This is a guest post from a friend of mine, Dr. Brad Noel. Bradley Truman Noel serves as Director of Pentecostal Studies for Tyndale University College and Seminary. He is ordained with the Pentecostal Assemblies of Newfoundland and Labrador. When not at Tyndale, he and his wife Melinda make their home in Springdale, Newfoundland. He is the author of Pentecostal and Postmodern Hermeneutics: Comparison and Contemporary Impact.
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I was born and raised in a Pentecostal home and followed the call of God into theological education. I have pastored youth in a Pentecostal assembly, and now find myself on the faculty of a Christian university, directing a training program for Pentecostal pastors. Through all of this, I have spent much time considering the Pentecostal subculture. All denominational groups have their own subculture, and Pentecostalism is no different. I have been struck lately with how often our greatest strengths can also become our greatest weaknesses. The emphasis within Pentecostalism upon exuberant, and sometimes emotional worship, combined with a desire to see God’s Spirit move within our Sunday gatherings – preferably during an altar call – is just one example. With this in mind, allow me to share a few thoughts on Pentecostalism, emotions, and the anointing.
Pentecostals – we must not confuse our emotions with God’s anointing. They are not the same thing. Often, we confuse how we emotionally react when we’re excited to be in God’s presence with how his anointing actually is manifested among us. The presence of the Spirit among us may look very different than our weeping, jumping, shouting, shaking, or other emotional reactions. If the Spirit fell on a believer, however, causing deep contemplation, and giving quiet wisdom for the Body, would we recognize that as His presence among us? In other words, would a Spirit-inspired desire to deeply contemplate the things of God via the intellect, even register on our scales of what the anointing looks like?
Granted, one of the things Pentecostal churches have done very well is in allowing worshipers the full range of emotional expression during our services. We have recognized that God’s Spirit will impact the whole person, and that singing, shouting, dancing, weeping aloud, and such are therefore not improper. We have given people freedom to respond to God as they feel to (within the bounds of propriety), and that’s something to be celebrated. I am not calling for a reduction in this freedom. On the contrary, I am rather arguing for increased discernment in terms of recognizing the Spirit’s movement among us through means other than emotional response. We were so good, in our early days, of freeing souls to worship through the emotions, (contra so many other groups of the day), that in many ways we have baptized the emotional reaction as a spiritual one.
A final thought on Pentecostalism, emotion, and the anointing. In my experience of our history, much of what we do – from the types of songs we sing, sermons preached, and altar calls we hear – to our perception of what the anointing looks like, is geared towards the emotion. Emotionally wired people thus fit in, and are typically ministered to very well. For my friends who are wired primarily as “thinkers”, and not as “feelers”, however, you may have often felt as though you don’t fit in among Pentecostals. You may have even wondered (as I regularly did when I was younger), “What’s wrong with me? Why doesn’t God speak to me? Why am I not ‘moved’ in our worship services? Why don’t I ‘get’ this sermon?” The fact is there is nothing wrong with you at all. You’ve simply been conditioned to expect God to speak to you on one ‘channel’ – the emotions – instead of through your natural inclination towards reason, within the life of the mind.
One of the most freeing days of my life was when I finally realized that God can speak to me in precisely the way I need to hear – the way he wired me to hear. This has not been through ways typically experienced in Pentecostalism. Worship connects with me, for example, when the theology in the song is particularly rich; I get “buzzed” when studying the theories of the Atonement. To those “misfits” within Pentecostalism, those who experience the world through the life of the mind first, I say this: The God who created the universe so that no two fingerprints are alike, and no two snowflakes are alike, is well able to speak to you in your language – in ways tailor made for your understanding.
My hope is not that Pentecostalism will cease to encourage the full range of emotional responses to the Spirit’s presence, but that we will sharpen our tools of discernment and recognize that there are a great many signs of the Spirit’s anointing in our midst that we have heretofore failed to properly appreciate. Further, we should explore ways of mediating the rich presence of the Holy Spirit in our services to those who will connect with him on a cognitive level first. In so doing, we will help our brothers and sisters, who are more intellectually or rationally wired, to honestly declare that they feel at home within Pentecostalism.
