Post-charismatic?

Way back in the dark ages of the `70's and `80's, the Charismatic movement swept through the church like a very controversial flood. It was followed with the empowered Third Wave evangelicalism of the Vineyard movment. (And more controversy.) There were controversial renewal movements within the broader movement (Toronto, Brownsville). Throw in a variety of other controversial tangents like Word of Faith teaching, the Shepherding movement, some ungrounded and sometimes wacky teaching...and it can become easy to throw baby and bathwater out the window.

I recently ran across this guy's blog - he's an academic, and he did a really thoughtful analysis of the Charismatic movement in recent years. You might want to check it out: http://www.robbymac.org/charismatic/

When a church has a healthy relationship with the Giver, the Gifts (yes, all of them) are used to build up the body and proclaim the power and beauty of Jesus to a watching world. There is nothing more wonderful than seeing God animate someone to serve the body through a prophetic word, through a love of caring for little ones in the nursery, through teaching, through a healing gift, through pulling weeds. It is heaven invading earth. I long to be in a church like this!

But churches are full of sinners, and sometimes, things go south. People screw up. Mistakes are made. Messes happen. What happens then?

People get burned, or they get burned out. And, in most of the cases we've encountered, when a Charismatic church experiences a mess, they either (a) veer off into false teaching/unbiblical practice OR (b) they clamp down in order to make sure that no more messes happen ever, ever, ever.

We’ve seen more (b) than (a) - churches that at one time were willing to allow people to get messy while they learned, but the leadership (understandably) got tired of cleaning up the messes, so they declared that it was time to grow up and stop spilling milk all over the place. So nobody ever spills anything anymore. The places are very clean and antiseptic and controlled.

I'm thinking about this because someone recently said to me, "I am a Charismatic, but I just ‘do my thing’ on my own. There are no good Charismatic churches around here." The "doing my own thing" idea kind of flies in the face of what the gifts are all about - but I understood exactly what this person was saying. No more messes.

But no growth or learning, either.