pilgrim.not.wanderer

Because of this stuff, I’m not Pentecostal or charismatic.  Watch it.  This is idiocy, isn’t it?  Isn’t this basically satanic?  

I’ve personally heard stuff like this (though slightly less crazy) from charismatic preachers.  I’ve personally experienced a preacher, who looked just like Tobias Fünke (from Arrested Development), try to “bless” the gathering at a men’s retreat by flamboyantly running around with a weird flag and dragging it over our heads.  In my opinion he was acting more like a gay witch doctor than a Christian pastor.   Wasn’t his so called blessing basically pagan, even if it was dressed up in quasi Christian language?

I bumped into him while returning to my cabin about an hour later and it was all I could do not to smack him.  I didn’t, obviously.  I bet that if I pointed out how ridiculous his behaviour was I would have been pinned down and prayed over by ’spiritual warriors’. I simply avoided eye contact with him and shook my head in disaproval.

My friend asked me these questions: Do you think that God communicates to us through coincidences? What would you consider the main ways that God communicates with us now a days?

One thing we know is that success and/or happy circumstances are not a sign of God’s pleasure/approval.

After all God

makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.

The bible teaches that God doesn’t providentially rule the world such that the evil always suffer and things always go well for the good.  (See Psalm 73)  So is it wrong to conclude, simply from good and agreeable circumstances, that God is happy with us.  In my opinion this represents a kind of generically religious though unChristian superstition.  

If I want to know how God feels about me, I look to the gospel and to Christ.  I don’t look inside of myself or outside to my circumstances.

If I want to know what God would have me do, I

(a) read the gospels, the NT, and the OT as interpeted in view of Christ

(b) seek out wise counsel

(c) try to rationally evaluate the options

(d) try to make sure my conscience is properly formed and sensitive

(e) pray for wisdom and guidance

and other things like this.

I don’t think that there is a secret “will of God” which is hidden up in heaven and has to be pried from God’s hands through special spiritual techniques.  God expects me to be faithful to what he has revealed.  I don’t need to be on an endless search for secret information about my future and what God specifically wants me to do in each and every situation.  That’s called divination isn’t it?  Isn’t this forbidden? A Christian horoscope?

That’s my thoughts on this stuff, at least for now.  Basically, we need to spend more time in the Bible and looking to Christ and less time obsessing with God’s secret will for our lives.

I wouldn’t want to rule out God getting our attention with strange circumstances.  It also seems right to thank God when strange circumstances turn up in our favour.  (I got into a specialist the very next day instead of the usually 6 week wait last fall.  I thanked God for it.)  But we need to be cautious.  There is such a thing as superstition and it shouldn’t be confused with faith.  

Prayer isn’t spiritual technology.  Prayer isn’t Christian spell-casting.  Prayer isn’t Christian divination.

It isn’t even a “proven and sensible” means to some end.  

The question of whether prayer works is nearly irrelevant.  To the person who prays, such a question is foreign.  If you find yourself dwelling on this question, it may be that you haven’t tasted the living flavour of prayer.  

Prayer bursts forth from the heart.  Thankfulness.  Praise.  Lament.  Longing.  Petition.  

We don’t pray these prayers because they work.  (Which is NOT to say that we pray them even though they don’t work.)

Real prayer isn’t so cold and calculated as to render such a question relevant.  In face of life we find ourselves with thankfulness, praise, lamentation, and longing for God to set things right.  Prayer is the expression of these matters of the heart.  We simply find ourselves with the need to express these things, and so we do.  

So like I said, in the heat of the moment the question of whether prayer works is foreign to the one who prays.

We don’t do it because it works, but because we can’t help but do it.  Real prayer is that desperate.  

Cold and calculative prayers are hardly worthy of the name.

I guess I should elaborate on my recent ‘drive-by criticisms’ of Pentecostalism and the charismatic movement generally.  (See here.)

I said: “ Pentecostalism is a kind of cancer that eats away at Christ centered piety in the church. “

In my younger days I heard it said more than once that we Evangelicals have spent too much time on Christ, to the neglect of the Spirit.  If anything, I’d say opposite is true.  The Spirit is the Spirit of Christ, bestowed upon the Church by Christ.  The Spirit was sent to draw us to Christ.

