THE RADICAL MIDDLE (part 1)
“Paul steers a path through the radical middle that is often missed by both Evangelicals and Pentecostals, who traditionally misplace their emphasis on one side or the other.”
- Gordon Fee
Growing up in the Pentecostal tradition has been both a beautiful and challenging thing for me. Beautiful because I saw the presence and power of the Holy Spirit as essential to my Christian walk, but challenging because of all the messy, extreme, and damaging stuff I saw in church. For many years I saw the tension between Christians who longed for a move of the Holy Spirit and Christians who were hesitant about the whole thing. One I call the Spiritual Enthusiast and the latter I call the Spiritual Skeptic.
Can we blame people? After all, one person doesn’t want to feel restricted when seeking an experience with the fullness of God’s presence, while the other doesn’t want to be hurt or mislead and so they dig in their heels and remain planted in skepticism. What is even harder to deal with is that somehow we’ve justified this divide within the church of Christ. Do we need to emphasize one to neglect the other? Will one extreme over the other ever portray God’s glory through His church? Not likely.
Fundamentally, the church of Jesus Christ exists because of His physical death on the cross, physical resurrection from the dead, and the empowering of the Holy Spirit for witness. Practically every Christian agrees with that. People, however, have not primarily disagreed with this message or mission but with the methods used in living it out. So, I’ve wrestled with questions like: How do we join in God’s movement? How do we exercise the gifts of the Holy Spirit? What is the healthy way to proceed as a unified church that is empowered by the Spirit? Why should we care about all this anyway, when it would just be easier to pick a side?
Ultimately, journeying through these experiences, whether in church or at a personal level, have motivated me to seek what Gordon Fee calls THE RADICAL MIDDLE. My ambition has been to open up dialogue and seek to re-engage God’s people with the Spirit and the Word, but as a unified and healthy community. For me, this radical middle has been defined as: Become a community of believers that learns to live engaged with the Spirit and is accountable to the Scriptures. This pathway has not been simple and most definitely not easy, yet, I believe that both the skeptic and the enthusiast are called to live in the radical middle.
So, over the years my first priority has been to establish a safe environment where this could be explored. Meaning, neither side could have dominance over the other, and no favouritism could be shown as we sought to learn from one another. All this because the beauty of our unity in Christ is seen by how we merge our diversity for the sake of embracing His fullness and truth. For this, both groups had to have a willingness to surrender anything that would hinder or harm that unity, while also being prepared to establish boundaries for the sake of having a safe community atmosphere where we can explore and experience the Holy Spirit.
Going at it with this type of mindset has allowed me to see where people are coming from, and here is one of my most significant findings: people sincerely desire God. So, how do we help them meet in the radical middle?
Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet for this. If there was, we’d all be seeing the church well and alive as God intended. However, because it all revolves around being a relational community, we’ve been learning how to:
be gracious listeners of each other’s stories;
be humble, not pursuing our own selfish ambitions;
be ready to repent of any offence caused;
be quick to forgive others; and
accept that it will take time and intentionality.
Learning to live in this radical middle has been an amazing adventure, and as a result it has given me the ability to navigate through many other issues in life and faith. There are so many things that tend to divide the church, and these past two years of the pandemic have demonstrated the negative effect that extreme views can have on a community. People have been conditioned to “pick sides,” and as followers of Jesus, we are called to rise above that.
If our greatest commandments are to love God and love people (Matthew 22:37-40), then we must ask: (1) would we rather be right? Or, (2) would we rather have relationship? There are truths on both sides, but what is the ultimate goal?
To help you catch a glimpse of where each side is coming from, and what their greatest fears tend to be, I will share in my next two blog posts what I’ve learned from the many one-on-one conversations with my brothers and sisters in Christ. Hopefully, you can have an openness of heart and a prayerful disposition as you read what I share of the spiritual skeptic and the spiritual enthusiast.