Remember, The Bathwater Needs Flushing

Dear friends, 

A while ago I had a prophetic picture at a gathering of SOMA International leaders where I saw a baby carefully wrapped in swaddling bands being handed to us. This was our inheritance as a charismatic renewal movement. A precious gift, a much younger sibling to Pentecostalism, and an infant compared to its great uncles, the Evangelical Revival and the Reformation, and a newborn in contrast to its far older ancestors with clear roots in the early church. The charismatic movement that has been so lovingly handed on to our generations is a precious spiritual baby. But it is a baby that has been swimming in some pretty murky bathwater. 

What are these murky waters? 

Partly they are murky because they hide something.

Recently we have been reeling from delayed revelations. Whenever we talk about a ‘culture of honour’, we ‘preach the positives’ or we turn a blind eye to the failings of a megastar/movement because we crave their success, we run the gambit of delayed revelation. Delayed because we put it off. Revelation because everything hidden will one day be revealed. Gambit because delayed revelation reeks destruction. 

I tend to get more knocked than my wife does when a scandal breaks out. I think it’s because I think I am still somehow searching for a hero, a spiritual John Wayne (or John Welsey) I can join in with, whereas she has a more realistic assessment of people. I get equally disappointed in myself. She keeps a more even keel. But as destructive as these scandals can be, the answer is not to keep things in the dark, but to bring them to the light. While we hide in false optimism or rank denial it gets more and more obvious to those around us that our ‘baby’ isn’t getting any cleaner. We’ve come to the point that the bathwater needs emptying, and if we’re honest, the point when this ‘baby’ of renewal needs to grow up. 

It is not always a culture of honour that causes us as trustee boards, staff, family, church members, and institutions to protect a wayward star or protect ourselves. Sometimes it is fear: ’If anyone knew this what would happen?’ So it takes 25 years for a young worship leader’s story to be believed. Sometimes it is blind faith: ‘It couldn’t be him/her, they’re so close to God.’ So no-one believes the reports of the masseuse claiming abuse, or the volunteers at the community serving disabled people. Sometimes it is loyalty: ’I/we owe everything to them.’ So we keep our head down and hope it will get better. Sometimes it is a misplaced sense of common failings: ‘We all have faults/who am I to judge?’ So we send them away/onto the next role and allow abuse to be perpetuated in another part of God’s world. Perhaps most tragically, sometimes it is simply finance: ‘What would happen to our “goose that laid the golden eggs” if everyone knew the goose was really a pigeon? 

But let justice flow like a river and wash out the bath tub again. 

We have to be better at recognising our own failings as a movement. 

If everything will one day be revealed it is because the Lord wants truth to be known.

In eternity we will be ‘fully known even as we fully know’ and we will be praising the Lamb in wonder, awe and admiration that he allowed any of us to enter His Father’s home with him. There will be an apocalypse. An unveiling. And right now on this earth there seems to be an unveiling too. It is several years on from the #metoo movement, the Jimmy Saville scandal in the UK and the aftermath of George Floyd in the USA and we’ve just been through the murder of Nahel. M in Paris by police. It seems that this is an era in God’s economy where formerly untouchable men (and some women) and institutions of power are being brought into the light and held accountable for their crimes, failings and wrongdoings. 

But while there have been real and culpable faults and crimes in leaders, there have also been systemic, cultural flaws within movements and institutions that need addressing. These can be just as hard to spot and ultimately more damaging. They are often justified by a concern for the ‘greater good’, or ‘God’s Kingdom’ but before long can easily take us in completely different path where the only kingdoms we are protecting are our own. 

Systemic Faults – the Making of Many Hagars

Let’s pause for a moment and consider the biblical story of our father in faith, Abram who became Abraham:

Abram was promised an inheritance to make a prosperity teacher blush. The stars in the sky, the sand of the seashore would pale in comparison with his descendents. But the promise was a long time coming. So when it was suggested that he father a child through a (presumably) younger and more virile woman than his wife, we read that he took the chance. Ishmael was born to his #babymama Hagar. Hagar was his shortcut to the promised glory.

Hagar, despite keeping her end of the bargain was then driven out into the desert when wife #1 finally had the child of promise. This was one of the many Old Testament #metoo moments. Sarah’s son’s name Isaac means he laughs, but there wasn’t much laughter going on for #babymama Hagar when she was driven out. Instead she was driven to the point of despair for not just her life but also the life of the ‘Father of Faith’s’ eldest son.

It takes an angel from God to intervene, but not before we get an early megaphone clue in Scripture that even the posterboy ‘man of faith’, Abraham and the chosen one Sarah, can hurt a lot of people on the way. The God of the Beatitudes is often found sitting with their castoffs outside the camp. Blessed are those who mourn. Blessed are the Hagars. 

Back to today, and it doesn’t take long to realise that there have been a lot of Hagars in the charismatic movement. 

