a reasonable mystic: October 2006

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Rhonda Hughey - Three Doors

A year or so ago I went to the YWAM base in Melbourne, Australia to hear Rhonda Hughey speak. What i heard was inspiring. Here is a woman who, while being a leader with a global perspective on the church, at the same time sees the preeminent importance of a truly intimate relationship with Jesus. I want to quote to you what she says in the introduction to her book, Desperate for His Presence: God's Design to Transform Your Life and Your City.

In a declining culture, the church cannot fully recover the presence of God
in her midst apart from the catalyst of a true revival from heaven. We are
living in an important hour of history! God is challenging the church's
self-centered identity and shifting our mindsets and ineffective methodologies.
He is inviting us to respond to one of the greatest challenges we have ever
faced - to return to our first love and to step out of our compromised church
culture into His kingdom!

Do you hear the message here? Instead of being focussed on ourselves, or even on the church, we need to expand our horizon and see that the Kingdom is the true reality. Hughey goes on to speak about three doors that the Lord has placed before us:

In order to fulfill the purposes of God for our cities, we must hear what the Spirit is saying to the church and be obedient to His voice. Isaiah prophesied: "Pass through, pass through the gates! Prepare the way for the people. build up, build up the highway! Remove the stones. Raise a banner for the nations" (Isa 62:10 NIV). The Lord is issuing an invitation to His church to pass through a threshold into the reality of His kingdom. He is opening three "gates" or doorways before us.

The first door is the Door of Intimacy. Scripture contains
two pictures of this door. The first is found in the Song of Solomon: "I sleep,
but my heart is awake; it is the voice of my beloved! He knocks, saying, 'Open
for me, my sister, my love, my dove, my perfect one'" (5:2). A second picture is
found in the book of Revelation: "Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If
anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with
him, and he with Me" (Rev 3;20). Jesus is knocking at the door of His church,
longing for fellowship and intimacy with His beloved. This door must be opened
before the church can become like Jesus. We can only become what we are
beholding in prayer and intimate fellowship. By fixing our gaze on Him, we can
be transformed into His image, from glory to glory.

The second door is a Door of Hope. In Hosea we see the response of God to His
wandering bride: "Behold, i will alure her, [I] will bring her into the
wilderness, and speak comfort to her. I will give her her vineyards from there,
and the Valley of Achor as a door of hope; she shall sing there, as in
the days of her youth, as in the day when she came up from the land of Egypt"
(Hos 2:14-15). The Lord is opening the door to invite His people out of their
captivity and compromise and into their true destiny. It's a door that leads us
out of the Valley of trouble and into renewed covenant with God. This door will
lead the church from her compromise into betrothal and fruitfulness.

Finally, the last door being opened is the Door of Heaven.
In the book of Revelation John writes, "After these things I looked, and behold,
a door standing open in heaven. And the first voice which i heard was like a
trumpet speaking with me, saying, 'Come up here, and I will show you things
which must take place after this'" (Rev 4:1). The Lord, who invited John to come
up higher for the heavenly perspective, is also inviting His church, His
beloved, to "come up higher" and sit with Him around His throne. The invitation
lifts us out of our compromised state and into the revelation of heaven's
perspective. With heaven's perspective, we gain revelation regarding our
identity and destiny in God. This door will help the church realize her
transforming purpose.

Is this not the same perspective that was being sought by those called "mystics" since the beginning of the church, beginning with John, the beloved disciple?

Labels: presence of God, Rhonda Hughey

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Evelyn Underhill - Demystifying Mysticism

I've begun reading some of the works of Evelyn Underhill, an Anglican writer on mysticism, a novelist, a metaphysical poet, and a student of Baron Friedrich von Hügel. Early in the Twentieth Century she wrote many books on mysticism, some of which go a long way to demystify it (if you'll pardon the pun).

In the first chapter of Mystics of the Church she gives a useful description of the words "mystic" and "mystical":

"Mystic" and "mysticism" are words which meet us constantly in all books that deal with religious experience; and indeed in many books which do not treat of religion at all. They are generally so vaguely and loosely used that they convey no precise meaning to our minds. and have now come to be perhaps the most ambigous terms in the whole vocabulary of religion. Any vague sense of spiritual things, any sort of symbolism, any hazy allegorical painting, any poetry which deals with the soul - worse than that, all sorts of superstitions and magical practices - may be, and often are, decribed as "mystical". A word so generalized seems almost to have lost its meaning; and indeed, not one of these uses of "Mysticism" is correct, though the persons to whom they are applied may in some instances be mystics.

Mysticism, according to its historical and psychological definitions, is the direct intuition or expereince of God; and a mystic is a person who has, to a greater or less degree, such a direct experience - one whose religion and life are centred, not merely on an accepted belief or practice, but on that which he regards as first-hand personal knowledge. In Greek religion, from which the word comes to us, the myste were those initiates of the "mysteries" who were believed to have received the vision of the god, and with it a new and higher life. When the Christian Church adopted this term it adopted, too, this its original meaning. The Christian mystic therefore is one for whom God and Christ are not merely objects of belief, but living facts experimentally known at first-hand; and mysticism for him becomes, in so far as he responds to its demands, a life based on this conscious communion with God. It is found in experience that this communion, in all its various forms and degrees, is always a communion of love; and, in its perfection, so intimate and all-pervading that the word "union" describes it best. When St. Augustine said, "My life shall be a real life, being wholly full of Thee," he described in these words the ideal of a true Christian mysticism.

