Contemporary Christian music and the spirit of the age.

Previous instalments of this series have looked at the spiritual power of music and its biblical significance, and have argued that popular trends in music always reflect the spirit of the age.

But should this be the case for music used inside the Church? Shouldn’t this be reflecting a different Spirit altogether?

Music at the Centre

Music has always been a strong feature of Judeo-Christian worship and culture. One only has to read the Psalms of Ascent (Ps 120-134) to see how important a role it has played in Jewish communal worship, as pilgrims sang on their way up to Jerusalem for festivals.¹ Since Jesus’ time, generations of Christians have learned of the Lord through song, and rightly so, for biblical songs are vital to the health of the Church (Eph 5:19; 1 Cor 14:26; Col 3:16).

It is good for believers to strengthen their theology through music; it is one of the wonderful gifts the Lord has given to bind the Church together through the ages, encourage her and keep her on a sound footing.
However, there is something different about this current generation. It is perhaps more concerned with musical worship than any previous generation – but it is also less concerned with Scripture.

For modern Christians, our musical intake includes both worship music used in church services and what has become known as ‘Contemporary Christian Music’ (CCM), an umbrella term for songs of any modern style that are intentionally Christian in their lyrics.² As long as songs are biblical, God-glorifying, and written in the right spirit, both of these musical avenues can be great for encouragement and edification.

This current generation is perhaps more concerned with musical worship than any previous generation – but it is also less concerned with Scripture.

But some problems have started to creep in in recent years as songs have become, for many, a substitute for scriptural learning. As biblical knowledge has generally been in decline, the way has been opened for modern Christian music to be permeated not by the Holy Spirit, but by the ‘spirit of the age’.

In this article I will outline four such ways this is occurring, focusing particularly on music popular in evangelical and charismatic circles. What follows is a largely critical remark – but please bear with me as next week’s conclusion to this short series will be much more positively focused on the hallmarks of good, solid, biblical music. For those interested in my own musical background and the position from which I am offering these comments, please see the Author Bio at the end of this page.

Four ways in which modern Christian music can channel the spirit of the age

1. Entertainment

Hillsong meeting in Sydney, Australia. See Photo Credits.According to secular theorists, Western culture has developed an obsession with entertainment. Key features of this culture include preferences of illusion over truth, appearance over reality and distraction over meaningful pursuit.³ When this comes to religion, it also means a preference for an appearance of spirituality without concern to live this out fully (i.e. 2 Tim 3:5).

Christian worship meetings that look and feel more like pop concerts have long been the chagrin of folk who prefer more traditional formats. Whatever your personal taste, there is no doubt that both Christian worship music and CCM have imbibed something of the contemporary spirit of ‘entertain me’: all the buzz of a spectacle and the enjoyment of (usually) an attractive set of faces, and all the sense of participating in something that ‘feels’ spiritual, but with very little personal challenge or follow-through.

The blending of Christian music with the secular world of entertainment – whether we are talking about borrowed styles and genres, or borrowed formats of mass gigs and music festivals - “changes it subtly, for the musical and emotional [is] exploited while the spiritual [is] denied or perverted.”⁴ It is obviously possible for God to work powerfully through such forms and events, but too often it’s equally possible for nominal Christians and unbelievers to partake, enjoy, adulate the performer and leave feeling good, but otherwise unchanged.

The blending of Christian music with the secular world of entertainment is not something to be taken lightly.

Meanwhile, Christian bands and artists face enormous commercial pressure to put out best-selling albums every year and to gig their way around the globe, winning Grammy awards as they go.⁵ Part of this pressure comes from record labels, which these days include secular conglomerates like Sony and EMI, who want songs that sell. This means that trends in music are more likely to be defined by what is popular and award-winning than by theological accuracy.

Edifying, doctrinally-sound songs still ‘make it big’ today. And many Christian artists take very seriously their opportunity to give the Gospel to a mass audience. However, the taking of inspiration from the secular realm is not something that should be done lightly, and has often also popularised a Christianity ‘lite’ based on thin doctrine and transient commitment.

2. Celebrity

Western culture’s obsession with entertainment goes hand-in-hand with a fascination with celebrity which has, sadly, also infiltrated the Church. The Gospel Coalition’s Mike Cosper notes that “Celebrity culture turns pastors and worship leaders into icons. Celebrity culture turns worship gatherings into rock concerts. Celebrity culture confuses flash and hype for substance.”⁶

Gigs, popular charts and social media all naturally draw the eye not to Jesus but to the artists, with more pressure on them to demonstrate charisma than a fear of the Lord. Being in the public eye obviously affords performers great opportunity to point people to Jesus but an obvious risk here, nonetheless, is idolatry and its attendant problems.

