Four Reasons I Left Pentecostalism.

For a brief time during my early Christian years, I participated in the Charismatic movement.  The church I attended as a new Christian had been neglectful of the Holy Spirit, with a corresponding imbalanced emphasis on end-times, plus their own peculiar church distinctives.

Their dread of the Holy Spirit left a dryness in my heart that cried out to be filled. The teaching about spiritual growth I received amounted to a pessimistic spiritual stalemate [1]. The approach to Scripture was too intellectualized, as if spirituality meant being a Bible-memory machine. Piling on the passages in a message was considered good preaching, even if it wasn't illustrated or applied, and even if you couldn't remember any of it afterward.

But I was searching for a path forward out of my sins and the emotional damage from abuse. I was also in anguish over my mother’s crippling disease, and longed for hope for her. When I was exposed to Charismatic material during a summer job at a Pentecostal publishing house, I read the materials and it appealed to me. 

But then, what got me out of the Charismatic movement was not a preacher, or a course on spiritual gifts.  It was a Bible Interpretation class!

I had no clue how to interpret the Bible, prior to taking that course. I just believed whatever anyone credible told me. I believed my Scofield notes. I believed things I heard on the radio. I believed stuff I read in Oral Roberts books. I spun back and forth like a weather-vane.

This was because I had almost no discernment, and that was because I had never been taught by anyone how to think. I was just a confused mass of emotion and hurt, groping for clarity, and seeking a better way of living my life.

That Bible interpretation class taught me a lot of important truths, but it especially taught me four principles:

Principle #1: The importance of defining Bible words in context.

It was in that class that I was introduced to word studies, and how to do them. It began to dawn on me that just because the same word appeared here or there in the Bible, they didn’t always mean the same things everywhere. Luke and Paul might use the same word in different ways.

The cliché I’d run across in books, that such-and-such a word “always” meant X, was wrong. “Yeast” is not always a symbol of sin. “Agape” is not the “God kind of love.” It was useful to know what the Greeks meant by it. The meaning of a word was established by how a writer uses a word in a particular context. That word "context" became important.

There was no magic Bible code-wheel I could turn, to find the one right meaning for each and every Bible word. This made me ask whether preachers were defining their words correctly. I began to realize that the Pentecostal preachers I liked did very little of this, and when they did, it was often sketchy.

Principle #2:  Historical settings and applications.

Just because the Bible described something, didn’t mean we should expect that, or claim that, or do that.

Abraham paid a tithe. That does not prove I had to tithe. God promised blessing to Jabez. That didn't prove God promised those blessings to me. The 120 in Acts 2 speaking in tongues did not prove I should speak in tongues. Paul raising the dead didn’t mean I can raise the dead.

I learned that the Bible’s core is history. It describes God’s dealings over centuries with humanity, especially with the Jews. God at one time told His people to do or not do certain things, and then later in history He would rescind some rules, or institute new rules.

Acts wasn’t an obsolete, non-applicable record of stuff that never happens anymore (which was the ultra-non-charismatic dispensational attitude). But it wasn’t a applies-everywhere how-to manual for everyday Christian living either (Pentecostalism). Both approaches were simple -- and also simple-minded.

The more I learned about how to apply historical examples in Scripture, the more dissatisfied I became with a lot of preaching, especially charismatic preaching.

Principle #3:  The Power of Rational thinking. 

I grew up in a house where the usual parental response to hard issues was to shout, cry, and scream. This did nothing to develop my ability to reason; in fact, it scrambled it.

But buried inside me was a thinking person who was fighting to emerge, like a drowning person clawing to reach the surface. C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity lit the fuse for me, and my teacher, James Bjornstad, further fed the flame. Because of him, I learned a lot about how to reason.

I turned away from the devilish anti-intellectualism I had picked up from false teachers like Kenneth Copeland. Dr. Garry Friesen led me to the Scriptural view of the mind, which led me even further away from charismatic movement [2]. I began to evaluate preaching by whether it was true, not by what emotions it made me feel.

I developed a high view of the mind, meaning, a Biblical view. Rather than seeing my mind as the obstacle to knowing God (as Pentecostal preacher Ken Hagan taught), I realized my mind was God-given. My mind was how I could knew God (as Dr. R.C. Sproul taught).

Principle #4:  Everything in the Bible is not a symbol.

There is wicked egotism to the idea that there are "secret truths" hiding behind the plain words of Scripture. Yet many preachers resort to this idea all the time. It makes them sound wise.

The worst pulpit example I remember was of a preacher going through the list of family names in Nehemiah 3, and making every one of them stand for something “spiritual.” By that time, I had learned enough that I knew that his message was dreadful. It sticks in my mind as a top example of what never to do.

I once read a book by a prominent West Coast Pentecostal preacher, in which everything in a historical passage became a symbol of something else. He reduced the passage to silly-putty. Or in my Brethren assembly, whose elders preached incessantly against allegories, then couldn’t seem to resist turning OT stories into “types” of Christ.

There will be indicators in the text when a figure of speech is being used, whether in the immediate text or a related one. Metaphors, similes, metonyms are common in Scripture, but they aren’t everywhere.

A lot of times a palm tree in the Bible is just a palm tree.

The violation of this rule doesn’t turn me off to charismatic preaching only, but quite a lot of preaching across the denominational spectrum.  


These were the reasons I left the Charismatic Movement: I couldn't trust the preaching, and I realized their preachers were making absolutes of out material that was limited in time, place, and recipients.  These interpretation rules are also very much the reasons I rejected Bill Gothard, abandoned the old, Chafer-type dispensationalism, reject egalitarianism today, and criticize Growing Kids God’s Way and the Family-Integrated Church movement. They are all characterized by consistently bad hermeneutics.


[1] The two-nature view, but presented as a perpetual stand-off, with pessimistic expectations.

[2] Even though I don’t agree with him that God never speaks, Dr. Friesen’s book Decision-Making & The Will of God was an important influence on my life.