'Thus says the Lord': Overstepping our authority

Twenty years ago I was a member in good standing of Easton (Pa.) Assembly of God. That all came crashing down in one Sunday school class.

Laverne Webber, the wife of our church's pastor, was teaching a class on the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. This is a fairly significant doctrine in the Assemblies of God; essentially it holds that there is a special encounter with God made manifest by glossalalia, the ecstatic utterance in unknown tongues.

I had questions. I still do. That's how I work. I ask questions until I understand, not to someone else's satisfaction but to my own. So I asked, and when the answers weren't satisfactory, I pressed. Other members of the class I found wanted to hear the answers too.

Well, Laverne kept leading the class, and I kept attending; and you know, I never did start speaking in tongues, and neither did anyone else in the class.

One week Laverne approached me. She had been praying and God had spoken to her. About me. The way he does.

"David," she said, "I really feel the Lord is saying you need to stop questioning, and just have faith."

I nodded agreeably, but inside I was thinking "Well, four more weeks, and then this session of children's church is done. I'll wrap up my commitment, and then I'll go."

I had helped to lead the children's ministry at church for two years. I had helped to write the curriculum because what we had been given was so stupid. They lost that commitment and support. I was headed toward a breakup with this church for a number of reasons, but two things hastened that split.

One, don't ever tell me to stop thinking and just "have faith."

Two, don't ever tell me what God wants me to do unless you're prepared to show me proof that he has authorized you to speak on his behalf. That is abusive and manipulative at its worst; and when it's at its best and just misguided, it still is the key to messing up impressionable minds.

If you are actually going to claim to speak for God -- even if you try to couch it terms of "I think God wants you to do thus-and-such" -- then you don't have the maturity to be in any sort of leadership.


Copyright © 2016 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Writings lost, and writing saved

I've written a lot of things online that I wish I still had access to.

There was a discussion several years ago on the About.com Christian Humor forum where I reflected on why I had left Pentecostalism. It stands out in my memory because it expressed clearly for the first time a lot of complicated thoughts I'd been having about a period of my faith that had meant a lot to me, but the post is gone.

I've been stirring in the dust of the CHRefugee forum on Delphi for the same reason. I've made some posts from time to time on that forum that contained decent ideas or original thoughts; as a result, when I have the time to kill, I'm looking for them there, cleaning them up, and then posting them here, on this blog.

Another lost item is the ten dares I had come up with for returning missionaries. Item: "Visit a Pentecostal  church. During worship, use your new language to order a large pepperoni pizza with extra cheese. Sit back and await the interpretation."

That one stands out not only because it's my favorite, but because I actually did something similar to that in children's church at the Assemblies of God church I attended.

In a puppet show about the Baptism of the Holy Spirit that we were performing, one of the puppets was supposed to start speaking in tongues. Rather than mess around with that "untie my bowtie" nonsense, I said, "Mwen vle un pitsa laj avek pepewoni e ple fwomaj."

The associate pastor, who was backstage with me, started to laugh and promptly smacked me.

I made the list years ago, and I'm afraid I can't recall it entirely. The few I can:

1. Tell the board of elders what you really think about the proposed bowling alley addition to the church, the new Ford Lincoln Mercury for the pastor, or the latest frivolous additions to the sanctuary.

2. While on the missions field, send your tithe back to your home church. Designate the money for your own support.

3. Also while on the missions field: Borrow a baby and convince a friend to stand next to you for a photograph. Turn the picture into Christmas cards "from my family" and send them to all your supporters. Please note: This works even better if you were already married when you left for the missions field. (Yes, I did this one too. Some people still crack up over it, while others will brood silently.)

Remembering Easton Assembly of God

Some of the best worship services I've ever been a part of were at Easton Assembly of God while I was a member there.

The preaching was excellent under the first pastor there too. Nothing lasts forever. I stuck around for about four more years after we hired a new pastor, but eventually left. It was the lackluster preaching, particularly the wrongheaded messages like "Christians should smile all the time if they have the joy of the Lord!", combined with increased dissatisfaction with the church's lack of interest in the community around it, that did it. The differences between me and the church's take on the gospel eventually started to really get at me.

