The following piece was posted by Kenneth Tanner on his Facebook page a few days ago. I am reposting it here, with his permission. Having had some experience in the Charismatic Movement some decades ago (though not born into it as was Mr. Tanner), reading the following Facebook post really resonated with some of what I saw and experienced.
“I was born into a family of multi-generational Southern Pentecostals and while it got wild now and then its embodied wisdom and beauty—present especially in its music, hospitality, elderly saints, and prayer—impresses itself on my heart more and more even decades down the road.
At 12, I was drug from the joy, fervency, and occasional theatrics of my childhood religion—against my will, I finally see—into something confused, without roots, and too often abusive.
Folks with ballast in Catholicism or Methodism or almost any historic tradition of faith might have found the charismatic movement renewing, but for many (so many I sit with and too many who wrote to me in pain from harm) it was a hot mess.
I was never a Charismatic, even though my parents were and wanted us to be. In its independent and prophetic mode, the charismatic movement was and is a perfect storm of unsound teachings, abusive practices, and emotional roadshow gone amok. It’s lack of wisdom repelled me from the get go.
It’s hard to be self-aware of this resistance as a child but it was there, I now see, all the way along.
When I discovered the first Christians, I think my greatest relief was how unspectacular they are, how married they are to the ground, how much wisdom they found in the ordinary. Their expectation was suffering, not success. This flows from their center in the extreme humility of Jesus Christ.
Thankfully, my parents joined me when I embraced the wisdom and practices of the first Christians, and while they remained prophetic-oriented charismatics in some ways, ways they didn’t live long enough to reject, I resisted a charismatic compass from day one and I still do.
The harms are too many to mention—the ones I experienced or the ones I witnessed—the victims too numerous. I don’t need to rehearse those here. And where the first Christians (starting with Paul) saw the work of the Spirit in the church, and carefully led the churches in those edifying works, which I do embrace, I also ***rejoice*** in spiritual gifts.
But I do think we should be surprised by them when they’re authentic.
They should always overturn our expectations. Too often today prophecy—personal or corporate—is all-too-often predictable. It rings off-script in terms of the gospel.
More than anything it is the use of supposed spiritual gifts as a means of control, to underwrite the outcomes that leaders want to see, or more often the exercise of spiritual authority by people whose disposition and bearing does not match the humility of Jesus, causes untold pain.
A leader should feel like a janitor or a waiter or a doorman and has to be ever-vigilant concerning their desires and hold their ego in check.
As a pastor in the Charismatic Episcopal Church there is, I realize, an irony in all of this because I’m a very bad charismatic, at least in the myriad senses of that word in actual recent history that are demonstrably false and unwise.
I just need to be clear now where I do not stand.”
Kenneth Tanner