A Call to Recover the Church’s Expectation of Signs, Wonders, and the Full Power of the Holy Spirit

by Al Ngu, MDiv

There is a question that sits uncomfortably at the intersection of theology, experience, and church culture — one that many congregations would rather not ask aloud: Are the signs and wonders of the New Testament still available to us today? The discomfort is telling. For a people who confess the living God, the very unease with this question reveals how thoroughly the assumptions of a rationalistic age have colonized the imagination of the modern Church.

Let me begin with what should be settled. Any attempt to strip the miraculous from the person of Jesus Christ is not a serious theological proposal — it is a kind of literary vandalism. The four Gospels — Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John — are so saturated with signs and wonders that any effort to extract them would leave nothing recognizable in their wake. History has already given us a cautionary example: the so-called ‘Jefferson Bible,’ and more recently certain rationalist projects that have attempted to ‘humanize’ Jesus by excising his miracles and reassembling a sanitized, manageable figure. These efforts are not just theologically wrong. They are an exercise in intellectual embarrassment that does profound harm to the body of Christ. The evangelical world, by and large, agrees on this. The miraculous belongs to the person of Jesus the way light belongs to the sun — it is not incidental, it is constitutive.

But here is where honest conversation becomes harder. The question that genuinely divides us is not whether Jesus performed miracles. It is whether the miraculous power of God continues to operate in and through the Church today — and if so, to what degree, in what forms, and with what expectation. It is on this question that I want to press the conversation forward, not with polemics, but with pastoral urgency and biblical fidelity.

“The last words Jesus spoke before his ascension were not a historical footnote. They were a living commission — and they were addressed to us.”

The Promise That Changes Everything

Acts 1:8 (ESV)

“But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”

These are the last recorded words of Jesus before his ascension into heaven. Consider the weight of that. When a person speaks for the final time before departing, those words carry a gravity that ordinary speech does not. Jesus had forty days after the resurrection to say whatever he wished. He chose, as his parting commission, to speak of power — the power of the Holy Spirit — and of witness that would extend to the ends of the earth.

If Acts 1:8 is not applicable to the Church today, it is difficult to understand why Jesus would have spoken it at all. Either his promise was for a specific historical moment now closed to us — a position that requires significant hermeneutical argument — or it is a living word addressed to every generation of the Church until he returns. I am firmly persuaded it is the latter. The Great Commission has not expired. Neither has the promise of power that undergirds it.

The question, then, is not whether this power is available. Acts 1:8 asserts that it is. The more difficult question is this: Why does so much of the Church in the modern West seem to operate as though it has never received this promise — or worse, as though it has quietly decided the promise no longer applies?

Pentecost and the Grammar of the Miraculous

Acts 2:1–4 (ESV)

When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place. And suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. And divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.

Acts 2 arrives almost immediately on the heels of Christ’s ascension, and what it describes is not subtle. Tongues of fire. A sound like a mighty rushing wind. A company of believers suddenly speaking languages they had never learned. If the Church is honest with herself, she must acknowledge that this is extraordinary — not metaphorically extraordinary, but literally, categorically beyond the ordinary course of nature. This is a sign and a wonder by any definition of those terms.

The sign of tongues at Pentecost is particularly significant, and particularly contested. On the day the Church was born, the first gift given was the gift of tongues. Not administrative skill. Not theological acuity. Not eloquence. The first gift was a supernatural language — an utterance that bypassed the speaker’s natural comprehension and came directly from the Spirit of God. In Acts 2, these tongues were actual human languages, understood by the gathered diaspora crowd from across the known world, though the speakers themselves had never studied them. That is a miracle by any account.

I will speak plainly from my own experience here. When I was twenty-one years old, studying at university in England, I was filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in tongues. I had very little theological framework for what was happening — I had not yet studied the systematic theology I have since spent years in. What I had was a raw, undeniable encounter with the living God, expressed in a language that was not my own, that I could not manufacture, and that left me permanently changed. I am not building an entire doctrine on personal experience. But I am saying that personal experience, when it aligns with the testimony of Scripture and the practice of the early Church, cannot simply be set aside as emotionalism or cultural conditioning.

