The Art of Losing Control. Jules Evans
But even in therapy we know it’s not really unconditional, that at the end of the hour we have to pay and leave. No one talks about our need to be loved because if we did we might have to admit that we feel lonely and needy, and that is pathetic in our individualistic and success-oriented culture. What if there was a God and He loved us? What if the creator of the universe had a special concern for us, even at our worst? What if that love was free? We could let go of our fear, our shame, our inhibitions, our sense that we’re not well and have to hide it to avoid others’ rejection. We could stop trying to prove our importance to the world. We could relax and expand in God’s love, like a sponge in a warm bath. This is what Alpha tries to teach: the Jesus cure. God’s love will cure you of your shame, your addictions, your hang-ups, your desperate striving for the world’s approval. Your Alpha group will love and accept you. The wider community of HTB will love you too, particularly if you’re a ‘seeker’. You are the prodigal son (or fatted calf), whose return to God is celebrated by the saints and angels. You will never be higher status than as a seeker on the Alpha course.
In week seven, all the groups went on the ‘Alpha weekend’, staying in a hotel on the coast in West Sussex. Nicky said we would learn how to invite the Holy Spirit into our hearts. The Holy Spirit doesn’t enter unless you invite him. ‘The Lord is a gentleman,’ another pastor explained, meaning that, unlike Zeus, Jesus doesn’t rape you – although the word ‘rapture’ comes from the Latin raptus, meaning ‘abduction’ or ‘rape’. Nicky explained that the Church had sometimes been suspicious of ‘manifestations of the Holy Spirit’, but they actually have a central role in the Bible, as in the Pentecost episode in the Acts of the Apostles. The Holy Spirit can grant all of us the charismatic power the apostles possessed. To get the fires burning, Nicky said we would pray the oldest prayer in Christianity: Come, Holy Spirit. ‘You might feel a warmth in your chest,’ he said, ‘or a tingling, or your palms might feel a bit sweaty . . . Come, Holy Spirit . . . Come . . . Thank you, Lord . . . Thank you . . . Even now, the Holy Spirit is here, at work in some of you.’ I could hear some people gently sobbing around me. One woman behind me started quietly singing in tongues, like a Mediterranean baby-talk. I opened my eyes and Nicky appeared by my elbow. ‘Can I pray for you, Jules?’ he asked. I was flattered. ‘Lord, we ask that you fill Jules with your Holy Spirit, and reveal Your amazing plan for his life.’ I opened my eyes and Nicky smiled at me eagerly. ‘How was it?’
A brief history of charismatic Christianity
It’s remarkable that the Church of England should have become so ecstatic, considering it was established back in the Reformation as a prophylactic against ecstasy. The Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, tells me that during the Reformation there was a ‘fear of the irrational, a fear of the ungovernable spirit’. This is unsurprising, given some Protestants were using the Holy Spirit as a justification to start revolutions. Luther dubbed such ecstatic revolutionaries ‘enthusiasts’, and insisted that it was heretical to claim special gifts or revelations from the Holy Spirit. The Church of England was, from its birth, suspicious of ecstasy – the Holy Spirit was ‘edited out’ of Thomas Cranmer’s 1540 prayer book, according to the Bishop of London. Monasteries and nunneries, which provided a cultural framework for ecstatic voyages, were dissolved by the state and their assets seized. In the second half of the seventeenth century, after the English Civil War and the Thirty Years War, the secular nation-state emerged triumphant and ‘enthusiasm’ was deemed a medical illness and threat to public order. Christianity was rationalised: all claims to personal revelation were subject to reason. God became distant, a blind watchmaker or Deist Supreme Ruler, and Christianity became a matter of agreeing with a handful of propositions.
