The fire begins to burn

The fire begins to burn, and we rush to quench it.

We had a friend with a passion for teenagers, and her passion was specifically around the music teenagers liked to listen to. She wanted teenagers to know that there were alternatives to the violence- and-sex-drenched songs produced across so many musical genres. With full support, she started a small lending library ministry on Sunday mornings at church – wheeling out racks of Christian music CDs – rap, country, rock, pop, even heavy metal (who knew?). The church teens swarmed around it.

She spent a lot of her own money to buy the CDs. She listened to each one. She staffed the library each Sunday. The teens loved it. She loved it.

Someone on the church staff took notice, and discovered that it was a ministry that was not to be found on the official organization chart. Eventually, the staff took over.

The music ministry to teens died. No one had the passion and the commitment our friend had. No one could talk to the teens about the music like she could.

Francis Chan, author of Forgotten God: Reversing Our Tragic Neglect of the Holy Spirit, might say that the church, in this case, institutionalized the Spirit out of existence. The ministry was safely on the organization chart, but it was dead.

Churches grow, add staff and managerial duties, and manage ministries. But like in any organization, the purpose of staff is partially one of control. Companies do this, non-profits do this, governments at all levels do this. And, unfortunately, so do churches.

“Instead of encouraging people who are doing courageous things for God and joining them in their discernment process of how to be faithful to what God is calling them to do,” Chan writes, “we tell them to slow down and back off.”

The fire begins to burn, and we rush to quench it.

I’ve talked before about problems we’ve encountered with churches and church organization; it’s not a problem only recently discovered by millennials. Churches can get caught up in corporate models of management, or the latest fashion or craze, as easily as the general culture can. And churches just as susceptible to the problems that result.  

Many church members want to see the status quo maintained; others want to see the status quo shaken up. It’s been my own unfortunate experience to be caught between both on more than one occasion. But they both share one central practice in common: they are both the result of human desires, aims, thought, and plans. We dress it up in the right churchy language, of course, but that’s what much of this actually is – the plans of humans.

Chan’s concern is not about one specific way for people and churches to be radical. There is no one specific way. Instead, he says, “it is both about encouraging others to obey the Spirit’s leadings and about listening to and obeying His leading in your own life.”

The fire begins to burn. What if, rather than rushing in to quench it, we simply watched it to see what might happen?

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading Chan’s Forgotten God. Today’s discussion concludes the book. To see more posts on this final section, please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

Photograph by Ken Kistler via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Heaping Burning Coals

At work not long ago, a large group of us were having a luncheon meeting to discuss an upcoming marketing campaign. Part of the campaign involves talking directly with the public, which is something of a leap for a non-consumer business.

This has been building for months. And on this day, the discussion is around the company’s “persona” or voice, and what it should sound like, what language should be used and what language to avoid, and possibly even what movie actors in various roles might suggest for the effort.

The discussion reaches a point where it’s noticeable that I’m not participating. So I’m asked for my opinion.

“When did we forget how to talk with people?” I ask. “When did forget to put ourselves in others’ shoes, hear what they’re saying, and find a way to respond to their concerns? Why do we think we have to script everything? We’re talking about being authentic when it sounds like what we want is to control the conversation.”

The conversation takes a turn, and in a good direction. Not everyone agrees with what I say, but it’s not easy to argue that authenticity may be the antithesis of what’s being proposed. But at least this issue is out on the table, recognized, debated, and, if not resolved, at least understood.

I’m passionate on this subject. The people around the table hear it in my voice. I hear it my voice.

This is one of those days I feel like a dinosaur. This is not generally the way the company is going, nor is it generally the way the world is going.

Afterward, alone in my office, I think about the church. And I understand what has been troubling me for almost the last 15 years. The business conversation we had at lunch applies to what I’ve experienced at two churches for the last 15 years.

Here’s what Francis Chan says: “We’ve created a whole brand of churches that do not depend upon the Spirit, a whole culture of Christians that do not depend on the Spirit, a whole culture of Christians who are not disciples, a new group of ‘followers’ who do not follow.”

I read those words in Chan’s Forgotten God: Reversing Our Tragic Neglect of the Holy Spirit, and I feel burning coals being heaped upon my head.

Been there, done that.