So, there is nothing too esoteric here, nor magical, nor superstitious - just Christians desiring to be filled with God and to know him intimately - which is exactly what I find held out to me in the Gospels and the letters of the early church!

Labels: Evelyn Underhill, intimacy, mysticism, prayer, presence of God

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Praying Hypertext

How often, when you are reading an online document or webpage, do you find a link that leads to a related term? You follow the link, fully intending to return, but you find more links. Gradually you diverge further and further from your original quest or task, until eventually you can no longer remember what you wanted. Even if you did, you might be hard pressed to find it again. And, what do you do with all the marvellous things you discovered along the way?

Does this remind you of many so called "prayer meetings"? Each person prays their list, while the next person desperately tries to find something they can pray which hasn't yet been mentioned, at the same time trying to listen to the prayer. Or, you may want to add to a prayer, but someone gets in first and changes the subject! And so it goes on, around the world and back again a few times. If you wanted to agree with something and try to drag the prayer back to a previous point, you are just sure that people are thinking, "Where has he or she been?"

For me, often the only thing lacking in such meetings is prayer itself!

A sure sign, for me, that a group is listening to God when they pray is that there will be only one agenda, and the prayers that are prayed will not be those that the participants had in mind when they came to the meeting. After all, are we wanting to pray God's own heart, or do we just want to look spiritual? Who is fooled by this? Cetrtainly not God!

Labels: prayer

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Charismatic Mysticism

In my last post I mentioned the more obvious mystical stream in the Evangelical church, based on the contemplative tradition. Much less recognised, however, and one of the primary motivations for my explorations, is the clear mystical content of the Charismatic Movement. This movement, following on after the original Pentecostal Movement of the early 20th Century, introduced the direct, tangible experience of God into the lives of many otherwise conservative, evangelical believers, who would probably neither have, nor desire, contact with anything they thought of as mystical.

Evangelicals have long had a suspicion, even a fear, of mystics and mysticism, seeing their teachings and practices as closer to Eastern religions than true Christianity. Some of the old mystics appearing to engage with the occult did not help either. The modern equivalent is seen in the New Age Movement. Yet, when we look at the goals of many mystics and those of many charismatics, they are identical - only the point of origin of their journey differs.

Consider my own story. I was raised in a Fundamentalist break-away from a conservative Baptist church. Eventually I migrated back to that Baptist church, and finally my wife and I became its pastors. Before we met we independently found the baptism of the Holy Spirit, largely due to a total dissatisfaction with the absence of real spiritual experience in our earlier training. Then together we embarked on learning, then practicing, and then teaching healing prayer ministry (which was earlier called prayer counselling), intercession and spiritual warfare, and operating in prophetic gifts. Of course, along the way we had to learn how to hear and recognise the voice of God (and other spirits), and had many experiences of hearing, seeing and feeling God's presence in ourselves and on behalf of others. For us, the Vineyard Conferences in Melbourne, the Toronto Blessing of the 1990s, Intercessors for Melbourne, Tom Marshall seminars, and the prayer ministry courses of Elijah House, Ellel Ministries, Charles Kraft's Deep Healing Ministries, and Wholeness through Christ were part of God's great training ground.

While many people appear to see this charismatic movement as a new thing, I have long considered that there is an unbroken stream, which runs right through church history, of people with similar experiences of the power of the presence of God in the believer. It is usually manifested in small groups of people held suspect, or even ostracised by the rest of the church. Some of what they did was indeed heretical, but this is possibly inevitable among pioneers of unpopular views who are willing to risk reputation, and even life, in the pursuit of some reality.

I am sure we will take a closer look at some of these groups in our further explorations of being a reasonable mystic.

A few of the books related to this post:

Vineyard and John Wimber:

John Wimber, Power Evangelism. Trafalgar Square Publishing, 2000.
John Wimber, Power Healing. HarperSanFrancisco, 1991.

Toronto Blessing:

Guy Chevreau, Catch the Fire: The Toronto Blessing an Experience of Renewal and Revival. London: Marshall Pickering, 1995.
Dave Roberts, The Toronto Blessing. Eastbourne: Kingsway Publications,1994.

Tom Marshall:

Tom Marshall, Living in the Freedom of the Spirit: Becoming the Person God Intended You to Be. Tonbridge, Kent: Sovereign World, 2002. [Was Free Indeed!, Sovereign World, 1983.]