In my observation Pentecostals and charismatics deal with the the Spirit as a kind of mysterious hidden power which does exciting tricks and otherwise empowers us.  At its worse this amounts to a kind of natural, generic religion.  You could believe in and practice this stuff without ever hearing of Christ or reading the gospels.  If Christ is involved at all, He is merely the doorway in to this ‘higher’ life in the Spirit.  Our goals and our methods are then ‘empowered’ by this ’spirit’, rather than Christ’s goals and methods.  This turns Christianity into an ugly, greedy, power-hungry religion.  Somehow “taking back the culture” or growing a ridiculous TV ministry conglomerate becomes an expression of Christian piety.  Christianity gets turned into a way to get power to achieve exactly what we want.  This is paganism dressed up in quasi-Christian terminology.

I said: “ I see the Pentecostal/charismatic world as a bastion of spiritual abuse. “

In Pentecostal and charismatic churches humans gain tremendous power and authority.  With this ‘power’ comes all sorts of abuses of power.  

I said: “ Taking the Lord’s name in vain seems to be standard practice. “

The chief form in which this abuse of power takes place is through ‘words from the Lord’.  I can’t count how many times I’ve come across this.  I’ve heard someone say God specifically told them they’d marry their current girlfriend.  A year and a half later I found out they had a horribly messy breakup.  I can assure that God didn’t lie, so who did?  I’ve heard of someone approaching one of my friends with a message from God: you are supposed to break up with your current boyfriend, God told me.  They didn’t break up.  They are happily married.  Apparently God never felt the need to directly tell them to breakup.  He chose this blessed messenger instead?  I doubt it.  It seems extremely likely to me that this person was merely invoking God’s name to back up his own opinion.  That’s a pretty serious sin.  In my observation this kind of sin is absolutely rampant amongst Pentecostals and charismatics.

I’d like to add one more thing.  Pentecostalism and the charismatic movement  have transformed our understanding of the presence of God.  God is now thought of as very distant, and the way to get him to come near is by singing.  We coax him down from heaven by singing praise and worship songs.  D’you ever notice that in the midst of praise and worship singing the ‘worship leader’ will almost always comment on how close God is?  Where was he before?

This has lead to a vast reshaping of Christian piety.  Very many Christians I know are terrorized by the distance of God.  They live in fear of ‘how they are doing with God’.  When someone asks them, ‘How are you doing with God?’, their thoughts immediately turn into themselves and their own internal states.  They think of their emotions.  They live in a bi-polar spiritual cycle.  They have huge spiritual highs at ‘worship’ services and crazy lows at other times.

I believe in praise and worship, but I do not believe in ‘the Gospel of Praise and Worship’.  That is, I do not believe that singing praise and worship songs mediates my relationship with God.  I absolutely do not believe that singing praise and worship puts me in better standing with God.  Neither to I believe that God is only near to me when I feel him while singing praise and worship songs.  

This way of thinking has completely taken over Evangelicalism.  I was raised in it.  You’d be hard pressed to find a single church that doesn’t hardily embrace it.  I don’t buy it.  I think it amounts to a denial of the Gospel, at least in practice if not in official doctrine.

Here’s an interesting article by James J. A. Smith.  It is called Teaching a Calvinist to Dance.  It is a kind of personal testimony and apology (i.e. apologetic) for being both Reformed and Pentecostal.  

I couldn’t disagree more with his enthusiastic embrace of Pentecostalism.  

I know, nothing is more thrilling for an author (and yet so boring for his readers) than criticizing a fellow Christian on the web.  And few things are more evident of self-righteousness than ill-tempered, uncharitable criticism.  

Still, I can’t help but disagree.  Read the article yourself and come to your own conclusion.  

As for me, Pentecostalism is a kind of cancer that eats away at Christ centered piety in the church.  I see the Pentecostal/charismatic world as a bastion of spiritual abuse.  Taking the Lord’s name in vain seems to be standard practice.  (I take that to mean using the name and the authority of the Lord to back up one’s own projects and desires.  ”God told me to do this!”  ”The Lord would have us do that!”)  Pentecostalism is an ugly, power hungry version of Christianity.   