When did we forget to depend upon the Spirit? When did we decide that Willowcreek is the model, or Mars Hill is the model, or “one church / multiple campuses” is the model? When did we start applying the notion of “success” to the church and defining and measuring success by size and numbers? If it was about numbers and size, why didn’t God start with the power and size of Rome instead of some fishermen in an empire backwater?

Perhaps it’s the effects of getting older and more curmudgeonly. Perhaps it’s heard one too many church transformational plans. Perhaps it’s walking into too many church meetings or seminars and being ambushed with a great new revitalization proposal to “bring millennials back to the church.” Perhaps it’s singing one too many repetitious praise songs in worship services.

Those heaping coals are burning.

“God is not interested in numbers,” Chan says. “He cares most about faithfulness, not the size, of His bride. He cares about whether people are lovers of Him.”

And big buildings, big music, big attendance, eclectic services, church planning consultants, fundraising programs, new communications technology and coffee bars can’t do that. None of these things can do what God cares most about. These things come from man.

Only the Spirit can do what God cares most about.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading Forgotten God. To see more posts, on this chapter, “Supernatural Church,” please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines.

Photograph by Petr Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The One Thing We Want More Than Anything Else

We’re having this conversation at work: How does a big company talk to people?

More to the point, how does a big company talk to people in the age of informality and social media?

Most big companies (especially those in non-consumer businesses) and most big organizations like to talk with people from the perspective of expertise. If the company is big in technology (of any kind), then the conversation tends to reflect scientific or technological expertise.

That was us – scientific expertise central. It’s where we are comfortable. It’s what we know. It’s where we can best debate and defend.

We were having the conversation because, based on extensive market research, we were to speak in a different way – friendlier, and more conversational.

As we talked, it struck me that, no matter if we spoke with expertise or with friendliness, we were actually trying to accomplish the same thing. And it’s the one thing that companies, organizations, and even most of us individuals want and crave more than anything else.

Control.

I’m not sure whether it’s because we believe our world is wacky and careening from crisis to crisis, or because nothing seems to make sense any more, or that the wrong party is in control of Washington, D.C., or because politics is making our workplaces turn into some combination of Oz and Wonderland (and we would all secretly like to be the man behind the curtain; he at least has the appearance of being in control). But we want to be in control.

And even we Christians have our own form of this. We’ve been told that God loves us and has a wonderful plan for our lives. Well, fine. What is it? What’s the plan?

Of course, we don’t exactly ask the question that way. Instead, as Francis Chan points out in

Forgotten God: The Tragic Neglect of the Holy Spirit, we talk about discerning God’s will for our lives, and preferably our complete lives. We want the big picture. As Chan points, out, though, waiting to get “the complete picture” is a way of putting off what has to be done, today, this afternoon, and now.

“Part of the desire to ‘know God’s will for my life’ is birthed in fear and results in paralysis,” Chan writes. “We are scared to make mistakes, so we fret over figuring out God’s will. We wonder what living according to His will would actually look and feel like, and we are scared to find out. We forget that we were never promised a twenty-year plan of action; instead, God promises multiple times in Scripture never to leave of forsake us.”

We want to know God’s will for lives because it’s a means of control, putting ourselves in control. And it’s no wonder that God tends not to cooperate. He doesn’t eliminate obstacles and problems; he doesn’t stop the curve balls; he allows the surprises. He doesn’t give us a nicely detailed blueprint for how our lives will go. He seems to turn his back when we run into the nasty political types at work.

Instead, what he does give us is the moment, living in the moment.

If we had the wonderful plan for our lives, everything would be simple. We would know what to do in each situation. We would know how to respond exactly. Life would be great. We would be in control.

Right.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading Forgotten God. To see more posts on this week’s chapter, “Forget About His Will for Your Life,” please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

Photograph by  Виталий Смолыгин via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Spirit of Necessity

The birth of our first grandchild in 2010 included an event that still gives me shivers. 

My son, daughter-in-law, her mother, my wife and I had gone out to dinner, and then we went to the hospital for the start of our daughter-in-law’s induced labor. After she was settled into the birthing room, we went home to sleep – it would be some time before the baby would arrive. 

About 11:30, I was starting to drift off to sleep when the phone rang. It was our daughter-in-law, telling us our son was in the emergency room at the hospital. She hurriedly explained that he had fainted (empathy for her dislike of needles) and hit his head on the floor. Within minutes I was on my way to the hospital. 

