It’s Coming!
October 31, 2005
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Announcements, Blogging Feedback : 8 comments
The Cerulean Sanctum post that will forever change the Christian blogosphere (as well as the world as we know it) is coming soon….
Tags: Announcements, Blogging
In the Trenches of the Worship Wars
October 28, 2005
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Christianity in North America, Church Issues, Relevance, Worship Feedback : 25 comments
Michael Spencer delivers a crushing blow to the solar plexus of twenty-something worship leaders everywhere in a piece that had me alternating between howls of derisive laughter and outright head-nodding anger. Check out "That Flushing Sound: Evangelicals Worship Till There's Nothing Left" if for no other reason than to bond with another "came to Jesus during the '70s" blogger. Any guy who references Yohann Anderson's quirky "Songs & Creations" songbook knows that of which he speaks.
A sampling:
This was in the early 1970s. There was something just beginning out there in evangelicalism. It was an awareness of the youth culture that had defined the sixties. For some time, our church fought that youth culture, with its long hair and rock music, but now, something had changed. There was the beginnings of seeing the wisdom of allowing that same youth culture to have an influence in the youth ministry of the church.
Now there were youth musicals that used contemporary music, played by bands with drums and guitars. It was OK to have long hair and dress like the rest of your school as long as you were still part of the youth group. You could be "cool" and be a "Jesus person." On those Sunday nights, you could see the beginnings of that youth culture, that "Jesus Movement" as we called it, beginning to come into the church.
How did it get in the door? How did those drums and guitars get into the sanctuary? How did those songs that WE liked but our parents didn't like get into the service? The leadership of the church said it was OK as long as it kept the young people interested in church.
Sound familiar? It should. It was the beginning of a way of thinking that has the adults in your church being told to do the hand motions to the latest Third Day songs.
Owie. Michael, I'll be looking for you in the pew again on Sunday. From what I can tell, you're out doing field research and must've dropped in unexpectedly last weekend.
I play a drum kit (not a staple of the Robert Shaw Chorale last time I checked) in the worship band at my church and I can vouch for everything that Michael says. I may very well be part of the problem.
Toward the end, he tosses out this grenade:
The results at the majority of smaller churches are chilling when compared to the competent, decently organized worship of a few decades ago. Unprofessional behavior. Ridiculous casual approaches to God. A performance mentality that puts some of the worst people in the church up front solely because they have the ego to want to sing. Stupid yammering between songs. Endless repetition. Too much music. Music that is too loud. Music simply being TOO IMPORTANT. Taking up too much time and too much energy. Too much depending on musicians. The endless addition of new songs off the radio and from CDs hardly anyone has heard and many will never be able to use in worship. Technical glitches galore. (What I have sat through with the projection of words on a screen has long passed comic. It�s torturous. It's insane. And yet we put up with it.) What has happened to the worship of the average small church in the last 5-10 years is nothing less than a plague and I know I can't be the only one who feels it.
I feel your pain, Michael. I'm the drummer and I'm telling people we need to rein it in a little, but the response is basically the same as MC5's oft-quoted (and unrepeatable) admonition that includes mothers, jams, and kicking. 
Nor do I ever advise anyone to base their worship "stylings" off anything that would appeal to Eddie Vedder or Lars Ulrich.
Yeah, I've been there—and in many ways am still there. I was once a part of a Vineyard church that had glorious worship times that mixed Christ-centered modern worship music with the great hymns of the Faith. When a new worship leader took over, it was off to the races on arrangements. It was all too fast, too loud, and too in your face. I was 38 years old and thinking, These kids today and their rock worship music….
In other words, I feel like I could have written the InternetMonk's cautionary tale myself.
I do have a little addition to his insights, though. He goes on to say the following:
Can someone do something?
Yes, church leaders need to do something. They need to understand what is happening, and they need to stop it from happening. Allowing the cause of "keeping the young people/young families interested" to run a church is a dereliction of leadership. Someone get a grip.
Pastors and elders: Get some spine! Have a session or a meeting and speak clearly to this. Don't hand your worship leadership over to anyone who isn't willing to accept a vision that includes everyone and to work closely with you to have a competent, intergenerational, Christ-centered worship service within boundaries that you choose. If it looks like a bad excuse for a concert, and if the older members can't join in, there's something wrong. Stop it now.
