An old Pastor of mine used to say that when someone spoke in tongues in a church meeting, it was like a spiritual hand grenade being rolled into the room.
He was a military man, an ex-Para, so it sounded less odd from him than it does from me: a man who has only seen grenades in museums. His point, though grandiose, was a good one.
If someone brings a tongue as a contribution in a meeting, everybody takes an intake of breath. I imagine the shock at a literal grenade is somewhat stronger, but the analogy just about holds. We wait to see if it ‘goes off.’ When someone brings a tongue, we all know that it’s vital that the next thing is an interpretation. Someone might get up and say that, even, though I don’t think you need to every time. Sometimes a keen bean jumps into the gap with a contribution that isn’t an interpretation—a prophetic word is a common mistake here as tongues are from man to God (1 Corinthians 14) not from God to man—and the room becomes uneasy, the grenade hasn’t gone off.
Then, someone brings the interpretation, a godward expression of praise that somehow catches the tenor of the original tongue that was spoken or sung. The grenade goes off, and usually the spiritual temperature in the room notches higher. It’s like something has shifted in the atmosphere. Sometimes all heaven breaks loose. We’re explicitly told to prefer prophecy, so we should (1 Corinthians 14), but this is still a gift given by God to his church for their edification. The interpretation is integral to that edification, no one is edified without it.
It’s particularly exciting when it happens across languages. It’s the gift of languages, after all. There’s something wonderfully Pentecostal about bringing a tongue and then having someone with a different mother tongue to you interpret it. You spoke together despite the division of your languages. Babel is undone in the multiplication of tongues bringing unity, just like at Pentecost.
We should prize this encounter in our gathered worship, just as we prize prophecy (though the Bible is clear we should have a preference for prophecy). There’s plenty of weirdness around prophecy that we could do with losing too, just as there is with tongues. The gifts themselves are weird enough: making Christianity weird again requires the strangeness of God’s word rather than charismatic accretions.
That means you’re going to need to teach people how to do it.
If you want good prophetic words, you encourage those with gifting, you train them, you send them to occasional conference (but not one of the too weird ones), you get them amongst other prophetically gifted people or maybe even someone recognised as a ‘Prophet’. There isn’t the same capital letter position for tongues and interpretation, and nor should their be; we should still teach people how to do it.
You will need to teach people to interpret, especially if you want them to realise that it’s not a rare gift for the super spiritual but a normal thing you can see in every home group. You may need to workshop tongues speaking, with interpretations, on a Sunday morning. You will need to teach people to receive the gifts.
Any time the number of tongues and interpretations you hear on a Sunday morning is dropping lower than one each week, that’s a sign that you’ve not done any of these things recently enough. If we truly believe that these are gifts for today, we should gently encourage their use amongst us. We love our cessationist brothers, but we would expect our gathered worship to look and feel different. We love our lunatic charismatic fringe brothers (with slightly gritted teeth, perhaps), but our worship should again feel different. We expect order. We expect the gifts.
I’m aware I’m read in various places that aren’t my own world. For readers from elsewhere in the world it might be worth saying that the British Reformed Charismatic scene doesn’t look much like what I’m told goes under the label ‘charismatic’ in the US. I’m told that those who might share my beliefs in America won’t call themselves charismatic because of who it tends to associate you with. I don’t really know what that means and am only vaguely aware of the strangeness that exists out in the wilds of the west (and the internet) so it’s difficult to denounce. Please do be weird, but Bible weird, not… the other kind.
We need to plan these things carefully. Grabbing the mic on a Sunday in a church that hears a tongue once a year and saying ‘let’s have lots of tongues back-to-back’ isn’t going to get you what you want. It’s either going to result in some real weirdness, some stony silence while you look sheepish, or someone asking why you want to lick their back (for the record that’s the bad kind of weird). If you want to make it more frequent, you’ll need to teach, to frame things for people, to create low risk arenas for them to have a go in, and then build into your Sunday, just like you would with anything else.
It’s worth the effort though. In my experience if you don’t do this you will gradually lose it.
Photo by Sven Verweij on Unsplash
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