A Typology: Part Nine

The Charismatics/Pentecostals
From one of the oldest rivers in the Christian watershed to one of the brand new little rivulets that have sprung out of the ground in the last 100 years or so.  Here we have a type of Christian that has just barely been around long enough to have maybe a generation or two say: "This is the way we've always done it."
The title Charismatic, does not refer to the people or even their leaders having charisma any more than Pentecostal refers to something involving the actual day of Pentecost.  The two words have to doe with this groups relationship to spontaneous expressions of the Holy Spirit, like happened on one particular Pentecost right after Jesus died and was resurrected.  The root of Charisma is the Greek word Kairos which refers to a time, a certain place, a special moment.  The Day of Pentecost in the beginning of the Acts of the Apostles, was a Kairos moment, when the Holy Spirit came upon the otherwise lost and confused disciples and holy fire began to make things happen.  This sort of Kairos moment is at the core of many great revivals, and is certainly a part of authentic experience of Christian faith.  Somewhere in the fairly recent past, people found that you could get "in the Spirit" through certain forms of worship, maybe with a little bit of exhaustion and crowd pressure.  People could start speaking in tongues, like it says in the Bible, and people could get slain in the spirit and see visions and be healed and all sorts of really high spiritual kinds of things.
Historically the sort of ecstatic union with the spirit that some of the most extreme expressions of charismatic faith aim for has been the domain of mystics and people who were either exceptionally sensitive or who managed to cultivate an awareness of the Spirit.  I'm going to put some of my skepticism on hold for a minute and admit that I do, in fact, believe that some people have ecstatic experiences of God.  I do believe that there are moments of authentic epiphany and spiritual awakening, and I do believe that sometimes these happen at a tent revival on the old sawdust trail or at a Billy Graham Crusade.  I do believe that these things might happen on a regular basis in churches that really go wholesale in for the experience of the Holy Spirit, referred to by the "old time" Pentecostals as, "getting a dose of the Ghost."
I believe that the occasional trip to the Mountaintop can be a good thing for the soul, but you can't live there, and the nature of such intense experience is fickle at best, and too often a failure of the "old old feeling" discourages people in the walks of faith.
Maybe this is just the frozen chosen Presbyterian in me talking, but it seems that if you can only get in touch with God in the Kairos moments that are grand and (maybe literally) on fire with the Holy Spirit, then you're going to be disappointed and lost far too often.  Perhaps we need to listen to those (really) old mystics that tell us about times when the opposite of ecstatic union is the reality, when the "dark night of the soul" gets a hold of  you, when you have a hard time singing a bubbly praise songs or even saying the Lord's Prayer let alone listening to someone stumble their way through a sycophantic "Jesus we just..." prayer for twenty minutes.
Maybe there are times when someone gives the call: "God is good..." and you know you're supposed to say: "all the time," that you just can't bring yourself to say it or even think it, because God isn't being very present and kind to you at the moment.
There are those within the Charismatic movement that deal with this reality, but the practice of it... well it's just not hospitable to people who can't bring themselves to answer the call to the altar.
The movement has deeply, and perhaps irrevocably changed the landscape of American Christianity, and was also rather influential in the latest round of exported religion from the Western Churches to the Developing world.  In many ways Charismatic worship and faith is perfect for Africa and Latin America, it just sort of fits the exuberance of spirit one finds there, it also is an uplifting experience for people who may suffer greatly from poverty and oppression.
All in all this sort of Christianity is strong, and vital, but it's not the answer, it's not the "right" way to do church, any more than any of these other ways are THE "right" way to do church, it is an option, it is an influence, it can bring us some good things but it has some weaknesses.  It's biggest flaw is a sort of internal bias against those who can't seem to manifest a certain set of defined "spiritual gifts."  If you don't speak in tongues, or if you haven't "given your heart to Jesus," you need to get on with that because your eternal soul is in peril.  It's at that point that some of the more horrible theology starts to rear it's ugly head, and it's there that people get hurt, and God's grace goes begging.