The tragedy is that the gift of tongues has become one of the most divisive issues in the body of Christ, when it was given as one of the most unifying signs of the Spirit’s arrival. Many in the Reformed tradition have moved to marginalize or dismiss this gift entirely. When a church begins to deny or diminish the gift of tongues, it tends — almost inevitably — to begin diminishing the broader expectation of supernatural gifts across the board. The slide is logical: if the most visible, verifiable gift of the Spirit at Pentecost is explained away or declared obsolete, the same hermeneutical logic will eventually be applied to prophecy, healing, and the rest.

I do not want to be unfair to those who hold cessationist convictions — they have thought carefully about their position, and they are brothers and sisters in Christ. But I do want to press them on one point: the pattern of Acts 2 is not restricted to the Twelve. The tongues of fire rested on each one who was present. The Spirit was poured out on all of them. This was not an apostolic privilege. It was the normative experience of the gathered community of Jesus.

“When a church begins to diminish the gift of tongues, it tends — almost inevitably — to diminish the broader expectation of the supernatural altogether.”

The Prophetic Promise of the Last Days

Acts 2:17 (ESV)

“And in the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.”

Peter, addressing the bewildered crowd at Pentecost, quotes the prophet Joel. His interpretive move is decisive: what you are seeing right now, he says, is the fulfillment of what God promised for the last days. The outpouring of the Spirit — prophesied, awaited, now arriving — is not a temporary anomaly. It is the characteristic mark of the age between Christ’s ascension and his return. We are in the last days. Which means we are in the age of the Spirit’s outpouring.

The language of ‘pouring out’ is emphatic and generous. It is not a trickle. It is not a carefully rationed dispensation to a select few. God says he will pour out his Spirit on all flesh — sons and daughters, young and old, across lines of gender and generation. And what follows from this outpouring? Prophecy. Visions. Dreams.

This is precisely where many Reformed and cessationist churches grow quiet. The outpouring of the Spirit is, in some theological frameworks, reinterpreted as referring solely to the writing of the New Testament, or to the establishment of the apostolic office, now closed. But this interpretation strains against the plain reading of the text. Peter does not say the Spirit was poured out on the apostles. He says it was poured out on all who were present — and extends the promise further still to all whom the Lord our God will call (Acts 2:39).

The gift of prophecy, in particular, deserves recovery in the contemporary church. The Apostle Paul devotes an entire chapter — 1 Corinthians 14 — to its proper practice. He does not do so to describe a historical phenomenon safely in the past. He writes to a living congregation, offering pastoral instruction on how to administer this gift for the upbuilding, encouragement, and consolation of the body. He commands them — not suggests, commands — to eagerly desire the spiritual gifts, especially prophecy (1 Cor. 14:1).

1 Corinthians 14:1–3 (ESV)

Pursue love, and earnestly desire the spiritual gifts, especially that you may prophesy. For one who speaks in a tongue speaks not to men but to God; for no one understands him, but he utters mysteries in the Spirit. On the other hand, the one who prophesies speaks to people for their upbuilding and encouragement and consolation.

Notice the framework Paul establishes. Love comes first — always. The gifts are never ends in themselves. They are servants of love. A congregation that pursues the gifts without love produces noise, confusion, and harm. But a congregation that loves without pursuing the gifts is not following Paul’s command. The two are not alternatives. They are partners.

How can a congregation eagerly desire a gift they have never been taught? How can they pursue something their pastors never model, never preach, never make space for? The silence of so many pulpits on the gift of prophecy is not theological neutrality. It is a form of deprivation. The sheep cannot receive what the shepherd never offers.

Let me speak from my own history again. There have been moments in my life when someone prayed over me and spoke something they could not have known — something that had been buried in the quiet of my heart for a long time. A word about my calling. A word about my children. A directional word that came to pass. I received a word once, spoken over me before a congregation of two hundred people: ‘Your heart will long for a land far away from this shore.’ That person said nothing more specific than that. But we was in Malaysia at the time, and the word eventually led us across twenty-one hours of ocean to America. That is the gift of prophecy operating in the framework of love — not for spectacle, not for control, but for the upbuilding of a servant of God who needed to hear his Father’s voice.

I am also keenly aware of the excesses. The prophetic culture of some Pentecostal and charismatic circles has produced manipulation, false predictions, and wounded people who built their lives on words that never came true. This is real, and it must be addressed — not by eliminating the gift, but by returning to the apostolic framework Paul provides: prophecy that edifies, encourages, and consoles; prophecy that is tested, weighed, and submitted to the community; prophecy that operates in the atmosphere of love.

Visions, Dreams, and the Suppressed Imagination

Acts 2:17 also promises that young men will see visions and old men will dream dreams. The evangelical world has largely spiritualized these categories into metaphor, or dismissed them as the province of more excitable Christians. But the New Testament treats visions and dreams with remarkable seriousness. It was in a vision that Ananias was sent to the blinded Saul of Tarsus. It was through a dream that Joseph was warned to flee to Egypt. It was in a trance that Peter received the vision of the clean and unclean animals, which dismantled his assumptions about Gentile inclusion.

I find that when I lean into worship, when I create space for quiet and attentiveness to God, things come into my mind’s eye that feel less like my own imagination and more like something being given to me. I have largely stopped sharing these things in my current context — the culture of the denominational congregation where we presently worship does not make space for it, and I do not want to cause disruption or confusion. But I am aware of a cost in that silence. Something is being withheld from the body that it was meant to receive.

This is the practical effect of a church culture that does not theologically sanction the experiential gifts: people who carry these gifts learn to suppress them, to privatize them, to wonder in silence whether what they are experiencing is real or simply self-generated. The doctrine of the church becomes a ceiling on the experience of the Spirit, rather than a framework that helps the Spirit’s gifts operate with wisdom and order.

Laying Hands on the Sick — A Command, Not a Suggestion

Mark 16:15–18 (ESV)

“Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. And these signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up serpents with their hands; and if they drink any deadly poison, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover.”

This passage is part of Jesus’ commissioning of his disciples into the world. It is embedded in the Great Commission itself — the same text that evangelicals rightly treat as the Church’s marching orders for all generations. And Jesus says, without qualification, that signs will accompany those who believe. The casting out of demons. Speaking in new tongues. Healing the sick.

Most non-charismatic evangelical churches enthusiastically embrace the Great Commission. They send missionaries. They plant churches. They translate Scriptures. But the signs that Jesus says will accompany those who believe? Those are quietly set aside — explained as belonging to the apostolic age, or reinterpreted symbolically, or simply not discussed.

The healing of the sick is perhaps the most practically significant of these signs, because sickness is universal. Every congregation contains people who are suffering — cancer, depression, chronic pain, grief, addiction, anxiety, the slow attrition of bodies that are aging toward death. Jesus says: lay your hands on the sick, and they will recover. The Church should be doing this. Many do — there are healing prayer teams in churches across the denominational spectrum. But the frequency of visible healing is, in much of the Western church, remarkably low.

Someone once described this contrast to me with painful clarity. A healing team that had seen extraordinary results in Africa returned to New York City and found the atmosphere profoundly different. Healings that had seemed almost natural in one context became rare in another. The explanation Jesus himself offers, again and again, is faith: ‘Where is your faith?’ And faith, as Paul reminds us, comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ (Romans 10:17). What the pulpit preaches shapes what the congregation believes is possible. If the pulpit never speaks of healing, never models expectant prayer, never creates liturgical or pastoral space for the laying on of hands, the congregation will not carry a living expectation of the miraculous. This is not a failure of faith in the abstract. It is a failure of formation.

There is also a word to be said about spiritual warfare. Jesus says that those who believe will cast out demons. I recognize that this makes many Christians — especially those formed in rationalistic, cessationist, or mainline traditions — deeply uncomfortable. But consider the demographics of a congregation today: How many are struggling with suicidal ideation? How many wrestle with addictions that seem to have a will of their own, that resist every rational intervention? How many carry patterns of destruction that they themselves cannot explain? The New Testament would not necessarily pronounce a demonic verdict on every one of these struggles. But it would not dismiss the possibility either. Spiritual warfare is real. The deliverance ministry of Jesus was not incidental to his mission — it was central to his announcement of the Kingdom of God.

