Is what happens in charismatic churches a genuine move of the Holy Spirit, or is most of it emotionalism and crowd psychology dressed up as God?

• M

  Maya1w ago

  I was raised Southern Baptist and thought ALL of it was fake. Then I watched my mother — a woman who does not cry, ever — fall to her knees weeping at an Assemblies of God service and say afterward she felt something she couldn't explain. I still don't know what to do with that. I'm not ready to call it fake anymore.

  187Reply
• N_

  Nina _x1w ago

  i grew up pentecostal and i will be honest with you. i faked tongues for three years because i was embarrassed that i hadnt received it yet and everyone around me had. nobody ever questioned it. nobody ever tested it. that should tell you something about the accountability in those spaces.

  178Reply
• R

  Ravi1w ago

  My husband had a grand mal seizure in a charismatic service and three people laid hands on him and rebuked the demon. Nobody called 911 for almost four minutes. He was fine eventually but I want you to think about what the stakes are when we can't distinguish a spiritual experience from a medical emergency.

  162Reply
• T_

  Theo _x1w ago

  Been a Pentecostal pastor for 22 years. The most Spirit-filled person I have ever known in my life was a quiet Presbyterian woman who read her Bible every morning at 5am and served at a soup kitchen every Thursday without fail for thirty years. She never spoke in tongues once. I had to rethink a lot after meeting her.

  155Reply
• N_

  Noah _x1w ago

  My grandmother spoke in tongues privately every morning of her life from age 19 until she died at 86. She was the most patient, generous, Christ-like person I have ever been near. I don't need a theological framework that explains her. I need one that has room for her.

  148Reply
• S

  Sam1w ago

  Crowd psychology. That's it. That's the whole comment. Loud music + dim lights + an emotionally charged speaker + people who WANT an experience = you'll get one every single time. You don't need God for any of that. You need a good PA system.

  143Reply
• R9

  Ravi 921w ago

  Gold dust. GOLD DUST. You people believe gold dust appears on people's hands and that's the Holy Spirit at work and you want me to take this seriously as a theological position. I genuinely cannot.

  134Reply
• HS

  Hana S.1w ago

  That last question is the most useful one in this entire comment section and it will probably get the fewest responses.

  121Reply
• RS

  Riley S.1w ago

  i asked someone at my old charismatic church to interpret the tongues being spoken and they said they couldn't because it wasn't meant for interpretation it was a private prayer language. i went home and read 1 corinthians 14 and the next sunday i started looking for a different church.

  119Reply
• MS

  Morgan S.1w ago

  The fact that 1 Corinthians 12-14 EXISTS is kind of hard to explain if all these gifts stopped in 70 AD. Like Paul wrote an entire chapter on how to ORDER the gifts in a church service, not how to know they're all about to expire. The cessationist timeline requires some serious hermeneutical gymnastics.

  112Reply
• D

  Diego1w ago

  As someone who left a charismatic church after a very painful experience with so-called 'prophetic ministry' that caused real damage to my family, I want to say: the harm is real. The people who stay in those environments and get spiritually abused are real. Dismiss that at your peril.

  107Reply
• Q

  Quinn1w ago

  Here's my problem with a lot of the charismatic world: the focus drifts from Christ to the EXPERIENCE. I've been in services where Jesus was barely mentioned but the Spirit was invoked constantly. That's backwards. John 16:14 says the Spirit glorifies the Son. If He's the star of the show, something is wrong.

  104Reply
• P

  Priya1w ago

  Not every manifestation is from God, not every manifestation is fake, and the third option — that some of it is genuinely demonic — is one almost nobody in these conversations wants to entertain. 1 John 4:1 says TEST the spirits. Not assume. Not dismiss. TEST.

  96Reply
• F

  Feli1w ago

  Okay genuine question for the charismatics in this thread: what would CONVINCE you that a particular manifestation was NOT the Holy Spirit? What's your falsifiability standard? If the answer is nothing, that's not faith, that's a closed epistemic loop.

  93Reply
• R

  Riley1w ago

  The global church doesn't look like a Reformed seminary. Most Christians alive today are in the Global South — Nigeria, Brazil, South Korea, the Philippines — and in those places the miraculous is ASSUMED not debated. The Western cessationist tradition is a minority position on a global scale. That doesn't make it wrong but it should give us pause.

  91Reply
• Q

  Quinn1w ago

  To the person mocking gold dust — I agree that specific claim is dubious and I'm charismatic. We do ourselves no favors by defending every single weird thing that happens in every single church. Discernment isn't cessationism. We need more of it, not less.

