Jun15 Written by:Kayle
6/15/2008 4:41 AM
Our church had a "School of the Spirit" weekend where they invited another speaker from within their denomination to come speak about the Holy Spirit. This guy and his wife have a huge multi-racial church in Capetown and this guy was advertised as an expert in the field. Mat and I had a teacher's conference all weekend at the college and so we couldn't go to the church event. But we heard disturbing reports of what was being taught: saying things like he doesn't care how the spirit manifests itself in you, as long as you walk away from church being filled with the spirit, he said Jesus sees us as people who are without sin since he's forgiven us (which is true), but kept having the crowd chant, "We are sinless!" which started to become quite misleading, he said if you don't believe in the baptism of the spirit (a very Pentecostal belief) then you must be "so daft (or stupid) to even breathe",and he mostly preached his opinion, which was barely or loosely rooted in the Scriptures.
We also heard disturbing things of what was going on: people being slain in the spirit, people falling down and convulsing upon prayer over them, the wife prayed for someone and was telling them to just laugh in the spirit, lots of prayer for a guy in a wheelchair and forcing him to get up out of his wheelchair (I guess hoping that he'd be miraculously healed and would be able to walk),
Mat and I aren't Pentecostals and realize some of this stuff may come down to difference of denominational belief, but we're also a bit disturbed that the leadership hasn't questioned what this guy is saying and seems to see nothing or little wrong with the content of his preaching. It's disturbing to hear members in the congregation "amening" everything that's being said by this guy, even "amening" when he would speak wrongly and have to correct himself showing that people are just accepting what is being said without thought or testing, It is times like this that you feel like all the teaching we've been doing in the church is not making a difference at all.
However one encouraging thing that has happened is that the guy in the wheelchair, Keith, told me after church last week that he wants to become a better preacher and was asking me about books he can read. This week when I got back to him, he said he noticed that this guy's preaching is not quite "exegetical" (or preaching from the text), but instead that he tells stories like Beni Hen. I agreed and said that I want to see someone's stories being backed up by what the text has to say. I was encouraged that Keith could recognize the difference that this man's preaching wasn't solidly built on the text.
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