Trouble in River City!

Image from  Wikipedia

        Remember the movie "The Music Man"? Remember how the main character, Howard Hill comes into town and gets folks riled up about their kids playing pool? Remember how he uses this technique to scare up sales for his phony band instrument business? Do we do that same kind of thing today? Do we listen to half-truths or even full-on lies and in the end, miss something really important?

        Let's take the song where Howard starts the con. It's called "Ya Got Trouble". But I'm going to put my own spin on it:

Well, if so my friends,

Ya got trouble,

Right here in River City!

With a capital "T"

And that rhymes with "P"

And that stands for Pentecostal.

We've surely got trouble!

Right here in River City!

Remember the Maine, Plymouth Rock and the Golden Rule!

Oh, we've got trouble.

We're in terrible, terrible trouble.

Oh yes, we got trouble, trouble, trouble!

With a "T"! Gotta rhyme it with "C"!

And that stands for Charismatic!!!

        Now I'm not poking fun at Pentecostals or Charismatics. I am trying to show how easy it is to spread fear and doubt about something that we don't understand. This was part of my problem during my coming home time. My wife and I didn't see eye-to-eye when it came to all things spiritual. I felt like I knew more because I had grown up in a church family while she had not. However, she had had a Charismatic revival experience as a teenager and had always been seeking a return to that experience. The problem, at that time in our lives, we didn't have the vocabulary to explain or understand each other's spiritual experiences. So she couldn't tell me she had a "Charismatic" or "Pentecostal" a-ha. If she had, I could have googled it to find out what those words meant. I took her "difference of opinion" to mean her worship preference. And so the worship wars came to the Sommerville household.

        I was from the traditional camp, while my wife and daughters seemed to prefer the contemporary flavor. Of course, mine was better because it was mine. But then my wife started to church hop. I couldn't understand how one "contemporary" service could be any better (or worse) than any other. Remember, though, I didn't have the vocabulary to understand that what she was seeking wasn't a performance style, but a spiritual experience. To be fair, she didn't truly understand this either. She just knew that the churches she visited were not like the one she had experienced as a youth.

        To confuse matters even more, my understanding (at the time) of the words Pentecostal and Charismatic didn't help, either. I didn't even bother to look them up in the dictionary, but instead, used a poorly understood cultural context to define the meanings. Pentecostals, in my mind, handled snakes and drank poison. So I really didn't want to be around people like that. Charismatics were simply charming and popular people. Again, poorly understood definitions, which in turn, framed my categorization of groups of Christians.

        Outside of the worship wars came personal worry. I worried that there was something dysfunctional in my family because we couldn't go to church together. (There's that dreaded phrase, did you hear it? Let me repeat it for you: "go to church".) I also worried about my family because we didn't worship together. Not to mention, that no one, but my son and I were in Bible studies or Sunday School classes. Then along came a good friend and retired pastor, Bill Krieg. Bill told me to not worry about my family, because as he put it, "They're worshiping somewhere". He reinforced to me that being the spiritual head of my family didn't necessarily mean that we "went to church together". Thanks, Bill. Your advice calmed my soul and has allowed me to be more understanding of my family's differences.

        Another difference that I've touched on before, I'm an intellectual. A "head" person. My wife is a creative. A "heart"  person. For me, I first had to wrap my head around my spirituality. I had to think about it, analyze it, reverse engineer it before it could be completely processed. Even then, my "understanding" rarely made it to my heart. There was no "emotionalism" for me. My wife, on the other hand, didn't spend too much time "thinking" about her spirituality - she just felt it. And of course, I frequently dismissed her experience because I couldn't understand how she could just "feel" things without having to first "understand" them. This point right here, folks, was the source of many a late-night argument.

        Because of my wife's spiritual feelings, she started to attend a church that I thought was a bit "cultish". Now, remember, my wife and I didn't have a common vocabulary to share. She couldn't explain her heart experience so that my brain could comprehend, and my brain couldn't grasp her feelings. Somehow, I'm reminded of the old Reese's candy commercial: "You got your chocolate in my peanut butter…" But I digress.

        This new church believed in things like speaking in tongues and physical healings. And here is where my brain melted down. I grew up and was currently part of a tradition that didn't teach things like tongues and healing. Not to say that Methodists don't believe, we just don't talk about it a lot. It's a little too "far out" for us. Let me demonstrate with an example of how I process different ideas.

1. I could read or watch a work of fiction and for the duration of the story, suspend my disbelief in order to enjoy the book or movie. For example, I could read "The Lord of the Rings" or watch "Harry Potter" and then, knowing they were works of fiction, still say "Isn't that neat. Wouldn't it be cool if I could really wave a wand and…" However, in the end, after the book was completed and the movie was over, I knew they were just stories, "make-believe", and not real.
2. I could read all of the bible stories about miracles. Things that seemed so magical, but somehow, I could believe that while they happened in Bible times, they just don't happen anymore. They certainly don't happen for me. So they must not be real. At least not today.
3. I could watch a Christian Charismatic Show, like "It's Supernatural with Sid Roth" and enjoy the conversations about angels, healings, and miracles. Yet somehow, it was almost like reading fiction. It was cool that someone else was having the experiences. But I wasn't, so, therefore, it wasn't the reality for me.

Tied to the way I process reading fiction or the Bible, was that many of the modern miracle workers were also TV evangelists. So I automatically dismissed them as con-artists and hucksters.

        It's really easy to dismiss what I don't understand. Or even what I don't want to understand. I've studied my Methodist history and have always enjoyed the stories about John and Charles Wesley and how they became defiant of the Church of England and started a rapidly growing following, now known as, the Methodist Church. I, like many of my Methodist friends, have repeated the story of John's heartwarming experience, without really understanding what a "heartwarming" experience is. By the way, did you know that Charles had a similar heartwarming experience? Did you know he had his before John's? Another story from my Methodist tradition was that John was refused his own pastorate. I had always thought it was because he was just so into things that the Church didn't want to do, like feeding the hungry and visiting the sick and imprisoned. But now, I wonder if his heartwarming experience wasn’t more of a Pentecostal experience? I wonder if the church wasn't trying to quietly show him out the door because he was "different"?

        Next time, I want to explore the Wesley boys and what I think is a well-kept secret of my Methodist heritage.

~~Ken