Pneuma Review: Please tell our readers about your Pentecostal roots.

Andrew Gabriel: I grew up worshipping in primarily Pentecostal churches, although we did, at times, attend some other denominational churches. After graduating from high school, I studied at a Pentecostal Bible college, and eventually I was ordained in the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada, as I still am today.

Pneuma Review: In your book, Simply Spirit-Filled, you said that at one point in your life you were a spiritual experience junkie. Please explain what you mean by that and why you went through that phase.

Andrew K. Gabriel, Simply Spirit-Filled: Experiencing God in the Presence and Power of the Holy Spirit (Emanate Books, 2019), 179 pages.
Read John Lathrop’s review.
Read an excerpt from the book: “Two Common Myths about the Spirit-Filled Life.”

Andrew Gabriel: As I think about it now, the term ‘junkie’ might sound pejorative, but I don’t mean it to be. My heart was certainly in the right place. I was a young, somewhat naïve, Christian who wanted “all that God has for me,” as the preachers used to put it. As a result, you could say that I was “all in” when it came to trying to experience God.

The result was that, like some others around me, I wasn’t too concerned with trying to discern if experiences were authentically from God, or if they were emotional experiences that were being manufactured by the groups that I worshipped with. And, for the most part, I think the people that were manufacturing those experiences had good hearts too. They also wanted to experience God, but they thought that there were only certain ways to do so. So, for example, the music had to be a certain way, or maybe they would “encourage” you to fall down.

Pneuma Review: Later in your life you became quite skeptical of spiritual experiences. What factors contributed to that skepticism and what eventually brought you back to again appreciate the value of these spiritual experiences?

Andrew Gabriel: I think my skepticism was simply me over reacting to my realization that not everything I had experienced in the church was truly from God. And it probably stemmed from the same thing that made me a spiritual experience junkie in the first place—namely, a desire to experience God. Only now, I was more concerned with having authentic experiences of God.

Andrew Gabriel is an ordained minister; he holds credentials with the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada. He has a doctoral degree from McMaster Divinity College and is associate professor of theology at Horizon College and Seminary in Saskatoon, Canada. He has also served in pastoral ministry. Dr. Gabriel, whose Pentecostal roots go back to his childhood, brings both theology and his practical experience of the church together in this book. He has written other books which are more academic in content. Simply Spirit-Filled is written on a more popular level which makes it accessible to a wider readership. His desires for this book are that it will help those who are skeptical about experiencing the Holy Spirit to be more open to Him, and to help those who are very open to experiences of the Spirit to be more discerning (page 10).

The book consists of seven chapters and a postscript prayer. The chapter titles are: “Confessions of a Recovering Spirit-Experience Junkie,” “Shake and Bake,” “Knock, Knock, Who’s There?,” “Crazy Talk,” “Living Large,” “ Measuring Up?,” and “What Does It Mean to Be Spirit-Filled?” The postscript prayer is the text of Ephesians 3:16-21. In the course of these chapters the author weaves theology, observation, and personal experience together as he deals with such subjects as hearing God, speaking in tongues, shaking, being slain in the Spirit (people falling over, usually backwards), the health and wealth gospel, and the characteristics of a Spirit-filled person. At the end of each chapter there are questions for reflection or discussion. These questions help the reader interact with the material in each chapter. This book can be used for either personal or group study.

I particularly enjoyed Gabriel’s treatment of some of the more controversial physical manifestations that are sometimes seen in Pentecostal/Charismatic meetings. I am referring here to people shaking and being slain in the Spirit. In addressing these manifestations the author avoids making general statements that either wholeheartedly endorse or completely condemn such manifestations. He acknowledges that there are a number of possible reasons why people may exhibit these manifestations. Sometimes people behave in these ways because the physical reactions have been subtlety, but humanly, prompted. Gabriel knows this, in part, because of his own experience. He admits he copied the behavior of others at times, including shaking (page 4). So, people may feel a sort of “peer pressure” to conform to what others are doing. Another example, which he points out, is that a person may be primed to expect to be slain in the Spirit by having “catchers” put in place behind them prior to receiving ministry (page 32). There is an element of community pressure to conform. That being said, Gabriel believes that at times manifestations such as shaking and being slain in the Spirit are genuine responses to the Presence and power of God.

Most non-Christians think that the Bible reduces to mere interpretation. So why do not more Christians focus on hermeneutics? This is a perennial question that needs to be resolved. Postmodernity, though not fully expressed yet, nevertheless is in full swing at the moment. In postmodernism, it seems, one literary item means one thing to one, and another thing to another. This situation was not the case with the Apostle Paul; rather, he postulated that there were both right ways and wrong ways to understand the Bible.

