Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 01150. Personal experience is one of the trickiest pastoral challenges I deal with, because the person raising it against me is very rarely being dishonest. They have genuinely felt something, whether healing, direction, liberation, or spiritual encounter, and when I gently point out that Scripture seems to say something different, I can watch the…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 60023 Christian television has produced a particular kind of ministry figure: the faith healer who calls words of knowledge from the platform, lays hands on people who fall backwards, announces dramatic healings, and encourages large financial donations as an act of faith. Millions of people watch these programmes. Some are ill and desperately hopeful….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4093. Learning to discern Spirit’s leading from my own preferences, fears and appetites is, in my experience, one of the hardest and most necessary skills in the Christian life. It is not a question of doubt or weak faith. It is the honest recognition that I am a fallen man with complicated motives, entirely…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4087. Distinguishing spirit prompting from your own reasoning is one of the most practically pressing skills a Christian needs to develop, because the stakes of getting it wrong run in both directions. Claim the Spirit’s leading for what is really just personal preference dressed up in spiritual language, and you end up living by…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4053. I get asked about the gifts of the Spirit more than almost any other subject in pastoral ministry, and the gift of discernment of spirits sits near the top of the list of things people misunderstand. Some picture it as a kind of spiritual x-ray vision, a superpower for spotting demons in a…
Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 4143. The spiritual man and natural man in 1 Corinthians 2 are Paul’s two categories for describing how human beings relate to the things of God, and the difference between them is not intelligence, education or moral effort but whether or not a person has the Holy Spirit. “The natural person does not accept…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4158. The Lakeland Outpouring was a series of nightly meetings held in Lakeland, Florida, in 2008, led by a travelling evangelist and broadcast widely over Christian television and the internet. For a few months it gathered large crowds and attracted enormous attention before collapsing amid scandal almost as quickly as it had risen. Of…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4157. The Brownsville Revival was a sustained season of intense meetings that began on Father’s Day in 1995 at Brownsville Assembly of God in Pensacola, Florida, and continued for several years. It drew enormous crowds, with people queuing for hours and travelling great distances, and it became one of the most talked-about religious events…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 4156. The Toronto Blessing is the name given to a wave of unusual religious phenomena that began in 1994 at a church near Toronto airport and spread to thousands of congregations across the world. For a few years it was almost impossible to be part of charismatic church life in Britain without encountering it…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4160. Grave soaking, sometimes called grave sucking or mantle grabbing, is the practice in some charismatic circles of lying on or beside the grave of a famous dead preacher in order to soak up the anointing that supposedly still lingers there. People have travelled to the resting places of healing evangelists of past generations,…