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Trinitarian tongues and interpretation
I attended a trinitarian Pentecostal church yesterday where there was a tongues and interpretion at the end of the worship portion of the service. The church is a medium sized church of about 600 people and has been around for about 90 years. They are self ascribed "Pentecasual" in that they don't demonstrate alot of public displays of what is normally considered Pentecostal style worship and prayer. While I've seen speaking in tongues, the practice of spiritual gifts and such in a small group or one-on-one setting I've not seen it in the public service. So it was a out of the ordinary for this tongues and interpretation to happen as it did. I say all that to set the context so that it is understood that there isn't pressure on people to 'perform' or act 'spiritual' as I've seen in some Pentecostal circles which seems to produce some wack jobs and many 'false' events. If it happens in this church it is generally the real deal.
The lady who spoke out was an elderly lady with a lovely German accent. She rolled her R's and everything. It was pretty cool. She spoke the tongues and then the pastor had everyone sit down and explained to visitors what was going on. He talked about the importance of this gift and asked for people to speak up of they felt they had the interpretation. Nobody volunteered. He sensed that the elderly lady had the interpretation and asked her if she had the message and she did and spoke it out clearly and strongly. It was very powerful, and everything she said was biblically based as far as content and it had an edifying and exhortive effect on the congregation. Ironically the title of the sermon was "Pentecost - The most important event of the church!". It was obviously a God moment for the church and not contrived.
As one whose roots are in OPism I tuned into something that most of them probably didn't realize. As she spoke it was clear that it was the Holy Spirit speaking and she referred a couple of times to "Jesus" and "The Father" in the third person and it was clear they were menat to understood as an something other than than her or the one speaking through her. Had this happened in an OP church it would have been disconcerting for many OP's present as it obviously had a trinitarian perspective.
Ok, so here are my questions. First of all what is your reaction to this spiritual event happening in a trinitarian church? Second, what do you think about the trinitarian flavor of the message? A follow-up to that would be how much do you think our personal theology effects our 'interpretations' of tongues both in the verbal offering of the interpreation as well as the mental processing of those who hear it?
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"Most human beings are not able to stand the message of the shaking of foundations. They reject and attack the prophetic minds, not because they really disagree with them, but because they sense the truth of their words and cannot receive it." Paul Tillich
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