Here's where I pull out the old "you can't go home again" problem with this advice.
Part of Michael's contention is that once you had real worship leaders schooled in actually reading music and directing choirs. I knew people who had degrees in such a thing as Church Music. A quick look around, though, shows those people to have vanished into the ether. Where did they go? Answer: Church's killed their careers, but not necessarily in the way the Monk contends. Guitar slinging teens raised on Larry Norman and Randy Stonehill didn't put the choir director out of business, the paradigm shift in paying church staff did.
I got my degree in Christian Education right at the time that churches decided to stop paying folks like Christian Education Directors and Music Directors. That fifty-year old guy who could read an E. Power Biggs organ chart and knew the difference between a soprano (not Tony) and an alto (not a saxophone) was told he could keep his job so long as he didn't expect to get paid for it anymore. The new spirit was that of volunteerism. (In my case, my alma mater read the handwriting on the wall and rechristened my old department "Spiritual Formation." As far as I can recall, Director of Spiritual Formation was what those bearded Haight-Ashbury types who lived in Big Sur and spent most of their day in a hot tub called themselves. And we all know how they got paid.)
Anyway…this is about music and how it went from paid professionals to guys ten rungs below youth pastor—and salaryless, too.
Let's face facts. The great composer of high church music, Johann Sebastian Bach, was able to add "To the Glory of God" to the end of every one of his great compositions because someone was paying him to write them. He didn't have to take another job to feed his twenty children. But as today's churches decided that it wasn't worth paying a professional, educated music director, so went the quality of music. They wanted free and they got exactly what free pays for.
Today a few megachurches do pay young guys fresh out of college (or not) who grew up listening to their dads' Ramones records. But the Church on the Corner doesn't and therein lies the problem. Guitars didn't kill old fashioned worship music, cheapness did. I would venture to guess that the majority of small churches don't even pay for the rights to sing the Top 40 worship songs they dredge up off the radio, much less consider paying for the quality and professionalism a real music director can bring.
And one last thing…
Rock music put guitars, bass, and drums into the churches, but as the limited pool of musically-inclined people began to flock to those instruments, there was left a dearth of professionally-trained pianists, organists, vocalists, and orchestral performers—the very folks we formerly saw every Sunday morning. Today, most non-megachurches have maybe one or at most two folks who are trained on a classical instrument—and that number's not getting larger. I hate to think it's Pandora's box once more, but it certainly seems that they may never pass this way again as long as garage bands playing rock on Saturdays are on stage in our churches on Sunday.
Now there's a real downgrade issue for you.
Tags: Christianity in North America, Church Issues, Relevance, Worship
The Obligatory “Halloween Is Bad” Post
October 27, 2005
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Church Issues, Discernment, Maturity, Spiritual Warfare, Supernaturalism Feedback : 9 comments
"Halloween is bad!" said my son just the other day.
That wasn't how I was raised, though. My good Christian mother went into overdrive to handmake our costumes. More than once as a child I won the best costume award at my school. That same creative spirit in my mother extended to me, and by the time I was in my teens I was winning awards for costumes I made myself. During the energy crisis of the 1970s, I dreamed up "Super Arab," a kind of Snidely Whiplash-like character dressed in Saudi garb with a giant felt oil derrick on my back and a bag of phony Franklins that I would shove in the faces of parents and say, "Look who's got your money now!" Those parents got a BIG kick out of that one.
If only I had known how that would turn out in the long run.
Anyway…
I'm one of those crazy ones who believes he's witnessed the whole Halloween thing take a decidedly more nefarious turn. Despite some essays that Halloween is a most Christian holiday, and despite protests that this Christian event has been co-opted by neo-pagans, the fact remains: it's been co-opted by neo-pagans.
So my wife and I, despite going out as kids pretty regularly for Trick or Treating, have given a thumbs down to Halloween. Our son has most definitely picked that up and he tosses off the "Halloween is bad" mantra without much coaxing from us.