High-profile Christian musicians also wield huge influence, especially over young people. This can be a force for good, but it can also be used to promote heresy. Consider the following examples:

Pro-LGBT

Example: song-writer and worship leader Vicky Beeching, who came out as a lesbian in 2014 and now works to further the LGBT agenda in the British Church.

Universalism/Multi-faith

With universalism and multi-faith agendas gaining currency in mainstream evangelical and charismatic circles as well as in the ‘emerging church’, several Christian musicians are endorsing this, directly or indirectly. Examples include:

• Well-known Christian artists contributing to the soundtrack of the universalist film The Shack.
  
• Hillsong’s worship pastor Carl Lentz downplaying Jesus as the only way to God when interviewed by Oprah.⁷
  

Edifying, doctrinally-sound songs still ‘make it big’ today – but so do songs promoting a Christianity ‘lite’ based on thin doctrine and transient commitment.

Contemplative Prayer

Various Christian song-writers are allying themselves with the contemplative prayer movement, which utilises prayer methods advocated by the so-called ‘desert fathers’. This movement is drawing extensive criticism for often amounting to a new age counterfeit of the true Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Examples: David Crowder, Michael W Smith, Michael Card.⁸

Dominionism

One of the main ways in which the highly influential ‘New Apostolic Reformation’ group of teachers and ministries in the USA has managed to export and mainstream Latter Rain/dominionist teachings⁹ worldwide is through music.

Example: Bethel Church in Redding has an extensive music scene, producing songs that promote its own brand of theology and exporting them worldwide via groups such as Jesus Culture and Bethel Music. These songs are being given further credence by endorsements from big names such as Chris Tomlin and Michael W Smith, and from major conferences such as Passion in the USA (click here for a critical review).

3. Emotionalism

An important feature of postmodern Western culture is the triumph of heart over head. These days, reason and hard facts matter less than feelings. This also means an over-emphasis on experience (or, in Christian jargon, ‘encounter’).

Such a culture within the Church developed initially as a reaction against lifeless Christianity, and arguably has encouraged an honesty in music about lived, felt aspects of the Christian walk. However, it has often gone too far, with doctrine giving way to emotion. The way has therefore been opened for other spirits to counterfeit the work of the Holy Spirit, while true faith is side-lined.

Two extreme but nonetheless influential examples in Christian worship and CCM are hyper-charismatic music associated with the NAR group in America, and music used in the contemplative prayer movement (both mentioned previously). Both of these rely on repetitive rhythms and phrases, atmospheric mood music (referred to as music for ‘soaking’ or ‘meditation’, respectively) and intentionally vague lyrics.

High-profile Christian musicians wield huge influence, which can be a force for good, but can also be used to promote heresy.

The net result, in both camps, is music which draws the listener to switch off their mind to prepare the way for a spiritual encounter,¹⁰ rather than biblical music which should involve our minds as well as our spirits (1 Cor 14:15).

A brief excursion into the Bethel Music website provides some example lyrics:

• “Face to face, falling in / I surrender all again / I fall back into Your arms / I feel Your heart beating against me / Face to face, there’s no space between us”¹¹
  
• “I’m standing on the edge again / I feel Your breath coming on the wind… / It only gets stronger / It only goes deeper / My head’s underwater / but somehow I can finally breathe… / My heart is on fire / and this love is setting me free”¹²
  
• “It all starts with breathing You in / breathing You in / deeply / I’ve been drowning under my skin / no one but You can save me”¹³
  
• “Let the Holy Ghost come so close our hearts explode with your love / Let healing power come like fire and burn in the marrow of my bones… / Open the sky / Come and ride on the songs we sing…”¹⁴
  
• “The waves of your affection keep washing over me… / All those angels / they are swimming in this ocean and they still can find no shore / Day and night / night and day / They keep seeing new sides of your face”¹⁵
  

These are potted examples from one (albeit influential) source, but they show how songs utilising experiential, emotive language and lacking in clear doctrine could (at a push!) be interpreted in the light of Scripture, but could also be interpreted in all sorts of other ways.¹⁶

4. Self

The previous three points are united by a recurring focus on self. While time spent worshipping God undoubtedly leads to great personal blessing, there is a danger that this becomes imbalanced and fleshly, such that times of worship are approached primarily because of what I might receive from God. Contemporary worship music and CCM have, sadly, both imbibed this inward-looking focus on personal blessing and gratification.

