Charismatic

An Ache for Awe

2024-04-08 total eclipse, photo by Bill Killgallon.
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Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and signs were being performed through the apostles.
—Acts 2:43

The mainstream media has discovered the empty pew. Everywhere I turn online, publications weigh in to explain dwindling church attendance in the United States. The pile-on of doom has been so intense of late, you wonder if the reporting verges on glee as one more despised institution crumbles into dust.

To every article I encounter, I post the same comment. It’s a quote from British/American revivalist Leonard Ravenhill:

You never have to advertise a fire.

This past week amplified the truth of that quote as people around the United States flew, drove, bicycled, and walked, sometimes hundreds of miles, to dwell in the shadow of the moon. The April 8, 2024, total eclipse captured the imagination of millions seeking a rare experience, an awesome thrill irreproducible via AI, CGI, Apple Vision Pro, or a vivid imagination. It was a cosmic event too big, too wondrous to ignore.

Call it a “fire in the sky.”

At the risk of alienating fellow believers. I’m going to state what I believe is the obvious. No one is banging down the doors of our churches because, in far too many of them, the glory has departed. Whatever fire of God burned brightly within the church walls has dimmed or departed.

What has remained after this Ichabod event is whatever human beings can substitute. Manmade experiences fill the void. You get a rock band, a million dollar sound system of epic decibels, a half-million dollar lighting rig of retina-frying lumens, attractive people on stage, special effects to empower the sermon message, and voila! You have the average megachurch meeting. Ramp that up now and then for a “special event” to pull in the lost, and now you’re cooking with FIRE.

Except none of this is the fire of God, the Spirit He promises to all who believe. The Spirit whose presence in their midst stirred the early Church to awe.

Too critical?

I wonder how long it took the priests of the Temple in Jerusalem to realize something was amiss. They’d killed that troublemaker Jesus, so they must have thought their troubles were over. Except some vandal tore the temple curtain that restrained the overwhelming glory of God’s Presence, exposing sinful men like themselves to the Shekinah, which at one time was instant death for the unprepared.

Except nothing. Nothing happened because, at the death of Jesus, the barrier that separated God from the unwashed masses disintegrated and the Shekinah glory of God no longer dwelt in temples built of stone but in sanctified hearts made by God Himself in His image. (More on this here.)

Do you think the priests noticed? Was the Temple colder? Emptier? Do you think they changed their rituals after God left? Or did they go on like nothing happened, sewing the curtain, and reverting to business as usual, unaware that they had become superfluous?

Do you think the priests felt the old fire return when Spirit-filled believers began to meet in the Temple? Did the presence of those born-again, fire-filled souls ignite in them a desperate thirst for what they had lost?

People need awe. People are desperate for the fire of God made manifest in their lives.

Are we failing this lost generation because we ourselves have lost the fire? Would we know if we had? Or would we go on substituting manmade experiences in an effort to keep the masses from missing the genuine fire that once burned brightly?

I ask this because rekindling that spiritual fire is the only answer to dwindling church attendance. And it absolutely boggles my mind that I can go into the comment section of any of these “Why is the Church in America losing attendance?” laments only to find a million excuses and countless solutions, and yet the answer given is NEVER “We need a reinvigoration by the Holy Spirit.”

Why? Because too many church leaders today have never had the Holy Spirit fall on them in that fire-filled way. They’ve never seen a genuine revival, the kind that would at one time sweep the world now and then. They’ve never seen the charismatic gifts of the Spirit in genuine operation (in fact, many have misguidedly crusaded against them).

So all or our offering of awe becomes manmade. We’ve substituted manmade smoke and mirrors for Spirit-sourced signs and wonders. We read the second chapter of Acts, and our response is “More strobe lights.”

People are dying for the kind of movement of God in their lives that the Bible holds up as the normal Christian experience. They’re desperate for healing for their diseases. They’re desperate for deliverance from their afflictions. They’re desperate for a move of God in their impossible situation, whatever it might be. They’re desperate.

Where is the fire of God? Church leaders need to start asking this and doing what it takes to answer it. Because when someone finally figures this out, we won’t need a church marketing campaign anymore because people will be beating down the doors to experience true, Spirit-filled fire.

Eclipse image © Bill Kilgallon. Used by permission.

