Forming a Community of the Spirit: Hospitality, Fellowship, and Nurture, Part 1
At this point in this narrative, it is certain that most believers would give enthusiastic assent to what has been written: a faith community can provide a place of hospitality for all, encourage the formation of a listening community, and hear the biblical stories and the testimonies of the gathered saints, even those who are inarticulate and require help from the believing community. If only this did not sound so idealistic, as though it were an egalitarian dream. What about all the messiness, fleshliness, and foolishness found in even the best of faith communities?
Those who have participated in Pentecostal church services in which testimony was encouraged will, no doubt, recall painful moments when people decided to use the time for lengthy speeches of complaint, or rambling accounts of who-knows-what, or the same old line about gratitude for salvation, sanctification, and Spirit-baptism. Many would cringe when certain ones would stand to testify, certain that they were about to unleash something strange or lengthy with little connection to the work or voice of the Spirit.
The result of this kind of frustrating experience with testimony time has been its gradual disappearance from the Pentecostal church. This seemed to have started with attempts by professional ministers to control the content of testimonies. In 1989, Margaret Poloma reported,
In many large churches testimonials have become professionalized. Selecting persons to give testimonies may eliminate the potential problems of the practice but at the expense of charismatic spontaneity. When eliciting a testimony from someone in the congregation, some pastors use the “question-answer” format of television talk shows, for it gives the pastor control over what is shared.32
Certainly, it takes courage by church leaders to make sure there is order in all parts of church worship (or in whatever setting) according to the apostle’s instruction in 1 Corinthians 14:26–33. However, the deletion of testimony time or the strict control of it by professional ministers actually robs the faith community of the powerful work of the Spirit in creating Spirit-enabled fellowship as well as ways the voice of the Spirit might be heard.
In subtle and not-so-subtle ways, the message by church leaders to the congregation might be that lay voices in testimony are not welcomed and will not be heard. An unspoken yet very clear message might be conveyed that only the pastoral staff and the worship team are allowed to express themselves publicly in church meetings. As a result, laypeople learn that silence is valued and that listening is a one-way street—the pastoral staff and worship team may speak, the laypeople must listen.
It is in community worship or settings in which all voices can be heard—Sunday school class, home Bible studies, prayer meetings—that Pentecostal people have claimed, “the Spirit is in control.” If that is the case, more people than the pastoral staff and worship team would have an opportunity to speak, share a hymn, or give a word “for the strengthening of the church” (1 Cor 14:26). This means that careful and active listening must be practiced by church leaders, both to give the “amen” to that which is confirmed as coming from the Spirit, and to give proper, gentle discipline to those who are “out of order” in that they are not speaking by the Spirit.
In my own early days of Pentecostal experience, I understood that worship was led by the pastor and church leaders, but there were at least two times during worship services when lay voices must be heard because these voices just might be speaking by the Spirit: (1) during testimony time and (2) during times at the end of the service when people gathered around the altar benches to pray. The only “control” exercised by the pastor might have been to encourage a person who had spoken too long to get to the point, or to stop someone from interrupting someone else.
In addressing the issue of the messiness and potential strangeness of testimonies during testimony time in worship, it is important to stress the work of discipleship. Disciples are ones who can learn from their mentors in all aspects of the faith, including how to testify. They learn how to listen to God as well as how to express what they think the Spirit is asking them to say or do. They can also learn to alter their explanatory style, (i.e., learn how to say what they feel compelled to say in words or song or prophecy appropriate to the setting).33 Where else might they learn the appropriate language to express their story?
Category: Ministry, Winter 2012
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