Praying in the Spirit: Focus of the Charismatic Experience: Tongues, the Holy Spirit, or Christ?
From the beginning of the twentieth-century Pentecostal outpouring, leaders have instructed those receiving the gift not to become infatuated with tongues but to preach Jesus. “In the first year of the work in Los Angeles [1906],” wrote Pentecostal pioneer A. W. Orwig, “I heard W. J. Seymour say, ‘Now, don’t go from this meeting and talk about tongues, but try to get people saved’” (Dalton, p.45). Pentecostal Joe E. Campbell was acutely aware of the dangers of glossocentricity when he titled his book Warning! Do Not Seek for Tongues. And his chapter titled “Something Far More Important than Speaking in Tongues” establishes love as the “motive spring from which all gifts of the Spirit should proceed” (p. 138). There is life after tongues! A life to be crucified; a life to bow to the Lordship of Jesus Christ; a life of servanthood to God and man.
The strongest criticisms leveled at the charismatic renewal seem to center on two theories: one, the experience is tongues-centered, and two, the experience is Spirit-centered. The two have in common, of course, the inference that the source and focus of the baptism and its attendant gifts are something (or someone) other than Jesus.
And by the same token, non-Pentecostals who consider the renewal as tongues-centered need to rethink their positions as well. While it is a mistake to label the charismatic renewal a “tongues movement,” the mistake is understandable. After all, the spiritual gift of tongues has been a distinctive of the baptism in the Holy Spirit since the day of Pentecost. Being a more vocal and outward spiritual manifestation, the gift of tongues undoubtedly draws attention.
First is the natural curiosity surrounding the experience of speaking in tongues. As Harold Horton says, people “are always asking us about the gift and compelling us to discuss it” (p. 131).
The name Dennis Bennett is familiar to most Pentecostals and charismatics. He was the first high church figure to make Time and Newsweek with his charismatic experience. The late Rev. Canon Dennis Bennett resigned from his Episcopalian parish in 1981 to found, with his wife Rita, the Christian Renewal Association. He was considered an “elder statesman” of the charismatic renewal for many years, and was made a “Canon of Honour” in 1980 in recognition of his work for renewal. In his spiritual autobiography, Nine O’Clock in the Morning, he tells of how it all began.
Category: Spirit, Summer 1999
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