One of the insights given to those of us approaching old age is the recognition that the wisdom you have now obtained was not there thirty or forty years before. As a retired parish priest, I see clearly how some decisions made in the past were not always the best ones. I am not thinking about things that could have harmed people, but judgements made that may have affected the general progress of a parish. Back a few decades (I shall not be more specific), I was faced with the arrival of a clergyman (we will call him Peter) in my parish who had taken early retirement on health grounds. My 2021 self would now ask some very penetrating questions about the nature of the ‘health grounds’. I should at the very least have made a phone call to an archdeacon to find out a little more. Probably in this case, I would have picked up the message that there was something to be cautious about. On the face of it Peter had had a lively ministry, albeit of a charismatic flavour. This was, however, the only style he seemed to understand, and it was not where any of my then congregation were. The sermons that Peter preached were volatile and unpredictable. Displays of emotion in the pulpit about relatives who were not ‘saved’ did not edify but rather embarrass. The liturgy was also subject to random editing which did not stand up to any kind of theological consistency. As time went on, he began to show signs of mania which are not the product of a healthy charismatic spirituality. I have always been tolerant of charismatic styles of prayer and it was probably this tolerance in my younger self that allowed a difficult situation to continue longer than it should have done. It did eventually resolve itself as Peter found a much more congenial audience for his style of preaching among the network of independent congregations around. They welcomed a new voice to their services.
My exposure to charismatic forms of preaching/ministry did not start from the experiences I had with Peter. My pre-Peter experiences had been reasonably extensive, and I certainly feel that I had been able to grasp the importance and appreciation of these styles of spirituality to a ministry of healing. Healing and the support of healing ministries took up a significant part of my ministry and I served some years as a Bishop’s Adviser. This role involved me with becoming sensitised to a variety of theological styles when practising this ministry.
It was tempting right back in the 70s when I first encountered charismatic phenomenon and preaching, to think of it in entirely theological terms. To introduce any kind of psychological insight in assessing it seemed somehow blasphemous. The Holy Spirit was, to all appearances, operating directly in the lives of Christian individuals and transforming lives and making them holy. This direct unmediated access to the Holy Spirit was similar to other claims that conservative Christians were making about the text of Scripture. Anything as pure as the ‘unmediated Word of God’ had to be beyond any kind of human criticism. This uncritical approach to the manifestations of the Spirit was quite simply another form of fundamentalism. Both the Bible and the Spirit quickly could however, become tools of oppressive power in the wrong hands. We can see that the entire charismatic movement has been damaged by such claims for the ‘infallibility’ of the Spirit. Statements like ‘God is speaking to me and revealing his will’ enter into the discourse of the leaders. This kind of grasping of power by Christian leaders, using the tool of text-quoting and appeal to spiritual phenomena, is unlikely to be healthy. Just because followers long for certainties in the Christian journey does not mean that Christian leaders should spoon feed them As readers of this blog will know, I have never allowed the mere quotation of a biblical text to resolve a theological issue. Finding ‘truth’ in the miasma of text-quoting and the multiplicity of theological traditions that we have, is endlessly complex. Christians may long to possess certainties but there are many reasons to suggest that this is not easily delivered. The Bible is not, and never has been, an oracle full of proof texts. Culture and the rules of meaning within language will throw up ambiguity and nuance at every turn. It is what makes the Bible and the theology it contains an endlessly fascinating study but, for some, this does not provide the certainties for which they crave.
Pentecostal/charismatic-style preaching with its double appeal to unmediated pure reality of God through scripture and experience will have tremendous drawing power because it meets a craving for certainty. Being entranced by this link to certainty will also mean a strong attachment to the one teaching and preaching in the church. In what I, and many other Christians, would consider to be a kind of blasphemy, there is a process which transforms an ordinary fallible human being into a super-human oracle of God. By demonstrating the power of the Spirit and being the only legitimate interpreter of the Word of God, the minister/pastor claims all power to himself. Someone who believes that he indeed has such extraordinary power may also be on the way to a manic breakdown. This is what appears to have happened to Peter before his early retirement and his arrival in my parish.
