“And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak with other tongues, even as the Spirit was giving them to declare.” Acts 2:4 A.S. Worrell Translation
In his footnote on this verse, Dr. Worrell states: “This gracious experience—whether considered as an immersion in the Holy Spirit, or a filling with, or the gift of the Holy Spirit, is the privilege of every true believer, (v. 39), and his duty, (Eph. 5:18).” Yet how do we teach this privilege and duty in our post-Christian culture?
My conviction is that the Lord wants to baptize every believer in the power of the Spirit. For that to happen, He wants to teach us, as He has faithfully done in every age of every culture, how to communicate this wonderful experience in fresh new ways that will reach people instead of turning them off and driving them away.
Let me suggest some practical ways to minister the Holy Spirit baptism in today’s culture:
1. Decide it is a blessing and not a curse. Missional leaders work very hard to connect and communicate with the cultures in which God has placed them. The last thing they want to do is drive people away! Because of that, some develop a real apprehension toward preaching or teaching on the baptism in the Holy Spirit.[1] No one needs to feel condemned; it is a legitimate concern, especially for those who are reaching people from diverse backgrounds.
What I am asking is that you decide in your heart of hearts that the Holy Spirit baptism is biblical and that it is a viable experience for your church today. With some creativity and intentionality, you can see your people come into this life-changing experience without scaring them away or freaking them out.
More and more, younger ministers are walking away from Pentecostal circles because they have become convinced “tongues”[2] was no longer theologically correct. It is too bad there was not some mentor available to help them along the way. In many cases, their struggle is really with past methodologies and not so much with the theology at all. The truth is, everyone that I have known who has walked away spoke in tongues in their own private prayer times, and now instead of leading others into this joyous experience they are robbing others of this great gift. That is grievous and unnecessary.
The Holy Spirit baptism is a valid, biblical experience that Jesus administers Himself,[3] and I am asking, no matter the hang-ups, that with integrity you simply say, “OK, it’s Bible.” This is where we must start. Pentecost is not a cultural thing that turns us off; it is a Jesus thing, a Bible thing, and a relevant thing for today!
2. Be creative with this subject just like you are with everything else! Never has there been a more creative, educated, and talented group of ministers in our history. I love the creativity and innovation of this generation. So be creative in teaching this great truth. You guys and gals can do this—use that God-given creativity and make it fun and powerful! Mark Batterson, pastor at National Community Church in Washington DC says part of being God-like is being creative. I agree. Be God-like in proclaiming the truth of the Holy Spirit baptism.
For example, I used a Pentecost Sunday sermon series written by Ron Bontrager, pastor of Lakeview Christian Center in Indianapolis, IN entitled “Power-Aid.” My young creative ministry team put more than a hundred bottles of Power-Aide on our stages. Each week, drinks were given away, and it was a simple but fun way of dealing with the Holy Spirit baptism. After the third message, we came around the front and worshiped, and many experienced their own prayer language for the first time. It was fun, contemporary, and easy. For weeks after, people e-mailed us and testified that they had received their language while reading their Bibles at home, and one guy while driving to work!
3. Be intentional. Schedule a stand-alone or short series in the spring of the year around Pentecost Sunday. If you will do this instead of ignoring the subject, it will force you to make it work in the culture of your church and community. Consider scheduling a Holy Spirit retreat at the end of your Alpha course, or start a class, a seminar—whatever it takes, but resist the temptation to do nothing. I know of a Lutheran church in St. Paul, MN that teaches on the Holy Spirit baptism through classes, seminars, retreats and all kinds of creative ways—more than most Pentecostal and Charismatic churches do.
Part of missional leadership is doing the things we know are right but would rather not do. For me, it is preaching on money—I don’t like it, but, when I do, people and our church are blessed because of my obedience. Pastoring would be easy if all we had to preach on was grace, but it’s not!
Resist the temptation to ignore this great truth. Resist the subtle temptation to wait until you have this all figured out. Does anyone have it all figured out? It is simply our job as leaders to teach our people and lead the way. We must provide opportunities for growth, and we do that by being intentional. We must make plans and then work those plans like we do with so many things.
4. Avoid the ditches of legalism and liberalism. It is not right to just neglect and log-off in regards to ministering the Holy Spirit baptism to our people. We want what is best for them and do not want our neglect to hinder their walks with God in any way. The truth is, if we just leave out teaching on the Holy Spirit baptism it can lead to criticalness, being judgmental and into the ditch of liberalism. By liberalism I mean out of balance. It is a whole lot better to drive down a road than it is to run off a road and into a ditch. People can get hurt, our vehicles can get damaged and at the very least we can delay the journey for ourselves or someone else. It is good to be reminded that our calling is to faithfully “preach the Word”[4] and of course we want to do that like a good missionary in culturally relevant ways. This wonderful experience of the Holy Spirit baptism will greatly enrich the lives of our people as it has each of us so we need to avoid this ditch of indifference.