“What the pulpit preaches shapes what the congregation believes is possible. The doctrine of the church can become a ceiling on the experience of the Spirit.”

The Cultural Rationalism We Have Inherited

None of what I have described above happens in a vacuum. The modern Western church is formed by a broader cultural rationalism that has been accumulating for centuries — from the Enlightenment’s confidence in human reason, through the rise of scientific materialism, to the pervasive assumption of our present moment that what cannot be verified empirically is not real, or at least not reliable. This cultural atmosphere shapes what we consider plausible, even before we open our Bibles.

When the majority of our waking hours are spent in a world that is resolutely materialist — where our senses are attuned to the tangible, the measurable, the reproducible — it becomes genuinely difficult to maintain an expectation of the miraculous. This is not a failure of sincerity. It is the predictable result of formation in a culture that treats the supernatural as the province of the credulous. The apparent diminishing of signs and wonders in the Western church is not primarily a theological conclusion. It is a perceptual one, shaped by the assumptions of our age.

But the assumptions of our age are not the last word. The Church in the Global South — in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America — is exploding with accounts of healing, deliverance, prophetic words, and miraculous provision. These reports are not the product of theological naivety. Many of the fastest-growing, most theologically serious movements in Christianity today operate with a completely natural expectation of the miraculous. They read Acts 2 and see a description of normal Christianity. The Western church’s skepticism is the anomaly, not the norm.

A Call to Theological and Practical Renewal

What I am calling for is not a collapse into undisciplined enthusiasm. Paul’s instructions in 1 Corinthians 14 stand: let all things be done decently and in order (v. 40). The gifts of the Spirit are given to the community, exercised within the community, and tested by the community. Prophecy is weighed. Tongues are interpreted. The spirit of the prophet is subject to the prophet (v. 32). These are not restrictions designed to minimize the Spirit’s work. They are guardrails designed to protect it — to ensure that the supernatural gifts build up rather than destabilize.

But order without expectation is a form of unbelief. A church that has arranged its liturgy, its polity, and its theology to make no room for the miraculous has not achieved theological maturity. It has achieved a sophisticated form of practical cessationism — the functional belief that the extraordinary promises of God no longer apply, whatever doctrinal position it formally holds.

Renewal begins in the pulpit. Pastors must preach the full counsel of God — including Acts 1:8, Acts 2, 1 Corinthians 12 and 14, Mark 16, and every other text that speaks to the present reality of the Spirit’s power. They must preach these texts with the same expectant faith they would bring to texts about salvation or sanctification. They must create structures in congregational life — prayer teams, prophetic communities, healing services — that give these gifts space to operate with wisdom and accountability.

Renewal also requires humility. Those in cessationist traditions must be willing to ask honestly whether their theological framework was shaped more by the Enlightenment than by exegesis. Those in charismatic traditions must be willing to ask honestly whether their practice of the gifts has been ordered by love and truth, or by a culture of spectacle and individualism. Both streams have something to receive from the other. The goal is not to win a theological debate. The goal is to be the church that Jesus promised — filled with the Spirit, moving in power, witnessing to his resurrection to the ends of the earth.

The promise of Acts 1:8 has not expired. The last days Joel prophesied have not ended. The commission of Mark 16 has not been revoked. The gifts Paul described in 1 Corinthians 12 and 14 have not been quietly withdrawn. What has happened, in too many quarters of the Western church, is that we have allowed the plausibility structures of our culture to override the plain testimony of Scripture and the witness of two thousand years of Church history.

Signs and wonders should never be diminished. They should be pursued — soberly, lovingly, scripturally, expectantly. Not because we are chasing experiences. But because we are following a living Lord who is the same yesterday, today, and forever — and who promised that those who believe in him would do the works he did, and greater works than these (John 14:12). The Church owes the world nothing less than the full gospel: not a rationalized gospel with its power quietly excised, but the gospel of the Kingdom — announced in word, demonstrated in power, and driven by the love of the Spirit poured out on all flesh.

— — —

Pastor Al Ngu (MDiv) is a church planter in New York City and the founder of Hearts Burn NYC,

An outdoor faith community gathering in Union Square Park.

