Tag Archives: post-Pentecostal

“The Holy Spirit Is NOT for Sale” by J. Lee Grady

A few years ago while taking a class on the emerging church, I ran across the identifiers  “post-Pentecostal” and “post-charismatic.” At first I did not fully understand what these terms meant nor while someone would want to use them…but slowly over the years I have come to realize that I myself am a post-Pentecostal/post-charismatic follower of Jesus.

The term, contrary to what some may think, are not referring to cecessionist doctrines or theology, nor are they saying that we have move beyond the movement of the Holy Spirit as ushered in by THE Pentecost of Acts 2. Instead the terms post-Pentecostal and post-charismatic pay homage to the mentality of post-modernism in that they refer to a new shift in thinking about Pentecost and the workings of the Holy Spirit.

In other words, post-Pentecostal/post-charismatic folks tend to be tried out by all the hype and faddism that seems to follow Pentecostalism and Charismaticism.  We are people who are turned off by the worship of super-star healers, prophets, speakers, and miracle works. It’s not to say that God does not work through those people, ‘cause he can if he wants, it is just that we just not going to listen if all we hear is marketing and hype. Give me simple, humble workers of Jesus who see the lame healed, injustice destroyed, and signs and wonders in both the church building and on the street corners. Those are the folks I want to listen to and read about!

An unfortunate consequence of this post-Pentecostal/post-charismatic mentality is that my reading list and study material tended to come from the Evangelical, non-charismatic side of Christianity. I basically stopped paying any attention to anyone on the Pentecostal/charismatic side of the fence – all the while, mind you, practicing a spirit-led life that regularly saw miracles, signs and wonders (remember, I’m a member of the Third Wave and not a cessessionist!).  God, of course, doesn’t like fences and, as such, started prodding and poking me towards my  Pentecostal/charismatic roots – as I wrote about here and here.

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