We also need to avoid the ditch of legalism. Legalists are never happy regardless of what is said or done and they are certainly out of balance. They equate Pentecost with certain styles of preaching, singing and other methodologies to numerous to mention. There is a spiritual smugness about them and they have a tendency to reject anything they do not understand or is not like them. Somehow a legalist Pentecostal wandered into our church on a day I was teaching on the Holy Spirit baptism. I did so in a conversational way and then had a simple time of worship and prayer around the altars that probably only lasted ten minutes or so. There were around twenty people that morning who began to speak in a prayer language for the very first time including Miss America 2003, Erika Harold! Anyhow, this Pentecostal legalist almost accosted me after the service and said, “There is no way those people were really baptized in the Holy Ghost.” I asked why she felt that way and she actually said, “Because it wasn’t loud enough and there was no real emotion in it.” She was stuck in the ditch of legalism.
In order to stay out of both these ditches we need to remember that none of us can save anyone, so why do we think we can get anyone Holy Spirit filled? In both cases we just teach the Word of God and create the atmosphere, then God does His thing. Just preach salvation, and you will get people saved. Preach Holy Spirit baptism, and you will get Holy Spirit-baptized believers. We get what we preach.
In order to stay out of the ditches you also need to free yourself from the pressure of thinking you always have to have an “altar service.” Train people to be on prayer teams and have them available to pray with people who want to make a public commitment to Jesus and for those who want to be filled with the Holy Spirit. It is not necessary to have a Billy Graham-type appeal to see people saved, and it is not necessary to have a camp meeting-style appeal to see people Holy Spirit baptized. Today’s audiences will not process old methodology, and it may even cause them to freeze up or perhaps walk out.
People do not always respond immediately to a message of salvation. It is the same way with the Holy Spirit baptism. There will not always be an immediate response, but eventually some will respond. We just have to be faithful.
5. Pray your people will be Holy Spirit baptized. There is no real gift of praying people through to the baptism as some think. We just teach God’s Word in creative ways, learn to connect with culture and not to alienate people, and then we just pray our heads off for the Lord to save and baptize people. I want to encourage young pastors/leaders to sincerely and consistently pray: “Jesus, I need you to baptize these people in the Holy Spirit. You said you would, and I am asking you to do it.” Then go ahead and pour out your concerns to Him about people getting weird, demonstrative, and spooky; ask Him to take care of those things for you.
I am in a city with a huge university that has people from every conceivable walk of life coming to our services. Like you, we try to do things with order and excellence. I want people to connect with God through salvation and the Holy Spirit baptism, but I do not want Pentecostal cultural things to chase them away. I have told the Lord that I am not ashamed but that He has to help me make all this work in our setting. In the past, many Pentecostal churches have left out the baptism as they have grown or have regulated it to Sunday or Wednesday nights. With the huge cultural shifts we have seen and with the dissolution of Sunday nights, it is imperative that we learn how to teach this in relevant ways on Sunday mornings, in our youth or young adult meetings and other primary meetings.
6. Admit your fear and do some defragmenting. Paul said to young Timothy, “For God did not give us a spirit of timidity (fear), but of power, love and sound mind” (2 Timothy 1:7). Just like a computer needs to be defragmented once in a while, so we need to do the same. We need to get rid of junk like fear that slows us down and keeps us from doing what know we should do. We cannot afford to give in to our fears and apprehensions. This I know: desire overcomes fear and intimidation! If we will simply have the desire and ask the Lord to really help us, He will. If we will be faithful, He will be faithful and believers will be Holy Spirit baptized!
You don’t have to lose your mind and put on some kind of gospel freak show to teach the truth on the Holy Spirit baptism. But you do have to be willing “to preach the message, to insist upon proclaiming it (whether the time is right or not), to convince, reproach, and encourage, as you teach with all patience”[5] like you promised to do when you were licensed and/or ordained to full gospel ministry. As men and women of integrity, we have to do what we promised the Lord we would do. We need to be like Jet Li, the warrior in the movie Fearless. His family name was shamed, and he regained honor for his family by defeating the best warriors in the land. We need some young, fearless ministers to show us how to do this in post-Christian culture.