Do Not Diminish the Fire

A Call to Recover the Church’s Expectation of Signs, Wonders, and the Full Power of the Holy Spirit

by Al Ngu, MDiv

There is a question that sits uncomfortably at the intersection of theology, experience, and church culture — one that many congregations would rather not ask aloud: Are the signs and wonders of the New Testament still available to us today? The discomfort is telling. For a people who confess the living God, the very unease with this question reveals how thoroughly the assumptions of a rationalistic age have colonized the imagination of the modern Church.

Let me begin with what should be settled. Any attempt to strip the miraculous from the person of Jesus Christ is not a serious theological proposal — it is a kind of literary vandalism. The four Gospels — Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John — are so saturated with signs and wonders that any effort to extract them would leave nothing recognizable in their wake. History has already given us a cautionary example: the so-called ‘Jefferson Bible,’ and more recently certain rationalist projects that have attempted to ‘humanize’ Jesus by excising his miracles and reassembling a sanitized, manageable figure. These efforts are not just theologically wrong. They are an exercise in intellectual embarrassment that does profound harm to the body of Christ. The evangelical world, by and large, agrees on this. The miraculous belongs to the person of Jesus the way light belongs to the sun — it is not incidental, it is constitutive.

But here is where honest conversation becomes harder. The question that genuinely divides us is not whether Jesus performed miracles. It is whether the miraculous power of God continues to operate in and through the Church today — and if so, to what degree, in what forms, and with what expectation. It is on this question that I want to press the conversation forward, not with polemics, but with pastoral urgency and biblical fidelity.

“The last words Jesus spoke before his ascension were not a historical footnote. They were a living commission — and they were addressed to us.”

The Promise That Changes Everything

Acts 1:8 (ESV)

“But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”

These are the last recorded words of Jesus before his ascension into heaven. Consider the weight of that. When a person speaks for the final time before departing, those words carry a gravity that ordinary speech does not. Jesus had forty days after the resurrection to say whatever he wished. He chose, as his parting commission, to speak of power — the power of the Holy Spirit — and of witness that would extend to the ends of the earth.

If Acts 1:8 is not applicable to the Church today, it is difficult to understand why Jesus would have spoken it at all. Either his promise was for a specific historical moment now closed to us — a position that requires significant hermeneutical argument — or it is a living word addressed to every generation of the Church until he returns. I am firmly persuaded it is the latter. The Great Commission has not expired. Neither has the promise of power that undergirds it.

The question, then, is not whether this power is available. Acts 1:8 asserts that it is. The more difficult question is this: Why does so much of the Church in the modern West seem to operate as though it has never received this promise — or worse, as though it has quietly decided the promise no longer applies?

Pentecost and the Grammar of the Miraculous

Acts 2:1–4 (ESV)

When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place. And suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. And divided tongues as of fire appeared to them and rested on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.

Acts 2 arrives almost immediately on the heels of Christ’s ascension, and what it describes is not subtle. Tongues of fire. A sound like a mighty rushing wind. A company of believers suddenly speaking languages they had never learned. If the Church is honest with herself, she must acknowledge that this is extraordinary — not metaphorically extraordinary, but literally, categorically beyond the ordinary course of nature. This is a sign and a wonder by any definition of those terms.

The sign of tongues at Pentecost is particularly significant, and particularly contested. On the day the Church was born, the first gift given was the gift of tongues. Not administrative skill. Not theological acuity. Not eloquence. The first gift was a supernatural language — an utterance that bypassed the speaker’s natural comprehension and came directly from the Spirit of God. In Acts 2, these tongues were actual human languages, understood by the gathered diaspora crowd from across the known world, though the speakers themselves had never studied them. That is a miracle by any account.

I will speak plainly from my own experience here. When I was twenty-one years old, studying at university in England, I was filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in tongues. I had very little theological framework for what was happening — I had not yet studied the systematic theology I have since spent years in. What I had was a raw, undeniable encounter with the living God, expressed in a language that was not my own, that I could not manufacture, and that left me permanently changed. I am not building an entire doctrine on personal experience. But I am saying that personal experience, when it aligns with the testimony of Scripture and the practice of the early Church, cannot simply be set aside as emotionalism or cultural conditioning.