Another reason I left was an overemphasis on glossolalia. The Baptism in the Holy Spirit is a trademark of the Assemblies of God. To their credit, I never heard anyone in authority claim that people who didn't speak in tongues weren't really Christians. But someone did tell me how mortified she was that I would presume to teach children's church without that gift.

The truth is, I'm a skeptical believer in the gift of tongues. I've yet to hear a reasonable biblical argument against the continued existence of glossolalia as a gift of the Holy Spirit.

 I believe the Holy Spirit can inspire people to speak either in a human language they don't know or in a heavenly language, but I can only think of one instance where I believe I might have witnessed it. In that particular case, the utterance had a lot of repetition, enough so that there was a recognizable structure to the language. The interpretation came out with the same manner of repetition.

Other times I've heard alleged messages in tongues, the interpretations were incomprehensible mishmashes of contemporary and King James English; they were so vague that they were meaningless; and so on. Usually, when I've heard people praying in tongues in church, it goes against what Paul sets down for guidelines about speaking in tongues in 1 Corinthians.

Most ecstatic utterances in tongues appear to be just that -- ecstatic utterances born entirely of the human spirit, with nothing divine about them. Spoken tongues like that are found in other religions, notably at least one sect of Islam, and have been practiced by heretics throughout church history.

As to an utterance in a language unknown to the speaker but known to a listener, I've heard stories about that happening, but I have no way of knowing if there's any truth to them, so I don't bother to enter them as evidence one way or the other.

 I don't particularly disbelieve in glossolalia, but I don't believe I've seen more than one legitimate instance of it in my life. I do believe I've seen enough error, confused doctrine, abuse and misuse of the gift, and just muddled thinking to convince someone who's already skeptical that the whole thing is a fraud.

I will say that I've been tempted to use my knowledge of Haitian Creole during a worship service to order a large pepperoni pizza with an order of breadsticks and a bottle of Coke, and wait for the interpretation, but that's something that's amusing only in concept. It would be incredibly disrespectful to actually do it.

I left Easton Assembly of God years ago. I went to visit the church about 2½ years ago, when my foster son was with us, because I needed to get away for a little.

The worship is almost all done on an organ now and has none of the brilliance that made it work before, and the pastor's preaching is just as awful as ever. A lot of the church leaders from when I was a member have gone (not all), and it seemed a duller place than ever.

'If I speak with the tongues of men and angels...'

I'm a former Pentecostal, and I have a confession to make. Even though I still believe in the gift of tongues, I still have no idea what the supposed scriptural basis is for a "prayer language."

This is a practice among Pentecostals and charismatics of praying in unknown tongues during private prayer time. The believers I've known who practice the karisma swear by it. They describe these prayers as effortless, tireless, and a direct line between their soul and God, unobstructed by the clumsiness of human speech.

The difficulty I'm having is that if Scripture is our guide to spiritual matters, it doesn't provide much guidance when it comes to having a personal prayer language. When the glossolalia first was manifest in Acts 2, it was with the express effect that Jews from all over the world heard the gospel proclaimed in their own native languages -- even though the speakers were virtually all from Judea and Galilee.

The believers weren't praying in unknown languages. They were praying in languages that they personally couldn't speak, but the onlookers could. It would be like going to Lisbon and speaking in Portuguese without ever studying a lick of it beforehand.

In other words, this was a reversal of the Babel curse; the purpose of tongues was to unconfuse human language and to make communication easier.

This is also what Paul suggests is the use of tongues when he writes to the church in Corinth. If people come into church and hear you worshiping in a language they don't know, it means nothing to them. But if they hear you worshiping in their own language -- which you don't know -- they stand convicted that God is in the church (1 Corinthians 14:22).

That certainly was the impact of the crowd who heard Peter's sermon early in Acts.