Elijah House and the Sandfords:

John and Paula Sandford, Elijah Among Us: Understanding and Responding to God's Prophets Today. Grand rapids, MI: Chosen Books , 2002.
John and Paula Sandford, The Elijah Task. Tulsa, OK: Victory House, 1979.
John and Paula Sandford, Healing the Wounded Spirit. Tulsa, OK: Victory House, 1985.
John and Paula Sandford, Prophets, Healers and the Emerging Church. Shippensburg, PA: Destiny Image, 2003.
John and Paula Sandford, The Transformation of the Inner Man. Tulsa, OK: Victory House, 1982.
R. Loren Sandford, Wounded Warriors: Surviving Seasons of Stress. Tulsa, OK: Victory House, 1987. (This is now out of print but the material has been incorporated into the following book)
R. Loren Sandford, Burnout : Renewal in the Wilderness. Concrete, Washington: Exanimo Corporation, 1998.

Ellel Ministries:

Peter Horrobin, Healing Through Deliverance, Vol 1: The Biblical Basis. Chosen Books, 2003.
Peter Horrobin, Healing Through Deliverance, Vol 2: The Practical Ministry. Chosen Books, 2003.

Deep Healing Ministries and Dr. Charles Kraft:

Charles H. Kraft, Christianity with Power: Your Worldview and Your Experience of the Supernatural. Ann Arbor, MI: Servant Publications, 1989.
Charles H. Kraft, Confronting Powerless Christianity: Evangelicals and the Missing Dimension. Grand Rapids, MI: Chosen Books, 2002.
Charles H. Kraft, Deep Wounds, Deep Healing: Discovering the Vital Link Between Spiritual Warfare and Inner Healing. Vine Books, 2004.
Charles H. Kraft, Defeating Dark Angels: Breaking Demonic Oppression in the Believer's Life. Tonbridge, Kent: Sovereign World, 1993.
Charles H. Kraft, The Rules of Engagement: Understanding the Principles That Govern the Spiritual Battles in Our Lives. Wipf & Stock, 2005.

Intercession and Spiritual Warfare:

Cindy Jacobs, Possessing the Gates of the Enemy, Third Edition, Revised with Study Guide: A Training Manual for Militant Intercession. Grand Rapids, MI: Chosen Books, 1991.

More books later.

Labels: charismatic, mysticism

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Defining Christian Mysticism

First, let me apologise for the disjointed order of these posts, although I shouldn't need to apologise - blogging gives an author the freedom to post items as they come to mind. The reader must wait in anticipation to see if and when some order emerges from the heap. Why should I deprive anyone of that adventure?

Today I plan to begin discovering what mysticism is, and I will begin with a definition from Wikipedia:

Mysticism from the Greek μυστικός (mystikos) "an initiate" (of the Eleusinian Mysteries, μυστήρια (mysteria) meaning "initiation") is the pursuit of achieving communion or identity with, or conscious wareness of, ultimate reality, the divine, spiritual truth, or God through direct experience, intuition, or insight; and the belief that such experience is an important source of knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. Traditions may include a belief in the literal existence of realities beyond empirical perception, or a belief that a true human perception of the world trancends logical reasoning or intellectual comprehension. A person delving in these areas may be called a Mystic.

The term "mysticism" is often used to refer to beliefs which go beyond
the purely exoteric practices of mainstream religions, while still being
related to or based in a mainstream religious doctrine. For example, Kabbalah is a significant mystical movement within Judaism, Sufism is a significant mystical movement within Islam, however Gnosticism can refer to either a mystical movement within Christianity or as various
mystical sects which arose out of Christianity. Some have argued that Christianity itself was a mystical sect that arose out of Judaism. While Eastern religion tend to find the concept of mysticism redundant, non-traditional knowledge and ritual are considered as Esotericism, for example Buddhism's Vajrayana. Vedanta is considered the mystical branch of Hinduism.

My only interest is in Christian mysticism, so I will give the Wikipedia definition of this:

Mysticism is the philosophy and practice of a direct experience of God. Christian mysticism is traditionally pursued through the practice of the disciplines of prayer (including meditation and contemplation), fasting (including other forms of abstinence and self-denial), and alms-giving, service to others, as discussed by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7). Other forms of mysticism in general include participation in ecstatic worship and the use of entheogens, the latter not being associated with the mainstream of Christian spirituality. Christians believe that God dwells in Christians through the Holy Spirit, and therefore all Christians can experience God directly.

Without needing to accept that these definitions by the unknown Wikipedia authors are the be-all-and-end-all of truth, one point immediately becomes clear. If mysticism includes "the pursuit of achieving communion ... with, or conscious awareness of, ... God through direct experience, intuition, or insight; and the belief that such experience is an important source of knowledge, understanding, and Wisdom", and if "Christians believe that God dwells in Christians through the Holy Spirit, and therefore all Christians can experience God directly", then all Christians can and, I contend, should be mystics!

Of course, there is at least one growing mystical movement in the Protestant church, alongside the mystical elements of more Catholic and Orthodox traditions, which never went away. This is typically expressed in an exploration of the contemplative traditions, and perhaps accounts for the fact that so many Protestant, and even Evangelical pastors now have Roman Catholic spiritual directors. The movement is typified by such organisations as Renovaré, a Christian renewal para-Church organization founded by Quaker Richard Foster in 1988. There are many other signs and centres of this stream.

Some of the resources of this stream have been useful to us in our teaching people how to hear God's voice, as can be seen on our listening2god website.

Some Renovare resources: