Dynamics of Spiritual Life: An Evangelical Theology of Renewal

by Richard F. Lovelace

We should look forward to fully integrated churches in which all the gifts are practiced with restraint and charity, but not by all, in place of churches which are homogeneously Pentecostal or non-Pentecostal, in which counterfeit gifts are being fostered in one area while genuine gifts are repressed in the other.

In folk religion the posture of the Christian toward fallen angels is defensive; in Scripture the church is on the offensive, and the blows it receives from Satan come from a retreating enemy.

Once the activity of Satan has been detected in any situation, unusual caution or elaborate rituals of exorcism are not necessary to handle the enemy forces. Nevius found that the proximity of strong Christians and the reading of Scripture was enough to drive off many of the possessing spirits he encountered.

The Christian who is substantially walking in light is practically invulnerable to the assaults of darkness as Jesus intimates in the parable of the empty house (Mt. 12:43-45). This is beautifully expressed in John Bunyan’s image of the powers of darkness as lions chained on a short tether on either side of the road to the Celestial City. These lions can maul travelers who wander from the middle of the path but cannot touch those who walk precisely in the center. This metaphor emphasizes that Christian warfare is not a conflict in which the sides are in any way equivalent,

It is true that all vital Christians are to some degree “demonized,” when demonization is defined inclusively to cover every phenomenon from temptation to possession. But the ordinary remedy may not be exorcism but counseling into the fullness of Christ, including an understanding of our authority against demonic agents and a stance of resistance against them in contested areas of the personality.

that converts are won more by the observable blessedness of a whole way of life than by the arguments of individuals.

the predominant motive of the Puritans in moving to America was not mission but the preservation of godly family dynasties.

It is possible for both individuals and churches to become devoted mainly to personal spiritual culture and forget outreach, especially if the process of reaching out involves touching those who may contaminate us, Thus many Protestant churches have in effect become closed systems for the nurture and servicing of the inheritors of a denominational tradition.

the Great Awakening was preceded by a period of sterility and stalemate in the life of Western Protestantism in which a few evangelical leaders began to call for and organize prayer for a new Pentecost, an outpouring of the Holy Spirit to carry the church forward at a pace which would accomplish in decades works which had previously taken centuries.

Deficiency in prayer both reflects and reinforces inattention toward God.

prayer was not an expression of faith in God’s grace, but a monument erected to attract his attention. Trust was not centered on the God who constantly oversees our paths and knows our needs, but on prayer itself, which must be used as a magical lever to pry answers from an unwilling God.

It is sometimes forgotten that if the devil can tempt us to do evil, he can also tempt us not to do good. He can glamorize sin, but he can also paint an ugly picture in our minds of any work which is the will of God, including prayer.

As pain tells us of the need for healing, worry tells us of the need for prayer.

Perhaps much of our prayer now should simply be for God to pour out such a spirit of prayer and supplication in the hearts of his people.

One of the most interesting variations of this pattern was an invention of Ignatius Loyola, the temporary monastic retreat, which became an important engine of the Counter Reformation and is the rather unlikely prototype for the Evangelical summer conference experience.

Mennonite self-criticism has recognized this problem: Speaking from an MC [Mennonite Church] background, John H. Yoder writes that Mennonitism has become “a small Christian body, a Christian corpuscle,” into which most members are born and into which few converts are won. “If there has not come into being a ‘new humanity,’ made up of two kinds of people, some of whom had good strong parents and some who did not, of whom some were born under the law and some were not, and of whom some have the heritage of moral rigidity and some do not, if the marriage of Jews and Gentiles is not happening in every generation, then the work of Christ as described in Ephesians is not happening.”

In many respects Herrnhut must be considered the most thoroughgoing and fruitful application of the principle of community in church history. Since Zinzendorf started not with an integrated Christian community but with a collection of fragments from widely different ecclesiastical backgrounds who were at one another’s throats to begin with, his success in turning Herrnhut into a unified community through the linked use of prayer and small groups serves to demonstrate that Luther’s original plan was viable.