Blame us if you will for being freaky charismatics that are constantly on the lookout for demons hiding behind this tree or that, but despite the fact that a lot of high-profile Christian bloggers have poo-poohed such anti-Halloween vigilance, I'm going to defend my position here with one bit of logic that no one is discussing: We're not raising our kids for 2005.
What do I mean by that? Well, isn't it the goal of every parent to raise their children for the future? Given what I've seen in the rise of neo-pagan practices in just the last twenty years, I've got to believe it's going to get worse instead of better. Earlier this year I was drawn into a conversation on an Emerging Church website of some renown where the topic was whether it was possible to be a Christian Wiccan. Trust me, I never in a million years thought anyone would be trying to combine those two, but there you have it.
Compromise comes through the little things. One day your daughter is preferring to wear black all the time, the next thing you know she tells you she's into the Goth scene, and before you can say "Transylvania!" she's running around with kids who fashion themselves to be vampires, even going so far as to drink each other's blood. Satan looks for chinks in the armor and he's had a long time perfecting his technique.
Who knows what my son will confront twenty years from now? All I know is that I'm trying to prepare him for that day. If my wife and I have ruined what some believe to be just another attempt by the greeting card industry to make some more cash, then so be it. I'm willing to err on the side of caution. Twenty years from now when some worldwide bastardization of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Taoism, Zoroastrianism and whatever "-ism" they throw in the mix is masquerading as the new religion of the enlightened, I hope all children now being raised in Christian homes will have enough grounding in rejecting even the slightest hint of evil that the Lord will still find faith on Earth when He returns.
It's going to cost something, too. Even now my son is missing his preschool Halloween party. That was a tough decision, but it's a decision we made. We may not go to our church's Halloween-alternative party, either, because I've never been a fan of Christians trying to redeem every worldly activity. Some things are best left rotten rather than trying to wash the stink off them and bring them into the Church. I'm still divided on that one. Ask me again on Tuesday.
I've got to admit that I do have some level of admiration for Christians who fire up the BBQ, hand out food and drinks, and try to use Halloween as an opportunity to witness to parents and kids trolling through the neighborhood. That fits with my image of Christians being the most hospitable people in any neighborhood. Still, I've got to wonder at what point we bag the whole thing because Halloween keeps taking one more step over the line.
Most people reading this today aren't prophets, but I think that many of us know what's coming down the road. Call me a prophet of doom, but I'm less encouraged by the day that things are going to get better rather than worse. Bunker mentality? Perhaps. But I think it's wise to have one foot in the bunker right now rather than being a hundred miles away from it.
What's happening to Halloween is just a symptom of a greater problem. As for me and my house, we're going to serve the Lord. That doesn't mean you can't send your kids out Trick or Treating or dress up yourself as Mr. Incredible or Elastigirl if you want to and hand out candy. It's just not something that's worth it for us anymore.
Tags: Church Issues, Discernment, Maturity, Spiritual Warfare, Supernaturalism
The Truth About Women (and Men)
October 26, 2005
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Best of Cerulean Sanctum, Christianity in North America, Church Issues, Counterculture, Dying to Self, Godly Character, Holiness, Maturity, Men Feedback : 19 comments
After Brian Colmery said such nice things about me, I'm going to take him to task a little for his post "The Need for Protection in the Church" because I think it presents an overly romanticized view of women, men, and our cultural assumptions. Playing into the theme we see so often on TV of men who are utter dolts but are married to women who possess the wisdom of Solomon and the patience of Job, 
Brian gets a little lopsided on who's to blame for the sorry state of relationships.
This all started because of an article in the laddie magazine Maxim in which advice is given to guys looking to score with "church babes." However, if you really want to go back to the source, John Steinbeck's classic, The Grapes of Wrath, features a minister who advises that the best time to take advantage of a young woman is right after she's walked out of the Sunday morning service. You'd be frightened at how accurate that statement is. Mixing the emotional nearness that people feel worshiping the Lord with romantic feelings of love and nearness to another person is all too easy to do.
But Brian weighs in:
I have plenty of thoughts on the issues that men have in the church - including, but not limited to, the fact that they've lost any coherent concept of masculinity, they need books telling them to go hunt things in the woods to awaken the "man within," the single ones tend to be deathly afraid of speaking to women of any type, not to mention that they haven't the foggiest idea of how to properly treat a woman (which involves cherishing, caring for, appreciating, encouraging, and protecting, not stammering in front of and equivocating on everything under the sun). These issues, while the root of the problem, have given birth to one of the saddest and most ignored issues in church life: the lack of protection of our women.