When I got to his beside in the emergency room, I knew his condition was serious. He recognized me, but it took him some time to tell the doctor who I was. And he kept asking, over and over again, “Where’s my wallet?” I answer that question at least 20 times. He was x-rayed, and the doctor could see a small hematoma, or pooling of blood, beneath the skull. He was kept overnight; I returned home, seriously shaken. 

Late the next morning, our daughter-in-law in labor on one floor of the hospital, my son was x-rayed again. The hematoma was growing, putting pressure on the skull. He was having a severe headache. Within a few hours, the neurosurgeon came in while the pastor from the church was there in the room with me and my son (my wife was in the labor room with our daughter-in-law). And he said our son needed surgery, and as soon as possible. Brain surgery. He described exactly how they would get through the skull to relieve the pressure. 

This isn’t happening, I kept telling myself. This is a bad dream. 

The doctor left, the pastor looked at my son and I and said, “Let’s pray.” The pastor and I went down on our knees next to my son’s bed. And we prayed. 

It was the first moment of absolute calm in a tumultuous day. From that moment on, I knew that it would be okay. I didn’t know how, but I just knew.  

Sometime around 4 p.m., my son was being wheeled down to the surgical floor. The nurses made a stop on the second floor, for him to see his wife, now well into labor. Then he was taken to surgery. The surgery was successful; they were able to stop and control the hematoma. Very early the next morning, they wheeled him in his bed to the labor room, where he was able to coach his wife through the final 30 minutes. And then came our grandson Cameron. 

“From my own experience,” writes Francis Chan in Forgotten God: The Tragic Neglect of the Holy Spirit, "I have felt closest to God when nearness to him was a necessity. The Bible says that the Spirit comes through in situations where we would normally be afraid. We experience the Holy Spirit guiding us in desperate situations."  

 

What Francis Chan has written here is true. I can testify to it. I should have been a basket case. I experienced the full range of emotions – anxiety, concern, worry, shock, fear. The concern never left. But I knew it would be okay. And it was. 

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading Chan’s Forgotten God. To see more posts on this chapter, “A Real Relationship,” please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines. 

Top photograph by Paul Brennan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Right Reason

I was at a writer’s conference, carrying with me my selection of a work in progress like hundreds of others, scheduled for a meeting with both an editor and an agent. Like most of the people there, when not in a general session or a seminar, I spent a lot of time milling about, looking at the writers’ books for sale, talking to a few people, trying to understand what I was even doing there.

At one of the luncheons, a woman sat next to me, her arms full of books, papers, notebooks, purse, briefcase, and water bottle. She smiled expansively at the rest of us at the table and announced, “I am a writer.” Loudly. Loud enough so that the people at the next table turned their heads.

She went on to tell us, knowing we were all phenomenally interested, that she was in her positive affirmation mode. Declaring herself to be a writer meant, as night followed day, that she was one. And she went on to explain what that meant.

“One day,” she said, “I will be on that dais, getting ready to make the luncheon address. I will be signing books during the meet-the-authors sessions. My books will be on the best-seller lists. I will be mobbed by people asking for advice and the name of my agent, and manuscripts thrust in my face to read.” She smiled. “I will not just be a writer; I will be an author” (emphasis in the original). She looked around, a smug smile on her face. “And each of you knows that’s what you want, too.”

The rest of us at the table suddenly discovered reasons why we had to be somewhere else. And if we had to choose between two good seminars scheduled at the same time, the decision would be easy once we saw which one she had chosen.

What struck me about her words wasn’t her brazenness. It was that she didn’t want to become a writer, not really. What she instead wanted was the experience of becoming a writer. The difference was, and is, huge. One implies work; the other implies adulation. One implies a love for others; the other implies a love for self.

In  Forgotten God: The Tragic Neglect of the Holy Spirit, Francis Chan asks a rather pointed question about Christians’ desire to be “filled with the Spirit.” And that question is, “Do I want to lead or be led by the Spirit?”

It’s not unlike “do I want to write or have the experience of being a writer?”

Chan asks the question rather bluntly because there’s no dancing around it; this isn’t the time to be polite. Your faith is either all about you, or it’s not. How you live your faith is either all about you, or it’s not. How you pray is either all about you, or it’s not.