What is important is not the mechanism of community but the principle articulated in the body metaphor used by Paul in 1 Corinthians 12 and Ephesians 4. The latter passage makes it quite clear that full spiritual vitality cannot be present in the church until its macrocommunities and microcommunities consist of fully developed networks of Christians who are exercising their gifts and contributing to one another, so that “the whole body, joined and knit together by every joint with which it is supplied, when each part is working properly, makes bodily growth and upbuilds itself in love” (Eph. 4:16).

The pattern of congregational life established by the beginning of the Middle Ages, in which the laity become passive observers of the redemptive mystery instead of celebrants and participants mutually edifying one another, has resulted in an individualistic spirituality which the church has never quite abandoned. In this model of the Christian life the individual believer is connected to the source of grace like a diver who draws his air supply from the surface through a hose. He is essentially a self-contained system cut off from the other divers working around him. If their air supply is cut off, this does not damage him nor can he share with them the air that he receives. The situation would be no different if he were working alone a hundred miles away.

Therefore “the normal Christian life” is not simply a function of an individual believer’s relationship to God. If he is isolated from Christians around him who are designed to be part of the system through which he receives grace, or if those Christians are themselves spiritually weak, he cannot be as strong and as filled with the Spirit as he otherwise would be. Individual spiritual dynamics and corporate spiritual dynamics are interdependent, just as the health of the body and the health of its cells are correlative. “If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together” (1 Cor. 12:26).

I believe that a return to a stronger view of the Supper, and the more frequent Communion advocated by the Reformers, would be immensely helpful to the spiritual life of Protestantism.

it is apparent that where the truths embodied in the Lord’s Supper are clearly taught and proclaimed, spiritual renewal is present, but where the sacraments are administered without much explanation simply as a kind of spiritual medicine, a palpable deadness may set in. If all parts of the church were to make clear to their communicants the full meaning of the Lord’s Supper, we might see spiritual blessing come upon all, but with a special fullness upon the branch of the church with the correct doctrine of the Supper.

The spiritual gifts of the laity have atrophied, while the responsibilities of ministers and administrators have hypertrophied.

In both revivals many of the major leaders were men of both spiritual depth and intellectual force. Men like Timothy Dwight and Charles Simeon in the Second Awakening were able to exert both theological power in the church and apologetic control over the culture.25 As the divorce between piety and intellect in American Christianity continued to advance, however, evangelical leadership began to fall increasingly into two classes: the evangelistic technicians on the one hand and the orthodox confessional theologians on the other.

Thus the gospel is free to become encultured—to wear many forms of cultural expression, with perfect freedom to change these expressions like clothing when the need arises—only when it has been disenculturated.

In an ironic inversion, the gentile Christians, who had been persecuted by Jewish racists and threatened with cultural imperialism by Judaizers in the church, became racist persecutors of the Jews, insisting that conversion must mean abandonment of the Jewish culture and adoption of the culture of Christian Gentiles. This kept many potential converts from coming in. Of course, it also kept many rather nominal Christians in “Christendom” from dropping out, a rather questionable advantage.

Abandoning the Reformers’ use of Sunday as a day of rest, recreation and reflection on the works of God, they turned the Sabbath into a day of strenuous holy work with recreation tabooed.

As the understanding of grace declined in revivalism, evangelicalism erected a stronger shell of protective enculturation to guard it from the world. Not only did it cling to the Puritan taboos, but in the nineteenth century it added more: wine and tobacco, both of which had been consumed by both Reformers and Puritans. The early Temperance movement was motivated by social compassion for the victims of distilled liquor during the stresses of the Industrial Revolution, and it really called for temperance. When moderation seemed too difficult a spiritual discipline and too slow a remedy, the revivalists of the 1820s and 30s moved on to redefine temperance as abstinence, to the horror of Charles Hodge, who protested that the replacement of Communion wine with grape juice was an insult to Jesus and to biblical ethics.

an insidious process of cultural fusion was going on in which Christianity was gradually identified with Americanism, patriotism and the preservation of the status quo.

