Where were the gifts of the Spirit between the New Testament and 1900?

The Healing Reawakening: Reclaiming Our Lost Inheritance by Francis MacNutt

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars

I had the opportunity to speak with Beth on the phone last night (she was making sure that I wasn’t stranded in London as the hijacked email purported. Thanks). I realized that while she said she was struggling to square MacNutt’s use of scripture, I had glossed over it. Perhaps it was because I have heard similar arguments all my life, but I found when I came to a block quote of scripture I said to myself, “ah that one” and skimmed through it.

Nothing jumped out at me as being way off. There may have been some isogesis evident in his insistence that the open-endedness of Acts made implicit that early church ministry was expected to continue (73). Was that Luke’s intention, or was it simply that he could not yet comment on Paul’s death.

Also the case he built that healing on the Sabbath was specifically a cause of his death seemed a bit of a stretch (43). Surely it was part of it, but Jesus’ conflict with the religious authorities stretched well beyond that. Still the one-sidedness of this argument doesn’t detract from the conclusion that Jesus really valued healing. That is evident in every gospel.

Overall his use of scripture seemed fair, obviously used in service of his point, but not out of context, if without the benefit of higher biblical criticism.

For me, the greatest value in MacNutt’s book is answering the question I have always had, “what happened to the Baptism in the Spirit from the time of the New testament to 1900?” It is, I think, easy for classical Pentecostals to think that they disappeared from the church completely until we came along. That has always been a sad thought to me, and indeed, if it were true, it would lead me to question the validity of our Pentecostal experience.

I appreciate how MacNutt traces both the factors that lead to minimizing the charisms, particularly healing, as well as the remnant of the saints of God who kept the memory alive.

I think he made his case powerfully with me. I fell at times, into reverie, imagining myself praying for the healing of people in my church. I saw myself setting people free from demonic oppression and addictions. It seemed just the thing our village needs.

Repeatedly in the Masters in Spiritual Formation program, I have been faced with the irony that as we study the richness of the various streams of Christianity, God is, at the same time, drawing me deeper into my own.

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Healing

I watched a healing service conducted by Kenneth Haggin at a church in Sterling Heights, MI. He spent perhaps a half hour preaching about the woman with the issue of blood. Many of his phrases sounded like he had just read MacNutt (The Healing Reawakening: Reclaiming Our Lost Inheritance). The second half hour showed him praying for the people in need of healing in rapid fire. He explained that it worked better for him that way, when he felt he had the anointing, which presented itself as a burning in his hands, he had to use it quickly. I also found I interesting that he distinguished between the gift of healing (restoring what is already there, like bringing hearing to a damaged ear drum) and miracles (creating something that wasn’t there to begin with, like bringing hearing to someone born with out an ear drum). He had the gift of healing, he said, but he would believe with people for a miracle as well.

Many fell under the power of God as he prayed for them. I have been in these kinds of services and have no problem with people falling. I watched the people who didn’t fall when he prayed with some amusement. I watched their faces as they tried to figure out what to do next. I noticed that Hagin laid his hand on the top of their head with the heel of his palm resting on their forehead. He would push back as he proclaimed, “Receive!” I have had strong physical reactions to the Spirit as people have prayed for me, and I also know what it is like to loose your balance as a minister pushes on your head. I found myself trying to identify which ones just lost their balance and which were overcome by the power of the Holy Spirit (like the lady with the cane who started quaking before she fell.)

Even in the midst of my amusement and critical ogling, a curious thing happened. Toward the end of the video, the Spirit was working on me too! At times when he said, “Receive” my arm would have a strong reflexive twitch. It is weird I know, but that is a way my body has routinely reacted to being overcome by the Spirit. I wanted to find someone to pray for when I was done watching to see if I could share some of that “anointing.”

I have continued to experience this as well. As I read scholarly treatments of healing, the Spirit overtakes me and my shoulders quake. Tonight as Cliff was playing the part of the man born blind at our lenten service, I felt that same electric shock move through me when we described how he was healed.

That's what it is like too... just now I remembered the time that I leaned one hand on a cooler in the coffeehouse and the other hand on a display case with faulty wiring and had a nice jolt of 220 run through my arms. That same jerk reaction is what happens to me still when the Spirit is on me. Tears come to my eyes after it happens and a tenderness rests on me.

As I said this has happened several times now as I have been reading about reading, especially when I start daydreaming about God using me in that gift, strengthening the latent gift of healing I have identified might be in me. Perhaps it is the Holy Spirit dreaming along with me and encouraging me to go for it.