There was always going to be a reaction to this repression of ecstasy. Christianity, suggests the Bishop of London, ‘exists as a massive symphony, where the truth is given by the interplay of the various parts. If you omit any part of it, then there is a reaction and exaggeration of the missing element.’ Ecstasy came back into Anglicanism with a vengeance in the mid-eighteenth century. To be precise, it came back on 24 May 1738, at 8.45 p.m., in Aldersgate Street in London. A pious young Christian called John Wesley felt his heart ‘strangely warmed’ after attending a gathering of ecstatic Protestants called the Moravians. His brother, Charles, had likewise experienced a ‘baptism of the Holy Spirit’ three days before. The Wesleys spread their new vision throughout the Anglican Church, although it later split from Anglicanism and became known as ‘Methodism’. At its heart is the idea that Christians can encounter the Holy Spirit today, and this baptism of the Spirit gives us the assurance that we are saved. Methodists became famous – or infamous – for their highly emotional services, their theatrical sermons, their wonderful hymns (many of them written by Charles Wesley) and their strenuous evangelism, particularly to the working class. They would organise ‘love-feasts’, where hundreds or even thousands of people would gather for open-air services and ‘camp meetings’, which could go on for hours or days. Attendees wept, fainted, shook, groaned, danced, laughed and leaped for joy as the Holy Spirit descended upon them and they committed their life to Jesus.
The Holy Spirit spread across the world, and is still spreading, through spectacular revivals. There was the Welsh Methodist revival of the 1730s–50s, in which ‘old men and women leaped around like roe deer’.5 There was the First Great Awakening of American Christianity in the 1730s and 1740s, and the Second Awakening of the early-nineteenth century; there was the Welsh revival of 1904, and the Azusa Street revival of 1905, which kickstarted Pentecostalism. Since the 1980s, Pentecostal churches have experienced extraordinary growth in the developing world, as people in Latin America, Africa and Asia move to the city and look to the Holy Spirit for life-guidance. Around 35,000 convert to Pentecostalism every day – think of that, 24.3 intense personal surrenders to the Holy Spirit every minute.
Ecstatic revivals tended to follow a similar script: someone had an ecstatic experience, it spread, and the religiosity of their community abruptly went through the roof, with people flocking to all-day all-night services, where they burst into prophecy or song as the Spirit came upon them. Sometimes charismatic preachers stirred the crowds to heights of emotion, but equally often the congregation themselves took charge, including working-class men, women, black people, people whose voices were not always heard in less ecstatic times. The Spirit was no respecter of order or hierarchy. Like wildfire, the revival would spread to a nearby community, and again people would be swept up in religious excitement, a sense that they were living in extraordinary times, perhaps even End Times, when great miracles were possible, when bodies were healed, sins cleansed, souls saved, churches revived.
Gifts of the Spirit
Sceptics, including many Christians, observed these revivals with a mixture of amusement and horror, as a regression to primitive irrationalism, like the flagellant craze or dancing manias of the Middle Ages. No wonder, critics sneered, revival ecstasy was so common among women, the working class, ethnic minorities – these groups were naturally more unstable, emotional and credulous. But in some ways, Methodism and its later descendants could be seen as a product of the sceptical Enlightenment, as well as a reaction to it – it was an ‘experimental religion’, as John Wesley put it, in which God’s existence and personal love for you was ‘proven’ by the intense physical and emotional experience of ecstasy, as well as in dreams, healing, prophecy and other ‘gifts of the Holy Spirit’. Mainstream Protestantism and Catholicism had, since the Reformation, insisted such gifts of the Spirit had ceased after the first generation of Christians (a doctrine known as ‘cessationism’). But the Wesleys helped to popularise a new form of ‘charismatic Christianity’, which insisted the Holy Spirit was still handing out the free gifts (charis in Greek means ‘grace’, ‘favour’ or ‘gift’). Like good Enlightenment scientists, churches kept statistical records of how many people made ‘commitments to follow Jesus’ as statistical proof of God’s power and love. In total, around a hundred thousand supposedly made ‘commitments’ in the Welsh revival of 1904, a tenth of the population, although it’s not clear how many were Christians already, or how many remained Christian once the collective ecstasy had subsided.
Revivals tended to take place in nonconformist Protestant congregations – Methodist, Mormon, Baptist, Pentecostalist, Shaker, Seventh-day Adventist