Stop pushing people over - 12 May 2011 |
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I’ve been having a sporadic conversation with a Christian friend-of-a-friend (let’s call him Wesley) about falling over in church. Wesley believes that we should expect God’s Spirit regularly to make people fall over in a kind of semi-trance during worship. I don’t, because I can’t see that stuff in the Bible.
So I asked Wesley to show me where in the Bible he gets his ideas from, which he kindly did. Here are the texts he mentioned: Genesis 17:3; Genesis 17:17; Leviticus 9:24; Numbers 16:45; Matthew 26:39; Mark 3:11; Mark 9:20; Luke 17:16; Acts 9:4; Revelation 1:17. At first glance this looks quite compelling. After all, here’s you’ve got lots of guys falling over in all sorts of different situations. But a closer inspection reveals two major flaws in what Wes is saying.
1. Some of these texts are about falling down deliberately, not falling involuntarily or in a trance. Leviticus 9:24; Numbers 16:45; Matthew 26:39; Mark 3:11 and Luke 17:16 seem most likely to fall (no pun intended) into this category. Nothing to do with spiritual swooning; just deliberate bowing or prostration. As it happens, I think this is a good idea in worship, and it’s one reason why at Emmanuel we kneel to confess our sins. But deliberate prostration and involuntary swooning ain’t the same thing.
2. These biblical texts indicate what God could do, but not what we should always expect him to do. The key difference between Wes and me is not what we believe God could do. As I’ve mentioned in this conversation before, I agree that God could cause people to fall over in a trance any time he wanted to. The key question here is not what God could do, but what we should expect him to do when we gather to worship him. These texts say nothing at all about the normal practice of Christian worship.
To illustrate: if we’re talking simply about what God could do, then we should also expect a whole bunch of other things in our worship besides falling over: things like spontaneously burning bushes, talking donkeys, and the odd couple at the back of church falling down dead, just to take a few random examples from the Bible. But to my knowledge there aren’t many churches who make a big deal about talking livestock. The fact that God could cause someone to fall over in a trance doesn’t mean that this is what we should expect him to do.
My real concern here is a pastoral one. There are some over-zealous, misguided church leaders out there who put pressure on people to fall over in a trance on the mistaken assumption that this should be a regular feature of Christian worship. A combination of emotional preaching, emotional praying and emotional music hypes up the atmosphere to the point where people feel under pressure to fall (again, no pun intended) in line. After an hour or so of swaying and singing in a warm room on a Saturday night, it just becomes hard to remain upright.
This kind of emotional pressure isn’t just unbiblical; it’s damaging. Those Christians who go with the flow end up with a set of false expectations about how God deals with his people. Others – more sensible and level-headed, perhaps – just walk away concluding that such nonsense isn’t their thing. And frankly I don’t blame them.The tragedy is that they might just walk away from Christ altogether.
In summary, I’ve got nothing against deliberate prostration, falling down before God, kneeling and bowing. I’ve got no quarrel with the fact that God could cause people to fall down whenever he wants. I just want pushy church leaders to quit telling people that they have to.
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Posted by Steve Jeffery · Topics: Minister's Blog