Why do people flock to such congregations where the preacher may sometimes exhibit mania and other disturbing facets of the narcissistic personality that we have talked about on other occasions? Something I have recently read about the charismatic leader in all walks of life explains this conundrum very elegantly. One prominent feature of many groups and that includes many charismatic/Pentecostal congregations is the strong sense of us/them. Belonging to a group that that many such groups carry as part of their identity. Part of the church’s corporate memory will then consist of the way that there was once this traumatic separation from another group. This may have involved a parting of ways from another denomination. There will thus be a major ‘them’ from the past as well as a number of other thems in the present. We have contending against us the unsaved, the mockers of the faith and the liberal intellectuals. It will take a relatively modest level of rhetorical skill for the preacher to incubate successfully that sense of separateness and estrangement felt by a congregation. People enjoys this feeling of being specially chosen when compared with the ‘other’. Separateness make them aware of themselves as distinct from their Christian and other neighbours. It is not hard, as we have seen before, to back up from Scripture this strand of teaching. By emphasising this line of exposition, the congregation can be persuaded to give up their thinking selves as a way of suppressing any dissonance that they may feel. That will allow them to fall in with the dominant opinion, that of the leader or preacher.
The book I am reading explains how the preacher/charismatic leader is subtly encouraging one part of the brain to become dominant. It is well-known, even in motivation/leadership courses, that people working for a corporation are seldom motivated merely by appealing to the rational part of the brain. It is the emotional brain, the amygdala, the more instinctive part of the brain, that needs to be activated for real changes in behaviour to take place. It is this part that is activated when the body senses some danger or something causing fear. In a congregational setting the ‘enemies’ of faith are named as threats and this will get the amygdala activated. This will successfully override the pre-frontal cortex, the part of the brain that uses reason for decision making. Such group thinking is also common in a political context. The leader, having roused an audience to fear the other, whether an idea, a group or an individual, can then keep them in a state of expectation and longing to have provided for them the ‘answer’ that will remove the demons out of sight.
My appreciation of charismatic preaching and practice has to be qualified by my dislike, even loathing, of methods of manipulation that involve the subtle use of threats and fearmongering. The path to a holistic appreciation of the Christian good news should surely involve the reason, the thinking part of the human person. Can we ever afford to hand over ‘faith’ to the irrational and the primitive functioning of the human brain? There is a time for the emotions and the feelings to take a prominent place in our religious life. Supressing reason and discernment is not the way to do this in a healthy way.
Getting the balance right between which brain we function from is a challenge. The emotional brain, considered more “primitive”, is still available because it offers high speed yet narrowed responses to threat, for example. A child rushes unrestrained towards a busy road, the parent gets upset and grabs it quickly. The response is instantaneous.
The rational head, the cerebral cortex, makes slower more considered decisions and can tackle complex data, but using this brain we have learned we can also shut out almost anything we don’t like and paradoxically live in a world of make believe.
We need both parts of our brain.
Those of us who are overly “rational” can look down on our emotional charismatic friends as being unstable or living in error. But at the same time, by suppressing our emotional brains, we are in danger of losing our humanity.
Those of us who seek out emotional experiences, know how engaging, how exciting they can be, almost to the point of addiction. Our thinking can be so narrowed in this state as to be unable to prevent ourselves from more subtle harm, and to those we lead. The narrowness is compelling because only the THING we are pursuing can be seen and we are able to forget the potential dullness or grind of reality.
At least as long as the meeting lasts. Is this God? We hope so. We know it.
Both sides confuse how they function, with what God is doing. That’s not to say that God isn’t doing anything.
I’ve sat through Easter Day services that were like funerals and participated in huge seemingly “spiritual” events where we seemed to experience our Lord palpably. And yet no one changed and it turned out the leader was having an affair with someone else’s wife. By their fruit…
There are nerve connections between the different parts of our brains and we can learn to use them.
Thank you Stephen for this valuable introduction.
It’s important to distinguish between 2 quite separate but both relevant uses of the word ‘charismatic’.
‘Charismatic’ (A) which is the one centrally relevant to the New Testament and to Christianity: concerning the charismata or endowments/gifts of the Spirit, or any perspective that emphasises these.
‘Charismatic’ (B) in the Max Weber sense (and cf. Jesus’s authority in calling men to drop their nets and livelihood and follow him) is to do with personal authority, influence and magnetism.