Hagars who have been used to serve a God-given vision and spat out when no longer able to act as a short-cut to institutional growth. 

A lot of the bathwater around the charismatic movement has to do with the way that we have made ‘Jesus’ into a commodity for profit and for power. 

This leads us to to use and mis-use people, use and mis-use hope and aspirations, to use and mis-use platforms, to use and mis-use truth and Scripture, to use and misuse finances, and use and mis-use power. How many Hagars have been hurt along the way because they are no longer convenient or economically viable to us? Discarded like a once famous Hollywood starlet? Quietly ignored like an unacknowledged aide? Unthanked and unnoticed until they drop out, burn out, level out or quietly leave? Then simply replaced when the next shiny person comes along? It brings a tear to my eye when I realise my part in that. 

The Hagar syndrome is an apt analogy for how it can feel to work for a Christian organisation. If you give your body and soul for the cause and get sent away into the night with a non-disclosure (NDA) clause slapped on you then you’re a Hagar. It can be even worse if you’re also expected to endure a handshake/prayer/platitudes as you get discarded into the night. 

Yes, it happens.

Yes, it happens far too often. 

How in heaven’s name did we become business minded organisations who protect their ‘spiritual legacy’ at the expense of those who serve alongside us? May God have mercy on us all. 

These are techniques we hold in common with any number of secular organisations, but we compound it with the illusion of shared purpose and shared family identity. So there is a ‘one hand on the shoulder’ prayer ministry and another hand holding a dagger in their back as a former staff member is shoved out of the door. Imagine having to endure that from your persecutors/former employers. Imagine Abraham and Sarah praying for Hagar as she was sent into a wilderness desert. Ultimately in God’s Kingdom all NDAs will be disclosed. Truth is truth. Wouldn’t it be better to face the music now than have to face the face of Christ on that day and be held to account for all we have done? 

Hagars abound. 

Hagars will receive God’s blessing – even if those carrying a fraction of Abraham and Sarah’s anointing shove them out. 

If we are honest sometimes the Hagars have to go because they remind us of failure, or because we have grossly overestimated our own spiritual success trajectory. Yes, there may be some others who needed a push out of the nest, some who just couldn’t do their job, some who no longer believed what they signed up for. But this fear of fear of failure, and stifled success is chronic.

Charismatics have been notorious for overpromising and under delivering.

A new day is always dawning – but it’s always just around the corner.

I’ve just heard of a flagship charismatic church that has had to lay off over half its staff team.

But this is not a new issue.  

Rob Warner’s analysis shows that charismatics overall experienced a 16% decline in the 1990s (and that was during a decade that was supposed to be the heyday of the Toronto blessing, the decade of evangelism and the rise of Alpha). Yet nevertheless 79% of those same charismatic churches were expecting a large growth in the early 2000s. Warner writes: 

Optimistic expectations have become heightened beyond reality as a result of embracing later-modern assumptions of assured growth and success. Moreover, this ideology appears to have become unfalsifiable: if success is the automatic and intrinsic destiny of the true church, whenever churches suffer decline, it can only be, according to the law of inherent and assured growth because they are not Evangelical, Pentecostal or Charismatic enough… there has been a zealous stroking of vision inflation… when their growth expectations wantonly disregard the fact that the decade of evangelism has been a decade of decline evangelicals in general and charismatics in particular appear to be in denial … and exemplify Fastinger’s account of the characteristic response to cognitive dissonance – a defiant optimism that is essentially an escapist fantasy to sustain implausible convictions.

Rob Warner, Warner, R Fissured Resurgence: developments in English pan-evangelicalism, 1966-2001, 130, https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/files/2929985/430439.pdf p.130 [accessed 19.3.2021].

Selling a dream

We can misuse hopes and dreams as well as people.  A peculiarly charismatic part of the murky bathwater is the selling of spiritual hope, aspirations and dreams. It is a cyclical dream of imminent instant success couched in revivalism. This dream keeps coming round, and is then sent out into the wilderness to die. 

One of our issues is we rarely hold up our hands where we have got it wrong. I remember being a young student in the mid-1990s, printing copies of the 2 Chronicles 7:14 promise, “if my people, who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray…” for other people to put up in their university bedrooms to match my one. I was dreaming non-stop of revival from my conversion onwards. In some ways it was because I wanted everyone to experience what I did. In other ways it was because I wanted this Christian thing to work – and work in a way I liked. O that all my college/school would bow the knee as I (thought I) had to Jesus. When my pastor’s wife commented, ‘wouldn’t it be amazing to see revival in your school,’ I retorted, hyper-confidently, ‘wouldn’t it me amazing to see revival in right across the South of England’ (I’m not sure where my geographical boundary came from, but I had never lived as far north at London at that stage). 