Residency Day 3

Tonight Ken spoke about the connection between social justice and the charismatic movement. I wish all the A/G could hear that message. The world needs our prophetic and discernment that comes from Spirit Baptism. The poor need the gift of healing. The principalities and powers that oppress with injustice need to be torn down by our spiritual warfare.

After his message we had a charismatic worship time. He introduced me to some structures (liturgy) found in our worship that I hadn’t noticed before: the back and forth between the structure and spontaneous as we sing. The other new thing for me was a form of worship called “Harp and Bowl.” It is similar to lectio devina but in the context of sung worship. I haven’t been in an A/G church that has done this but Jerrell’s church has done it. I’d love to experiment with it.

I felt like my true self tonight. I miss a time of good Pentecostal worship and a ministry time employing the gifts. I received prayer for my sleep disorder. I am anxious to see how rested I am tomorrow. More impressively as Ken was praying for me the Spirit zeroed in on what is really at my heart, the people of my church. He prayed for us to have an awakening and a time of freshness and spiritual restfulness – that the people would receive what I preach and that a fresh anointing would fall on me to preach. He also prayed that healing would flow through me to my home, and my community. Yes Lord! Amen.

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.

Ignatian Pentecost

Consolation has captured my imagination lately. Dean Brackley in The Call to Discernment writes about how the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises can be used for discernment. I have been experimenting with using consolation and desolation to discern the voice of God leading me.

Simply put, when we are following after God, “It is characteristic of the Holy Spirit to move us to ‘true joy and spiritual delight, taking away all sadness and turmoil induced by the enemy.’ It is characteristic of the enemy to ‘work against this kind of joy and spiritual consolation, introducing false reasons, subtleties, and persistent fallacies’” (135). I have been trying to be more aware of those feelings of joy that are disproportionate with their cause, and follow that consolation as the way God is leading me. Likewise I have paying attention to the feelings of desolation that are disproportionate to cause, trying to track down where that feeling began and address that incursion of the enemy as a departure from what God would lead me. This has been exciting, as I have learned to hear the voice of the Spirit in the sensations of my soul. There are of course dangers in false consolations; I can’t trust my feelings, only my God. So I need much practice in these experiments to learn to tell the difference.

Brackley made an immediate connection to my Pentecostal heritage when he mentioned that the Greek word for this consolation is paraklesis: the very stuff of the Paraklete (one of our favorite names for the Holy Spirit). “The comforter has come!” and it is even by his comfort that we learn to hear his will.

Smells and bells

I love smells and bells! I am not the organized type, I buck structure, perhaps that is why high liturgy has appeal to me, it gives me something I normally lack: discipline.

We protestants are quick to judge Catholics, we grew up with ideas about them. When I first went to some services, I was amazed that any Catholic could be nominal. I found the smells and bells powerful reminders of the mystery. Personality wise they appealed to my imagination and creativity.

But nominal Christians should never surprise us, nor should they cause us to cast nasturtiums on a tradition. They are in fact in every tradition where the culture allows them to comfortably call themselves Christians (the persecuted church has few of these). The practice of infant baptism brings the person in to the church, they can claim that affiliation forever if they wish, and never go to church (not that the church or priest is happy about them doing that). Parents bring their children to be baptized because of cultural tradition and as a form of fire insurance, just in case there is a God, and cross their fingers to the promises they make to bring them up to love God.

Perhaps coming from the outside, with out those cultural impediments allowed me to experience the forms of worship with awe and wonder. Perhaps my experiences with the Spirit allowed me easily to see the forms as full of life, rather than empty religion.

I told the retreatants at the Abby with me, that I wanted to plant a pentecostal church with all the smells and bells. I think they all ready had an inkling that I was crazy.

Pentecostal Foodstuff

“For us, therefore, religious experience is to spiritual direction what foodstuff is to cooking. Without foodstuff there can be no cooking. Without religious experience there can be no spiritual direction” (Spiritual Direction in Practice 8).

Barry and Connoly give the work of spiritual direction as drawing out those times in life when God is interacting with the person they are directing. This means that the directee has to have had some kind of religious experience to draw on. Some prayer to discuss, maybe not even formal prayer, but the opening of the heart to God and experiencing him.

This got me thinking of the conversation I had with Dallas Willard. He wrote that the ecstatic experiences we Pentecostals cherish don’t build character. They are for something else, namely ministering to the body of Christ.

But they do provide religious experiences to draw on. A dutch reformed pastor who is on retreat with me related the story of a friend who went to the Toronto Airport Vineyard church during it’s famous revival. He went with his Ph.D. adviser as a sort of anthropological experiment. He even reluctantly went to be prayed over, being goaded by his adviser to study it. Those praying over him prayed some very specific things (like we experienced when we experimented with Spirit directed prayer during our January retreat). He was even “laid out” by the Spirit.

