Snapshots and Synapses

How sad when the Church fails to reflect Christ… and by “Church”, I mean the collection of people that make up the universal church, not a specific person or denomination. Without going into a lot of details, shortly after I started getting more involved in my local church, I discovered that the church could be every bit as exploitative as the world. I found out that oftentimes: a person’s value in the church was proportional to the time, talents or money that they contributed it was okay to gossip so long as you put it in the form of a “prayer request” in practice (or should I say “malpractice”), accountability and submission to authority were often control techniques freedom and grace could be used to excuse a rebellious attitude In reading Scripture, I’ve noticed that the only words of criticism Jesus had were for religious authorities. But I also see that one of His ending prayers was for these very same people: “Father, forgive them. They don’t know what they’re doing.” So as ...

In the late nineties, I taught at a Christian school in the Orlando area. As I was interviewing, I was asked the question: “Have you been given any extraordinary gifts of the Spirit?” My response was sincere: “Are there any gifts of the Spirit that are truly ordinary?” This caused the people in the room to laugh with me, and the interview continued without any further probing into my beliefs about spiritual gifts. I got the job and we moved from the Washington D.C. area to Orlando. The school was part of Reformed church that had very specific beliefs about the gifts of the Spirit, and it was at our first Sunday service I discovered the real meaning of the question I had been asked in my interview: in a sermon on spiritual gifts. Now, there is the fruit of the Spirit (love, joy, peace, etc.), and there are gifts of the Spirit. I had grown up in a liturgical denomination and wasn’t familiar with the term “extraordinary gifts”. For me, the gifts of the Spirit were all lumped into one cat...