Do I want to lead or be led by the Spirit?

That question requires a deep pondering, a prayerful searching of the soul. The answer isn’t as automatic as we like to think it is, or hope it is.

Because if there’s one thing that’s true about the Christian faith, it’s that it’s not about the person holding that faith. It never was and it never will be. To be a Christian is to be other-directed, in the same way Jesus was other-directed. For him, and for many of us over the centuries, it meant being other-directed to the death.

Jesus didn’t die to save himself.

That’s why Francis Chan asks that question about the Spirit.

Do I want to lead or be led by the Spirit?

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading Forgotten God. To see more posts on this chapter, “Why Do You Want Him,” please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

Photograph by Marina Shemesh via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Personality? Who Knew?

It is one of the lines in the Bible that I’ve read rather lightly over, never stopping to consider what it might mean. Perhaps it’s easy to overlook because I want to get to where the story really begins. Or it’s so well known that I simply skip over it.

The line is in the book of Genesis, chapter 1, right at the very beginning in verses 1 and 2: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and void, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters (NIV; emphasis added). The King James Version, always more poetic, says the Spirit was moving over the face of the waters.

Well, of course the Sprit of God was hovering; this is the creation story, and where else would the Spirit of God be?

I never stopped to ask the rather obvious, what is meant by “hovering”?

One approach, the Life Application Bible, says that the image suggested by the words in the original Hebrew “is similar to a mother bird caring for and protecting its young.”

This isn’t a simple movement of the Spirit, or a pausing over the waters. This is something active, implying caring and protecting, as a mother – any mother – would be protective toward her children.

It implies even more. It implies that the Holy Spirit has personality.

Have you ever thought of the Holy Spirit as having personality? My image of the Spirit has always been that rushing wind and those tongues of fire in Acts 2, when the Spirit comes upon the disciples and they begin to speak in foreign languages.

But personality?

And there’s more, says Francis Chan in Forgotten God: The Tragic Neglect of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is a person, he says; “He is not an indistinct ‘power’ or thing.” He is a person, with personality, and we are called to relationship with Him, just as we are called to relationship with the Father and the Son. It’s a three-for-one deal. It’s not relationship with two and being come upon or empowered by the third.

Chan goes on to list the key elements of the doctrine of the Holy Spirit. He is a person. He is God. He is holy and eternal. He has his own mind and he prays for us (consider the image of a mother and father praying for their children). He has emotions; the Bible clearly says the spirit can be grieved. He has his own desires and will. And the Spirit is all-powerful, all-present, and all-knowing.

My surprise at the idea of the Spirit having personality is evidence for the point that Chan is making in this book – we Christians, and perhaps especially we American Christians, have neglected the Spirit. In our focus on having a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ” and our prayers to the Father, we have forgotten the Spirit, the “power source” for our Christian lives.

And the Spirit is hovering over us. Caring. Protective. Feeding. And being grieved.

As the Life Application Bible says, “God’s Spirit was actively involved in the creation of the world. God’s care and protection are still active.”

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’ve been reading Forgotten God. To see more posts on this chapter, “Theology of the Holy Spirit 101,” please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines.

Photograph by Brunhilde Reinig via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Fear Was Not Part of the Job

A little over a decade ago, I spent nine months as director of communications for St. Louis Public Schools. I was hired three months into a massive reorganization. The district had hired an outside management firm from New York to essentially take over and close schools, downsize the work force, outsource, consolidate – all those things people in corporations are familiar with. But an urban school district?

The problem was obvious – a school district built to educate 150,000 children was now educating something south of 40,000. I say “something south” because no one really knew; in fact, the number was likely closer to 30,000 than 40,000. And the district was going broke, while all the usual measures of education success also looked close to educational bankruptcy.

My first day on the job, actually, my first 10 minutes on the job, the secretary told me that Channel 4 and Channel 5 has film crews outside waiting for a statement from me.

“A statement?” I asked. “On what?”

“The teachers are protesting the end of being able to bank your sick days,” she said. “They’ve called in sick.”

“Who here can I get information from for a statement?”

She looked embarrassed. “Well, the acting superintendent is at a breakfast. The assistant superintendents left the building. They were afraid you’d ask them to go on camera.”