The tragedy is that the gift of tongues has become one of the most divisive issues in the body of Christ, when it was given as one of the most unifying signs of the Spirit’s arrival. Many in the Reformed tradition have moved to marginalize or dismiss this gift entirely. When a church begins to deny or diminish the gift of tongues, it tends — almost inevitably — to begin diminishing the broader expectation of supernatural gifts across the board. The slide is logical: if the most visible, verifiable gift of the Spirit at Pentecost is explained away or declared obsolete, the same hermeneutical logic will eventually be applied to prophecy, healing, and the rest.

I do not want to be unfair to those who hold cessationist convictions — they have thought carefully about their position, and they are brothers and sisters in Christ. But I do want to press them on one point: the pattern of Acts 2 is not restricted to the Twelve. The tongues of fire rested on each one who was present. The Spirit was poured out on all of them. This was not an apostolic privilege. It was the normative experience of the gathered community of Jesus.

“When a church begins to diminish the gift of tongues, it tends — almost inevitably — to diminish the broader expectation of the supernatural altogether.”

The Prophetic Promise of the Last Days

Acts 2:17 (ESV)

“And in the last days it shall be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.”

Peter, addressing the bewildered crowd at Pentecost, quotes the prophet Joel. His interpretive move is decisive: what you are seeing right now, he says, is the fulfillment of what God promised for the last days. The outpouring of the Spirit — prophesied, awaited, now arriving — is not a temporary anomaly. It is the characteristic mark of the age between Christ’s ascension and his return. We are in the last days. Which means we are in the age of the Spirit’s outpouring.

The language of ‘pouring out’ is emphatic and generous. It is not a trickle. It is not a carefully rationed dispensation to a select few. God says he will pour out his Spirit on all flesh — sons and daughters, young and old, across lines of gender and generation. And what follows from this outpouring? Prophecy. Visions. Dreams.

This is precisely where many Reformed and cessationist churches grow quiet. The outpouring of the Spirit is, in some theological frameworks, reinterpreted as referring solely to the writing of the New Testament, or to the establishment of the apostolic office, now closed. But this interpretation strains against the plain reading of the text. Peter does not say the Spirit was poured out on the apostles. He says it was poured out on all who were present — and extends the promise further still to all whom the Lord our God will call (Acts 2:39).

The gift of prophecy, in particular, deserves recovery in the contemporary church. The Apostle Paul devotes an entire chapter — 1 Corinthians 14 — to its proper practice. He does not do so to describe a historical phenomenon safely in the past. He writes to a living congregation, offering pastoral instruction on how to administer this gift for the upbuilding, encouragement, and consolation of the body. He commands them — not suggests, commands — to eagerly desire the spiritual gifts, especially prophecy (1 Cor. 14:1).

1 Corinthians 14:1–3 (ESV)

Pursue love, and earnestly desire the spiritual gifts, especially that you may prophesy. For one who speaks in a tongue speaks not to men but to God; for no one understands him, but he utters mysteries in the Spirit. On the other hand, the one who prophesies speaks to people for their upbuilding and encouragement and consolation.

Notice the framework Paul establishes. Love comes first — always. The gifts are never ends in themselves. They are servants of love. A congregation that pursues the gifts without love produces noise, confusion, and harm. But a congregation that loves without pursuing the gifts is not following Paul’s command. The two are not alternatives. They are partners.

How can a congregation eagerly desire a gift they have never been taught? How can they pursue something their pastors never model, never preach, never make space for? The silence of so many pulpits on the gift of prophecy is not theological neutrality. It is a form of deprivation. The sheep cannot receive what the shepherd never offers.

Let me speak from my own history again. There have been moments in my life when someone prayed over me and spoke something they could not have known — something that had been buried in the quiet of my heart for a long time. A word about my calling. A word about my children. A directional word that came to pass. I received a word once, spoken over me before a congregation of two hundred people: ‘Your heart will long for a land far away from this shore.’ That person said nothing more specific than that. But we was in Malaysia at the time, and the word eventually led us across twenty-one hours of ocean to America. That is the gift of prophecy operating in the framework of love — not for spectacle, not for control, but for the upbuilding of a servant of God who needed to hear his Father’s voice.

