Crazymatics pt 1 of 3

I start this mini-series by saying the following: I love Charismatics, and I remain unapologetically, though slightly ambiguously, ‘charismatic’, albeit with a small ‘c’.

Indeed, in the formative years of my faith, I was heavily influenced by the late and great John Wimber and the Vineyard Church, but also by Jack Deere.

Though I’ve been moving away from some of the charismatic way of doing things for some time now, I am, unlike many people I respect, by no means a cessationist, nor, exegetically speaking, could I justify that movement. Actually, my own extremely able supervisor has written a fantastic work on this very subject: The Holy Spirit and Spiritual Gifts, Then and Now - the best, to my mind, on the topic.

However, some things that swim around in charismatic culture and some of the 'teaching' nark me off big time.

And there is one webpage that I'll mention in the following posts that tends to rub me up completely the wrong way. Completely. It is based on an e-mail list that daily publishes ‘prophecies’ made by most of the big names in the charismatic world. Don’t get me wrong, I am quite sure that the webpage is run be extremely godly and well-meaning Christians, and sometimes they have some good things to say, but some of the stuff they sell is either silly or downright preposterous. In the following posts, I will give some of my favourite examples.