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Wouldn’t You Like To Be a Charismatic Christian, Too?

November 14, 2010 By Randy Olds 12 Comments

Pentecost

“Most charismatic Christians are just one major crisis away from a nervous breakdown”, my Missionary Baptist pastor-friend sagely advised me over a decade ago. I had just come out of a year-long relationship with a local charismatic church that touted the “Health and Wealth Gospel” and was in the midst of a faith crisis after I had determined that the pastor of this church was a fraud and that the doctrines that were espoused there were simply not biblical.

After spending a few years licking my wounds from my failed charismatic experiment, years in which I attended no church at all, I sought refuge within the safe confines of the United Methodist Church.

Ah, reason. And reasonable faith as well.

Nobody babbling away in tongues in the pew in front of me. Nobody rebuking the devil if even the slightest hint of oppression was sensed. If I came to church with the sniffles I didn’t have to worry about half a dozen well-intentioned (but in my mind misled and overly wrought) brothers and sisters coming to lay hands on me and pray for healing.

Right!

This!

Minute!

In the name of JESUS!

However, no matter how far I have tried to seperate myself from the enthusiastic and starry eyed faith crowd of the charismatics, they always seem to find me. And yet part of me still has this sense that I am lacking something in my realistic (and sometimes skeptical) approach  to things like healing, gifts of the Spirit, and even Faith. Part of me wants to be a Charismatic Christian, too.

I have read through all of the pertinent scriptures on the Gifts of the Spirit and frankly I still can’t come away with a solid cessationist doctrine. (For those not familiar, Cessationism is the doctrine that all of the supernatural events like tongues, prophecies, and spontaneous healings ended with the first century church)  While I do believe that the “Health and Wealth” Gospel is a false one and I also think that many charismatics are not using their “gifts” in a biblical manner, I simply cannot understand biblically why they should not be available now.

Today.

For me.

Although I am very comfortable in the United Methodist Church, I actually have many more close friends who are charismatics than are Methodists. As the result of my involvement in the Christian renewal movement known as Tres Dias, I spend a lot of time at meetings (I’m on the board of one Tres Dias community) and retreats with Christians of many different denominations. The Tres Dias communities that I am most involved with locally are composed of about 70% charismatics, with the rest being primarily Baptists and a smattering of mainliners such as myself. I quite often see myself as an oasis of reason among the enthusiastic blind faith of my beloved charismatic brothers and sisters in Christ.

And contrary to my friends sage advice of so many years ago, none of my charismatic friends seem to be anywhere near the realm of nervous breakdowns. Even though my charismatic friends will indeed lay hands on a brother or sister with the slightest case of the sniffles and offer “effectual, fervent prayer”, the majority of them do not seem to be too taken aback if the ailment persists. They will simply go through the routine again and again until they sense that a healing has occurred or the sniffles go away on their own (I sometimes wonder however if my friends don’t still claim Victory when natural recovery take place).

Sometimes I find myself wondering if the reason that I doubt is simply because of my doubt. “I believe, help my unbelief!” cried the father of the young boy who was possessed (Mark 9:24). Or how about “But let him ask in faith without doubting. For the doubter is like the surging sea, driven and tossed by the wind. That person should not expect to receive anything from the Lord.” (James 1:6-7) Is it my own doubt and skepticism that stands in between myself and greater blessings?

A friend of mine recently asked me if I had ever spoken in tongues. I told him that I was quite sure that I hadn’t, to which he responded, “Have you ever prayed for the Holy Spirit to give you the Gifts”. I had to admit that requests such as those were not part of my prayer life.The fact is that I did “speak in tongues” those many years ago in that charismatic church, but I have long since convinced myself that the experience was “emotionalism”.

But what if the experience was genuine?

Emotionalism is what I often classify most of what I have observed in the charismatic community. Everything from speaking in tongues to prophecies to healings I have often spread under the wide umbrella of  “Emotionalism”. If you believe in something strongly enough, the mind has a nifty little way of making it come to pass.

But is it all emotionalism?

I have heard stories from Baptist and Methodist friends who have been on missionary trips where they witnessed what they could only describe as genuine outpourings of the Holy Spirit. I have a friend who, as a Baptist pastor, has witnessed inexplicable examples of tongues being used in a wholly biblical manner in churches that he visited, where one person spoke and another translated.  I have even heard stories from reliable (and non-charismatic) sources of a person speaking in his native tongue in a foreign land and the audience hearing him in their native language.

In a post last week, Chaplain Mike (another skeptic) related his own difficulties with understanding charismatics. He admits that he ‘doesn’t get it’, yet he posted a link to the revival at the Bay of the Holy Spirit, where Delia Knox was apparently healed from twenty-two years of paralysis a few months ago. I spent several hours investigating Mrs. Knox’s claim of healing (with a very skeptical eye) and simply can’t poke any solid holes in it. I believe that she was indeed healed, as wildly implausible as that may sound.

One of the blogs that I follow is that of Scott Lencke, who is an enthusiastic, yet very reasonable supporter of Continuationism (the doctrine that the Gifts of the Spirit did not cease in the 1st century and are readily available today). He actually has two blogs, and he regularly provides sound exegesis and support for reasons why all of the Gifts of the Spirit are available today. I have yet to find any serious flaws to his approach to charismatic Christianity. (He had an excellent post yesterday on Healing and The Atonement)

Between reasonable information like what Scott (and others) provide and my relationships with the charismatic Christians that have entered my life in the last few years, I more and more find myself questioning my approach to charismatic Christianity. I find myself wondering if the problem is not with charismatic Christianity, but is perhaps instead with me. Perhaps my own skepticism (and self-perceived intellectual superiority) is the problem.