Now I don't disagree with Brian on the issue of protection. Nor do I disagree with his trashing of the inane culture we've made out of Wild at Heart. Whenever I hear that men are bored in church, I have to ask myself how bored we can be when we've all got responsibility to not only ensure the protection of our own kids, but also the sons and daughters of all the other people in the church. Honestly, few things in this life are more precious than young women and young men growing into their adulthood. Our lame-brained rugged individualism in the American Church, though, has told us that someone else's kids are not our problem, so it's no wonder that our teens and tweens are getting picked off by the Enemy.
Brian goes on:
We've failed on two fronts, and the article makes it obvious. The first is that women in the church have been exposed to such weaklings in the pews next to them that they are tempted to connect with men who haven't been born again. The fact that Christian men today do not stand out as above and beyond non-believing men in terms of their moral core, security (in Christ), capacity to make decisions and create, to work and make difficult decisions and simply to stand, is a blight not only on Christian men but on the God they serve. With the very Spirit of God living inside their chest, they squelch it enough to come off as spineless.
Whoa. That's a pretty heavy accusation and one that I must say has not been my experience in toto. I'll talk more about this in a bit.
Brian's second point:
The same insecurity and androgyny that has led Christian men away from their rightful place as the culmination of masculinity has prevented them from being able - and even willing - to protect the women God has placed around them in their church. Again, women are more than capable to make good decisions, and yet I can't help but feel (and read in the bible) that men have a responsibility to care for and cherish the women God has put in their lives. This shouldn't have to involve a "program" effort, where this is outlined in three points and given out in memo form to the congregation. This desire to protect and cherish should arise from the inside of every man. And yet, if it must be programmed, let it be. The women in our churches are being preyed on by men who have nothing but their worst interest in mind. And the first line of defense has laid down their arms and sat down.
While I'll certainly be scourged for offering that most young women I see in churches today are making terrible decisions, I'm going to stick with that for now. More in a little bit.
He finishes with this:
Anyone who isn't a member of the church community and attempts (or even desires) to get close to a female member should have to go through the men of that community. Not in an "ask the father first" sort of way, but, well, yeah. Shouldn't the men in the community be of such a caliber that the women would seek out their advice (in the same way that the women of the community should be of such a caliber that the men should seek out their advice)? And shouldn't it be understood that there are men of such a caliber surrounding the women of a church community that wolves know not to enter there?
Now I'm going to weigh in based on my own experiences over the last nearly thirty years of being a Christian.
When I was a single Christian guy I know that just about everyone in the church around me held me in high esteem. I was teaching Bible studies by the time I was sixteen and discipling others. No one ever said a bad word about me. I was a clean-cut kid, 6' 4" tall, strong as an ox, well-built, smart, and fine to look at. I treated every woman I dated like an absolute queen and was universally acclaimed for my creative dates that made women feel special. Despite this, I lasted a very long time "on the market."
If we applied Brian's standard of masculinity here, I should have had the young women in the churches I was a part of fighting to be seen with me in public. So what was the problem?
Having a lot of time to think about this over the years, I've come to a few conclusions:
1. Many women today want financial security above all else
- I never saw the guys who were ultimately on the fast-track career path suffering for the ladies, no matter how cloddish, caddish, or half-hearted about the things of the Lord they were. To a lot of young women, money alone talked. I'd chosen to go into camping ministry—not a direct path to being Bill Gates. I even had one girl I was particularly enamored with tell me that she didn't see how I could fulfill her monetary aspirations making less than a thousand dollars a month out in the woods somewhere. Well, at least she was honest!All those guys I knew who were poor, but loved the Lord with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength…well the ladies weren't banging down their doors. Sure, if one of those poor guys was going into the ministry, he might get a few takers. But the poor laborer rarely got a second look from the girls who ran in the church circles I did. Makes you wonder what the real priorities are and where those young women were getting those priorities.
