I was lying in my dorm room bed at Moody Bible Institute a few months after arriving there, listening to a sermon from Timothy Keller. He had long been one of my favorite preachers, but one thing that’s true of humans everywhere is this: you don’t realize what you disagree with them on until it comes up.
“I’d consider myself an 80% cessationist,” Keller said at one point in the message. (A cessationist is someone who believes the spiritual gifts have ceased.) “I believe that about 20% of what people report actually happens and is from God. The rest I think is emotional excitement or mental placebo.”
Aw man! I thought. I thought Tim Keller was cool! How can one of the best preachers be so wrong??
I wasn’t just a little charismatic, I was all in.
I led a street prayer ministry the whole time I was at Moody, and we often prayed for supernatural miracles. And I saw a couple. I was in Nigeria, Brasil, Thailand, India, and more with very charismatic organizations. We saw supernatural things: most prominently, a demon cast out of a Thai farmer. And despite how often we prayed for miracles to happen, that’s one of the few real ones I ever saw.
There were a lot of times we celebrated a healing of someone’s back because their pain had instantly disappeared, only to return a few hours later. We would often pray for a local (who didn’t know English) and they would nod that their knee was healed, probably just to get these weird kids to stop touching their leg.
I was even caught up in the ‘penny trick,’ where you pray for God to hold a penny to a wall or ceiling. I remember Kim Walker explaining that it’s like lifting weights in the gym: it doesn’t accomplish anything in and of itself, but it strengthens your faith. Most of the time it was just the moisture from the paint holding it up, but there was one time I saw a penny hold fast to a slanted, dry ceiling which was strange.
All that is to say, I wasn’t just a casual charismatic believer; I was in it. Miracles and supernatural events were my bread and butter, and when they didn’t happen, there was grave disappointment. My fledgling theology didn’t know how to make sense of a God who didn’t show up, say, 80% of the time…
Despite the tone of this article, I want to be clear: I love YWAM, IHOP, OM, et al and the passion and zeal of the charismatic movement. I grew so much during my time with them and know they are doing SO much good around the world, advancing the gospel of Jesus in places it needs to go. The purpose of this post is to encourage charismatic brothers and sisters to see a few things I’ve realized and learned after living outside of that circle, which you may not otherwise be exposed to. Diving deep into history, philosophy, and other strains of evangelical theology has taught me more than I ever got from any ‘prophecy’ (save one at OneThing conference 2014 from a dude named Sam, again proving the point that very few events were actually of the Spirit…but some certainly were). It has helped my faith and love for God grow, not diminish.
Adjusting to life at Moody as a charismatic was a tough transition: in some ways MBI is the opposite end of the spectrum—I had some professors tell me that I had never, in fact, seen a miracle and it was all in my imagination. I had a group of fellow former YWAMers and we would gather and worship and pray, and this was great.
However, it was over my three years at Moody that my knowledge would expand, thus adjusting my view of miracles and supernatural activity. It didn’t remove it completely, but it balanced it. It’s a mistake to think that non-charismatic believers are anti-Holy Spirit. Granted, some are, but just because I don’t consider myself ‘charismatic/pentecostal’ doesn’t mean I think God cannot still do miraculous, supernatural things. Let me explain.
I always return to John 4:23-4, where Jesus tells us that worshipers worship ‘in spirit and truth.’ You need both in order to survive as a Christian, and I tell folks that I got the spirit from YWAM and the truth from Moody (and now Denver Seminary).
If you have the truth but no spirit, your religion quickly becomes dry, legalistic rule following. Often it is this side of Christianity that is critiqued more for being ‘Pharisees and judgmental legalists,’ which is fair, but what about the other extreme?
If you only have spirit but no truth, cults are formed and anything someone says goes as long as you seem to be ‘led by the Spirit.’ As the charismatic/pentecostal movement becomes the fastest growing branch of Christianity worldwide, we need to be sure that we are balancing our spirit with truth, not allowing our members to spin off into wild theological quandaries which may sound spiritual, but have little to no biblical precedent. (This is the side of the pendulum this article is focusing on; I know there is much to be said for the other extreme as well, but that’s for another day.) Even prominent charismatic scholar Craig Keener has admitted that charismatic believers need to become more educated, not following every wind of prophecy. I’m not just talking about damaging practices like forced speaking in tongues, I’m talking about even deeper beliefs which would lead to practices like that.
Take, for instance, the recent tragic episode of a Bethel worship leader trying to raise her daughter from the dead: without going into the details of the story itself, a lot of Bible verses were thrown around out of context in order to prove one side’s point. This is obviously a detrimental way to build arguments and do hermeneutics no matter which side you’re on. This heartwrenching event served to expose a lot of the beliefs of the charismatic church and the grounds upon which they build their theology.