Many reading know that Cerulean Sanctum has been moribund since I signed off about seven years ago. I wrote about my wife’s illness and its impact on our lives. We later had a terrible 2019 where she spent most of the year in and out of hospitals, only for us to finally find some calm as 2020 started. We all know what happened next.

But, praise God, my wife is coping better and is moving into new horizons helping others with mental illness. Our son is grown and graduated college. I find myself with more free time and more opportunities to think and pray deeply.

So, perhaps I will blog now and then on issues facing the Church in the America, because God knows they are piling up and the solutions some are offering are truly whack-a-doodle.

Father God, bring your holy Fire. Maranatha!

A Circus, a Church, and the Death of Jan Crouch

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“Everyone loves a circus.”

Or so it is said.

You want a circus? Follow the link and read the posts on Facebook regarding the passing of Trinity Broadcasting Network co-founder Jan Crouch.

If you become disoriented and never make your way back here, I’ll understand. No hard feelings.

A sampling:

You have the adoring masses who called her “Mamma Crouch,” and who felt compelled to send TBN their “grocery money” as a tithe, because despite the Marie Antoinette-levels of gaudiness and gilded Rococo glitz evidenced on the hallmark “Praise the Lord” program, TBN seemed perpetually low on turnips and Cheetos.

You have the men (mostly) who have a form of godliness but deny its power, who seem incapable of not getting in one last dig about some “charismatic leader,” because the only thing sacred to them is their own rightness. And strange fire. Lots and lots of talk about that.

You have the (non sequitur alert!) funny Calvinist site and increasingly shrill internet darling, The Babylon Bee, posting a pile-on jest about Crouch. Because, low-hanging fruit—and bandwidth costs a lot. Buy a BB T-shirt, please.

You have the folks who talk incessantly about the Gospel, yet at the same time they can’t help but comment about the spiritually blind Mamma Crouch people who have this weird idea that if they have enough faith in God, anything is possible. Because it’s childish to think that faith can move mountains. “You see any mountains move lately, Buddy? No, I didn’t think so. Now go back to waiting to die so you can go to heaven.”

You have the hardcore Pentecostals that see TBN as a mighty force for Truth, Justice, and The American Way, promulgators of genuine Kingdom Living, advancing the Cause of Christ against the bulwarks of the Enemy in this End Times Dispensation. Hallelujah. Oh, and Creflo needs a big jet.

And lastly, you have all the comments from homosexual men and drag queens, who saw Crouch’s purple hair, Cleopatra-inspired makeup, and “Stevie Nicks gone pink” fashion sense as a life-changing inspiration, though probably not in the way Crouch intended.

Circus.

I could post a picture of Jan Crouch here. I could, but I won’t. You probably saw enough at Facebook.

I don’t know what to think about Jan Crouch and her husband, Paul, who died in 2013. As a young charismatic, I sometimes watched TBN to catch Christian music videos (“Real Videos,” anyone?) and to see if I could find something, anything, that showed what genuine Holy Ghost Christianity looked like. I found something else instead.

I do know this…

TBN presaged the slow turning of the Church in America. If anything, its success led to copying—if only tangentially and with massive denial of any hint of doing so—of its model. That glitz and showmanship crept into the larger Church, and larger churches was what it all became. Expand, take in money, and expand some more. Lasers. Disco balls. High-energy worship leaders. More, more, more. What we saw in TBN and decried, we saw in the wider Church just a few years later and embraced.

I have only one thing to say about all of this.

More than anything else, I want to start walking. I want to walk and walk until I can find some quiet place by a lake, where the breeze blows crisp and refreshing off the still waters, and I want to lie down on the shore and say, “God, I’m here. Please be with me. I need you so much.”

I don’t want frenzy.

I don’t want circuses.

I don’t want gilded lilies.

I don’t want darkened theaters filled with strobe lights and “high-octane worship.”

I don’t want a church that—no matter where you go or which denomination you turn to—feels like the same dog and pony show.

Somewhere, in the so-hard-to-find stillness, I just want to be where God is and dwell there in His embrace.

Maybe you do too.

Jesus Killed My Church–My Meditation on Guidance, Destiny, and The Big Lebowski

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Jesus Killed My Church by Randy BohlenderSteve Bremner at The Fire on Your Head podcast pointed out that Randy Bohlender‘s book Jesus Killed My Church was free for Kindle on Amazon, so I bit. Hey, provocative title–and I’d met Randy years before when our paths crossed at Vineyard Community Church in the Springdale area of Cincinnati.