“So who’s left?” I asked, reality slowly entering my brain. I was half afraid she was going to say –

“Just you,” she said.

I quickly scoured the building for anyone who might be hiding. Then I walked outside to the news media, introduced myself, and gave a statement. Guessing at what the policy would likely be, I made the statement up on the spot. As it turned out, I had gotten it right.

I called that moment God’s grace on Day One of the job. I experienced God’s grace every day, multiple times a day.

We had people working in the central district office who refused to visit the schools, especially the high schools. “It’s not safe,” they would say. “People have been attacked in those schools.” When I pointed out that we sent children into those schools every day, they would glare angrily.

In addition to the reorganizations and school closings, and a lot of community anger and protests, we had the usual problems of an urban school district in serious distress. We had incidents of violence. We had gun incidents. We had schools so fearful of the violence and drugs in surrounding neighborhoods that you had to buzzed through the doors after showing your face on video monitors. We had large protests at school board meetings; the first board meeting I attended had 400 screaming people and three arrests. “It was a good night,” my boss told me. “Only three arrests this time.”

School board meetings were at night, and usually at a middle school with an auditorium large enough to hold 400 people (the yelling and screaming was optional and normal). We are not talking neighborhoods like the one where I lived in a comfortable and highly regarded suburb. We’re talking neighborhoods when you could walk outside the school board meeting and sometimes hear gunshots.

I arrived at one board meeting to find almost 2,000 people in front of the school. That was 2,000 angry people, angry that the auditorium was already filled with 400 equally angry people. I stood my my car in the parking lot, and realized I was going to have to make my way through those 2,000 people to get to the door. And here I was, instantly recognizable to almost every single person in the metropolitan area as the face of St. Louis Public Schools (I was on television news a lot) (I was on television news almost every night of the week for months, and sometimes even weekends).

And the odd thing is, even standing in that parking lot, I can’t remember a single time I experienced fear, not once in the entire nine months. Perhaps I was been naïve or simply didn’t know enough. But I was often in schools in what even the police considered unsafe neighborhoods. I would walk outside the central office into screaming protests. My boss was assaulted in her office right next to mine (by an elected member of the school board), and I was right next door at the time and rushed out when I heard the commotion.

It wasn’t that I was brave or courageous (foolhardy, perhaps, but not courageous). But I never felt fear. And I think I know why.

“The truth is that the Spirit of the living God is guaranteed to ask you to go somewhere or do something you wouldn’t normally want or choose to do,” writes Francis Chan in The Forgotten God: Reversing Our Tragic Neglect of the Holy Spirit. “The Spirit will lead you to the way of the cross, as He led Jesus to the cross, and that is definitely not a safe or pretty or comfortable place to be. “the Holy Spirit of God will; mold you into the person you were made to be. This often incredibly painful process strips you of selfishness, pride, and fear.”

No fear. It is why I had no fear. I knew that, for those nine months, as hard and difficult as the job was, I was where I was supposed to be.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’re reading The Forgotten God. To see more posts on this chapter, “What Are You Afraid Of,” please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Did they have something we don’t?

Not long after I became a Christian, I became fascinated with early church history. A friend at our church in Houston recommended Alfred Edersheim’s The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah. I discovered the church history F.F. Bruce, author of such works as New Testament History and Paul: Apostle of the Heart Set Free. I read 19^th century church historians, like William Ramsay.

A few years later, when I was in my master’s program, I took a seminar called “Athens and Jerusalem” and one in early church history. I read some of the great secular church historians of the 19^th century, like Adolf von Harnack (whom my seminar leader always referred to as “the great von Harnack,” emphasis upon “the great”). And Peter Brown’s wonderful biography Augustine of Hippo. I read a lot in the early church fathers, and discovered Tertullian, a third century lawyer whose fire and passion in his defense of Christianity still breathes even in English translation. (For the record, Tertullian was known for being something other than totally orthodox, but it’s unclear what the something was.)

And the question, or questions, that kept nagging at me were, what fueled the growth of the church? Why did it become stronger in persecution? What did the early church have that we did not? Was it simply a matter of being closer in chronological time to Jesus and the disciples?

The answer to all of these questions turned out to be the same: the Holy Spirit.

