Somewhere Between Dead and Crazy

This month, renowned theologian, scholar, and writer Craig Keener comes out with a new book, Spiritual Gifts Are for Today: A Biblical Case for the Continuing Work of the Spirit. Keener is not only a friend; he is my go-to source for all things New Testament. I admire him. He’s a professor at Asbury Theological Seminary. He’s also considered one of the best New Testament scholars today and his books have sold millions of copies worldwide. I’m eager to read his new book (available on Amazon, Oct. 16). I believe spiritual gifts are indeed for today and needed desperately for the empowerment and strengthening of the Church. Keener writes, “Spiritual gifts are for today. Despite the flakes, frauds and failures, Scripture is 100 percent clear about the reality of spiritual gifts.”

But there are some problems…

A friend sent me a video recently of a church he absolutely loves out of Omaha, Nebraska. I clicked on the link and in less than 30 seconds I knew exactly what I was up against. It. Was. Horrid. In a word: it was crazy.

I’m Pentecostal. I was filled with the Holy Ghost and delivered out of darkness in 1980. My brother-in-law and sister were also filled with the Holy Spirit that same weekend. My Mom too. Coming from an independent, fundamentalist, Bible Baptist background, we’d been taught that the gifts of the Spirit were not for today. The theological term is cessationism. Cessationism is the belief that spiritual gifts, especially the miracle gifts, ended with the death of the last Apostle. That’s what we were taught growing up in a Bible Baptist church. That’s what we believed.

After our Pentecostal experience, my sister, brother-in-law, and I began studying God’s Word together daily for four months. We had one guiding principle: if it isn’t in the Bible, we don’t want it; if it is, we embrace it. We wanted to know what we believed and why we believed it—scripturally—so we studied.

We studied parallel translations of the Bible, read books, used concordances and Bible dictionaries. What we found was that indeed the Bible does teach a second act of grace—a separate work called “The Baptism of the Holy Spirit.” We highlighted passages in the Bible as they related to what we had experienced. We’re so grateful to have been brought up in a home that believed the Bible was God’s Word and that it was Truth. We are grateful to be brought up in a home that taught us to be discerning and, yes, spiritually skeptical. As we sought the Lord to find out what we believed and why we believed it, the Lord was gracious to us and opened His Word. The Holy Spirit has many purposes in the life of the Believer, and one of them is that of teacher.

Those four months of soaking in God’s Word have served us well even now. They helped us lay a firm foundation that continues today as we discipline ourselves to bring everything through the grid of Scripture. Our Christian worldview was shaped and honed through those four months of study. I think this time truly prepared us for what lay ahead.

Within the next few years, the three of us were seeing things in the church that were not Scriptural, or even in line with biblical principles. For example, church leaders trying to teach people how to speak in tongues. That’s not in the Bible. Tongues is a gift from God. Some people receive this gift, some people don’t. It’s up to the Lord. Yes, you can ask for the gift of tongues, but be prepared if God says no. He’s the Giver of all gifts and He’s the Decider.

We saw so many crazy things in those days. There was a genuine move of the Spirit across our nation, and around the globe, but there was also a weird perversion taking place. We attended Kenneth and Gloria Copeland conferences. Oh my! That was a whole bag of crazy. We listened to Kenneth Hagin, Charles Capps, and attended groovy Vineyard services with John Wimber. It was at one of Wimber’s services where we saw him trying to teach people to speak in tongues. I remember getting up and walking out of that meeting. I started experiencing what I now call crazy fatigue. This is when a person is totally fed up with others’ silliness.

Looking back, I do think we were fortunate to live during that time when the Spirit of God was moving. Now I realize it was a mighty move of God, but I didn’t know it then. I had no experience with Pentecostalism or with Charismatics. But God was indeed pouring out His Spirit around the world. The time range was not quite a straight line, but the Spirit started moving in the mid-1960s with the Jesus People Movement. It then hit another peak in the mid-1970s, and started slowing down by the 1980s—though there were places globally I found revival in 1986 (Spain and Finland), and 1988 (China and Hong Kong). These were where the Spirit moved mightily.

I often meet people who experienced this outpouring, though many are reluctant to discuss it openly with strangers nowadays. It’s like something people tell you after they’ve known you for a while. In those days, I experienced first-hand churches (yes! more than once) that were caught off guard as the power of the Holy Ghost swept through their buildings and through their services and in the lives of Believers. It was phenomenal. But by the early 1990s, churches decided that the Holy Spirit wasn’t gentlemanly enough to be a part of the Sunday morning service. So, for example, pastors across the United States prohibited the gifts of the Spirit on Sunday mornings. They decided Sunday evenings or perhaps a mid-week service would better suit the gifts of the Spirit in operation. One pastor told me, “We just don’t want to scare people away.” Leaders agreed and congregations complied. And now, nearly 30 years later, most traditionally Pentecostal churches don’t have a clue to what the Spirit of God looks like. Sanitized. Controlled. In other words, dead. They’ve lost their theological distinctives.