At least that’s what Pentecostalism is to me, according to my personal encounters with it in real Pentecostal churches and with real Pentecostal people.  I’ve attended Pentecostal churches and have some friends who still do.  I’ve interacted with tons of Pentecostals at the bible college I attended.  I have no doubt there are many saintly folks among the Pentecostal set.  It may even be that the official teaching of Pentecostalism (if such a thing exists) disapproves of these kinds of abuses.  Still, my lived experience of Pentecostalism was saturated with this stuff.  

Whereas most people outside of the church think that fundamentalism is the big threat, in fact it is Pentecostalism that poses the great danger.  It is the Pentecostals who think they have direct line to God.  It is the Pentecostals who seem so unwilling to exercise their critical faculties.  Pentecostal leaders can hardly be reigned in and kept in check–they speak for God himself.  If you are worried about Pat Robertson and his kind, you are worried about Pentecostalism.

I’ve encountered first hand far too many “words from the Lord” from Pentecostals which turned out to be complete and utter falsehoods.  I simply don’t buy it anymore.  Don’t try it with me.  (Don’t take me as saying that God doesn’t lead us.  God does.  But that is a very different thing from the Pentecostal/charismatic practice of constantly receiving “words” directly from the Lord.  So many of these “words” are obviously not from God.)

Smith has this to say:

In particular, I think Pentecostal spirituality and charismatic worship take the sovereignty of God so seriously that you might actually be surprised by God every once in a while. You are open and expectant that the Spirit of God is sometimes going to surprise you, because God is free to act in ways that might differ from your set of expectations.

In my experience, nothing is LESS surprising and LESS unexpected that the kinds of “acts of God” which pop up during Pentecostal/charismatic worship.  These things are very predictable.  For the life of me, I don’t know why more folks don’t call Pentecostals/charismatics out on this.  The Pentecostal dog and pony show can be (and usually is?) just as empty and formulaic as your worst liturgical high-church nightmare.  

What can I say?  Maybe my view of things is skewed.  But that’s how I see it for now.  I’m not Pentecostal or charismatic, and I’m happy about it.  I’m not Reformed either. 

It is a great and wonderful thing to be Christian.  

Christianity is not an idealogy.  In a sense it is not even a religion.

It is a great and wonderful thing to be reconciled to God by God.  In and through His Church God encountered me and proclaimed the Gospel to me, offering Himself for my salvation and the salvation of the world.  

To be Christian is to be on the way to somewhere amongst a great company of redeemed sinners, a pitiful bunch, who are on the way and yet not yet there.

Allow me to be frank, maybe even rude.  We are a fucked up bunch, we Christians.  Forgive me for my frankness.  Seriously. The Gospel doesn’t require me to believe otherwise, and I believe it.  Christ came to redeemed the sick and the lost.  Here I am, sick and lost.  On to the way to the heavenly city.  If you are neither sick nor lost, move along.  This is not for you.

Whatever else I know, I know this.  It is a great and wonderful thing to be Christian.  Here I stand, happily.  On the way.

If you don’t understand this, if this scares you, I implore you to carefully consider what it is like to be me.  Imagine what it is like to be Christian.  Don’t right me off just because you don’t understand me, and I’ll return the favour.

Attention Christians: Here’s how to tell you’re living in the past.

You think that one of our biggest problems in the church is resistance to change.  

In my world that is obviously not the case.  Maybe its true for Baby-boomers and other earlier generations.  (If your church is full of folks like that, then maybe it is true of your church.  Carry on, what I have to say doesn’t apply to you.)  

But my generation mindlessly embraces change and blindly assumes that change will always be for the good.  We’ve spent our entire lives upgrading our technology and buying into more technology.  It never crossed our minds to call this into question.  It never crossed our minds to be content with things the way they are.  We’ve always lusted for the next version.  

If anything, we need to be taught how to call change into question.

