Once again: on being unapologetically charismatic

‘Are you a closet charismatic, Steve?’

I was having lunch with someone I like and respect greatly when he threw this one at me a month or two back. My response was heartfelt and immediate: ‘What do you mean, “closet”?’ On this issue, I’m out and proud – although hardly uncritical of the movement as a whole, or in its various strands.

Because of this, I initially looked seriously at the first reports from the ‘Strange Fire’ conference that happened across the pond a while back; I have to admit that I quickly lost interest: there are some serious theological criticisms to be made of the charismatic movement, but there was no-one on that platform capable of making them. I picked up a farrago of unsubstantiated assertion, inaccurate history, poor exegesis, and – well, generally, it wasn’t good, and I quickly tuned out. One point stuck with me from what little I read, though.

My friend Andrew Wilson, who clearly has far more patience and Christian charity than I do, engaged seriously with some of the arguments presented at the conference on the Think Theology blog here; I want to pick up just on one theme, albeit a rather central one: the definition of ‘charismatic’. Andrew quotes, and accepts, a definition offered at the SF conference by Tom Pennington: to be ‘charismatic’ is to support the continuation of the ‘miraculous gifts’. I am not convinced by this definition.

My concern with this is simple, and deeply partial, in the sense that it is based only on my own experience and knowledge only, and not on any serious research. The charismatic movement which I know might formally be characterised theologically by its belief about certain spiritual gifts, but this is some distance from its lived concerns and interests.

Andrew makes the point that the ‘charismatic/cessationist’ debate is not about belief in continuing miracles: conversion – God giving new life to someone dead in their trespasses and sins – remains the fundamental miracle of the church’s experience, and is believed and rejoiced in on all sides of this debate. I want to push this further, though: consider the ‘gift of healing’: on the ‘cessationist’ side, I have never met a pastor who does not pray seriously for God’s healing for his/her flock when they are ill; on the ‘charismatic’ side, I do not think I have met anyone who claims to have ‘the gift of healing’ (I know they exist; my point is that much – perhaps most – charismatic life is not narrated in these terms). I know many people – including one of my own children – who can give serious testimony to seeing instantaneous and apparently-miraculous healing happening in response to prayer; but the language of  a ‘gift of healing’ is not the way these testimonies would be framed.

Similarly, I think of people in congregations I have led (or been a part of) who would regularly prophesy in our worship times; none ever (in my hearing) claimed a ‘gift of prophecy’; that was not their self-understanding of how they were ministering. Again, I stress, I am reflecting on my own experience – but I have been on the speaking or leadership teams of several major charismatic conferences in the UK over the last decade; in some of these prophecy, healing, and salvation were daily realities; I never recall hearing the language of ‘gift of healing/prophecy’ in any context in any of them. When I have been present when messages in tongues have come, the request from the front has always been something like ‘Did anyone sense God speaking as that message was brought?’ not ‘Does anyone have the gift of interpretation?’

Again, I know lots of people who pray in tongues. It happens that I pray in tongues every day (that rumbling sound you can hear is the collapsing of my academic credibility). I suppose if someone asked me ‘have you received the gift of tongues’ I would say yes, but I do not recall ever being asked that question, and I do not habitually think of my spirituality in those terms; my ordinary daily discipline is to say an office, to pray in tongues, and to intercede for needs I am aware of; during the day, I will respond to events/thoughts in prayer regularly, sometimes praying in tongues, sometimes not (our family prayer time at night is obviously in English exclusively). The daily office – and the family devotional material we use – would be as much a ‘gift’ in my narration of this as the ability to pray in tongues; to speak of ‘the supernatural gift of tongues’ is just not normal/common in my life, or in the – fairly wide – charismatic circles I have moved in.

Instead, language of ‘giftedness’ tends to be reserved for public liturgical ministries: preachers and worship leaders are routinely described as ‘gifted’ in my experience – and that is true in charismatic, cessationist, and confused circles alike. When we say ‘gift’ we mean pretty much the same thing. (Again, I am not claiming universal insight here, but narrating my own experience, which however is fairly wide in the UK at least.)

So what distinguishes a charismatic like me from my more ‘cessationist’ sisters and brothers? In my experience, it is certain practices: a practice of worship that focuses on and aims towards an experienced encounter with God; a practice of pastoral care that sees one-on-one extempore prayer ministry as fairly central; a practice of liturgy that is expectant of, and welcoming to, unplanned interventions; a practice of ministry that assumes the involvement of a significant number of lay people, some acknowledged to be more skilled/effective in certain areas than the pastor herself; and a ‘crisis’ spirituality which expects a series of defining moments that will lead to step-changes in Christian experience/discipleship.

A couple of examples. In my experience, all pastors will pray for healing for a member of the congregation who is unwell; the charismatic pastor – or a lay member of her team – might well do so in the context of a time of prayer ministry that follows an extended time of worship, and might well expect some sort of immediate change in the experience of the one prayed for – which might include physical healing, but might equally include a new depth of discipleship in one direction or another. Again, if asked to identify the most quintessentially charismatic services I have led, I would point to a couple of gatherings where nothing obviously ‘supernatural’ happened, but where congregational involvement (sometimes bringing ‘prophecies’, yes, but equally in open prayer and the like) led to such a strong sense of direction in the assembly that I and fellow leaders felt constrained to abandon what we had planned and go in another direction completely – once (only) I left a full sermon script on my seat and preached without preparation on a different text because the way the worship had moved convinced me that I had to switch themes. On that occasion I am fairly sure no-one in the room would have said ‘a gift of prophecy’ had been exercised, but there was a shared sense of God leading us in a different direction to the one we had planned.

All of which is to say that I suspect that an engagement between ‘charismatic’ and ‘cessationist’ evangelicals which is attentive to the lived reality of faith will turn less on confessions of belief about supernatural gifts, and more on debates about the place of spontaneity in worship, and about the effectiveness of crisis moments in sanctification and about the right ways to work out vocation. On the one hand, this approach will problematize the recent phenomenon of ‘Reformed Charismatics’ (yes, I’d own the label if I had to): charismatic spirituality, as I have narrated it here, stands very visibly in a genealogy that traces back through C20th Pentecostalism and C19th Holiness traditions to Methodism in the eighteenth century. I don’t think this genealogy makes ‘Reformed Charismatic’ an oxymoron, but I do think that it is a surprising development that stands in need of defence, if people are genuine about wanting to stand faithfully in both traditions. On the other hand, the approach I am suggesting will focus the charismatic/cessationist debate not on questions of orthodoxy, but on questions of best pastoral practice: how best to encourage growth in holiness, and similarly messy questions; I think this is just right; these debates, if properly understood, are about spirituality, not doctrine; to try to draw hard doctrinal lines is ill-informed and divisive.