Alan and Debra Hirsch are interna- tionally known missiologists who, early in their walk with Christ, “hung out in both a Pentecostal megachurch and a cessationist- fundamentalist church.” They said the result was experiencing “life with feet on both accel- erator and brake at the same time.” In one chapter of their book Untamed, the Hirsches write about their experience in these two congregations. While we might not agree with all of their conclusions, it is infor- mative to hear from their perspective.
W
E WOULD ATTEND the more conservative, fundamentalist church on Sunday mornings,
where we would sing the old hymns, hear the Word preached, and take the Lord’s Supper all in a very orderly, controlled fashion. Then we would tromp off to the Pentecostal church in the evening and partake of the Pentecostal shuffle—a boun- cy kind of dance known only to true devo- tees. These two churches were poles apart in the way they expressed their faith, but we loved it because we learned things we never would have if we limited ourselves to the one church. We came to see that the same God existed in both, and in fact we loved the diversity.
The genuine spiritual vitality of the Pentecostals kept us passionate and zeal- ous for God, and the deep love of the Bible and earnestness of the conservatives kept us grounded and deepened our under- standing of our newfound faith. We used to say that Sunday mornings kept our minds engaged and Sunday evenings kept our spirits alive. We learned about the gifts of the Spirit from the Pentecostals and the fruit of the Spirit from the conser- vatives. (Of course it was not that clearly divided, but you get the point.) Without doubt, this dual experience provided a solid foundation for us as young believers. However, not all that we experienced was positive: we also came to see the weaknesses. The cramped solemnity of fundamentalism could at times really quench the work of the Holy Spirit. And some of the extreme excesses of Pentecostalism made one wonder at
14 EVANGEL | November 2010
SPIRIT’SEDGE The
by Alan and Debra Hirsch
times whether it was really the Holy Spirit at work.
It is important to look briefly at some of the more obvious weaknesses in both expressions of evangelical Christianity. Either of them, without being informed by the other, fails to fully represent the Holy Spirit and His work in our personal and corporate lives. And embracing only one expression, without the counterbal- ance of the other, can cause us to have a less-than-adequate understanding and experience of God’s Spirit. Again, we say
and damaged the spiritual fabric of Jesus’ people. After being there for a while, we realized that it was the exact same “liturgy” every Sunday: rocking music to dance to (and we did), then D-minor chords to cry to (and we did), then singing in the Spirit, gifts of the Spirit (but not too much), a 30-minute offering talk, 40 minutes of preaching, 10 minutes of Communion, 15 minutes of altar call, ending with some more emotive music.
Growing Disciples
this as people who have a deep love for the things of God and know that our own experiences have caused us to look afresh at how the Spirit seeks to work in our lives. We ourselves are guilty of quench- ing the Holy Spirit because of our own reactions against the imbalances in either expression of God’s church.
Power and Control
One of the things we observed at times in our Pentecostal experience was a dis- concerting kind of spiritual “engineering.” Behind some of the apparent spontaneity and spiritual dynamism was a thoroughly mechanical, cut-and-dried set of tech- niques that (we believe unwittingly) hurt
After years of being in ministry, we and many others have come to the conclu- sion that with enough of the right music, preaching, emotively charged atmosphere, and clever group-socialization (crowd- control) processes, you can pretty much grow a church without God! Technique is a terrible substitute for God—an idol— and it’s too easy to revert to it to “grow the church” while the authentic experi- ence of the Holy Spirit is being edged out the back door.
Order and Control
On the other hand, we have the fun- damentalists—ironically named, because to us it appeared that there was not a lot of fun but a whole lot of mental. Actually, fundamentalism describes the religious mood of both movements we experienced, so perhaps we can basically say that it seemed to us that our more mainline Protestant evangelical brethren simply had a semi-pathological distaste for things disorderly and out of control. They sought order and control, and they did so in the name of maintaining “objectivity.” People really do fear the God encoun- ter, and for good reason. “It is a dreadful
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