Some "Clergy" Are Just Crazy! This is Too Funny!

"In the past, I once enjoyed a season in a charismatic denomination. My spiritual formation was greatly enhanced by the denomination’s belief in the supernatural and their determination to “get their miracle.” If you’ve grown up in that environment, you’ll remember that at the end of every service you had an altar time. That’s when you let the Holy Spirit have his way over the people who went forward for prayer, healing, and so on.

Once, during a leadership conference, the speaker asked every minister to come forward, and he told us that God was going to slay us in the Spirit. I’d been open to this in the past, but for whatever reason, God seemed to always pass over me. As the speaker had warned, everyone fell over, except me. I was like the ten-pin that just wouldn’t go down. The minister looked perplexed and came over to me and gave it one more shot, but I just stood there, now smiling. He didn’t think it was funny and applied a bit of “unnatural” pressure to my forehead and then gave me a pretty good nudge. Still no response, except I was starting to get a little ticked off. Then he whispered in my ear.
“Son, your lack of faith is keeping you from God’s blessing.”

I whispered back, “Maybe God’s got bigger fish to fry than blessing a bunch of people who have been blessed their whole lives.” I was out of there in a hurry and spent the evening at a local pub enjoying the company of the unblessed.

I’m not sure how we got where we are, but it’s amazing that we think our most powerful times, our most intimate spiritual experiences, are supposed to happen within the comfortable confines of our church services. The biblical evidence is overwhelming and is crystal clear that God’s power is most naturally meant to happen “out there”!

The early church did meet in secret; the church has done so in times of persecution throughout the world, and many still do to this day. Jesus also pulled his disciples away at times to give them a break and to debrief. That’s okay, too. We’re not saying that we shouldn’t have private times with believers, but in early church times, the majority of the Christian activities were clearly done in plain view and for the benefit of the onlooking culture. They did meet privately, not out of separation theology, but because they had to. If God’s church is to regain its influence in the world, we will have to get much more comfortable doing “our stuff” out there again."

(Tangible Kingdom. Hugh Halter, pg 128-129. 2008, Jossey-Bass)