No, I do not expect to ever accept the ‘Prosperity Gospel”, nor would I ever endorse a church full of people all speaking in tongues at the same time. I don’t see myself ever participating in a revival, a la Benny Hinn, either. And I have no intentions of becoming a “there is an angel behind every green traffic light, and a demon in every bush” Christian. None of those things are sound biblically.

But perhaps I should start praying, as my friend suggested, for the Gifts of the Spirit. And maybe start believing that healing is not only possible, but the doctrines behind biblical healing are sound, and therefore not only pray for healing, but believe that it is possible.  “I believe, help my unbelief!”

What could it possibly hurt?

Filed Under: Charismatic Christianity, Faith, Holy Spirit, Learning About God, Prayer

Failing Christianity, or Failed by Christianity?

January 20, 2010 By Randy Olds Leave a Comment

Twenty years or so ago I had no idea about what the terms of Justification, Regeneration or Sanctification might mean in a theological sense. I only knew about two ideas concerning the concept of Salvation, one being what I had been taught growing up in the cult known as the Worldwide Church of God, and the other what I had witnessed among the people that I had encountered in various forms of Charismatic Fundamentalism.

I had rejected the theology of Herbert Armstrong’s Church of God. It didn’t really take a whole lot of study in the New Testament to realize that most of his theology was grossly misinterpreted scripture. Somehow or another, though, I still somehow felt that being a Christian meant being good. The legalistic teachings of Armstrong had left it imbedded in my brain that in order to make it to whatever Heaven might actually be, you must do good works and a whole lot of them.

After leaving home and the ‘Church’ behind at the age of sixteen, I had a number of encounters with various forms of Charismatic Fundamentalism. I briefly attended a fairly broad spectrum of Charismatic churches, all the way from the United Pentecostals to the Assemblies of God to a variety of non-denominational Charismatic churches.

What I kept hearing was all of these personal testimonies of how people had been gloriously ‘saved’ from their former sinful lives. All you had to do, it seemed, was to believe in Jesus, get baptized and then you’d come out of the water a “Brand New Person”, never having to sin again. In fact, from the testimonies that I remember hearing, it was near about impossible to sin any more after getting ‘Saved’, the Holy Spirit would prevent you from falling back into sin.

Everything seemed to be about having a ‘personal relationship with Jesus’. From what I could gather, all you needed was some sort of a ‘Mustard Seed’ type of belief, confess Jesus, get baptized and Jesus and the Holy Spirit would do all of the rest of the work!

It really seemed to good to be true, and some of those Christian folks actually kind of scared me a little, so I shied away until I was about 25 or so from ever really making any attempt at ‘becoming a Christian.’

Not long after getting married and having my first child, I decided that it was time to clean up my act. I had struggled with substance abuse issues and a multitude of other ‘sins’ for many years by now, and my new marriage was starting to suffer because of it. Having tried A.A. and found it lacking, I decided that Christianity must be the answer. My wife was already a confessing Christian, having been brought up Baptist, so we decided to start attending the local Baptist church down the road.

This was my first Baptist church, and with the main difference being the more solemn style of worship (and no talking in tongues!), I heard pretty much the same message that I had been hearing in the Charismatic churches. Confess Jesus as Lord and Savior, get baptized, and it was a cakewalk after that. I decided that I didn’t have anything to lose at this point, so I took the plunge.

It didn’t work.

I came out of the Baptismal feeling just like I did going into it. Somehow or another, I had the impression that some sort of ‘magic’ was going to happen when I went into that water. You know, a choir of angels singing, bright lights, and of course a new and different stream of thoughts running through my brain. I thought that my problems with lust, anger, alcohol and all of the other ‘sins’ that I struggled with prior to getting baptized were simply going to vanish when I came out of the water. Instead I was just wet.

Nothing else, just wet.

If you haven’t read my more detailed posts about my journey in finding a meaningful and life transforming faith in Jesus Christ you can find my story here, here, here and here, or you can just read my Why Am I Here link and follow these same links at the end of the post.

Let’s fast forward to the last year and a half or so.

Everything that I had been looking for in that initial baptism has now occurred. I can’t say that I’ve really had a particular moment, a Damascus Road incident so to speak, where I knew that I had found the ‘Get Into the Wheelbarrow’ type of faith that I talked about in my last post. What I have discovered is that ‘magic’ that I was looking for so very long ago. I now have complete assurance of my salvation and all of those ‘sins’ that I struggled with so mightily for so many years, at least the largest and most agrievious portion of them, have vanished away with comparatively little effort on my part.

So the big question is, all of those years ago, did I fail Christianity or did Christianity fail me?

I asked the Pastor of the Methodist Church that we’ve been attending a while back if he thought I was ‘saved’ those many years ago with my first baptism or if it was in actuality much more recently after I had related my story to him. He seemed to be of the opinion that my salvation was actually secure from the moment of my first confession of faith and that I had for all of these years been suffering from a combination of various addictions and bad theology, but I’m not so sure.

So where am I going with all of this, you might ask.

Well, to begin with I have come to believe that many fundamentalist Christians, especially those of the charismatic variety, have come to view justification, regeneration and sanctification as a package deal. I am coming to see the great error in this.

Secondly, although I am deeply interested in finding out exactly how this deep fundamental change has finally occurred in my life and why it took so long, I am much more interested in finding ways to perhaps help others avoid having to take such a long and treacherous journey in finding a faith in Christ that really works.

I’ll try and explore in my next post some of the various options open to me within the various theological streams of thought to explain what precisely happened along the way to cause my journey to a meaningful and effectual faith be so difficult.

Filed Under: Armstrongism, Charismatic Christianity, Faith, Salvation, Spiritual Abuse