Let me illustrate this briefly. The annual worship compilation albums ‘WOW’ collect together each year’s most popular contemporary Christian music. On their 2017 album of 39 tracks, just 7 songs mention the name of Jesus, 5 mention the cross and only 4 mention sin. This same pattern is repeated historically - in fact, the WOW 2015 album, also 39 songs long, boasts just 4 songs that include the name of Jesus, 5 that mention the cross and only one that includes the word ‘sin’.

While time spent worshipping God undoubtedly leads to great personal blessing, there is a danger that this becomes imbalanced and ‘me-orientated’.

Of course, not every Christian song needs to mention the name of Jesus in order to be acceptable (the original lyrics of ‘Amazing Grace’ do not mention any of the above three words either!). But there’s a broader point here: the majority of contemporary Christian music, with its positive messages of personal victory, blessing, revival and overcoming, is in danger of obscuring vital parts of the Gospel. One could easily ingest the majority of modern Christian tunes and conclude that the Good News is simply a matter of accepting that God loves you.

Christian music should rightly make space for songs about the personal and individual. But great discernment is needed to stop this going too far – especially when Western culture is infamous for its inward focus on ‘me, myself and I’.

Conclusion

In writing this study, I have not wanted to ride roughshod over the many good, solid worship songs that are being written today, nor toss away the very idea of CCM. Personally, I think there’s a place for both – and next week I hope to unpack features of good quality Christian music.

But sadly, we live in a culture that is resorting to spectacle in order to distract itself from its own deep spiritual crisis – a culture that has turned inwards to personal feelings and experiences in order to avoid confronting the One True God. Is CCM and even Christian worship music unwittingly aligning itself with this?

I am left with a number of questions, which I will list here as prompts for further discussion:

1. Has the Christian worship and CCM industry imbibed too much of the ‘spirit of the age’ to be redeemable? Should we be looking to other sources of musical inspiration for our worship (e.g. Messianic congregations in Israel)?
   
2. Is there a place for the public testing of Christian songs and/or the public holding of the Christian music industry to account? How might this look?
   
3. How can we be wise with our own consumption of contemporary Christian music, personally and corporately?
   

Next Week: We will finish up the series by looking at what makes for good, biblical Christian music.

Author Bio

Frances is 28 years old and was introduced to both piano and clarinet from early ages. She was classically trained but has dabbled in (and loves) jazz, and sings folk and gospel music regularly with friends. She teaches music privately and has been leading worship in her home church for the past eight years, having played in worship bands since the age of 10. She has a love of music of many different genres and a passion to see the church of God led well in worship.

References

1 See also comments on the biblical role of music made in the first part of this series.

2 These genres overlap, but both stand relatively distinct from the liturgical music of established denominations. The CCM industry grew out of the Jesus Movement in the late 1960s/1970s and has since become a highly commercialised, near-billion-dollar industry that in the USA has outstripped the classical and jazz market combined. It has moved to overlap with ‘worship’ music (i.e. used in church services) much more since the millennium, after suffering something of a decline. Read a brief history here.

3 Read more here.

4 Wilson-Dickson, A, 1992. The Story of Christian Music. Oxford: Lion, p203.

5 Grammys for Best Contemporary Christian Music Song and Album were introduced in 2012.

6 Kill Your (Celebrity Culture) Worship. The Gospel Coalition, 29 January 2016.

7 See coverage here.

8 See here.

9 For more information, please see our ‘Blessing the Church?’ series.

10 I will not go into detail here, but there is considerable research elsewhere about how these two streams represent a deviation into the occult rather than biblical worship. One resource is the Lighthouse Trails Research website.

11 First Love by Jonathan David Helser, 2016.

12 It Only Gets Stronger by Jeremy Riddle and Ran Jackson, 2017.

13 Save Me by Steffany Gretzinger, Amanda Cook and John David Gravitt, 2017.

14 Wrecking Ball by Jonathan David Helser, 2010.

15 Endless Ocean by Jonathan David Helser, 2009.

16 Bethel’s Brian Johnson has gone on record saying that “I honestly think that people freak out too much about whether [worship music] is biblical or not.” Do you agree? 

David Noakes begins his chapter, offering a personal and biblical perspective of renewal.