July 23, 2012 at 9:49 am
I so resonate with this. I many times wondered “is something was wrong with me” because I didn’t get all hyped up by the music and start to dance or tremble. But I knew that if I did those things, I would be doing it to fit in in the eyes of those around me, not as a true expression of worship from my inner being. I determined that being true to how God wired me was more important than meeting the expectations of others.
Now, I do get emotional and excited. Hearing of an unreached people group receiving the gospel often brings me to tears of gratitude and worship to God for His mercy. When I’m reading a theological work, either for my own edification or for class at seminary, and the writer draws a connection I hadn’t seen before that ties it all together and makes sense of things that had puzzled me, I want to jump up and shout “YES!” with the enthusiasm most people display for their sports teams (I’m NOT a sports guy at all — when I take my daughter to her school’s games so she can hang with friends, I take a book and read).
I’m thankful that the church I attend appreciates the variety in the Body, and makes a place for each of us to minister.
July 23, 2012 at 8:57 pm
Thanks! Would to God that all Pentecostal churches would seek and flow in this balance also.
July 23, 2012 at 9:20 pm
Thank you for this wonderful article. I connected with it big time as a Pentecostal who probably can relate more to the “cognative” side than to the emotion side!!! I’ve had some of the same questions that this article addresses, including questions about myself!!! Thank you!!! This article is a blessing!!!
July 24, 2012 at 6:03 pm
Thanks, Adrian. Glad I could be of some help to you! This issue tormented me to the point where in my early 20s, I asked my pastor if indeed I was actually saved. I remember one prayer meeting while in university, a student-led event that saw 75 students fill a home for a night’s worth of prayer. By my calculation, 74 students were “slain in the Spirit” that night. You can guess who was still standing at night’s end!
July 23, 2012 at 10:13 pm
what Brian said almost to a T… this post really resonates with me.
July 24, 2012 at 6:03 pm
Thanks!
July 23, 2012 at 5:01 pm
You speak as though the essence of Pentecostalism is emotion. It’s not; Pentecostalism is about openness to God’s gifts being exercised in the context of the Body of Christ.
Emotion as a goal is empty. Emotion as a motivator produces instability. But when emotion as the product of God’s having done something for the believer, it is both healthy and appropriate.
A number of the denominations that grew out of the Charismatic movement grasped this, and exercise a more balanced approach to exercising the gifts of the Spirit.
July 23, 2012 at 8:55 pm
Thanks for your thoughts! The essence of Pentecostalism clearly is not emotion. When it comes to the practice of Pentecostalism, however, emotion has always occupied centre stage. I agree with your description of emotion as a goal or motivator and did not intend to argue otherwise. My call was more for Pentecostals to recognize the Spirit as he moves through the intellect.
July 24, 2012 at 5:03 pm
This was an amazing few paragraphs of enlightenment that all of us – emotional or intellectual – should pay attention to. I love emotion in worship but I also am blessed by the utter quietness and beauty of the meditative and contemplative aspects of being in the presence of God. We should always be “in the Presence” and we should not be governed by the expectations of outward behaviour imposed on us by those around us. There should be opportunity for ALL people to “feel” the anointing just as we have been created by the Creator to do. Neither aspect should be exclusive of the other. There “aint” no formula to call down the Presence of God. Brother Andrew knew that as he “peeled potatoes”. But I do know that we get caught up in a “form” and are deluded to think that only one way signifies the anointed moment. I love being Pentecostal. I love emotional moments of true anointing and I am totally blessed when my “grey matter” is challenged to hwlp me encompass who my God is. I wonder when all of us will be able to experience God’s Presence together . . . or do we scare the intellect away because we think the only way to see God’s anointing is through loud and noisy moments? Take heart, all those with great “reasoning”. My God is both emotion and intellect. He made me in His image . . . Shall we weep, dance, debate. think, search, shout, sing, ……? It’s all part of our walk as followers of the Lord. But you are right. Man does tend to place us in categories. Yuck! ( a totally un academic word!) Sorry I rambled. I guess I need my hands. (smile)