2. All most young women today know is the fallout of feminism
- The Church in America bought the lies of feminism, and like Pandora's Box, going back to what pre-feminist womanhood in the Church was like borders on being delusional. The same goes for manhood. The very foundations of our culture have changed because of feminism and the Church seems to be okay with what that has wrought, sadly. We may talk about spineless men, but that pandemic erupted because of feminism.I've talked much about the radical shifts in the work world and how they affected Christians, but few seismic shifts were greater than women entering the workplace. Now I'm not trying to excuse the Neanderthal mentality of men at work, but the repeated assaults they encountered for doing all the things men for years were told they needed to do with regards to women and to work made them gunshy. Rather than face a lawsuit for saying, "That's a pretty dress," or getting screamed at for holding a door open, men got used to ignoring women at work altogether for fear of losing their jobs. Better not to say or do anything that was formerly consider gallant than to say or do something that an "emancipated" woman would deem inappropriate. This has even gone so far that the military explicitly teaches young men (now that women make up a large part of our armed forces) to ignore the sounds of women soldiers being raped and tortured.
All this has carried over into the American Church. This does not excuse it at all, but to get at the root of the problem, the Church has to question some assumptions that it holds about the workplace, sex roles, and culture in general that it absolutely is not willing to discuss for fear of being branded "out of touch" or "patriarchal." We'd rather get riled up about gay marriage than to question if women should be assuming work roles that were prototypically male. I don't see James Dobson railing about lowering standards for firefighters and police to ensure that enough women can fill those roles. We conceded that issue a long, long time ago.
3. Our expectations about adulthood have changed
- In the not-so-distant past, unmarried children stayed home with their parents until they eventually did get married. That was the Christian norm. However, many Christians today are of the opinion that kicking Johnny or Janey out of the house at eighteen is the godly thing to do. As a result, Johnny and Janey better have some marketable skills or else they're dead in the workplace water. With college becoming the de facto requirement for getting a real adult job, if a young man or woman doesn't leave the shelter of home for college, their chances for "making it" go down considerably. Yet as we all know, college has become a hive of sin, even, sadly, at a Christian college.Yet what option is given to Christian young people anymore? Unmarried Christian women aren't at home learning how to become "a homemaker" like they used to be. Instead, they're expected to be out on their own, making their own decisions, and earning a living. Again, much of this is do to feminism, but it's hard to fault men entirely for this outcome. Is it any wonder that problems result?
4. Our culture denigrates the role of the elderly in aiding youth
- We have a tendency to shuttle our old people out of the way by sticking them in nursing homes or lumping them into church groups designated especially for them. But that lack of integration into the functioning community, even in churches, keeps the wisdom of the elderly away from the young people who need it the most. Grandparents used to have a much more important role in mitigating youth problems than they do today. This puts young people at a great disadvantage to their peers of a hundred years ago. Many youth live nowhere near their grandparents, either, but you don't hear the Church saying anything about how following jobs around the country has broken up the extended family.
5. We set-up singles (and couples) for moral failure
- Because our churches corral singles into peer groups, we fail them. We toss sexually-frustrated people into a sexually-frustrated pool and expect folks to be paragons of virtue. It's like asking a starving dog not to eat the steak we just tossed him. Even the Church has an obsession with career success and this has led young men and women to stay single longer. It only invites moral failure. Again, the Church is sitting on the sidelines and encouraging behavior that only creates wounded people.Because our churches don't begin marriage and family classes for kids as young as ten, we fail them. Domestic abuse in my area of Ohio is rampant. One reason is that we don't teach boys at an early age to never strike a woman—ever. Worse still, we never teach young women to avoid the losers out there who are most likely to hit them at some time in their relationship. I know so many promising young women dating guys who are losers, it's not funny. One of the girls I dated broke up with me and started dating a guy who abused her. She then turned around and started crying on my shoulder about it, while still dating the guy. Folks, that's pathological, but more common than we care to admit.
(For more on this particular issue, read "Singleness: Radical Answers for a Harsh Reality".)