There are many joys of understanding the Bible correctly; for example, one can hear God’s voice directly; moreover, one can find the truth of the heavenly realm and how to get there; thirdly, one can find out what preoccupies God. This is a book that helps one to find the joy of the Bible, as well as how to understand the Bible. This is not a predefined, laid-out methodology of steps to take; rather, herein one learns principles to apply and thereby learn to do Bible study on their own. Do not leave it to the experts. One can and should do it for themselves.

Andrew Sach

Nigel Beynon

Reading the Bible is both a science and an art. As a science, it is both rigorous and disciplined. As an art, it is something you learn by doing, almost as if by catching something. Each chapter of this small book introduces you to a separate tool of Bible study and explains how it works. At the end of each chapter, there are “dig deeper” exercises that allow one to practice using the tools oneself. The authors deem the Bible a “divine book” (18). Moreover, they contend that one needs God’s Spirit within them in order to interpret and apply the Word in today’s environ. However, the Bible is also a human book; so then, we need to recognize that the Bible was written in a particular time, by particular people, and for particular circumstances. God speaks to us, though, through their particularity.

In applying the principles in this text to Biblical interpretation, one needs to keep in mind the purpose, context, structure, linked words within and beyond the text, vocabulary, tone and feel, repetition, inner textual allusions, genre, and the implications from the text. Herein, one finds suggestions to do just this. I would unhesitantly recommend this title for those Christians who desire to understand the Bible better, and thereafter apply it in their lives.

Reviewed by Bradford McCall

Publisher’s page: https://www.crossway.org/books/dig-deeper-tpb/

An interview with Andrew Schmutzer about The Long Journey Home: Understanding and Ministering to the Sexually Abused, and part 1 of the chapter, “A Charge for Church Leadership: Speaking Out Against Sexual Abuse and Ministering to Survivors” as appearing in Pneuma Review Winter 2014.

 
A Theology of Sexuality and its Abuse—Part 1 A Theology of Sexuality and its Abuse—Part 2

 
 
A Charge for Church Leadership—Part 1 A Charge for Church Leadership—Part 2

Interview 1 Interview 2

Note from the Editors: Beginning a conversation about sexual abuse is uncomfortable, but we feel strongly that this topic is something the church needs to address. We believe the testimonies of authentic recovery can help us embrace the pain of the hurting and make openings for God to bring healing.

Pneuma Review: Do you appreciate how Nason-Clark and McMullin invite church leaders to speak out against sexual abuse as an opportunity and not as an obligation?

Andrew J. Schmutzer discussing The Long Journey Home in 2011, by Lulu Hé. Courtesy of Moody Bible Institute.

Andrew Schmutzer: To their credit, I think they were trying to cast a positive vision for making change, rather than framing the needs negatively or sternly. When there’s so much education to do to train church leaders, adopt appropriate policies for survivors, and then actively address their needs in church services—I think they put these tasks in a more positive light.

The reality is that “opportunity” sounds socially welcoming to pastoral leaders and those interested in social justice, whereas “obligation” sounds impersonal today, adding to the “deadweight” of unachievable tasks. That said, the role church leaders have—as first-responders—is an ethical and ecclesiastical responsibility to speak for those who’ve been denied a voice. I see their message being an opportunity to have an impact of a dynamic relational and spiritual kind…obligations per se, belong on check lists. Opportunities exist for those willing to be relationally vulnerable.

PR: Please share with us a testimony of speaking out against sexual abuse.

Andrew Schmutzer: It’s understood when working with abuse survivors, your story is your story and their story is their own. So while I’m aware of many abuse stories, and have a growing army of friends learning to live on the other side of abuse, I’m not comfortable speaking of others’ personal stories.

What I can say is that I’ve conducted some very meaningful chapels at Moody, where I teach. Several weeks out, I have students submit their personal abuse stories to me by email. They know their story will be used anonymously. Having collected around 20 individual stories, I have two students volunteer to read portions of these stories, which the survivors knew would be done. With mics located in the back of the auditorium, the male student reads the other male stories submitted, and he alternates with a female reader reading portions of women’s stories. This testimony part is one of the most powerful parts of these chapels, as students hear some very painful stories from their own peers! Written prayers of lament, responsive readings, prayer circles, candles, oil, and other meaningful rituals can be woven into these student chapels. Would you believe, they can’t wait for the next one the following semester!

Andrew D. Clarke, A Pauline Theology of Church Leadership (New York: T & T Clark, 2008), 189 pages, ISBN 9780567045607.

