After posting about the worship service at Kingsway Church in Cherry Hill, I thought a bit more about my personal history with Assemblies of God churches and with pentecostalism in general. In the early 1970s, when our little group of enthusiastic and ill-informed Jesus people were trying to learn more about Christianity, we were welcomed warmly and kindly by several small pentecostal churches in the area - southern Illinois. To understand how odd this was, you'd have to realize that southern Illinois is very southern. It has much more in common with nearby Kentucky and with the Missouri Ozarks than with Chicago. The members of these local, mostly independent churches were sometimes mocked even by other southern Illinoisans as hillbillies and rednecks. Most members of these churches had only a high school education (or less), and many were coal miners.
And into their churches we wandered - a group of long-haired hippies from the local university, who wanted to know more about Jesus.
You know what? Even though they were deeply conservative people in many ways, not one person in those churches ever told the men among us to cut their hair (they must have been tempted to say something, though), and not one turned us away. They invited us into their homes and churches, fed us, and worshiped with us. They showed us Christ.
Their theology was all over the place - in addition to some spectacularly ill-conceived charismatic beliefs, many were Oneness Pentecostals, some believed that the King James Version of the Bible had been written by the apostles, and more than a few were caught up in wild speculations about the end times.
Members of AG churches were more orthodox than members of the independent charismatic churches, of course. In fact, they were pretty much evangelicals who spoke in tongues and prophesied now and then, and occasionally fell down "in the Spirit." I do remember vividly, though, an elderly pastor at a local AG church who practiced that distinctive shouting style of preaching. That is, he would literally bellow his entire sermon, stomping around the stage, his face an alarming shade of red. There seemed to be no purpose to all the shouting - we weren't in a tent amid a noisy crowd, just sitting in an ordinary little country church.
I might as well mention here my beliefs about the distinctive teaching of Pentecostal churches and charismatic groups, the gift of speaking in tongues. At first I was as enthusiastic about it anyone else. Speaking in tongues seemed like a heartwarming proof of God's presence in our lives, a handy portable miracle we could call upon whenever we needed a little jolt of spirituality.
But I soon became disillusioned with speaking in tongues, partly because it was so easy to do, and partly because the "prophesies" that followed any public display of tongues-speaking were so underwhelming. Usually they were harmless assurances about how much God loved us, or restatement of Bible verses, but occasionally they varied from those formats, at which point they usually devolved into nonsense -- often harmless nonsense, like "I the Lord thy God am crackling with energy - I am ionic!" But sometimes harmful nonsense, like specific commands to do things and go places and prepare for the end of the world and so on.
The fact is, most of the people in our group gradually came to ignore it all, but at the same time no one wanted to be the first one to speak up and say what most of us were thinking - "this is dumb."
My husband, Neil, eventually wrote a short book about how he came to reject charismatic practices (My Search for Charismatic Reality). It's a good book. It has been translated into Spanish and French, and has been distributed by groups in various countries.
When I get to this point in the story people sometimes ask me if I still speak in tongues, and how I think people can speak in tongues if it isn't a miracle.
Actually, every now and then I do still speak in tongues. It's fun.
But I don't think it's a miracle. I think it's an ability that most everyone has, but few people except charismatics ever try to develop. It's the ability to speak fluent gibberish, and is much easier than you might think. It just takes a little practice. If you've ever heard the late Andy Kaufman spout gibberish in his role as Latka Gravas on the sitcom Taxi, you've heard speaking in tongues, in my opinion. (Plenty of actors develop this skill; I've seen it listed on actors' resumes.) In fact, I think it's likely that I could show anyone how to do it in one short lesson, without any prayer, spiritual feelings, or holiness involved -- but no one has ever yet asked for a lesson!
I know this might sound disrespectful to charismatics, and disrespect is not what I'm trying to convey. Today I think of speaking in tongues as another spiritual practice. We humans do lots of things in our attempts to connect with God - we kneel, we bow, we lift up our hands, we clap, we walk the stations of the cross, we meditate, we memorize prayers, we sing, we preach ourselves red-faced, and some of us speak in tongues. None of these activities is particularly supernatural per se, and most anyone can do all of these things, believer or nonbeliever. Speaking in tongues is no more and no less supernatural than lifting your hands in prayer, and just as efficacious in seeking to connect with God, if that's how you connect.
But do watch out for those prophecies. You won't get into too much trouble with words you can't understand, but the language you do know can really get you into hot water.
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