Been thinking about the congruent power of the Spirit and the reformed theology how’s that going to work out in practice which is something I would love to see being implemented. There is a remnant of reformed pastors with the charismatic background are doing some of both, I have my own vision of what it should look like that I would love to see.

Make it spontaneous and authentic

Recently we visited a church and I saw their charismatic inclination or to have people coming up to be prayed for. I see there is positive and negative on that. The negative is that after a while, because this is being performed week in and week out, it almost feels like the congregation looks forward to be prayed for and making this whole exercise rather routinely repetitive. It sort of takes off the supernatural edge to it meaning it can become mundanely routine. I think this will cultivate a psyche for people to long to be touched by the Lord which I fully understand, from my charismatic church background, however I really do not see that scenario in the Bible, in the case of the Lord Jesus or Paul or Peter. I think if people long to be touched by the Lord and be blessed by God’s healing and touch because of a great need, they should act like the blind, the crippled crying for Jesus, or the woman with the bleeding problem pushing in among men to reach Jesus to be healed. That makes it so authentically real and powerful.

God responds to hungry hearts, longing hearts

God is not interested in amnesia kind of desire or lukewarm Christianity. What I’m saying is that from the scripture I see the initiative of the people to come to Christ to be healed came to Christ, and not the other way round. I recognize that we are not in the realm of Christ or anywhere remotely near him, but I would say that a better way to execute and not perform healing, is to have a general prayer from the pulpit for all people who have needs of healing of sicknesses perhaps by them putting their hands on on the body that need healing. Or to save time we can also ask that anyone who needs healing to put your hands up, which is in line with the scripture because the crippled or the blind always come to Christ to make themselves known. I think there’s a far better way of executing the healing power of Christ to the congregation without dragging the meeting or spending too much time on everyone else.

Depth of Preaching

The second really important aspect I observed is the lack of depth in preaching. It is not something to criticize or any sort but this is really falling far short of the reformed preaching of exposition of the scripture the reformed theology is doing so well. That’s why it’s my burden to exhort my charismatic church pastors’ leaders, pastors to consider to look into learning theology in a far deeper way or else we will end up speaking in rather superficial way in a very fast to application format of preaching. And also I see that there is a lack of argument for a case in the sermon because there is none. It is pretty much more towards experiential and application types straight away without much exegesis at all. And I will say using “the Lord told me” in certain direction of preaching is rather questionable because this can form a shortcut in doing proper research and study of exegetical requirements of the word of God. I was really awakened to the contrast in the depth of preaching in the argument in preaching like Martin Lloyd Jones said “preaching is logic on fire” and that’s exactly what I want to do, and would love to see in reformed pulpit or charismatic pulpit.

Learn from our tradition & history

My last point would be just to emphasize the depth and the theological understanding insight from the reformed world like Calvin, Augustine, bathing, Edward is really something that we should take hold of and run with. For example I did a 30 minutes teaching on Christology taken mostly from Bavinck and I’ve found that astonishingly rich theology that I was not aware of even after gotten my own MDiv. But the beautiful thing is after you got your MDiv, you are kind of being trained to dissect and to analyze any theology books you read and make your own decision whether it is in line with the scripture, in context. I would say the non reformed world has missed a lot in this, the intellectual and pastoral great minds of our history.