Coming Out of the Hangar: Confessions of an Evangelical Deist
I am going to go out there.
I know a score of pastors and many more lay people who are undergoing this same transformation I am. Many of them are diving into the bracing spiritual waters much more boldly than I and with more dramatic results. It does not seem as difficult for lay people; they do not have to pretend they have already “arrived” and have all the answers to truth and life.
Recently I attended a conference on spiritual warfare hosted by the Vineyard Christian Fellowship in Anaheim, California. I resisted wearing a false nose and wig. In God’s great humor, I ran into half a dozen Presbyterian laypeople I knew, as well as several friends in pastoral ministry who were all unlikely attendees—from the Presbyterian, Conservative Baptist, Southern Baptist, United Church of Christ, and Covenant churches.
The evangelical church is opening up to the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit.
Two things changed my mind. First, Scripture. The charismatic church is often accused of elevating experience above Scripture as guide for doctrine and life. For me, Scripture pointed me in the direction of power ministry before any personal experience of the Spirit confirmed it. I believe it because the Bible teaches it. And I will pray for this anointing; I will wait for the Lord to bestow it; I will seek it from he Lord’s hand—in obedience to the Word. God will give it in his time.
The second reason I changed my mind on this issue was because of the powerlessness I experienced in my own spiritual life and ministry. In wrestling with recurring habits of anger and purity, I felt my spiritual resources—even when I called upon the Holy Spirit—to be inadequate. In sharing my faith, I was often frustrated by the lame sparring between my “truth system” and the other guy’s. I was discouraged by a relatively ineffective ministry of intercessory prayer. I long for a stronger, surer, exhilarating sense of God’s presence—to look into God’s face, catch God’s eye.
What I was desiring—and desire now—is more of a supernatural manifestation of God’s reality—to break the grip of false religion and ideology and open a person to the power and truth of the gospel; to deliver us from the bondage of sinful habits and addictions; to show the church (and the unchurched) what the gospel means, what the forgiveness of sins is like, by healing those who are sick (see, for example, Matt. 9:6; Mark 2:10,11; Luke 5:24; Jas. 5:15,16).
There are many in my church and denomination who are watching tentatively with the same longings and fears. They want very much to plunge into the water, although just to stick their toes in it right now is a terrifying prospect. My colleagues in ministry are cautious for the most part, but supportive. Most Presbyterian pastors in the region stayed away from a recent Presbytery-hosted conference on the Holy Spirit, where Don Williams spoke, a pastor formerly on staff at Hollywood Presbyterian Church, now with the Vineyard in La Jolla near San Diego (Don also contributed a chapter on biblical discipleship to this book). That was probably too threatening for most of them. Yet I am sure if the Holy Spirit were to fall mightily upon me tomorrow, most of them would want to know about it in more than an idly curious way. The very fact that the conference even happened is evidence of a new openness in my church.
Catching It
There is no institutional training center in the evangelical community for this kind of ministry. It is not in the standard curriculum anywhere (except for Fuller Seminary where Profs. C. P. Wagner and C. H. Kraft teach courses on power ministry and prayer). You have to take risks and venture outside to learn about it. There is a sociology of the Spirit: the people who do this kind of ministry are not uniformly distributed throughout the church of Jesus Christ. They are concentrated in scattered pockets, like-minded communities where people practice and encourage this ministry. You have to find them and hang out with them. Your initial encounters may be both hilarious and petrifying.
They do not teach you anything about this at most seminaries. At Princeton they did not teach me anything about prayer either, and it has taken me nearly three years to recover my reverence for Scripture. The deistic spirit which informs nearly all seminary training (including evangelical seminaries such as Fuller, Dallas, Trinity) succeeds in inoculating most graduating pastors, even evangelical pastors, against any Spirit-anointed, supernatural ministry unless God somehow undoes it or endues it.
Let me make a few modest suggestions, however, to evangelical and mainline Christians like me who are open to the kind of ministry of the Spirit that I have described here and want to know how to “catch” it, learn it, grow in it.
Study the Scriptures. The principal teacher on this subject is the Word of God. Do your own Bible study on the kingdom of God, particularly as it relates to the ministry of Jesus and the ministry he taught and commissioned the church to do. Read Luke-Acts and pay attention to the consistent connection between proclamation and miraculous signs. Watch the role that the Holy Spirit plays as the agent of power, not just in the apostles’ ministry but in Jesus’ ministry.
Try to read Scripture with a second naiveté, divesting yourself of theological presumptions that may distort your interpretation of the Word. Presumptions such as the apostolic age was an exceptional period of miraculous activity; the operation of the Spirit in the first century is different from the operation of the Spirit in our age; the miracles of Jesus were the result of his divinity rather than the work of the Holy Spirit through him (Matt. 12:28; shows Jesus’ own view on the matter; also suggested by Luke 4:1, 14-18; Acts 2:22; 10:38; etc.).
Do some homework. Read a good theology of kingdom ministry. There are some excellent works of biblical theology that organize the scriptural material into a coherent whole. I suggest a seminal evangelical work like Jesus and the Kingdom or A Theology of the New Testament, both by G.E. Ladd. The seminal works of European scholars like Alan Richardson2 and H. van der Loos3 would also be helpful.
Category: Living the Faith, Spring 2008
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