In 1 Corinthians 13, Paul does say, "If I speak in the tongues of men and angels, but have not love, I am only a tinkling cymbal or resounding brass." But one verse in isolation is a poor prooftext for  doctrine, and since every language has idiomatic expressions, I'm inclined to consider "the tongues of men and angels" to be one of those and nothing more until I hear a convincing argument otherwise.

In the meantime, I'm going to keep praying in the human languages that I know. They may not be a direct line from my soul to God, but they're all I've got, and they've worked all right for me so far.


Copyright © 2013 by David Learn, Used with permission.

On the propriety of speaking in tongues

So I have an honest question for anyone who comes across this entry and feels like contributing their  2 cents. Where do you stand on speaking in tongues?

Let me explain.

I spent my first seven or eight years as a Christian as a member of Easton (Pa.) Assembly of God, where we were taught that in the first century it was a standard experience for a new believer to begin speaking in tongues, though not necessarily a universal one. Pastor Mike Poppa did observe that every time a new group of people received the gospel, the writer of Acts made sure to point out that they also began speaking in tongues.

I've met a few Christians who believe you shouldn't serve in ministry unless you've received the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. I'm aware of others who claim you can't be a Christian without it. Neither of those positions is biblical.

The only rules Paul sets out regarding glossalalia pertain to corporate worship, where he favors maintaining order and keeping everyone on the same page. He tells believers not to speak in tongues at all during gatherings, unless they also can interpret; and even then he says to keep the number of messages in tongues to a minimum. "I would rather speak one word that you can all understand than ten thousand words in a tongue none of you will," he says.

As far as private prayer goes, he's content to live and let live, and places no limits on speaking in tongues; in fact he says, "I thank God I speak in tongues more than any of you."

Still, speaking in tongues is a lightning rod of controversy to some groups. I'm curious to hear where others stand. Sound off in the comments.

Ordering pizza in tongues

I don't speak in tongues myself, but I can do a decent job pretending to when I need to.

Back in the 1990s, I was a regular in the children's ministry at Easton Assembly of God, We wrote, performed and produced some of the most ridiculous material ever presented in Sunday school or a children's church service. We're talking original puppet shows with handmade puppets; live-action Bible stories where King David fell to the ground, frothing at the mouth and pretending to be insane; other Bible stories where Lazarus came forth; worship songs with outrageous hand movements, a Bible-quoting superhero and his archnemesis, and on and on.

(As campy as we got, we never reached the level of Duncan the Donut Man, or Psalty the Singing Psalter. We did have standards.)

It all started when we were handed an eight-week stash of puppet skits that taught core Christian doctrines like sin, repentance and forgiveness; the importance of prayer; and even the Second Coming. Because this was an Assemblies of God church, one week the lesson was on the Baptism of the Holy Spirit.

This is a teaching, widely accepted among charismatic and Pentecostal Christians but hotly disputed by John MacArthur, that at some point the individual believer may have an intense experience with the Holy Spirit that leads to the ecstatic utterance in other tongues.

In this particular puppet skit, I was providing the voice for the puppet Robby, who was supposed to get the baptism of the Holy Spirit and start speaking in tongues. The script actually continued scripted nonsense on the level of "Untie my bowtie who stole my Honda," which we all found distasteful, I'd returned from the missions field in Haiti several months earlier, so it was agreed that when Robby began speaking in tongues, I would simply speak in Kreyol.

So, while 30 children watched, Robby prayed to receive the baptism of the Spirit and began rather excitedly to say, "Bonswa. Sa se Robby Callenberg; mwen rete bo 12 Rue Pelerin. Mwen komande un laj pitsa avek pepewoni e fwomaj anpil." ("Good evening, this is Robby Callenberg of 12 Pelerin Road. I would like to order a large pepperoni pizza with extra cheese.")

Todd Seymor, the assistant pastor, was kneeling behind the puppet stage with me. He didn't speak a word of Kreyol, but I guess "large pepperoni pizza" sounds the same in almost any language, Todd smacked me on the shoulder and tried desperately to contain his laughter.

I never did get the nerve to do that during a worship service. Maybe sometime if I don't mind blaspheming the Holy Spirit and going straight to hell ...


Copyright © 2020 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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