Growing up as a third-generation Pentecostal in the Church of God of Prophecy, I remember hearing my parents and other older members of our church tell amazing stories. They related miracles, signs, and wonders as normative. My mother often told me of winter services in small country churches in the south, and how she witnessed people under the anointing of the Holy Ghost, open the pot-bellied stove, reach in and extract glowing hot coals in their bare hands and dance around unharmed.
Our COGOP assemblies were marked by the miraculous. People brought in on stretchers for prayer walked out healed. Canes and crutches were abandoned by those experiencing miraculous, instantaneous physical healing. I heard story after story of the assembly tabernacle filled inside with what was described as a blue haze that hovered over the congregation. I am told that people called the local fire department to report that the building was ablaze with huge flames when no natural fire existed. These things were our spiritual heritage — MY spiritual heritage — and they defined us as a people who believed that the supernatural was natural, healing was available, and the natural laws of physics were often suspended by an omnipotent God.
Somewhere along with the passing of years, we lost something. We still considered ourselves Pentecostal, because we accepted/practiced speaking in tongues, but miraculous healings became “I received a touch from the Lord, and I feel a little better.” As we got more sophisticated we became more domesticated, abandoning much of the fervor and flavor of the prior generations of Pentecostals. I personally became so jaded, and so skeptical, that I jokingly referred to myself as a SEMICOSTAL… I believed in the power of Pentecost, but saw so much fakery and foolishness done in the name of Pentecost that I slowly distanced myself from the label.
I/we saw other churches growing rapidly and thriving, and in our envy, we adopted the latest church growth strategies and adapted our services away from our roots. I am writing this as a confession, for I am guilty. I looked at reports from places where God was moving in ways I did not fully understand and derided them as fringe fanatics… maybe even a bit heretical in their ways. I learned how to do church so well it didn’t matter too much whether the Holy Spirit showed up at all.
The worship team could open with their formulaic peppy, up-tempo, happy-clappy wake-up-the-congregation song, and transition by song three to a slow, worshipful hand-raiser. We had it down to a formula. You could almost time any given service with a stopwatch because we had the pattern down and felt fine with it. Except we didn’t feel fine with it.
As a local congregation, we knew there was more. There HAD to more than just this carefully planned, well-executed, formulaic religious gathering. We had programmed the Holy Spirit completely out of our midst. Our services were neat, tidy, well-planned, controlled and totally unsatisfying. Sick people arrived sick and left still sick. People with really messed up lives came in burdened down and left a little bit encouraged and loved, but unchanged.
Then the Holy Spirit wrecked us.
I can’t put an exact date on it, because it happened over a period of months, but I identify Sunday, January 20, 2019 as a milestone moment. I wrote in my journal that day, “Reunion was FIRE today. Big crowd (80?). One hour and 15 minutes of worship… bunch of new people.” Something shifted in the atmosphere, in the heavenly, that day and we have never looked back again.
Since that date we have added 32 official (covenant) members, and in two weeks will add 15-20+ more. New faces arrive weekly. We are not doing any advertising, marketing, or promotions. I think the Leonard Ravenhill quote is applicable: “You never have to advertise a fire. Everyone comes running when there’s a fire. Likewise, if your church is on fire, you will not have to advertise it. The community will already know it.” We are seeing the truth of that every Sunday. At what cost, some may ask?
• Our control
We have abandoned control and surrendered control to the Holy Spirit. He doesn’t do things our way; he can be noisy, messy, spontaneous, surprising, and that makes leaders nervous. We pastors are trained and mentored to plan, schedule, organize, and keep the ship on a steady course. When we relinquish control to the Holy Spirit he controls the speed, direction, and destination in ways that can be scary and uncertain. We had to decide: do we trust him or don’t we? (You have to decide that, too.)
• Our schedule
God will not be confined to our neat, tidy, well-organized box. When you invite him in you have to throw out your traditions and your expectations. He will move as he chooses, upon whom he chooses, when he chooses. Our carefully crafted 75-minute services now run closer to three hours in length and include a lot more personal ministry time than we had become accustomed to. We unleashed the worship team into more spontaneous, Spirit-driven forms of worship and that freedom has released the congregation to greater freedom. Yes, we do in fact have people in the aisles dancing and waving flags, and even breakdancing before the Lord. It’s not neat, tidy, and “reverent” but it’s wonderful.
• Our connections
We lost people before we gained people. Not everyone is comfortable with the kind of loose, uncontrolled atmosphere we now enjoy. The church is a little too chaotic for them… the worship is too long and spontaneous… we attract some people they consider wacky and extreme… we are not following any of the proven church-growth strategies promoted by the experts… all those new people disrupt the comfortable, well-established social network in the church… the list is long. For every person we lost to another church we have gained 10+. Faith finds friends, and when hungry people discover a place of freedom, they tell their friends, who tell their friends, who… you get the idea.