This article is part of a series, republishing the 1995 classic ‘Blessing the Church?’ (Hill et al). Click here for previous instalments.

The history of Israel tells us that again and again the Hebrew nation, despite the Law, despite the warnings of the prophets, walked in ways of their own choosing and not in the ways of God.

They chose the way of the flesh, the way of self-will and disobedience, in preference to the will of their God; they chose to compromise and to make an accommodation with the spirit of the world in which they lived, to worship not only the God of Israel but also the false gods of the surrounding Gentile nations, and to walk in the ways of the world from which God had called them to be separate.

The final outcome we know: disaster and exile, from which the promised return is only now taking place.

The Church, likewise, in every era of her history has faced the same basic problems and the same moral choice. The pressures and the subtle attractions of the world-system which surrounds God's people confront us daily with the need to distinguish the ways of God from the ways of the world, and to make the choice to walk according to the Spirit and not according to the flesh; to walk in the will of God to the exclusion of the clamouring demands of the flesh in the form of self-will and self-indulgence.

The climate of the present age in which we live is, however, perhaps, the hardest to withstand which the Church has yet encountered.

The Spirit of the Age

In the society of the Western nations, the spirit of this age is one which seeks and demands the instant and the spectacular. The world's heroes are those who display outward charisma; their often morally bankrupt character is regarded as irrelevant. Instant success in the forum of materialism or of entertainment guarantees a man wealth and the status of a celebrity.

The pressures and the subtle attractions of the world-system which surrounds God's people confront us daily with the need to distinguish the ways of God from the ways of the world.

The achievements of electronic circuitry and other scientific advances have made commonplace instantaneous results in many fields of daily activity, and have brought intolerance of all that depends on plodding, painstaking labour to achieve its results.

In this disposable society, enduring results are not necessary; all is ephemeral. Tomorrow we will throwaway yesterday's wonder and get the new and better one which will by then be being offered.

Such attitudes, and the spiritual atmosphere which they engender, bring only death to the church which begins to accept and to embrace them. No longer is it seen as acceptable that “through faith and patience [we] inherit” the promise of God (Heb 6:12); we must have it all now. No longer is the discipline of waiting upon God and waiting for God regarded as relevant, but instead we want to be like the world. We crave for instant and spectacular results.

The spirit of the age has deluded us into thinking that the Church ought to be experiencing heaven on earth, here and now, forgetting the plain teaching of Scripture that this cannot be until the return of Jesus (1 Pet 1:3-7). We are encouraged to live in expectation that all problems should be speedily swept away, that financial hardship and ill-health should be eliminated; to believe in a magic-carpet type of Christianity in which we may rub the Aladdin's lamp and summon forth the genie who will do all our bidding for our comfort and prosperity, forgetting the teaching of Scripture that “We must go through many hardships to enter the kingdom of God” (Acts 14:22).

As Clifford Hill has stated in previous instalments of this series, it was into an age in which this sort of spirit was coming increasingly to hold sway that the charismatic renewal movement was born in the years leading up to 1960. The fear of the Lord was being replaced by contempt and disregard for the moral law contained in his word, which was coming to be seen as an unnecessary restriction upon a society which had never had it so good.

The spirit of the age has deluded us into thinking that the Church ought to be experiencing heaven on earth, here and now, forgetting the plain teaching of Scripture that this cannot be until the return of Jesus.

The British Charismatic Renewal Movement

The beginning of the charismatic renewal movement in Britain can be dated to the conferences convened by Arthur Willis and David Lillie, the first taking place in 1958.

This new move of the Holy Spirit had the potential to revitalise and revolutionise the Church, bringing about whole-hearted repentance, a return to the ways of God as revealed in his word, and a thoroughgoing and radical revolution in church life bringing back a quality of Christian corporate living scarcely seen since the 1st Century. Or, alternatively, it could fall under the influence of the spirit of the age and the ways of the world in which it found itself.

Sadly, the evidence tells us that the latter tendency has largely prevailed. In few places has the self-sacrificing quality of life of the early Church been re-established, and there has been nothing which could be seen as having the character of revival.

In the Church as a whole, numbers have continued to decline, biblical standards of morality have been abandoned wholesale, and the British nation has turned farther and farther away from God, while the Church has embraced the spirit of the world and has been sapped by it of spiritual vision and vitality.