He now has that experience of the Spirit moving in his life to remember and know that it is real.

Perhaps those goose-bump moments and the excitement they produce do not by themselves develop character, but build faith and become the foodstuff for later spiritual direction.

What are the gifts of the Spirit for?

In the Great Omission, Dallas Willard suggests that experiences of excitement that come with Pentecost do not form character. They are good for many things, but they do not fundamentally change us.

I wrestled with that idea this week. For some time I have been trying to figure out why we have the pentecostal experience. It seems those involved in the Pentecostal Revivals at the turn of the last century were also grasping to understand these things.

Richard Foster suggests that William J Seymour thought the new Pentecost meant racial reconciliation. Unfortunately the work of reconciliation is left undone, but the Pentecostal experience went on.

Others thought that the gift of tongues was for missionary work and thought that they didn't need to learn a language to speak to the people in another land. So they went and many discovered that it didn't usually work that way.

In the end we settled out with the Pentecostal baptism meaning the soon return of Christ. Many churches took out mortgages with no intention of repaying them because Christ was coming back soon. Well its been 100 years and he hasn't come.

Pentecostal experience is waining in our churches and small wonder. Why should we be baptized in the Spirit? All of these reasons haven't worked out too well. We say it is an empowerment for ministry, but then we also commonly make out that ministry along with discipleship is something optional to Christianity. It then follows that the Baptism in the Spirit is not meant for everyone.

In wrestling with this I wanted to bring the mystical back into it. The full on working of the Spirit experienced in Pentecostal Baptism (total immersion in Him) is a wonderful and intimate thing. So often in Pentecostal tradition, we have seen the working of the Spirit functionally and pragmatically. I was hoping I could make the things of the Spirit about spiritual formation. But along comes Dallas Willard suggesting that those experiences do not effect formation of character to Christlikeness.

Today Dallas sat next to me at lunch, greeting me, "hey Aquaman!" (I was wearing an Aquaman t-shirt). I sat just listening to the conversation around me as I had the previous days Dallas sat near me. Perhaps the explanation of who Aquaman is and his interaction with my family emboldened me to pose the question.

Dallas suggested that the manifestations of the Spirit's working remind us that the Kingdom of Heaven is here. He also noted that the gifts of the Spirit aren't for empowerment for ministry in general but are to meet specific needs in the body. Their use by all Christians, makes the body able to minister to each other through prophesy, words of wisdom, healing and the like. While those goosebump experiences do not form the character of the one being so used, the gifts can help to build others in the body as they are ministered to. They are also not to be isolated from the fruit of the Spirit which are entirely about character formation.

In the end it is more functional and practical than even pentecostal have commonly made it, but it is also more profound and foundational.

The silent power of God

What is the purpose of pentecostal power? If it is mystical, then what is the purpose of contemplation? It desires to do. Foster calls the charismatic stream the power to do while the holiness tradition is the power to be. Being strongly rooted in the Pentecostal tradition, I can wonder if we’ve even begun to tap into a power to do. Looking at the bigger picture we can see we’re doing, the Assembly of God is growing by leaps and bounds especially world wide; at home much slower, but we are still the fastest growing denomination. Still when we look at local narratives we don’t always see it fleshed out. Am I any more empowered to do than my brothers who pastor other churches and do not claim the pentecostal experience?

Rolhieser tells of Daniel Berrigan’s response to the question of God’s presence in today’s world.

He simply told the audience how he, working in a hospice for the terminally ill, goes each week to spend some time sitting by the bed of a young boy who is totally incapacitated, physically and mentally. The young boy can only lie there. He cannot speak or communicate with his body nor in any other way express himself to those who come into his room. He lies mute, helpless, by all outward appearance cut off from any possible communication. Berrigan then described how he goes regularly to sit by this young boy’s bed to try to hear what he is saying in his silence and helplessness.

After sharing this, Berrigan added a further point: The way this young man lies in our world, silent and helpless, is the way God lies in our world. To hear what God is saying we must learn to hear what this young boy is saying.

This is a powerful image of finding God in the silence, of finding the power that “lies muted, at the deep moral and spiritual base of things.”

Foster reminds me that for William J. Seymour, the renewal of the sign of Pentecost signaled divinely initiated racial reconciliation. Just as the original day of Pentecost had people from all regions of the Roman world hearing their own language, and has been seen as reversing the disintegration of Babel, this new Pentecost could bring integration reversing the babble of segregation. If this was God’s intent, and I believe it likely was, we quickly throw our monkey wrenches into it. Charles Parham quickly dismissed as sinful the worshiping together of black and white brothers. And the Assemblies of God became the white Pentecostals as the Church of God in Christ became the black. Some of this may have had to do with the strength of Wesleyan holiness with its view of sanctification as a second work of grace in black spirituality, but I’m sure the majority of the issue wasn’t theological but racial.

