It's Chon

This is part 3 of a series of posts about my Pentecostal past. If you need to catch up, here’s Part 1 and Part 2.

I’m humbled and amazed at the response the last 2 blog posts have received. Evidently more people than just me have had some level of encounter (and ensuing struggle) with Pentecost or charismatic churches.

Several interactions stood out to me:

One person who is still in an Assembly of God church, but doesn’t feel like they are able to share their struggles and doubts with anyone (remember how I mentioned that doubt/questions were associated with sin?).

Another person had a similar upbringing to me, attended an AG university and even became an ordained minister in that denomination, but didn’t know where to turn when questions and doubts arose.

To me, this is big payoff for writing these posts. I initiated this project for my own spiritual health, but I love that other people have been able to identify with my struggle and share (privately or publicly) about this taboo topic. If you know anyone that would be encouraged by reading these posts, feel free to pass it along. Or if you’re still in the AG/charismatic world and reading these posts and thinking “Jon has lost his faith,” I hope you’ll talk with me directly. I’m just waiting for that e-mail to show up in my inbox.

The next big idea that I want to remember and re-embrace from my Pentecostal past is the idea of being an agent of change. Whenever I remember this theme, my mind goes instantly to a time at youth camp before my junior year of high school. After an intense time of prayer, our youth pastor directed all of us to organize by high school—the Union kids, Tulsa Public, Jenks, Bixby, etc. Our pastor then led each group in a time of intense prayer for all of our schools, for each student who would go into that environment and for real transformation of that community by the work of the Holy Spirit. We prayed that each student would be a catalyst for change in the lives of their teachers, fellow students and everyone they interacted with.

And that message really resonated with me. Coupled with the idea of praying with expectation, I really took to heart the notion of being an agent of change. I went to a private Christian high school and was scheduled to be the Student Council chaplain that school year. Part of my responsibilities as chaplain was to give a devotional on the intercom everyday and to lead prayer at random school events. But my youth pastor’s message caused me to dream of possibilities far beyond what most people expect of chaplains.

I wrote in my journal that summer about how I envisioned my school hosting weeknight worship services where we would invite entire families to come. I envisioned broken families meeting Christ in those services and seeking restoration. I pictured people giving up addictions and confessing sins and being healed. I pictured “revival” really breaking loose in my school. That word, revival, was a big buzz word for us at the time. None of us could really define what it meant, but we all knew we wanted it. Revival represented God’s work being evident in unexpected ways—beyond our control. I even remember writing out a document when I was 16 or 17 and I changed the font of the word revival for emphasis. How goofy.

That summer I even roped in Emily and my buddy Colby to meet me in the auditorium at school to spend some time in prayer for the upcoming school year. I even brought a CD player and blasted worship music like we did at youth group on Wednesdays. I was just certain that this would be a transformative year for Metro.

Just before my sophomore year (1 year prior), I had similar expectations of how God might use me to do good stuff at my high school. We had a night of unplugged worship during the first week of school and I remember spending some time in prayer before it started—I just told God “however you want to use me, please do.” And that night I ended up impromptu “preaching” to my high school and even did an altar call of sorts (that’s what I was used to). What weirded me out the most was that people actually responded and came forward for prayer.

Now you may be wondering, what happened the year I was chaplain? After all the prayer, hype and dreaming I’d put into that magical year, how’d it turn out? Honestly, not much happened. Not that I saw, at least. I gave my devotions, I led prayer here and there, but no big moments of change like I’d hoped for. I remember being a little disheartened by that. My dreams of transformation hit the wall of reality and the slow rate at which change typically takes place. But I gave it a shot.

The point for me in talking about all of this was to remember the idea that was passed on to me as a high schooler. My youth pastor and others created the expectation that we were to do more than just survive high school—not have sex, not drink, avoid drugs, be moral. Our presence in our high schools (and everywhere we went) was supposed to fundamentally change in our environment. People were supposed to be able to sense the presence of the Holy Spirit in us and want what we had. We were supposed to be change agents.

I think I’ve really lowered the bar since then in how I think about how I interact with the world around me. Maybe it’s sobering reality setting in, or maybe it’s because I’ve given up some of my confidence in God’s ability to transform people, communities, etc.

I never want to return to a hyped up way of trying to live for Christ. I will never again fake, force or manipulate myself or others into conjuring up emotions for God and his world that aren’t already there. I’m done with that. But I do want to return to a way of living and thinking that puts a lot of stock in God. The reason that I could dream up such big dreams for my high school was because I thought God was capable of fulfilling them. My youth pastor always cited Habakkuk 1:5—“Look at the nations and watch and be utterly amazed, for I am going to do something in your day that you would not believe, even if you were told.” I believed that. And I put myself in situations to give God a chance to respond (i.e. preaching to my high school, etc.).