It was almost as if the people who left were pressing the brakes, while we were pressing the gas pedal, and once the brake was released, we sped forward with pent up inertia. An old COGOP preacher once said, “That church is about three funerals away from a revival!” His point was that in many congregations there are just a few people keeping the brakes on preventing the move of God. You must be willing to give up the familiar to move into uncharted waters.
• Our dignity
Decades ago Pentecostal people were branded as “Holy rollers” because… well, for obvious reasons. We no longer identified with that characterization because we found all that falling down, manifesting, and screaming of our heritage beneath our dignity. We also lost generations of our best and brightest young people who longed for real, passionate, unrestrained encounters with the presence of the Lord, and not the watered-down, tamed, oh so dignified versions of God we gave them. Reunion Hawaii Church is filled with 18-35-year-olds and their favorite services are when we wash one another’s feet. (When I was growing up they hid feet-washing on an off-night service because only the faithful few reluctantly participated.) They love the raw, relational expression of love and humility in the act of washing someone else’s feet. They walk around asking to wash the feet of our elders, honored to honor them.
• Our judgment
Another personal confession. I was, in the past, almost Pharisaical in my judgment of groups and individuals who were experiencing God in ways outside my comfort zone. Talk of “glory clouds” and transferring anointing scared me because it was different — except it really wasn’t; I had simply forgotten my heritage of hot coals, blue mists, and crazy, inexplicable miracles. The Lord had to spank me a little, sending me to some scriptural passages that convicted my heart.
Who are you to judge someone else’s servant? To their own master, servants stand or fall. And they will stand, for the Lord is able to make them stand. — Romans 14:4
“Teacher,” said John, “we saw someone driving out demons in your name and we told him to stop, because he was not one of us.”
“Do not stop him,” Jesus said. “For no one who does a miracle in my name can in the next moment say anything bad about me, for whoever is not against us is for us. Truly I tell you, anyone who gives you a cup of water in my name because you belong to the Messiah will certainly not lose their reward. — Mark 9:38-41
You might get stretched out of your comfort zone. You will not necessarily agree 100% with everything others believe and teach, but if you see the fingerprints of God upon them and their results, suspend your prejudices and stop “othering” them, as Jesus said, whoever is not against us is for us. My friend and Reunion member Sam Cabra often says, “God will offend our minds to reveal our hearts.”
• Our alliances
Back in what I recall as the bad-old-days COGOP held to an exclusivist ecclesiology erroneously believing that our organization exclusively constituted “the CHURCH” — very close to Roman Catholic doctrine and that mistaken concept led to an almost spiritually incestuous distancing from other parts of the Body of Christ. It was us vs them. We actually had a small imprint inside books promoted by our organization: ACD — Approved by the Committee on Doctrine. That kind of lockstep, inwardly focused, separatist mindset has sadly outlived our repudiation of exclusivist teaching. We have missed so much of the richness, diversity, and brotherhood that exists in the big, broad, worldwide church by isolating ourselves in suspicion and fear of “the other.”
I can directly attribute much of the revival we are experiencing at Reunion to Kingdom Living Oahu, a ministry school founded and led by the aforementioned Sam Cabra. http://www.kingdomlivingoahu.com/
Not only have a large percentage of our church members gone through Kingdom Living, but many from the school have come to Reunion. Kingdom Living is a once-per-week, 4-month ministry school focused on training and equipping revivalists to radically impact the world for Jesus Christ. “Our dream is to see individuals realize their God-given identities and step into their callings through new levels of intimacy with God. Kingdom Living is a revival hub designed to empower individuals to bring Heaven to Earth on a daily basis by releasing the Kingdom of God in their unique spheres of influence.” Curriculum topics during Kingdom Living include the Gospel of the Kingdom, the New Covenant, Our Identity in Christ, the Holy Spirit, Worship, Healing, Prophecy, Transformed Mindsets, Revival, and so much more.
The bottom line
This is not intended to be a 3-easy-steps how-to plan; it is not even a testimony about anything we have done. I am bragging on my God, telling “…all people about the wonderful things he has done.” (Psalm 96:3) I don’t think my church is all that unique, really, or at least it shouldn’t be. We just got hungry. Desperately hungry for more than religion, more than planned, pre-programmed, carefully controlled, safe, neat and tidy gatherings. We got hungry for the kind of move of God our heritage once celebrated… messy, supernatural, beyond our control and comprehension.
I pray that you, too, will get hungry, and that your hunger will be joined by others who are hungry, so you will become so desperate that you will be willing to lay aside control, schedule, connections, dignity, and judgment, and make the alliances God places in your path to lead you into new freedom.