Let me insert this here: I asked a co-worker to come to church with me one Sunday morning in 1981. She was Catholic, married, and had a small child. I loved her to bits and wanted to share my church with her. I was surprised she came with me! We heard a good message and she loved the singing (everyone loves the Charismatics’ songs). Just when the service was ending, an old woman that I didn’t think too highly of, started speaking in tongues. “OH NO!” I thought, “This is going to ruin everything!” The pastor gave the interpretation, but before he could finish, my little Catholic friend was tugging on my sleeve. “Oh, my word,” I thought, “She wants to get out of here and I don’t blame her.” I cautiously and slowly opened my eyes (they’d been closed tight in prayer, begging God to stop the old woman from speaking in tongues). “Teri,” my little friend said with tears running down her face, “that message was for me. I understood everything she said. Please go up to the front with me. I want to be saved.” And we ran to the altar. We hit our knees and the Spirit of God fell on us and she was miraculously saved and filled with the Holy Ghost. She was never the same. And there I thought I knew better than God how His gifts should work in the Sunday morning service. How arrogant. How prideful. How absolutely wrong I was.

But that’s what eventually happened across the nation. Assemblies of God and Full Gospel churches so sanitized their services that one could no longer tell them apart from Presbyterians or sober Baptists.

Daryl and I attended a Pentecostal church for five years in Lithuania. This church was part of the full-faith movement of the 1980s. It was actually founded as a result of the revival that swept across the Baltic nation. One night, we had a group of college students riding with us as we travelled to an evangelism meeting in another town. There were three of them. They had so many questions about Pentecost. First of all, none of them, though born and raised in this Pentecostal church, knew or understood the distinctives of being Pentecostal. And none of them had ever heard a person speak in tongues. They explained to us that no one in the church knew of such things. In fact, they wondered if the gifts were forbidden—in a Pentecostal church!

Restricting and prohibiting the Holy Spirit from moving in a church makes the church look better perhaps to nonbelievers. It makes the congregation appear normal, and not fanatical through the world’s eyes. These are undemonstrative churches that changed because they believed the Spirit made people look silly. They wanted to be safe from extremes. As a result, they became lifeless and flat. Some might say cold. But they sure aren’t looking foolish anymore. An old trite expression is, “We’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater.”

Yes, there is the other extreme—crazy. And even though Pentecostals and Charismatics have settled down over the past 30 years, there are still some shocking things happening out there in the name of the Holy Spirit. Sadly, there are people trying to raise the dead, telling people who to marry, and other ridiculous activities I just don’t want to mention here because they are totally unhinged from Scripture. But that does not mean we stop believing the gifts of the Holy Spirit are for today.

I’ve known good men and women, godly people, who experienced the Holy Spirit outpouring in their lives and, after a while, were so discouraged with the mishandling of God’s Word found in Pentecostal and Charismatic churches, that they abandoned the gifts of the Spirit and went what I’d call mainstream. Now, they never even speak of what happened to them years ago when the Lord baptized them in the Holy Spirit. Some became complacent, others became hostile to the gifts. It’s frustrating, because my sister, brother-in-law, and I experienced the same disappointments at services. Churches, once filled with the Glory of God and solid preaching, started inching toward either dead or absolute crazy.

Is there some place between dead and crazy? When it comes to the Holy Spirit and the Church today, it’s as if we have only two options. Isn’t it just like the enemy to trick the Church into believing one of these two extremes? I believe wholeheartedly that there is a way to move in the Spirit, function in the power of the Holy Ghost, and NOT be inept at handling the Word of God. But these days I feel we have few leaders to guide us.

The Bible teaches that we should be alive to the Spirit in alignment with the Word of God and neither crazy nor dead.

Lord, please have mercy on Your people because we have a whole generation who wants to hear God’s voice, to know if God really makes a difference in people’s lives. They hunger to know Him personally and intimately. How can they do that without a church that gives space for the Holy Spirit to move as He sees fit?

We need leaders who will capture a balance between the two extremes: dead church and crazy church. It seems to me that the devil so hates the Holy Spirit and the gifts of the Spirit that he works within human frailty to bring about either death or abuse. It’s heartbreaking!

Recently, I read 1 Corinthians 2, and I realized church leaders are doing the exact opposite of what Paul wrote in this passage. For example, it seems pastors would read the passage this way: “When I came to you, I tried to come with eloquence and human wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God…For my message was an attempt at wise and persuasive words, not with a demonstration of the Holy Spirit’s power, so that your faith might rest on wisdom, not on God’s power.” (If you’re not sure what the original passage actually says, please take a look at it).

American evangelicalism as a whole has sanitized and tightly ordered Sunday services, but what we need is a demonstration of the Holy Ghost’s power. We need the fire of the Holy Spirit and we need to be willing to look foolish. Paul goes on to write in 1 Corinthians 2:14 (NIV), “The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit.”

We need an outpouring of the Holy Ghost and Fire. We need to bring the gifts of the Spirit back into the Church and stop fearing them. There was once a time, in my lifetime, when the Church allowed the gifts of the Spirit to operate and there were healings, and people got saved, delivered, and people were set free. We had messages in tongues with interpretation and it was miraculous. Did some dirt get mixed in with the Divine? Sure. It always does, but now with our super-sanitized services and our orchestrated Sunday mornings there is absolutely no room for a Holy Spirit intervention. Please, Lord, let there be revival in our world, and let it start with me! I need a fresh Baptism of the Holy Spirit. I need power from on High! Peace.

— Teri