6. Our youth groups aren't discouraging a Girls Gone Wild mentality
- When I was in youth group, activities for the sexes were often segregated. The guys played football while the girls did whatever the girls did. (Hey, I wasn't a girl, so I didn't know what they did.) But not only have youth activities gotten wilder and stupider, but there's no keeping the girls out of that craziness. But girls and boys are different. If we open young women to the inane things that boys do, we give them the option to act just as stupid. In our efforts to make our youth groups cool enough to keep kids from dropping out, we've inadvertently encouraged the Girls Gone Wild culture.Should we be surprised then that young women today are remarkably aggressive compared to their peers from just thirty years ago? There's a hardness there that shouldn't be in a woman, especially a Christian one. Unfettered from whatever expectations we placed on feminine propriety back then, girls today look at themselves as being just like the boys. This is not to say that the boys don't have a responsibility to grow up, but that we've crushed one of the bulwarks of human society: female normalization of males. With the girls out trying to be one of the boys instead of being solidly female, you can't put all the blame on the boys if they respond to the girls as being just one of the guys, albeit with a different sexual attraction. That only leads to trouble.
7. We've encouraged young women to be their own bosses
- All the issues I raised above have led to today's young women thinking that they need nothing from men, especially protection. The problem for men here is that any man with a spine attempting to look out for a girl on the verge of making a mistake is more likely to get a "Butt out" as a response than a "Thank you for protecting me." I know that this has been the response I've received whenever I've questioned a young woman about here choice of a guy.Empowering young women to be the masters of their own fate has had this two-edged sword effect: yes, they are more confident in their decision making, but the decisions reached are often ill-advised. And no amount of pressure will change their minds. Given the cultural edicts we've erected even within the Church, our hand is forced unless we are willing to question the entire basis of modern femininity within the whole Church structure. As far as I can see, no one is willing to start this kind of soul-searching.
I could go on and on.
But my point here is the same one I made in "Are You a Hamster?" when I responded to Douglas Groothuis: The fix is too simplistic. To Brian I say that it is not enough to ask men to get a spine. All sorts of deep, deep cultural and Church issues are involved here. If we do not deal with those underlying issues, all the backbones in the world won't help.
In summary, the Church must start questioning
- How we prepare young people for marriage
- What expectations we set in others for determining a good marriage partner
- What makes a true man or woman of God
- What cultural values support or detract from godliness in our sexual roles
- The inroads that feminism has made into Church practice and the subsequent cultural expectations of Christians
- Whether defaulting to kicking the kids out at eighteen or sending them off to college is the way of Christ
- Whether we are contributing to the manliness of women
- Whether the measure of a man, at least the one is that women seem to be prioritizing, is how much money he makes or how successful his career is rather than the depth of his love for Christ.
- Whether women belong in the roles that formerly were held solely by men
Maintaining the sexual status quo we've adopted in the Church over the last forty years won't cut it anymore. It's not enough to grow a spine unless that spine is able to bear up under tough questions about womanhood and manhood in the American Church and the culture at large.
Are we ready to question it all?
Tags: Adulthood, Best of Cerulean Sanctum, Christianity in North America, Church Issues, Counterculture, Dying to Self, Godly Character, Holiness, Maturity, Men, Singleness, Singles, Women
Curses
October 25, 2005
Posted by Dan Edelen in : Best of Cerulean Sanctum, Charismatic, Church Issues, Discernment, Faith, Maturity, Spiritual Warfare, Supernaturalism Feedback : 9 comments
Death and life are in the power of the tongue….
—Proverbs 18:21a ESV
And the tongue is a fire, a world of unrighteousness. The tongue is set among our members, staining the whole body, setting on fire the entire course of life, and set on fire by hell. For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by mankind, but no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse people who are made in the likeness of God.
—James 3:6-9 ESV
At a healing service about ten years ago or so, I was called upon by my church to help with prayer. As a prayer team leader, I was charged with making sure we met the prayer needs of the church while directing the trained volunteers who would pray for others after our meetings. That role was an uplifting ministry that I cherished.
The healing service began and all of us were praying with folks who came up front. After a time, the crowd thinned and I found myself alone. Only then did a small man dressed in a suit entirely in white approach me. He was timid, and with an Eastern European lilt he could only say, "Please pray for me."
When I laid my hands on him, I knew immediately that this man did not covet my prayers for a nice day. Asking God to reveal the man's true need, I couldn't avoid a word that kept coming back to me again and again: Curse. 
