Pentecost tomorrow. I’m baptising Joshua. Cue much water and flames of fire alighting on all the believers present. (Well, vigil candles, anyway). Much thinking too about the Holy Spirit.
Just as all of us who are about my age or younger in the UK are Thatcher’s children in one way or another, regardless of what we thought about her, so are the UK churches all now in some way children of the Charismatic Movement.
When I encountered it, when I was worshipping regularly in places like Ivy Cottage church in Manchester, and at the various meetings of the Vineyard movement that stemmed from John Wimber, it was all very exciting.
Clearly, I don’t share the same presumptions now that I shared then, but I do know enough to know that without the rushing wind of the charismatic movement, the type of liberal catholic church which I now work in probably would not have come into existence. In the charismatic movement, God told us, above all, to relax a bit. The glorious kind of relaxed, comfortable, confident, high church, liturgical, mixed musical milieu that I now accept as normal is in its way a direct descendent of all that blew in with Watson and Wimber and all the rest of them.
Something to give thanks for really.
Much water indeed!
I certainly give thanks for that journey too, and I too don’t hold the same presumptions, but still hold on to the deep things encountered.
The Baptism sounded wonderful.