By the 1930s the average American Fundamentalist was not, at least, a proponent of theocracy, but he did have a way of confusing America, the Republican Party and the capitalist system with the kingdom of God.

It is also true that when the church loses its own Spirit-directed social initiative, that initiative passes to common-grace movements within the fallen world, for God’s compassion for humanity will not be frustrated by the church’s failure.

For it is not merely new methods, new insights and clearer theologies which will advance the gospel at the close of the twentieth century. It must be a cleansing of man’s spirit, and therefore a pouring out of the Holy Spirit of God.

Confronted with a change in the church’s program, their response will be a frantic clinging to past precedents: “But we always did it this way.” Their church life is a desperate effort to maintain allegiance to a Leviticus written forty years ago. Their ability to follow Christ into constructive change is severely limited by their bondage to cultural supports for their insecurity.

pastors gradually settle down and lose interest in being change agents in the church. An unconscious conspiracy arises between their flesh and that of their congregations. It becomes tacitly understood that the laity will give pastors places of special honor in the exercise of their gifts, if the pastors will agree to leave their congregations’ pre-Christian lifestyles undisturbed and do not call for the mobilization of lay gifts for the work of the kingdom. Pastors are permitted to become ministerial superstars. Their pride is fed and their insecurity is pacified even if they are run ragged, and their congregations are permitted to remain herds of sheep in which each has cheerfully turned to his own way.

The local congregation is like a whaling vessel. It is too large and unwieldy in itself to catch whales, so it must carry smaller vessels aboard for this purpose. But the smaller whaleboats are ill-advised to strike out on their own apart from the mother ship. They can catch a few whales but they cannot process them, and the smaller boats can easily be destroyed by storms.

It is often said today, in circles which blend popular psychology with Christianity, that we must love ourselves before we can be set free to love others. This is certainly the release which we must seek to give our people. But no realistic human beings find it easy to love or to forgive themselves, and hence their self-acceptance must be grounded in their awareness that God accepts them in Christ. There is a sense in which the strongest self-love that we can have, in the sense of agapē, is merely the mirror image of the lively conviction we have that God loves us.

As P. T. Forsyth says, “It is an item of faith that we are children of God; there is plenty of experience in us against it.”

As the great Pietist Francke said, “We do not have to ask, ‘Are you converted? When were you converted?’ But rather: ‘What does Christ mean to you? What have you personally experienced with God? Is Christ important to you in your daily life?’”5 If these questions elicit a reply which indicates repentant faith in Christ and a reliance on him for justification and increasing victory over sin, we can presume that we are dealing with a regenerate Christian.

Every Christian congregation should be at least as well instructed in the biblical treatment of the person, gifts and graces of the Holy Spirit as the average Pentecostal church. This means that the person and work of the Holy Spirit should be adequately covered every time the application of redemption in Christian growth is dealt with, since this is his particular office. His work in the believer’s life should be given full sermonic treatment more often than once a year at Pentecost.

A small amount of instruction in the strategies of darkness would save most ministers a good deal of wear and tear in church conflicts where the works of the flesh are triggered and reinforced by satanic accusation and deception.

It is not enough to renew individual hearts for churches to be renewed, although it is probably true that structural renewal cannot progress very far unless it is preceded by a great deal of individual awakening. Because individual Christians—and even local congregations—are not ultimate ends in themselves, but cells in the body of Christ, reconstitution of these cells is often necessary for spiritual health and the fullness of Christ to be present in the church.

many large congregations are like piles of iron filings which have been accumulated by the magnetism of a preaching ministry. There is no real life and virtue in such heaps of disconnected Christians. Vitality in the church of Christ gathers around centered groups of Christians who are interacting with one another and with other groups like cells or organs in a body. The most natural microcommunity in the church is the Christian home, and pastors should work to build up this unit into the functional strength it enjoyed in Puritanism (or in the patriarchal household in the Bible, which was the Puritan model).