I am not saying you have to preach on the Holy Spirit every week, but you have to be willing to preach it. Perhaps a stand-alone or short series around Pentecost Sunday would be sufficient. If there is no sin in preaching on the great truths of the incarnation and resurrection only around Christmas and Easter, why do some hyper-Pentecostals (who are on spiritual Ritalin) think we’ve lost it if we only deal with this once a year? Like I said, don’t let those legalists ruin it for you! You can mention it in your teaching once in a while and say things like: “Some of you need to search out the claims of the Holy Spirit just like you did the claims of Christ. See if it’s true or not. This is a Bible church, and I promise you I would not teach on it unless it was in the Word. See if God has a prayer language for you.” Of course I believe He does, but the way we say things will either free people or freeze them. As missional leaders, we are trying to connect with and reach people, not run them off!
We also talk about this at the end of prayer meetings when people are around the altar. I will put a quick outline on PowerPoint and go through the basics of Holy Spirit baptism in just a few minutes, and almost every single time there are people who receive for the first time and start praying in a language they have never learned.[6] The atmosphere in a prayer meeting, many of which are at night, seems to be totally different than Sunday mornings, when those exploring or window-shopping Christianity seem to show up. It’s not that I’m embarrassed being Pentecostal or anything like that. It is just a matter of trying to be wise and reach as many people as possible for Christ. After all, that is the primary reason Jesus told us to receive this promise of the Father, that we might be His witnesses.[7]
There are probably more people than we want to admit who get their ideas of Pentecost from movies like The Apostle or the crazy TV evangelists our culture makes fun of. Because of these very real obstacles, I think many simply fear teaching and praying for people to be baptized in the Holy Spirit. De-fragment your fear and go ahead and teach the baptism in a way that does not violate your personality or the culture of your local church. Styles that work at camps, retreats, and conventions don’t usually work on Sunday mornings, and that is OK.
Wrap up
I want to sincerely apologize to our younger generation of ministers/leaders who sometimes feel abandoned. Forgive me and my generation for not being better spiritual fathers. Forgive us for making methodology and programs sacred. And please avoid the mistakes we have made and embrace the baptism with the Holy Spirit. My word to our younger ministers is: “…desire earnestly to prophesy, and forbid not to speak with tongues” (1 Corinthians 14:39 A. S. Worrell Translation).
I used to hear that those baptized in the Holy Spirit had more power and ability to do the works of God. But in many of our communities, the churches really reaching the lost are not Pentecostal or Charismatic churches. That does not negate the truth of the power of the Spirit, but it does show that we have not contextulized to our cultures what the Lord has made available to us.
I love praying in a language I have never learned; it helps me so much. There have been so many times when I have not known what to do and I simply began to pray in the Spirit and the Lord faithfully gave me a word of wisdom, prophecy, or insight to bring healing and help needed to the person or situation. Some of those I personally know and love who are honesty trying to reach the unchurched absolutely they need the Holy Spirit’s fullness to help them. Whether it is Joel Gross in the Minneapolis uptown area, Brad Riley at the University of Colorado in Bolder or Terry Austria at the University of Illinois in Urbana—they each realize without the help and work of the Holy Spirit they cannot reach people in their unique cultures.
The truth is, none of us can afford to leave the Holy Spirit baptism out—we must in veritable ways learn to do things better and de-bunk Pentecostal myths.[8] The baptism with the Holy Spirit truly is a tremendous blessing to everyone who receives—and so I am asking my young minister friends to simply be creative, intentional, stay out the ditches, pray the Lord will baptize your people in His Spirit and do some de-fragmenting of your fears. We all struggle and I know this is a real struggle for many young leaders but please know you are loved, believed in and given leeway to figure things out. Let’s not walk away from each other—let’s embrace one another as we journey together. I am passing the baton to you.
Appendix A
6 Steps to Receive the Holy Spirit Baptism
1. Thirst—Matthew 5:6; Mark 11:24
2. Ask—Matthew 7:7
3. Look to Jesus—Acts 1:8
4. Receive—Galatians 3:14
5. Praise—Psalm 22:3
6. Speak in unknown language (tongues)—Psalm 81:10
[1] I use these terms interchangeably but prefer “Holy Spirit baptism.”
[2] I prefer to use the phrase “speak in a language never learned” because “tongues” has so much emotional and theological baggage associated with it.
[3] Luke 24:49
[4] 2 Timothy 4:2
[5] 2 Timothy 4:2 Good News Translation
[6] See Appendix A for this outline.
[7] Acts 1:4, 8
[8] For a complete discussion, request my paper Ministering the Holy Spirit Baptism in a post-Christian culture.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment