Coming Out of the Hangar: Confessions of an Evangelical Deist
Among evangelical and mainline pastors and church leaders, there is a fear and distrust of supernatural ministry, an underlying disbelief and a tremendous professional insecurity about it. If you are a pastor and healing, deliverance, and supernatural gifts are not part of your Christian experience, you seem to be stuck with an awkward choice: either those experiences are sub-Christian (phony or self-induced) or you are sub-Christian. You see the dilemma.
My own experience of the reality of God has been largely subjective. It has been confined mainly to God’s power to change people’s hearts and create faith, to console and exhilarate me when I read the Bible and reflect upon the love of Christ, to point me and tug me in the direction of righteousness, and to move me to hope in the coming kingdom of God when Christ returns in glory. There is much spiritual reality and consolation in all of that, and yet for me it is not enough. It is virtually all psychological. I believe in a livelier, more active and robust reality of God in the world. I believe these things not because my intuition or experience insists upon them, but because I read the Bible, and this kind of lively, powerful reality of God is what the Bible teaches me and shows me. My conscience is captive to this Word.
I wish to be as honest and forthright as possible about this peculiar disjunction between my deepest religious convictions and my personal spiritual experience. How do I cope with it? What am I doing about it?
I feel the same prickling uneasiness and frustration about it that I felt when I was a boy wrestling with a difficult mathematical concept and not “getting it”—or trying repeatedly to master some athletic skill or finesse and being repeatedly thwarted. In both of those instances there was a breakthrough moment where the mathematics suddenly made sense and where the skill to hit a ball right was finally “there.” The math may have taken a couple of days to coalesce; the ball skills took ten years. I experienced both breakthroughs as gifts. I had to want them, had to seek them, but in the end they had to be given. I could not make them happen.
Christian life has many breakthrough moments—moments of grace and visitation, of insight and consolation. I am still waiting for this breakthrough in my ministry—courting it, seeking it. And, I confess, I am still retreating from it, hiding, dreading it. My Presbyterian congregation is pretty lively and evangelical, but they would be happy if I stayed away from all this “power ministry” stuff and never brought it up. So would the other pastors on staff. There are whole months I let it rest, but afterwards the restlessness comes again.
If you are going to seek this kind of ministry from the Lord, these are the tensions you will have to contend with.
A Form of Godliness, But No Power—2 Timothy 3:5
How did we get to this place? What accounts for this peculiar schizophrenia where we profess a supernatural faith, but we practice a faith that is really powerless and faithless? I see two reasons.
First, we evangelicals have unconsciously imbibed the anti-supernatural and rationalistic assumptions of the culture surrounding us.
Second, the faith of the church’s own community (especially our leadership) has been corrupted by religious pride, a powerful spirit of unbelief, a fear of the supernatural, and an unwillingness to be open to the movement and work of the Holy Spirit.
As severe as that indictment sounds, it probably describes the western church in most times and places since at least the fourth century when persecution ceased and Christianity gained political ascendancy. A church that is faithful in both proclamation and demonstration is the historic exception. Even the apostles during their years of preparation, living with the Lord and witnessing his wonders first hand, fell regularly into unbelief. They did not believe God would be there for them or minister through them.
The evangelical church can no longer read the Lord’s words—“Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?” (Mark 4:40)—with any smug condescension. We are as timid and powerless as they. Ours too is the “unbelieving generation” (Mark 9:19). How long shall the Lord put up with us before he entrusts his kingdom-ministry and the lively presence of his Spirit to others in his church who will faithfully watch and learn from him?
It may be too late already. The growth of the North American and European churches went into free fall years ago. Between them they are hemorrhaging members to other religions and no religion, roughly 2 million a year in Europe, a million a year in the U.S. (Those are net losses after new conversions are counted).1
Meantime, the Spirit is moving in power in the churches of Africa, South Asia, and Latin America. In Brazil alone 10,000 new Christians are baptized every day. In Africa the church of Jesus Christ grew by 6 million members last year [1992] and by 35 million in China and Southeast Asia where conversion is often dramatic and costly. In these places the church is not only taking discipleship seriously, but is ministering confidently in the Spirit. The power of the gospel over rival religions and ideologies is dramatically evident in ministries of healing and deliverance. Sick people are cured by the power of God and demonic powers are broken. This sort of thing not only gets people’s attention but wins their heart-allegiance.
Category: Living the Faith, Spring 2008
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