To watch the unfolding of the history of the charismatic renewal movement has been for me a matter of great personal sadness. Having spent the early years following my conversion under the influence of sound evangelical doctrine, a foundation for which I shall ever be grateful to God, I received the baptism in Holy Spirit in 1967 as a result of a sovereign action of the Lord on a train travelling to Brighton to transact some business!

The charismatic renewal that started in Britain in the 1950s had the potential to revitalise and revolutionise the Church.

Following this unlikely-seeming event, I was introduced to the supernatural manifestations of the Holy Spirit, all of which I believe wholeheartedly are not only valid today, but will become of increasing importance to the Church in the days which are to come: days not of comfort, but of pressure; not of dominion, but of conflict and persecution; not of ease, but of the refiner's fire; days of turmoil and upheaval when God will be shaking all that can be shaken, both among the nations of the world and also in the professing Church. 

Days of Preparation

Believing this to be so, I perceive the times in which we are living as being, for the Church, days of preparation. I have come to understand God's purposes in renewing the activity of the Holy Spirit among us as being to strengthen the Church for the days to come, re-establishing our foundations upon Scripture, teaching us again how to live corporately as the early Church did, renewing the closeness and intimacy of our relationship with himself, and empowering us to be fearless and unshakeable witnesses to the truth of his word.

Possibly the most important single purpose of God in this visitation of his Spirit was to renew our understanding, and hence our outworking, of the corporate life of the Body of Christ. The Church has for generations been crippled in her functioning by our Western-style individualistic way of life, which has been such a feature of Protestant Christianity.

Vital though the Reformation was, it brought with it also this disadvantage: rooted in the Renaissance, with its rediscovery of Greek classical thought, philosophy and literature, the Reformation brought into the Protestant Reformed churches a Hellenistic view of life which is profoundly different at many points from that of the Hebrew.

To the Hebrew minds of those who formed the early Church, corporateness was instinctive; it was a concept built from the very beginning into the structure of the Hebrew nation descended from Jacob. Hence to them, the concept of the Church as a corporate entity presented no great problem of adjustment in their thinking; it was easy for them to understand its structure in the light of concepts such as that of the Body of Christ, or the corporate Temple made of living stones. They were able to understand their oneness in Christ in a way which the Greek-thinking mind does not easily grasp.

I believe we need urgently to let God renew our Western way of thinking in this whole matter, for it is only in the context of the commitment to one another which is established by a corporate understanding of the Church as the Body of the Lord Jesus that we shall be able to stand firm and glorify him when the days of testing are upon us.

God's purpose in renewing the activity of the Holy Spirit among us has been to strengthen the Church for the days to come.

It is significant that the chief purposes of the five-fold ministry appointments of Ephesians 4, and of the manifestations of the Holy Spirit specified in 1 Corinthians 12-14, are to build up the corporate Body of Christ in such a way as to bring strength and unity and to equip us as members of that Body to be able to carry out the purposes of Jesus, the Head.

By the late 1990s, more than 35 years after those earliest beginnings of the charismatic renewal movement, this had really not happened. There were a few notable exceptions, but most of the Church had made little or no progress towards the corporate unity in Christ which brings forth the quality of Body-life of which we read in the early chapters of the book of Acts.

Ishmael or Isaac

In the mid-1970s, during a time of heart-searching and of questioning over the developments of the newly-introduced doctrines of discipling and shepherding, which had operated to destroy a beautiful work which God had been doing among a group of deeply-committed Christians, I sought God for enlightenment and found that I was being drawn in the scriptures to the account in Genesis of the activity of Abraham in bringing forth first Ishmael and then Isaac.

I began to realise that embedded in that story was a great spiritual principle. Both Ishmael and Isaac were born as a result of Abraham's faith in believing God's promise that from his offspring would come blessing to the nations of the earth. The initiative in the whole matter came from God; of that there was no doubt. Abraham's response was one of faith. Yet the end result brought not only fulfilment and joy; but also tragedy and sorrow, heartbreak and strife, and an enmity which continues to cause conflict in the Middle East to this very day between the descendants of Ishmael and those of Isaac.

Why did this mixed result emerge from Abraham's belief in a promise of God which was intended only for blessing and not for evil? The reason lies in Abraham's failure to understand that the Lord who had made the promise had also already chosen the method of its outworking.

When we receive revelation from God of his intentions and purposes, there are two possible ways of responding: the way of the flesh, which seeks to work out God's purpose as quickly as possible in the ways of human wisdom and ability, or the way of the spirit, which hears from God but then waits for him to reveal further his chosen time and means of fulfilling his intentions.

