I know that the human mind is powerful and can do things to the body which are mystifying. In saying this, I am also aware that my own experiences of the Holy Spirit could also be explained away as being psychological, but I choose to believe they are the Holy Spirit, and trust in myself that they are encounters with God, because I need and want to believe that. Perhaps it is the mind, but if it is, maybe that isn’t so bad or wrong, because if God created and evolved the human mind to work a certain way, perhaps the unexplainable good that the mind causes us to experience, is God after all. It’s possible, I guess.

 

I don’t really know where that leaves me, it’s hard enough discerning my own spiritual experiences, let alone the experiences of millions of Christians across the world, but this does kind of tie into the next subject, so I will conclude at the end of that topic.

 

 

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