It seems that all of us have lowered our expectations. It’s a miracle for any of us to make it to church, occasionally read the Bible or pray. Maybe we need to challenge that. What if you/we/I entered each day with a sort of hope, or at least willingness, to be used by God to bring his transforming and empowering grace to others? What if we told God regularly that he could use us however he wanted?

Do you think we’ve lowered the bar—for ourselves, for the kids in our church? Do you think of yourself as an agent of change? Please share any thoughts.

jon

In my last post I talked about my early struggles in the Pentecostal church I attended. The gifts of the Spirit—tongues in particular—left me feeling confused more often than I felt connected to God. I wondered whether I was faking more than just praying in tongues—faking at passion for God, faking at believing in him at all. Though I struggled there, I also came to know and seek Christ in that church (though that looked very different than how I seek God now). I couldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Just like any other human interaction, it was full of the good and the bad—things worth keeping and tossing in the recycling bin.

But one of the main goals in reflecting on my past in this way is so that I can mentally redeem it and not leave it all behind. In this post (and the ones that follow) I will focus on one key idea that was impressed on me by friends, pastors and teachers in my Pentecostal church that I think are worth holding on to. Most of these are ideas or practices that I have long ignored, but want to reembrace.

One of the practices that my AG church and friends took seriously was prayer. And I mean they took it very seriously—even more so than you are imagining. I don’t doubt that my Methodist friends take it any less seriously, but quite frankly, I just don’t see us doing it as much. And I know you don’t see me doing it!

An hour before our youth group met on Wednesday nights, we had a 30 minute prayer time every single week. Our youth pastor, a great guy, blasted worship music and all of us that attended (usually 15-20) paced our facility and prayed fervently. I mean it—people marched back and forth, praying at the top of their lungs. In spite of the blasting music you could hear a roar of prayer coming from my youth pastor and a bunch of 16-18 year olds. And the prayers were always of a transformative nature. We pled with God to change people’s hearts during the service that night, to help us to want to know him better, to make us want to pray, to have a tangible experience of God’s presence with us that night. As I’ll talk about in another post, we prayed for our friends at school and asked that God would reveal himself to them. Again, people prayed loudly in tongues, hoping that God would speak to them and that our prayers would invite his presence. At the end of half an hour or so, we would all gather together, hold hands and pray with confidence that God would move in mighty ways that night. We expected that he would.

Our whole church did a similar thing on Saturday nights. Our entire pastoral staff and many from the congregation would meet in the sanctuary where we would spend 30 minutes in prayer (again, fervent, passionate prayer) asking for God’s presence during the Sunday services. It was really cool to see my senior pastor lead our congregation in that way. We saw him on his knees every week, praying on our behalf.

We all had was this underlying assumption that if we prayed, God would respond. That’s why we spent so much time in the prayer on Wednesday and Sundays. If you had a sin you constantly struggled with, wondered whether God might be calling you to ministry, if you needed encouragement or wanted to pray on someone else’s behalf, then we knew you needed to pour out your heart to God in the altars. Something happened there that changed you when you walked away.

Until writing this out, I had long-forgotten that comforting feeling of having some old saint in our church lay a hand on my shoulder as I cried out to God in the altars. I remember some good older men from our church that would walk through the altars with a little vial of anointing oil and laying their hands on our shoulders and praying for us. The altars in the sanctuary of my old church were permanently salty from tears.

I don’t do that stuff anymore. Not like that at least. I’ve lost some of that fervency and sense of expectation. I miss it, to be quite honest. I don’t mean to say that “real prayer” has to look like what I’ve described here. I hope you get what I’m trying to communicate…

My AG friends prioritized prayer and put a system into place to insure that it was happening. Everyone knew that on Saturday nights and before youth group on Wednesdays there would be a time of prayer. And we would almost always pray in the altars after service, too. Not everyone came to prayer or down to the altars every time, but the symbolism was not missed on me. If we really wanted “more of God’s presence” (a phrase we used a ton back then, but I scarcely ever use now), or for him to work in our hearts and leave us different people, then we needed to pray.

I loved our discussion on pt. 1 in this series. I would love to hear more about your experiences (Pentecostal or otherwise). How do you experience prayer in your life now? Did you notice anything about my experience that gives you pause? What do you think about it?

jon