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,…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4159. The holy laughter movement is the label attached to a wave of charismatic experience that surged through certain churches from the early 1990s onward, in which whole congregations would dissolve into prolonged, helpless laughter presented as a direct outpouring of the Holy Spirit. I do not come to this as a stranger looking…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 4165. The Word of Faith movement is the stream of teaching, popularised through prosperity preachers and broadcast ministries, that treats faith as a creative force released by spoken words and treats the Holy Spirit largely as the power that makes this force work. If you have ever heard that you can speak your healing…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4164. Kenneth Hagin, who died in 2003, was the man more than any other who gave the Word of Faith movement its shape, and his teaching on the Holy Spirit has reached far beyond his own ministry into the assumptions of millions of charismatic believers. When people ask me about prosperity teaching, positive confession,…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 4162. Bethel Church in Redding, California, has become one of the most influential charismatic ministries in the world, and its doctrine of the Holy Spirit shapes the worship, expectations, and practices of countless congregations far beyond its own walls. When people ask me about Bethel Church, they are usually asking about more than one…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 4181. The difference between being Spirit-led and impulse-led is one of the most practical things a Christian can learn, and one of the most commonly muddled. A sudden strong feeling rises up, an urge to speak, to give, to act, to walk away, and we baptise it with the language of guidance. We say…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04044. Becoming more sensitive to the Spirit’s leading is something many believers long for and few feel they have grasped. The phrase itself can sound mystical, as though some Christians possess a spiritual sixth sense the rest of us lack, and I want to take the mystery out of it without taking away the…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 00048. The claim that doctrine divides but Jesus unites is one of the most quoted slogans in the modern church, and one of the most quietly corrosive things a believer can be handed. It sounds humble, it sounds loving, and it lands a soft blow against anyone who dares to care about precise belief….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 04038. Being drunk in the Spirit describes a state, claimed in some charismatic meetings, in which believers stagger, slur their words, laugh uncontrollably, or behave as though intoxicated, all of it attributed to an overwhelming dose of the Spirit’s presence. It became widely known through the Toronto Blessing and similar movements of the 1990s,…