When my pastor’s wife commented, ‘wouldn’t it be amazing to see revival in your school,’ I retorted, hyper-confidently, ‘wouldn’t it me amazing to see revival in right across the South of England’

But I was not alone it this. And we don’t face up to these stories well. Consider the (then) prominent charismatic Anglican leader Mark Stibbe who in 1995 argues that the Toronto Blessing was the first sign of a ‘fourth wave’ of renewal which would result in global revival. Or consider Paul Cain who prophesied in July 1990 that a mighty revival would break out in London. He had been partly introduced in the UK via John Wimber by shining lights of the UK charismatic scene including Stibbe’s predecessor at St Andrews Chorleywood David Pytches, the founder of New Wine, and Sandy Millar at HTB. They helped usher in the Kansas City Prophets to the UK. John Wimber even declared that ‘Cain was never wrong in his prophesies’.

The whole thing got out of hand.

These predictions were heightened with ‘supra-biblical’ teaching from Bob Jones, who Wimber had apparently endorsed as highly prophetic while acknowledging he had a ‘demonic problem’. Jones promised a dramatic increase in signs of wonders for a ‘new breed of men’ and an ‘army of locusts’ who would sweep across the nation in a Holy Spirit revival. 

The revival never came, and a few months later Wimber contracted cancer of the throat which stymied much of the rest of his ministry. His wife Carol’s post-humous biography of John Wimber tells how many people tried to link his embracing of these prophetic ministries with his illness, but also tells of both of their regrets about endorsing Jones and Cain. Wimber died in 1997 and a year before he gave a retrospective to UK Vineyard leaders saying that: 

“During the period of the ‘prophetic era’ [Kansas City Prophets] and on into the ‘new renewal’ [Toronto] our people quit starting small groups, they quit prophesying, they quit healing the sick, they quit casting out demons, because they were waiting for the Big Bang, the Big Revival, the Big Thing… I thought, My God, we’ve made an audience out of them. And they were an army!

Carol Wimber, ‘John Wimber: The Way It Was.’ N.p.: Independently Published, 1999. 179-181

This was a huge admission from a champion of the charismatic movement, but we never talk about it. Using promises of hope made an audience out of an army. Will there ever be a day when charismatic leaders don’t declare some out of context promise from Isaiah as heralding in a new day for their institution, or assert that the coming world revival won’t begin in their town? Or when itinerant ministers will stop parodying British comic Michael Macintyre who declares wherever he goes that this is his ‘favourite venue’, when they declare wherever they go that this city will surely be revival HQ?  If the mistakes of people as admirable as Millar, Pytches and Wimber led to an audience not an army, why do we imagine anything different from each new false dawn sold to willing dreamers? 

We will return in later chapters to the misuse of truth, scripture and of power, but a word here is surely necessary about the platform. 

In a flat church hierarchy where it is hard for ambitious and talented people to assess their own performance, and ecclesiastical promotion (preference) may be rare, the one sad scorecard available to ministers on a set stipend is their status on the speaking circuit. This can be an anemic circuit made up of identikit performers touting their wares from a parade of platforms, pleasing with platitudes to a culture that celebrates celebrity. It’s harder to break into than Major League Soccer (where no teams are promoted or relegated for poor performance). But it remains an illusory goal. It is why is was so moving a few years ago to hear a prominent speaker from Northern Ireland, Alan Scott, talk about how God wants people who want to get on an altar not a platform (based on the Romans 12 charge for us to be ‘living sacrifices’).  ‘Make the sacrifice’ he intoned from the platform he’d been flown in to occupy.  And yet now we hear reports that he drove staff to conversion quotas and faces a lawsuit about the manner and way he has taken $66million worth of Anaheim Vineyard real estate out of the USA Vineyard network. 

Get an altar not a platform. Good advice. But the reality is the great altar in the Old Testament was higher off the ground than a conference stage. Leaders are exposed. It’s one thing to be a living sacrifice in private, quite another to do it in public. You don’t even need to get off the altar to turn it into a stage. You just have to stand up and make it about you.  

My goodness the water has got murky. 

But the bathwater needs flushing if the baby is to survive and grow. 

Notes: For details of 1990 invitation see Renewal, August 1990; See also Clifford Hill The Reshaping of Britain, 2018, 166-178 for a full discussion of Prophesy Today’s critique of Kansas City Prophets, Wimber, HTB and Toronto Blessing. For Toronto Blessing see Mark Stibbe, Times of Refreshing: A practical theology of Revival for Today (London Marshall Pickering 1995), 10, 21-29. For Roys Reports of Mike Pilavachi and Alan Scott see https://julieroys.com/exclusive-former-vineyard-staff-accuse-alan-scott-of-abuse-manipulation-lies/
https://julieroys.com/tag/mike-pilavachi/.

See all posts on: Letters to the Charismatic Church

Also may be of interest: HTB Network Thesis in 30 Parts

Next week: Chapter 3: Success Culture: Driven to Distraction by Success

EXCLUSIVE: Former Vineyard Staff Accuse Alan Scott of Abuse, Manipulation & Lies