I was in a pastors meeting several years ago where one of the pastors was complaining about how difficult it was to grow his church numerically.
A second pastor, whose church happened to be growing quickly at the time, spoke up:
“The reason you’re not growing is because you’re not doing what God wants you to do. If you were doing what God wants you to do, you would grow.”
And of course, what God wanted pastor #1 to do was what pastor #2 was doing. Just ask him; his church was growing, ergo he was doing the right thing.
One of the things that prompted my recent series on the Holy Spirit is the current of triumphalism that always seems to run through conservative Christianity.
“Triumphalism” has several definitions. The one that I am working with is “excessive exultation over one’s success or achievements”. In Christianity, this often takes the form of thinking that a particular set of blessings = God’s favor = success in all areas of life.
An example I often see is the attitude displayed in the story above. “My church is growing and being blessed. This means that I am doing everything right, and God is pleased with me. If everything wasn’t okay, then God wouldn’t be blessing me.”
Is this necessarily true? Is God a math problem, where you punch in the correct numbers and get the right answer? Or is God’s blessing more complicated than that?
My friend Warwick is an Australian Christian who served for years in the Assemblies of God there. He recently posted a series of tweets about Hillsong church and triumphalism in the AoG. His tweets follow; my further thoughts Monday.
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I’m going from my own (admittedly spotty-at-times memory), but this is the truth as best as I can remember it. There is so much that you can’t grasp about growing up Pentecostal from the outside. Like, you can hear the words, but it’s hard to understand how deep the roots go.
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Our world was divided into secular & spiritual. Good & evil. Black & white. Right & wrong. The church* and the world. Your thinking is dualistic to the core. But, as a Pente, we knew we had something over other Christians – we had direct access to God via the Holy Spirit.
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*Not the whole church. Most Christians who weren’t Pente were “saved”, but we Pentes were kind of more special, because we had the “gifts of the Spirit”. Most of us could speak in tongues (ya boi included). Others have the gift of prophecy and can speak the future (my dad).
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But this comes at a cost, because it also opens you up to a world of demons & “spiritual warfare”. Satan & his minions are actively involved in day to day life, and constantly putting God’s people, his special Christians (y’know, us!) in particular under spiritual attack.
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Many of our day-to-day conversations were rooted in the language of “spiritual warfare”. ANYTHING bad that happened was believed to literally be an attack from Satan. Anything. Pretty much everything bad was “demonic”. Anyone could be oppressed (or even possessed) by a demon.
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I had many serious conversations with people about whether or not a Christian could be demon possessed (I didn’t think so). And demonic possession was nothing like it was in the movies. That was ridiculous. Real demonic possession was (usually) far more subtle.
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I have to say that this is not AOG (now ACC) “theology” or doctrine. But it was part and parcel of the fabric of what I experienced. I can guarantee that virtually none of the people in my past would raise an eyebrow at this stuff.
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This might seem like a divergence, but it’s critical to understand this mentality, to grasp how what happened with Brian & Frank Houston could go so wrong. I’m doing this in sections, because digging around in this stuff hurts.
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Also, it’s risky for me to do a huge tweetstorm in the browser, but we’re on our way. That first lot of tweets is only part of it, but probably enough to outline now. Here’s the next thing you need to understand: our theology taught that growth was a sign of God’s “blessing”.
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If your church was growing, it was because God was “blessing” it. In the late 90’s, *NO* AOG churches were growing as fast as Hillsong Church. Hillsong was what we aspired to. We modelled our worship on Hillsong. We went to Hillsong Conference to learn how to do church better.
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Whatever Hillsong were doing was reaching people and getting them saved. It was making their lives better. They were surrounded by a loving community of people who were growing in God, and reaching out into their communities. We wanted what they were having.
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It wasn’t about the money. Sure, Brian LITERALLY wrote the damn book, but the money was LITERALLY secondary – more money meant we could bless people, we could bless our communities and minister to them more effectively. More money meant that we could provide for people’s needs.
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Hillsong was growing. People were getting saved, hallelujah! (and consequently had more people tithing, so had more money, et al) (Don’t ask about retention rates, or cannibalisation of other churches, OK? DADT.) We KNEW that Hillsong’s growth was a sign of God’s blessing
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This is a second critical point to understand, so imma reiterate it. *We believed growth (in people, and in finances) was a sign of God’s blessing.* Bad trees don’t produce good fruit. Hillsong was producing fruit 100-fold.
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Y’all don’t ask questions when God’s blessing is visible, because then you’re questioning God. God was blessing Hillsong Church, God was blessing Brian, anything bad is a “spiritual attack”… which brings us to Frank Houston.
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You gotta understand who Frank Houston was in our world. He was an elder statesman in the AOG. His son was running the fastest growing AOG church in Australia. God’s blessing was on the family, because of Frank’s faithfulness to God.
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So when someone comes along and accuses one of the elder statesmen, someone who is revered, and loved, and respected of something so heinous… That’s an attack from the devil, trying to pull down the work God is doing.
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You don’t believe it. You won’t believe it. You can’t believe it. But then… Brian stood him down and disciplined him for (and this, forgive me, is a little fuzzy), but IIRC “sexual immorality”. Shit. He did do something bad.
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Obviously not that bad, because if it was THAT bad, Brian would have gone to the police. He didn’t, so… But how hard would it be to place your own father, a man we all respected so much, under church discipline? We respected Brian for that. I am ashamed, but I’m not kidding.
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We didn’t think about the victim. We knew there was one accuser, and rumour had it that they were emotionally disturbed, but that there had been a settlement reached. Aye, but here’s the rub: after Frank had done this thing, (so long ago, too!), God “blessed” his ministry.
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We *knew* that people who were oppressed by demonic influences make stuff up; the devil uses them to try and destroy God’s work. Others just make up accusations because they’re rebelling against God and are motivated by anger. It’s always spiritual.
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Here’s the subtext: Since God had blessed Frank’s ministry, this was obviously a spiritual attack. The devil was trying to use this mistake that Frank had made to attack God’s work in the current day. It made perfect sense to us.
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Ultimately, it was the cognitive dissonance that got me. I asked the wrong questions, and I asked them too often. I kept getting into arguments with people who told me to ignore what I could plainly see in front of me, and instead see things from the “spiritual” level.
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I had a pastor who, from the pulpit, accused those who asked questions of engaging in “Greek thinking”, which was in his opinion, a SIN. Same pastor also took us through a book teaching that we were under his authority, and had to accept that unquestioningly.
Circleslide 