The charismatic gifts, whether we mean the dramatic ones like tongues, interpretation, prophecy, and healing, or the behind the scenes ones we could mistake for talent, like administration, are a vital part of church life.
The British New Church movement, of which my own reformed charismatic corner is a part, has had an enormous impact on the British church scene. This is sometimes overclaimed, jeans in church probably had more to do with the culture of the 1980s than it did Newfrontiers, but it cannot be denied that the various new church movements of the so-called second wave of the Spirit from the 1960s onwards have ‘changed the face of Christianity in this nation’ as the old often quoted prophecy declared.
Though it’s not my point in this post, I do wonder if the impact has been so large that the broad swath of evangelical churches now look so like us that we’ve lost our distinctives. Or, we could argue that from another angle, we’ve all normed to look like another outside influence that wasn’t any of us. One to ponder.
One of the major influences of the New Church movement was to make the charismatic gifts mainstream in evangelicalism, rather than something only practiced by Pentecostals who were a more distinctly separate category then than they might be today in the UK after the west African diaspora.
However, you go around many—though by no means all—of the churches in those foundational movements, and you might be forgiven for wondering if that’s true. Perhaps you won’t hear a tongue and the attendant pause before an interpretation. Perhaps you won’t hear anything that really sounds like prophecy. Most concerningly in my opinion, you might not even hear the foundation that those gifts are built on in congregational worship: prayers and scripture readings of praise from the congregation.
You may not encounter them in my own church either.
What I’m hoping to pull at is some of the reasons why that is. Why do churches who once were full of charismatic life shrink back from it? Why do they drift away from the gifts?
To be Missional
One of the primary reasons is not a drift or a shrinking at all, but a philosophy of ministry choice. While not my philosophy, at all, if church exists primarily to lead people to faith in Jesus, then it’s natural that you are going to want to make your Sundays as clear and simple and free from distraction as possible. The charismatic gifts might be off-putting (they also can be exactly the opposite when well-managed, but I understand where someone who argues this way is coming from), they might distract or confuse the core message of the Sunday, and they draw us towards an insularity focused on our own experience as a congregation rather than focused on reaching outwards.
I might come from a different philosophical stable, but these concerns need addressing carefully by those who want a rich charismatic life. We want Biblical weird, not charismatic excess; we want life in the Spirit that propels us centrifugally rather than keeps us navel-gazing centripetally (the true dynamic is more complex than that—a drawing in to be sent out—but the point is, I think, a sound one).
Too many excesses
Some people are really weird. They use charismatic gifts as the vehicle for their personal weirdness. That can be a power grab by people who are unscrupulous or immature, which needs to be handled well by godly authority, but it can also just be ordinary people not being discipled well into what helpful and unhelpful contributions sound like.
Elders who won’t shape, provide order, or take control if things get out of order, lead to environments that are unsafe for people to have a go but are the wild west for weirdos. This puts congregations—and elders—off these environments and makes them cool towards well-ordered charismatic life.
We stopped teaching it
The old adage is that the first generation fight for something, the second generation assume it, and the third generation lose it. That’s true primarily because the second generation don’t teach it to the third. The ‘third’, whether that’s a literal count or more of a state of mind, needs to decide again to fight for what we’ve lost if we want to regain it.
If you don’t teach people how to use gifts well, as those people who know how to do it move on or grow tired, your charismatic life will slowly wither on the vine. If you don’t teach people then only old hands know how to do things and before you’ve turned around twice you have a congregation who think that the ‘gifts’ are the thing that only those four people do because that’s what they’ve seen.
You need to constantly teach the charismatic to get well-ordered charismatic life. For clarity, while you might need a preaching series every few years so that the church understand the theology behind the practice, by teaching I don’t mean preaching. I mean training. You need to actually show someone how to interpret a tongue and give them safe environments to have a go in or they won’t do it. I first encountered charismatic church in a context where small group leaders were well-drilled in how to help these gifts operate in their home groups and how to teach people into them. People practised with eight others and then learned how to do it in a prayer meeting before working up the confidence for a Sunday.
As churches grow in size the intensity of training required for that is hard. I’m not even sure its desirable. However, if you don’t train you won’t get.
Our expectations slipped back
We started thinking it was OK to get a Sunday with a couple of slightly limp prophetic words that needed more cooking before they were ready for the congregation. We forgot the dynamic worship life we used to encounter and the way that led us into the presence of God. We let other concerns shape and shift us. We stopped fighting.
We decided that singing some songs and individual encounters as we did so was what we were meant to be seeking on a Sunday rather than the corporate, manifest presence of Jesus among us in the praises of his people.
We settled.
Resolve to not settle anymore, friend.
We forgot the way that we enter the presence of God
My previous answers are much discussed in this world. I don’t hear so much discussion of this one. You will not get dynamic life and the gifts and the experience weight of the presence of God unless you start with praise.
We enter his gates with thanksgiving, we enter his courts with praise (Psalm 100).
Teach your people to give thanks to Jesus. Sing songs that help them contribute, full of meaty theology that they can pray back to God in wonder. Teach them to read passages from the Bible without comment in delight. Teach them that loudly declared, full-throated, praises of God delivered in all the emotions of human life—from poetic delight, to wept lament, to courage-building battle cries—are what the church does whenever she gathers.
If the people praise Jesus for what he’s done you will encounter him by his Spirit. Prize the prayers of the saints.
Photo by Tamilazhagan on Unsplash
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