So I prayed that the blood of Christ would sever the power of all curses on this man's life. The instant I spoke this out loud, he began screaming and fell to the ground.
Being a prayer team leader, I swiftly summoned several others to come over and continue praying with me over this man. We prayed for about ten minutes and I witnessed his countenance utterly change from terror to peace. If ever I needed a video camera to record that kind of profound release in a tormented soul, that moment called for it more than almost any other I've witnessed in my life.
Talking with this man afterwards, he told me that back in his native country his mother had crossed the local sorceress, who responded by placing the entire family under a curse. The man's mother, pregnant at the time, later died in childbirth. The girl that was born was left profoundly retarded as a result of problems in delivery. The man's brother soon afterwards went insane and was institutionalized—until the country's asylums were dismantled in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union. The man's father went blind a few years after his wife died and now rarely spoke.
In my years as a Christian, I've prayed for a lot of people, but there have always been times when people I've prayed for embellish their stories. However, as much as I was beginning to think that this little man standing in front of me now was perhaps adding to his tale, he silenced my doubts by leading me to the back of the church where his blind father, deranged brother, and mentally disabled sister sat as quietly as could be expected, the brother only occasionally muttering something unintelligible.
I was shocked.
I was also called away for another prayer need. Telling the man I wanted to talk with him more, I went back up front, prayed for the new need that had arisen, then immediately walked back to that broken family, discovering they had left quietly in the sanctuary's semi-darkness, only one of them finding release.
Too much "Evil Eye" for you? Not the kind of thing you've ever encountered? Well let me share a more personal story.
I got a call from a friend one night who was truly suffering. He'd come to the decision that he could not be a Christian any longer, and as we talked he confessed that the reason he was abandoning the faith was me.
No Christian ever wants to be the stumbling block for another person's faith, and I was taken aback by the comment, searching through every conversation, every encounter I'd had with this friend for as long as we'd known each other. Nothing I'd said or done to him was coming back to me.
Then my friend confessed that the reason he'd come to this decision was from noting all the rotten things that had happened to me in the years since he'd known me. I won't go into that list here, but my friend recalled every item on that list in excruciating detail, some of which I had never told him, but he must have gotten from other sources. He summed up his comments by saying that he could not reconcile how a Christian like myself, who had given everything up to follow Christ, could possibly go on considering what I'd experienced. If "God" truly existed, what kind of god could he be if he treated his own servants so badly, returning faithfulness with pain? My friend also wondered if I was merely deluded for pressing on in faith with a smile on my face and hope still in my heart. It was for these reasons that he could no longer believe anything in the Christian faith was true. I was the example that proved his deduction.
We continued to talk for hours after. Only later did I learn that our conversation had probably saved his life. But what I didn't know was what was going on in spiritual places because of what he said to me one humid summer evening long ago.
I think it was just today that I came to grips with his pronouncement. In some of my darkest times, what he said to me that night haunted me, and only now do I recognize it for the curse that it was. Only now do I feel like the black power of that comment has been rendered inert in the light of Christ.
How many of us are laboring under a curse someone glibly tossed out a decade or more ago? What words carelessly spoken—or even spoken with intent—have pinned us to the ground or left us flailing?
Many of you reading this are not charismatics; I understand that. But this isn't pew-jumping, bark-like-a-dog charismania, folks. Curses are a dark demonic oppression that gets called into use to destroy, undermine, hamper, and diminish the work of God in our lives. If we do not take curses before Him and let His Strong Right Hand shatter them, they can persist and wreak havoc.
Ask God today to expose curses that have been pronounced over you in your life. Some of you may have had parents that said things to you that have bound you in chains for years. Get those before God. Or you may have said things with a fire on your tongue that has burned people so fiercely that they can't get over it. Pray that out and let God show you who you need to approach in forgiveness. Too many of us speak carelessly and unleash things that can damage many.
Life and Death are in the power of the tongue. Therefore, speak life and not death. Our witness for the Lord depends on it.
Tags: Best of Cerulean Sanctum, Charismatic, Church Issues, Curses, Discernment, Faith, Maturity, Spiritual Warfare, Supernaturalism, Talk, Tongue
Posts
Comments