Lust for change, together with a phony sense of discontent with the status quo, is the engine that drives contemporary capitalism.  The business world buys up our best and brightest to put them to work on making us feel this way.

When lust for change is the status quo, then challenging the status quo means challenging change.  So then, for my generation, truly embracing change means rejecting it.

OK, I’m only joking… but seriously, how come so many of the book-writing emergent church leader types as so freaking old?  I’m talking 40’s or early 50’s.  Or at least late 30’s.  I won’t name names, but you know who I’m talking about.  (If they aren’t really that old, then man, they really let themselves go.)

I’m not being ageist.  No.  I just think it is pretty hilarious that these old men are the supposed futurists guiding us into the world of today’s young people.  Go back to the 90’s where you belong!!!  

Heck, I’m 28.  Can you believe that?  These people don’t even belong to MY generation.  And the kids these days are reading them to find out about their own culture?  Only in Christendom.  Only in Christendom.

Relax, I’m half kidding.

BTW - Generation X folks are the new Baby-boomers.  Yes, Generation X folks are in their 40’s.  They are practically middle age.  Soon they’ll be seniors. 

When I first went to http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/, my first thought was to make a ’stuff Christians like’ copy cat.  Well, I never got around to it.  But I recently stumbled on this (http://stufffchristianslike.blogspot.com/).  I haven’t read much of it yet, so I can’t say if it’s any good.

Anyway, my first post on my copy cat would have been something like this:

Christians love talking to other Christians in hush tones about how badly the church has treated them.  This is called being ‘burned by the Church’.  When they begin to recount the supposedly horrid details be sure to nod your head.   Try putting a hand on their shoulder and groaning prayerfully.  Also, be sure to shake your head in quiet rage at the really bad parts.  

You might think that ‘being burned by the church’ is a bad thing.  You’d be wrong.  Nothing feeds a Christian’s sense of self-importance like being being ‘burned by the church’.  It is the fast track to self-righteousness and gives them an excuse to be either (i) a lazy sod or (ii) a divisive and vindictive practitioner of ‘church politics’.  When anyone criticizes them, their friends will simply point out that they’ve been ‘burned by the church’, and that explains everything.  

It also gives them a free pass to either start their own church (emerging or otherwise) or simply change churches.  Church hopping every 3 years is a wonderful way for those ‘burned by the church’ to spread the misery.  The more churches they attend and then leave, the more people they’ll get to feel superior to and look down upon.

If a Christian begins telling you their sad story, remember, they’re in search of a couple of things from you.  First, they want to be begged to be involved in church activities and be given more power in the church.  Second, they want you to reinforce their own self-righteous sense of victimhood.  So, either way, pour it on and they’ll love you for it!

BTW - I’ve never been burned by the church.  I’m cheerfully Christian.

What if I’m an emerging church kinda guy, and I didn’t even know it?  (Experientially and practically, not necessarily doctrinally.)

“Shepherd,” Fackenheim continued after another noxious exhalation, “modernity thinks God to be vague, abstract, ethereal, ‘iffy.’  God, however, is concrete, solid, dense with a density beyond our imagining.  There is nothing ‘iffy’ about God; but there is a great deal that is ‘iffy’ about you and me.”  Dumbfounded at the spiritual assault (albeit benign) from a world-class philosopher, I was still reeling when he launched the next salvo.  “Shepherd, in view of the horrific depredations of our century – crowned by the Shoah – there are huge question marks above humankind.  But concerning God there is no question whatever.  Never forget,” he concluded, “We do not demythologize God; God demythologizes us as God exposes the groundless myths by which humankind is enthralled.”  I staggered out of his office, the topic of my philosophy essay all but lost in the aura without and the awe within that have never evaporated and that continue to keep Fackenheim’s name fragrant.

My wife’s grandfather died a day or two after Christmas.  He was cremated right away, but the funeral wasn’t until today.

It was held at a Catholic church that was showing its age in a bad way.  It was literally a stone’s throw away from a another Catholic church in much better condition.  I don’t know for sure, but it seems likely to me that neither church is bustling on Sundays.  So why were they built so close to each other?  Anyway, apparently my wife’s mom was baptized at this old church.  

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