I am also keenly aware of the excesses. The prophetic culture of some Pentecostal and charismatic circles has produced manipulation, false predictions, and wounded people who built their lives on words that never came true. This is real, and it must be addressed — not by eliminating the gift, but by returning to the apostolic framework Paul provides: prophecy that edifies, encourages, and consoles; prophecy that is tested, weighed, and submitted to the community; prophecy that operates in the atmosphere of love.

Visions, Dreams, and the Suppressed Imagination

Acts 2:17 also promises that young men will see visions and old men will dream dreams. The evangelical world has largely spiritualized these categories into metaphor, or dismissed them as the province of more excitable Christians. But the New Testament treats visions and dreams with remarkable seriousness. It was in a vision that Ananias was sent to the blinded Saul of Tarsus. It was through a dream that Joseph was warned to flee to Egypt. It was in a trance that Peter received the vision of the clean and unclean animals, which dismantled his assumptions about Gentile inclusion.

I find that when I lean into worship, when I create space for quiet and attentiveness to God, things come into my mind’s eye that feel less like my own imagination and more like something being given to me. I have largely stopped sharing these things in my current context — the culture of the denominational congregation where we presently worship does not make space for it, and I do not want to cause disruption or confusion. But I am aware of a cost in that silence. Something is being withheld from the body that it was meant to receive.

This is the practical effect of a church culture that does not theologically sanction the experiential gifts: people who carry these gifts learn to suppress them, to privatize them, to wonder in silence whether what they are experiencing is real or simply self-generated. The doctrine of the church becomes a ceiling on the experience of the Spirit, rather than a framework that helps the Spirit’s gifts operate with wisdom and order.

Laying Hands on the Sick — A Command, Not a Suggestion

Mark 16:15–18 (ESV)

“Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. And these signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up serpents with their hands; and if they drink any deadly poison, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover.”

This passage is part of Jesus’ commissioning of his disciples into the world. It is embedded in the Great Commission itself — the same text that evangelicals rightly treat as the Church’s marching orders for all generations. And Jesus says, without qualification, that signs will accompany those who believe. The casting out of demons. Speaking in new tongues. Healing the sick.

Most non-charismatic evangelical churches enthusiastically embrace the Great Commission. They send missionaries. They plant churches. They translate Scriptures. But the signs that Jesus says will accompany those who believe? Those are quietly set aside — explained as belonging to the apostolic age, or reinterpreted symbolically, or simply not discussed.

The healing of the sick is perhaps the most practically significant of these signs, because sickness is universal. Every congregation contains people who are suffering — cancer, depression, chronic pain, grief, addiction, anxiety, the slow attrition of bodies that are aging toward death. Jesus says: lay your hands on the sick, and they will recover. The Church should be doing this. Many do — there are healing prayer teams in churches across the denominational spectrum. But the frequency of visible healing is, in much of the Western church, remarkably low.

Someone once described this contrast to me with painful clarity. A healing team that had seen extraordinary results in Africa returned to New York City and found the atmosphere profoundly different. Healings that had seemed almost natural in one context became rare in another. The explanation Jesus himself offers, again and again, is faith: ‘Where is your faith?’ And faith, as Paul reminds us, comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ (Romans 10:17). What the pulpit preaches shapes what the congregation believes is possible. If the pulpit never speaks of healing, never models expectant prayer, never creates liturgical or pastoral space for the laying on of hands, the congregation will not carry a living expectation of the miraculous. This is not a failure of faith in the abstract. It is a failure of formation.

There is also a word to be said about spiritual warfare. Jesus says that those who believe will cast out demons. I recognize that this makes many Christians — especially those formed in rationalistic, cessationist, or mainline traditions — deeply uncomfortable. But consider the demographics of a congregation today: How many are struggling with suicidal ideation? How many wrestle with addictions that seem to have a will of their own, that resist every rational intervention? How many carry patterns of destruction that they themselves cannot explain? The New Testament would not necessarily pronounce a demonic verdict on every one of these struggles. But it would not dismiss the possibility either. Spiritual warfare is real. The deliverance ministry of Jesus was not incidental to his mission — it was central to his announcement of the Kingdom of God.