Abraham, then, was faced with the option of these two different types of response to the revelation of God's purpose. God was going to do what he had said, and he was going to do it in his own time and in his own way; but how was Abraham going to co-operate? Would he “by faith and patience inherit the promise”? Would he display the maturity which he later showed when he was willing to sacrifice Isaac on Mount Moriah, believing that God would still fulfil his word even if humanly that had been made impossible? Would he be willing to wait in faith for a further 14 years until God's appointed time for the birth of Isaac, the promised heir?

Abraham did not wait. How much strife and suffering could have been avoided if only he had! Instead, he and Sarah applied their human wisdom and understanding and decided how, since Sarah was barren, they could accomplish the purposes of God and bring his promise to fruition. They decided how best to help God out in the doing of his own work.

When we receive revelation from God of his intentions and purposes, there are two possible ways of responding: the way of the flesh, or the way of the spirit.

In spiritual terms, they were deciding how the flesh could achieve the Spirit's work. But this is by definition impossible: nothing which is of the flesh, of man's self-will, can ever please God or accomplish his will. What Abraham and Sarah were planning was an unholy mixture of the revealed will of God with the activities of the flesh in seeking to bring the revelation into being.

At Sarah's suggestion, Abraham acted on human initiative and sought, successfully, to produce offspring from the body of Hagar, Sarah's maidservant. This offspring was, of course, Ishmael, who was to be the root from which sprang the Arab nations; but he was not the heir whom God had promised.

Hagar was Egyptian. We must not miss the significance of this, for in Scripture Egypt is a type of the world-system out of which the Christian has been saved. Abraham, acting in the flesh, had employed the ways which the world could offer in seeking to carry out God's purpose but it was to no avail. Ishmael was not the fulfilment of God's promise. When the fulfilment, Isaac, was manifested 14 years later, he would come as the result of a miraculous sovereign work of the Spirit of God. God would not use the methods of either fleshly wisdom and endeavour, nor would the ways of the world be involved in any way. It is always so with God.

He would visit Abraham and Sarah in their extreme old age and by the power of his Spirit, having waited until humanly it was beyond possibility, he would bring forth Isaac from their marital union.

A Parallel in Today’s Church

From this account, contained in Genesis 15-18 and 21, I began to understand that God was speaking of a parallel which was and is taking place within the charismatic renewal movement.

Ishmael stands for that which men's wisdom and activity can bring forth in the flesh by way of fulfilling God's purpose. Isaac, however, represents the true fulfilment of the Lord's revealed intentions, a work which his Spirit alone can accomplish, for which men must wait for God to act at his own time and in his own way.

The principle embodied in the account of how first Abraham produced Ishmael and then God brought forth Isaac remains true today. God asks us to cooperate with him in the outworking of his purpose through our exercise of faith, patience and humble obedience, refusing to fall into the trap of supplementing or even replacing God's work by our own human efforts.

The alternative course is that of human endeavour, prompted by a degree of awareness of what it is that God purposes to do, but with insufficient knowledge of his chosen method and too much haste to await his further revelation.

The first way of responding brings blessing and life.

The second has within it from the beginning the seeds of its own demise because that which is born of human striving and wisdom is of no value in accomplishing the purposes of God. To seek to organise God's work for him leads eventually to failure, disillusionment and confusion, and finally even to deception and error.

God asks us to co-operate with him in the outworking of his purposes – not to supplement or even replace his work by our own human efforts.

I believe that since the 1970s, God has been indicating that within the charismatically-renewed churches we have in various different ways been producing Ishmael and not Isaac. God gave in the late 1950s to David Lillie and Arthur Wallis a vision of how the fresh visitation of the Holy Spirit was intended to bring about a return of the Church to a structure and a way of life which we find revealed in the pages of the New Testament, particularly in the books of Acts and Ephesians.

It was of a corporate body of God's people functioning together in such a way that through them, by the powerful working of the Holy Spirit, would be brought glory to God in the Church (Eph 3:21) and a revelation to the world of the true character of the Lord Jesus; a body of people separated as the early Church was, neither relying upon the world nor compromising with its ways. That was the vision which was communicated to the key leaders who attended those early conferences.

Sadly, what we now see is so far from the purity of vision as to be almost unrecognisable, and the reason is that the ways of the world have infiltrated deeply into the charismatic renewal movement. We have been invaded in a variety of ways by the spirit of the age in which we live.

Next week: How the world has infiltrated the Church.