Expressions of Church

Jason's blog is also carrying a conversation about being post evangelical but not post charismatic.

I am a fairly intuitive creative expressive person, and the way that I am most able to express myself and be me in worship is in the gentle charismatic tradition (note the difference between this and charismania or classic pentecostalism). I like to experience God in worship, I like to pray in toungues, I like to wait on the power of God, I like to pray for others and work with laying on of hands and stuff. But what I can't stomach anymore is the fundamentalism and hardline evangelicalism that tends to go with this. The trouble I come across in finding somewhere to be home however is that I've never found theology that I'm comfortable with and expressions in which I can be myself under one roof.

It seems kind of ironic that in the reaction against the big conservative line (We're right, everyone else is wrong, we do everything 'by the book') one of the other things which has been lost is the intuitive experiencing of God and cathartic experiences of worship which is often found in charismatic worship.

I heard a fab talk by Dave Tomlinson at Greenbelt last year 'Is speaking in Tongues a Right Brain Experience'. For me I realised that when I speak in tongues I am expressing something very deep and personal that I don't have the words for... but I wouldn't necessarily make it a big mystical gift, I'd say it was me expressing myself... which in fact does make it a gift of God as in my book an expression of who I am is an expression of the life giving Spirit of God within me. When I've talked with friends in various places who are musicians they've compared this feeling to the part of themselves they express through playing an instument. I wonder sometimes if the same can go for a number of the spiritual gifts. For example, I am a naturally intuitive person, and when praying for friends in the charismatic tradition have often have 'words of knowledge'.

I'm not doing God or the miraculous down in all this, but to me it's all very similar to how I would opperate normally, and how others opperate without recognising it as a 'gift of the spirit'. It's just as Christians we've found a name for it. That's not to say it's not a gift from God or a miracle, coz Him living and breathing within us is a miracle, but maybe the greater miracle is how naturally this all happens?