Pentecostal Spiritual Direction

Dallas Willard told us that everyone has a spiritual formation the question is: what kind of formation will it be? In the same way Moon and Benner’s book Spiritual Direction and the Care of Souls has shown us that every tradition has ways of offering guidance for that formation, though it may not traditionally look like spiritual direction, as we know it.

This is true of the Pentecostal tradition as well. I found the places where McMahan found spiritual direction in my own tradition interesting. I hadn’t thought about it in those terms. (The terms the other authors who write about spiritual direction use make these ideas foreign and in many cases McMahan seems to find it hard to distinguish between pastoral council and spiritual direction.)

I remember many times growing up when the Spirit would talk to us in the midst of a service. Talk about spiritual direction! There he was, the Spirit speaking directly to us. I’ve often wondered why God would choose this method to address us, and why we didn’t take it even more seriously.

Here’s how I remember it happening then: the service would come to a place where it was particularly warm, what I would call today, consolation. Sunday nights were always warmer to me, they were less restricted, or stuffy, no one seemed in a hurry to leave. Often it would happen even before the sermon was given (the sermon would always still be given) when the time of singing was coming to an end and this feeling of consolation was over us. The music would be playing and we’d all be worshipping on our own a sort of melding of voices all expressing the worship of each heart. The voices would rise and fall together, and in some beautiful moments create new harmonies – a new song that would build, as a group and no one knew where it was going or even what language it had become. Then in the midst of this someone would feel a bubbling with in him or her, the Spirit tugging on them to speak out. They didn’t know what they would say, but they yielded and words came out – they spoke out loud sensing that what the Spirit was about was for everyone, they would raise their voice above the rest. As those around them recognized that a voice was standing out, they would hush and soon the whole room would be in hushed, uneasy silence as we waited hearing a message in a language not our own, perhaps not of this earth. The speaker would finish and we would wait. We understood that if this was of God, there would be an interpretation we all could understand. So I would continue my uneasy silence with the rest, listening to the Spirit afraid he might want to use me to bring his message. Then the interpretation would come, in the same way as the message in tongues. I don’t think the interpreter would know what she was going to say ahead of time, perhaps just a phrase or a word would come to her mind and as she said it the Spirit offered more.

There were of course times they would get it wrong, times when you could sense where they left the trail and finished under their own power. The message always had to be weighed against scripture and understood. Then there was the matter of responding. Often it would be something like, “This message was for someone here to night, if you sense it was you take the message to heart and do what it says,” though I wonder if the message wasn’t always for all of us, since it was given to us all and we had to do more wrestling with how it applied to each of us.

Sometimes it would be a comforting reminder that Jesus would come for us soon. Sometimes it was a warning to get our house in order, or to love more fervently.

Sometimes the interpreter would preface the message with “thus saith the Lord…” echoing the words of the prophets in the King James Bible that they undoubtedly loved very much. We pastors usually teach people to offer a little more wiggle room, “I feel the Lord may be saying…” Either way we recognized that the words coming from the voice of God had great authority and importance.

In this way the direction offered by the use of the gifts of the Spirit is like the direction of the Russian Staretz, it can be very directive and authoritative when truly discerned and spoken.

McMahan mentions also the use of testimony (155). From the very beginning of our movement publications spread the testimony of what God was doing in the lives of individuals. The Apostolic Faith was a publication from the Azuza street revivals covering 1906-08. They contain direction in the form of testimonies, instruction and answers to questions. This tradition still continues with Today’s Pentecostal Evangel.

There is a danger of the Spiritual Direction becoming too individual. I think McMahan is wrong to suggest that meeting one on one with a spiritual director increases that danger. The spiritual director as another human member of the body of Christ is a point of contact with the community that can be lacking in the anonymity of the worship service. I dare say every believer finding growth through the charisms (charismata) of the Spirit would do well to find a mature director.