The gist of Randy’s book: God leads. Put yourself in a place to hear His Spirit and then go with the flow.

Autobiographical and an apologetic for why you need to be baptized in the Holy Spirit, Jesus Killed My Church documents Randy’s and his wife’s first encounter with the Holy Spirit, learning to listen and trust the hearing, and following God along unexpected pathways. They end up at a home for wayward teens in the hinterlands of North Dakota, an old-fashioned Tennessee church, the Brownsville Revival, Burning Man, The Call, and the defunct College Football Hall of Fame in Mason, Ohio, all the while keeping their spiritual eyes and ears attuned to what God had next. In between stops, the Bohlenders get input from folks I’ve broken bread with, Steve Sjogren and Rusty Geverdt namely, and they reject some voices that attempt to steer them away from their God-directed courses. I mean, who hasn’t received a phone call out of the blue from some “prophetic” caller pronouncing words that clash with someone else’s prophetic leading? Been there, done that.

All the words, dreams, infillings, and circumstances that seem too good to be circumstance land the Bohlenders at Kansas City’s International House of Prayer and their eventual founding of a Christian adoption organization.

Oh, and the church they planted back in Cincinnati withered and died, hence the title.

Now, I’m going to tie this story with The Big Lebowski. Because it’s obvious, right?

Probably the most beloved film in the Coen Brothers’ Oscar-filled arsenal is The Big Lebowski. Aging stoner and White Russian-quaffer Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski finds two thugs in his home who, in the aftermath of a shakedown for cash, promptly take a leak on his rug, a favorite household item that “really ties the room together.” Seems the thugs confused this Lebowski for another Jeffrey Lebowski, a wealthy one, who has a pornstar wife gone missing, presumably kidnapped.

While trying unsuccessfully to get recompense for his ruined rug, The Dude encounters a panoply of weirdos consisting of anarchists, pretentious artists, criminals, and denizens of a bowling alley, that sport serving as a metaphor for life. The slacker Dude stumbles from one bizarre scene to another, hoping against hope that something positive might go his way regarding his rug. In between, he sires a child, buries a friend, and tries to make sense of this nonsense as he’s swept from one odd happening to the next. Helping him to cope is a cowboy who drops in now and then to comment on the proceedings, because, hey, every mythic story needs its oracle.

I know it may seem strange, but I see Bohlender’s story and The Dude’s as linked.

Recently, I had lunch with a friend, and as we discussed the vicissitudes of life as 50-something white guys in America, he stated that the world we live in now may be God’s best possible outcome. I wondered then if it was best for the whole of the world at the expense of being the best for any one of us in it, and I still wonder that.

God may very well sovereignly make the best that can be made of this sin-sick world, but what does that mean in the lives of you and me? To fill the gaps and to make that “best world” happen, does it come at the expense (as God may require) of individuals who may or may not live their “best life now”–as Joel Osteen calls it?

We have this tendency to think that God is always working His best in our lives, but are we the focus? Or is the world the focus?

When we attempt to look at another’s life and draw conclusions from it, what can we really know? And does being a Spirit-filled Christian mean that we can make any greater sense of the direction of our lives compared with someone who isn’t Spirit-filled?

As a Christian, I believe God leads. But what happens when He leads and the outcome is not only unexpected but downright bad–or at least bad on the surface? And what if it’s not just bad on the surface but terrible no matter which layer you examine?

Bohlender paints a picture of guidance by the Spirit that seems wonderful and freeing in close-up, but when you stand back and look at the big picture, it seems no better than the random vicissitudes of life.

Is that how God works? Is this His “mysterious ways” we always hear about?

And how is this any different than the story of The Dude, who somehow ends up okay in the end, if not exactly in the outcome he expects? What separates the drifting pothead seeking nothing more than to get through another day from the ardent Christian seeking guidance to change the world?

Now true, one is fictional and the other not, but when we survey the lives of people, Christian or heathen, fact and fiction converge.

I believe my friend is right about this world being the best possible world God can make given mankind’s fallenness. What that means for what you and I experience of it individually–well, that’s much harder to grok. Some seem destined for greatness, while others get ground up in the gears, and it’s not always clear which camp they belong to.

All I know is a Christian knows that somehow it’s all in preparation for when this life is done, and sometimes the when, how, and why won’t make any sense this side of heaven.