So if Azusa street was to usher in a power to do reconciliation, have we failed? I asked myself this yesterday as I pondered. If the power of my pentecostal experience is supposed to be a conduit to flow to those around me has it failed? As a fellowship have we embraced the Pentecostal power to change?

“Ask Zollie Smith if we failed.” The still voice came to my mind. Zollie Smith is the first black man to be on our national executive leadership team, moving from Executive Presbytery to be Director of Home Missions this year. It took a hundred years but God isn’t through yet! It is interesting how God chose the Charismatic Stream to effect Social Justice in his church. Zollie inspires me, not because of who he is, but because he shows who we are becoming as a church. Like Barack Obama challenging our concepts of race in presidential politics simply because he’s there, God is challenging the world through us because we are here.

So if the power of the Spirit is meant to make me a conduit of God’s power, to change me so powerfully by his presence in my life that my life changes the world with it’s presence, what will that look like? Lord God use me, let that power that underlies all that exists flow through me to the world around. Flow river flow. Spring up oh well of eternal desire!

Sunday Night with Tom Trask

Man, I miss Sunday night services. They are the perfect answer to my weekly postpartum depression after preaching. So when Brad Trask sent an invitation to all Michigan credential holders to come out to a Sunday night service, I was into it. His church is only a couple hours away, and he had the Detroit Life Challenge choir singing and his dad preaching.

The service was nice. It wasn't spectacular, or extravagant, just what Sunday night services always were growing up. I wasn't surprised because Brad, and the ministers who showed up were greatly influenced by Tom Trask's ministry and were old-school A/G. Ah, my roots. How I miss a good pentecostal service with out concern for time, and much lingering at the altar. It was such a refreshing and blessing to have the congregation of Brighton A/G pray for the ministers who came out and for Bro. Trask as he moves on.

Speaking of which, when people were wondering why he was leaving, and had a hard time accepting that he just heard from God, I agreed. "Something must have got him praying in that way in the first place right?"

He talked about it a little bit, at this, his last time preaching as the General Supt., and I got the impression that God spoke to him in the course of his regular prayer time. That shouldn't be hard for us to understand, though as I have lamented before, we pentecostal can be an awfully pragmatic bunch and demand rationales for all our movements. He said that he prayed about it from Nov. to the end of July after he heard God tell him to move on, just to be sure he heard right. His description of the process gives me renewed faith in his obedience. I just thought you might want to know.

The Future of the A/G

I have long quipped that I would stay with the Assembly of God until they kick me out. I am a bit out of the ordinary. While I still hold dear our distinctives, I am a little too liberal politically, I am a neo-traditionalist (I like the power of liturgy and the richness of vintage devotion), I am a mystic, and I no longer consider myself a dispensationalist. I have desired to see the day when my generation comes to the fore and see what the A/G will look like. Will there be a place for me in it? I have always asked that question hopefully.

With the resignation of our current general superintendent, I suddenly feel that moment upon us and I am a little afraid. How will it come out? What will it mean. The announcement was a little sudden, Elaine and I hadn't planned on going to General Council as our church can't afford to send us. So now we are left out of the process of picking the next leader of our movement. I turn to the Lord in prayer and must trust him. I am greatly heartened by the messages and prayers posted on futureag.blogspot.com Thank you so much for the effort!

Initial Physical evidence

The biggest concept I have been wrestling with tonight has to do with the evidence of the baptism in the spirit. I’m not concerned presently with whether tongues is the initial physical evidence, but with what that means and should mean in our lives.

My quandary is this: if the Pentecostal revival of the past century was to mark a particular closeness to the return of Christ, and so some extra power was available to evangelize the world as we said when the A/G formed…

And if we accept that saints of old were not filled with the Spirit by lack of that evidence…

And if I am filled with the Spirit, as I have spoken with tongues,

Then why is my life marked with significantly less power than heroes of the faith, capable theologians, preachers, and reformers who were not filled?

Does the Spirit connect to the hearts of people in my congregation more than he does in the congregations of my dear brothers in other denominations?

What can I say about this doctrine which I hold dear and have experienced, since I like most practicing Pentecostals don’t seem to find use for my Spirit-filled giftings to build up the body?

Perhaps being filled with the Spirit, like sanctification, is a process. It isn't enough to have a single experience but like the mystics of old, we must practice the gifts until they work out a greater power in the body than we have seen in practice these days.