Hence regarding my attendance at a Charismatic-Christian conference in sense (A), someone made some ‘Nuremberg’ remark and I had not the faintest idea of what their train of thought could be.
But it is quite true that although charismatic (A) does not intrinsically imply charismatic (B), a disproportionate number of charismatic (B) Christian leaders will be Pentecostals/charismatics.
The press also make a similar confusion between ‘evangelical’ and ‘evangelistic’ which are quite separate concepts but again with a certain overlap.
As a very young man in the late-70s I remember encountering a middle-aged couple who were members of an Anglican church that had got up in that form of charismatic Christianity known as “heavy shepherding”. I believe it originated in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Certainly some kind of spiritual abuse was going on, and the couple wanted “out”, but I didn’t know them well enough to ask for further details.
Your analysis is very helpful; powerful, manipulative and narcissistic leaders can emerge even in congregationalist settings such as my own denomination where decisions are supposedly made by the whole congregations. What worries me too (and you may have dealt with this elsewhere) is the way in which some church leaders are guilty of manipulation but aren’t even aware of what they’re doing. Of course we need strong leaders and good teaching but these must always be open to scrutiny and debate.
In my charismatic days I observed that some people were showing signs of addiction to spiritual highs. This was in my church’s Wimber phase, when it became common for people to remark that ‘God showed up’ when there were visible signs such as people falling over, crying, or laughing seemingly uncontrollably. The corollary, of course, was to assume that God wasn’t working when these signs weren’t visible. Then it took more and more extreme manifestatios to get the same high, so we had the advent of the Kansas City Prophets, closely followed by the Toronto Blessing.
Although I got very disillusioned about the whole thing – and said so in my book To Be Honest – when I moved on to an inner city church with small congregation and central churchmanship it took me a long while to adjust to the less febrile atmosphere.
Re the ‘Toronto blessing’ one can distinguish the bad fruit from the good; Margaret Poloma has written on the latter. The nadir was perhaps the improvised song recorded by David Hilborn’s timeline entitled ‘I’m drunk’ and including the words ‘I’ve been drinking down at Joel’s place every time and every day [sic]’ – I have seen the video. However, given that this message would have been understood for what it intended in the particular context, there were actually far worse nadirs. I didn’t see much good fruit in the Kansas prophets and was taken aback that some failed to spot the danger signs even when for example Paul Cain said that Jesus was jealous of his lady love. With things like that and the prosperity message I would have expected that people would have spotted them in a millisecond.
Thank you Janet
RE Charismatic leaders
When the laughter of the atheists and agnostics fades away and the reputation of the Christian church goes down the toilet, what will be left for the coming generation?
Chris Pitts
Hi Chris. I hope you are well.
Good article, hope I’m not too late to comment:- What’s the book you’re reading Stephen – would you recommend it someone interested in the topic?
Last year was an interesting year for charismatics on several counts.
i. No one prophesied the pandemic – A few have tried to bend words to support it. – But many had prophesies about a 2020 which turned out to be very different. It’s been interesting seeing the complete silence about this from many churches.
ii. Trump losing the election. Many Charismatic leaders supported him and some prophesied his victory. This included Kris Vallotton – influential Bethel Church leader who has been a headline speaker at New Wine. He at least has issued an apology for this.
iii. The fact that large crowd church meetings / conferences they rely on can’t happen at the moment. You don’t get the same feeling of crowd over zoom. Therefore Church is stripped back to something different.
I must confess that I wrote this three months ago and because a lot was happening it did not get used. The book that refers to brain function in charismatics is one that I bought on Kindle and I will try and work out which it was. I personally, in spite of my attempts to appreciate the movement have never found the contemporary attempts at prophecy very impressive and I never try to follow prophets. To me it looks like a kind of aggrandisement or power game with a solid dose of narcissism thrown in. In any event playing a future guessing is not what biblical prophecy is about. Prophecy is speaking God’s truth to the present day. There may be references to the future but that is not the point of the biblical prophets. Daniel (the one who does foretelling the future) was not regarded as one of the prophets by those who put the Bible together. He is placed among the ‘writings’ along with the Song of Songs. If you read the classical prophets of the OT with the lens of Daniel you will likely miss the point of what they are about. You will also miss a great deal of the solid religious and ethical significance of the Jewish tradition which Jesus inherited.