“What the pulpit preaches shapes what the congregation believes is possible. The doctrine of the church can become a ceiling on the experience of the Spirit.”

The Cultural Rationalism We Have Inherited

None of what I have described above happens in a vacuum. The modern Western church is formed by a broader cultural rationalism that has been accumulating for centuries — from the Enlightenment’s confidence in human reason, through the rise of scientific materialism, to the pervasive assumption of our present moment that what cannot be verified empirically is not real, or at least not reliable. This cultural atmosphere shapes what we consider plausible, even before we open our Bibles.

When the majority of our waking hours are spent in a world that is resolutely materialist — where our senses are attuned to the tangible, the measurable, the reproducible — it becomes genuinely difficult to maintain an expectation of the miraculous. This is not a failure of sincerity. It is the predictable result of formation in a culture that treats the supernatural as the province of the credulous. The apparent diminishing of signs and wonders in the Western church is not primarily a theological conclusion. It is a perceptual one, shaped by the assumptions of our age.

But the assumptions of our age are not the last word. The Church in the Global South — in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America — is exploding with accounts of healing, deliverance, prophetic words, and miraculous provision. These reports are not the product of theological naivety. Many of the fastest-growing, most theologically serious movements in Christianity today operate with a completely natural expectation of the miraculous. They read Acts 2 and see a description of normal Christianity. The Western church’s skepticism is the anomaly, not the norm.

A Call to Theological and Practical Renewal

What I am calling for is not a collapse into undisciplined enthusiasm. Paul’s instructions in 1 Corinthians 14 stand: let all things be done decently and in order (v. 40). The gifts of the Spirit are given to the community, exercised within the community, and tested by the community. Prophecy is weighed. Tongues are interpreted. The spirit of the prophet is subject to the prophet (v. 32). These are not restrictions designed to minimize the Spirit’s work. They are guardrails designed to protect it — to ensure that the supernatural gifts build up rather than destabilize.

But order without expectation is a form of unbelief. A church that has arranged its liturgy, its polity, and its theology to make no room for the miraculous has not achieved theological maturity. It has achieved a sophisticated form of practical cessationism — the functional belief that the extraordinary promises of God no longer apply, whatever doctrinal position it formally holds.

Renewal begins in the pulpit. Pastors must preach the full counsel of God — including Acts 1:8, Acts 2, 1 Corinthians 12 and 14, Mark 16, and every other text that speaks to the present reality of the Spirit’s power. They must preach these texts with the same expectant faith they would bring to texts about salvation or sanctification. They must create structures in congregational life — prayer teams, prophetic communities, healing services — that give these gifts space to operate with wisdom and accountability.

Renewal also requires humility. Those in cessationist traditions must be willing to ask honestly whether their theological framework was shaped more by the Enlightenment than by exegesis. Those in charismatic traditions must be willing to ask honestly whether their practice of the gifts has been ordered by love and truth, or by a culture of spectacle and individualism. Both streams have something to receive from the other. The goal is not to win a theological debate. The goal is to be the church that Jesus promised — filled with the Spirit, moving in power, witnessing to his resurrection to the ends of the earth.

The promise of Acts 1:8 has not expired. The last days Joel prophesied have not ended. The commission of Mark 16 has not been revoked. The gifts Paul described in 1 Corinthians 12 and 14 have not been quietly withdrawn. What has happened, in too many quarters of the Western church, is that we have allowed the plausibility structures of our culture to override the plain testimony of Scripture and the witness of two thousand years of Church history.

Signs and wonders should never be diminished. They should be pursued — soberly, lovingly, scripturally, expectantly. Not because we are chasing experiences. But because we are following a living Lord who is the same yesterday, today, and forever — and who promised that those who believe in him would do the works he did, and greater works than these (John 14:12). The Church owes the world nothing less than the full gospel: not a rationalized gospel with its power quietly excised, but the gospel of the Kingdom — announced in word, demonstrated in power, and driven by the love of the Spirit poured out on all flesh.

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Pastor Al Ngu (MDiv) is a church planter in New York City and the founder of Hearts Burn NYC,

An outdoor faith community gathering in Union Square Park.