This work is important for those considering how best to ‘do church’ and who are also seeking after a Biblical model of leadership. The volume, a theological monograph in the Library of New Testament Studies series, is both theologically up to date and pastorally relevant for today. Clark, a senior lecturer in New Testament Studies in the University of Aberdeen and also the leader of a new church in rural Aberdeenshire, continues and develops the theme of Paul’s understanding of leadership which he addressed in his earlier work, Serve the Community of the Church: Christians as Leaders and Ministers (Eerdmans, 2000). In that work, Clark had noted how Paul’s understanding of Christian leadership should be distinguished from contemporary, social understandings of leadership in the 1st century Graeco-Roman context.

Andrew D. Clarke

Clarke argues that we can only understand Paul’s perspective on leadership and apostolic authority within the ecclesial context in which he worked. That is, a context of house churches where relationship and transparency was integral to the leadership role. He sees the various descriptors—overseer, elder and deacon not as offices, as they would later become in the Ignatian model, but properly as descriptors, often interchangeable or overlapping, of leadership dynamics within the local churches.

For Clarke, the critical ingredients for Pauline leadership were both an ability to teach and an ability to model Christlikeness to others: functions that necessitated relational accountability of such leaders within the local church communities they sought to lead. Clarke see that an attempt to appeal to Paul for models of ministry that vindicate power structures within larger people groups is to remove him from his context.

Reviewed by Jim Purves

Andrew D. Clarke, Serve the Community of the Church: Christians as Leaders and Ministers (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 305 pages.

Clarke’s interest lies in discerning the attitude towards leadership in the early church, in New Testament times. Rejecting the traditional, protestant position that the early church was essentially a charismatic community which, through time, sublimated the offices identified in the later Pauline epistles, Clark leads us into a fascinating study of the real tensions over various styles of leadership that he traces in the New Testament, models present from the very beginnings of the church. His thesis is that leadership did exist in the earliest Christian communities, but that a distinction needs to be made between ‘the social processes that were active in a given Pauline community and the nature of godly leadership to which Paul appealed in his corrective statements’ (p 172).

Andrew D. Clarke

Clarke begins by seeking to identify the models of leadership present in the 1st century Graeco-Roman context. He reviews, in the 1st part of his book, leadership models in the Graeco-Roman city, the Roman colony and city, in voluntary associations, the family and household and the Jewish synagogue. In the 2nd part of the book, Clark goes on to trace the struggles over issues of leadership within the early Christian communities. On the one hand, there are the norms of community leadership carried into church from the wider community which influence the attitude and behavior of Christians in their embryonic gatherings. On the other hand there is the influence of Jesus, and the challenge to work through the implications of our life in Christ, in influencing how leadership is to be construed and applied.

Clarke’s excellent scholarship is not unapplied. Subtly yet respectfully, he leads us to see where his meticulous study would take us. In what is the best study in Biblical models of leadership that I have read, he makes a bold yet soundly based affirmation: that Christian leadership, properly understood, is fundamentally different from the models that operate in worldly structures. Clark carefully and thoroughly works through the implications of what any Greek scholar can confirm: that Paul deliberately avoids describing himself as a ‘leader’ and disregards extra-New Testament words for ‘leader’ as descriptors for any key function in the church. What a disturbing yet liberating discovery of a basic, biblical truth this could be for those entrusted with leadership roles in today’s church.

This book is a must for all who would take seriously the Bible as leading us into alternative way of leading the church.

Reviewed by James Purves

Leona Choy, Andrew & Emma Murray: An Intimate Portrait of Their Marriage and Ministry (Winchester, Virginia: Golden Morning Publishing, 2000), 269 pages.

This book did not disappoint me. Historical biographies that are both easy reading and entertaining are, after a hard day’s work, to be valued. This is one such biography. Written in a style that is both popular and easy to digest, it is at the same time a book that leads the reader into an ever deepening appreciation and admiration of the subjects, the Rev. Andrew Murray and his wife Emma. No reader should be afraid of this book. It is accessible and understandable to anyone who can read.

Before absorbing this book, my knowledge of Andrew Murray was only fleeting: I had read one of his books, but was aware of little about him. Leona Choy’s work so captured my interest that it drew me onto the internet, where a few of Murray’s works are freely available, and this has led me into a treasure trove of rich, spiritual Christian writing at the hands of this leader of the South African church and “higher life” movement at the beginning of the twentieth century. Murray’s works have a devotional depth and love of Scripture that make them an invaluable for Christians today, especially for those wishing to engage with issues of spiritual renewal who come from a Reformed background.

This engaging biography has an invaluable appendix containing a bibliographical listing of Andrew Murray’s works. To be fully recommended as both an entertaining and edifying read.

Reviewed by James Purves