Jesus promised his disciples that he would send a helper. And he told them to wait. It’s the part of the passage in Acts 1 that is easy to miss or skip over – the waiting. The helper was coming, but not on the disciples’ timetable. No, the helper would arrive on God’s timetable, at God’s timing. (We Americans are okay with the idea of a helper, especially if we’re the ones doing the helping, but the idea of waiting? We want to get it done now.)

The disciples didn’t have to wait long. On Pentecost, or the Feast of Weeks, 50 days after the resurrection, the helper comes But he comes in a totally unexpected and original way: the disciples, gathered together, hear a sound, a sound that fills the whole house where they are together. The sound is like “the blowing of a violent wind came down from heaven.”

And it’s not just the sound. The disciples see tongues of fire that apparently appear together and then separate, coming to rest on each of them. It was those tongues of fires hovering or resting on each disciple that “filled all of them with the Holy Spirit.” And the impact was immediate: each of them began to speak in different languages, recognizable to the people in Jerusalem for Pentecost. This wasn’t mere babbling of sounds but real languages, understandable languages.

People were amazed and shocked. And from the start, there were the cynics and scoffers, sneering that the disciples must have drunk too much wine. (Obviously, someone missed a marketing opportunity here – “drink the wine and speak a foreign language.”)

And from that day, the fishermen, a tax collector, a prostitute, a political zealot and others from the lower end of the economic and cultural worlds would go on to capture an empire, the mightiest empire the world has known.

“For some reason,” writes Francis Chan in Forgotten God: Reversing Our Tragic Neglect of the Holy Spirit, “we don’t think we need the Holy Spirit. We don’t expect the Holy Spirit to act. Or if we do, our expectations are often misguided and self-serving. Given our talent set, experience, and education, many of us are fairly capable of living rather successfully (according to the world’s standards) without any strength from the Holy Spirit.”

We don’t wait. We rely on our own abilities instead of God’s. We can do this on our own.

And very little of lasting value happens. We certainly don’t conquer empires.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, we’re reading Chan’s Forgotten God. To see more posts on this chapter, “I’ve Got Jesus. Why Do I Need the Holy Spirit,” please visit Sarah at Living Between the Lines.

Photograph of the ruins of the library at Ephesus by Kevin Casper via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Something as Real as the Wind

I’ve talked about this before, but some years ago, on a mission trip to Eastern Europe, I experienced something I thought I had never previously encountered. Sitting in a small church in Erfurt, formerly a communist party social hall (delicious irony, that), and talking with a young pastor while we were being videotaped, I was overcome by what I can only describe as a presence.

So were the pastor and the cameraman. For no discernible reason, the three of us began to weep, and simultaneously.

It lasted but a few minutes. We looked at one another, and knew something had happened. I don’t think any of us could ever describe it exactly; I remember feeling slightly dazed. And I remember thinking everything has changed.

It seems almost too easy to say it was the Holy Spirit. No tongues of fire appeared upon our heads; no odd languages escaped our mouths. Just the weeping, a sadness, a kind of gentle desolation.

I had never experienced anything like it before, inside or outside of church. In American culture, people will look at you a little strangely when you describe an experience like that.

Whatever it was, it was real.

I didn’t see anything; but something happened, something as real as the wind.

I think hesitate to name what I think it was because I have no corresponding experience to validate it.

In Forgotten God: Reversing Our Tragic Neglect of the Holy Spirit, Francis Chan says “there is a big gap between what we read in Scripture about the Holy Spirit and how most believers and churches operate today.” We pray to the Father; we have a “personal experience” with Jesus. But the Spirit is banished to a closet somewhere in the basement.

Right from the start, Chan is asking some tough questions. Without the Holy Spirit, does the church live any differently than any other group of people? Have we indeed banished the Spirit to the basement? Do we really even understand what the Holy Spirit is?

One of Chan’s statements is haunting. “The light of the American church is flickering and nearly extinguished,” he writes, “having largely sold out to the kingdoms and values of this world.” I ask myself if that’s true. Are we indeed more concerned about weekly attendance than the movement of the Holy Spirit?

It promises to be a wild ride of a book.

Led by Jason Stasyszen and Sarah Salter, a group of us have begun reading Chan’s Forgotten God. To see more posts on the book’s introduction, please visit Jason at Connecting to Impact. And consider joining us – we’re covering a chapter a week (and I downloaded my copy on Kindle).

Photograph by Lynn Greyling via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.