  89Reply
• J9

  Jordan 921w ago

  If you're a cessationist and you've never seriously sat with the possibility that you might be wrong — that God might actually be doing things you've trained yourself not to see — I'd ask you to spend some time with that. Not to flip your theology overnight. Just to hold it with a little more humility. Because the alternative is that you'll dismiss real works of God because they don't fit your system.

  85Reply
• P

  Priya1w ago

  I'm a licensed counselor and a Christian. Emotional contagion is a documented psychological phenomenon. So is religious ecstasy producing genuine neurological responses. The question of whether God is BEHIND those responses is theological, not empirical. But let's not pretend we can't explain the mechanism. We very much can.

  83Reply
• M

  Marco1w ago

  You want a 'confidently wrong' take? Here it is: Cessationism is functionally a form of practical deism. If you believe God exists but will not act supernaturally in your life or church, what exactly are you praying for? Comfort? Feelings? At some point the theology has consequences.

  77Reply
• Q

  Quinn1w ago

  I visited a charismatic church with my girlfriend and I am not a believer. I watched a woman in front of me go completely rigid and fall backward. The people catching her seemed totally prepared. The pastor kept going. Didn't even blink. That level of normalization of extreme physical behavior in a public setting is unsettling to me regardless of what causes it.

  73Reply
• R

  Reese1w ago

  Acts 2. Acts 10. Acts 19. The Spirit fell on people dramatically, repeatedly, across different communities and cultures in the early church. The burden of proof is on the CESSATIONIST to show me where in Scripture God said He was done doing that. Give me the verse. I'm waiting.

  71Reply
• J

  Jordan1w ago

  Hebrews 2:4 says God bore witness 'by signs and wonders and various miracles and gifts of the Holy Spirit distributed according to His will.' According to HIS will. Not according to our theological system. Maybe He distributes them when and where He chooses, including right now, and we should be humble about that.

  67Reply
• L

  Leo1w ago

  I've been a continuationist my whole adult life and I'll say this: the worst spiritual abuse I've personally witnessed happened in hyper-charismatic spaces where leaders claimed special revelation and used it as a control mechanism. That's not a reason to deny the gifts. It IS a reason to demand rigorous accountability around them. Elder boards matter. Doctrine matters. Order matters. Paul said so.

  63Reply
• M

  Maya1w ago

  Warfield's cessationism was largely constructed to argue against Roman Catholic miracles. That's the historical origin of the argument. Whether you find the argument convincing after knowing that origin is your call, but let's at least be honest about why it developed when it did.

  61Reply
• R

  Reese1w ago

  okay but can we separate the charismatic movement as a whole from the prosperity-adjacent televangelist circus because they are NOT the same thing. my church is charismatic and we feed 400 families a week, we preach expository scripture, and yes sometimes people get emotional during worship. the strawman some of yall are arguing against isn't us.

  58Reply
• M

  Morgan1w ago

  The response to abuses in charismatic circles is not to throw out every supernatural claim. It's to apply the biblical tests: Does it exalt Christ? Does it match Scripture? Does it produce love, holiness, fruit? If yes — receive it carefully. If no — reject it clearly. That's not complicated it's just work most of us don't want to do.

  54Reply
• R

  Ravi1w ago

  If the Holy Spirit is the same yesterday today and forever why would He stop doing miracles? God doesn't get tired. The idea that He just... powered down after the canon closed is a theological convenience not a biblical doctrine.

  49Reply
• J

  Jordan1w ago

  Hard cessationist here. The apostolic gifts were SIGNS authenticating the apostles' message. Once the canon was complete and the apostolic era ended, the authenticating signs ended with them. This isn't arbitrary — it's a coherent theological position with serious historical scholarship behind it. Warfield didn't make it up.

  44Reply
• J

  Jamie1w ago

  Nope. Hard disagree with the whole framing. 'Emotionalism vs. Holy Spirit' is a false binary. God made our emotions. He can use them. The question is whether the emotional experience is tethered to truth. Untethered emotion is dangerous. Emotion responding to the reality of who God is? That's called worship.

  38Reply
• C

  Casey1w ago

  both sides spend so much energy arguing about this and meanwhile people are leaving the faith entirely because nobody told them the basics. like can we get the gospel right before we fight about whether the shaking is real

  29Reply

More debates people can't stop arguing about