Vineyard/Barnyard
Back in the early to mid 90s, something happened in Toronto that was a little bit different. At the Toronto Airport Vineyard Church, people started to do things like bark, cluck, roar, groan, laugh hysterically, squirm on the floor, all “in the Spirit.” Apparently, this was accompanied by a more intense interaction with God. It was labelled “the Toronto Blessing.”
People started to make up meanings for the different sounds. Like, if you roared like a lion, it was the lion of Judah, and if you clucked like a chicken, you were giving birth to something spiritually new. These sound extreme, but they were serious interpretations of what was going on. There were more moderate ones, but those ones didn’t get the press.
And there was press. The National, Time, Maclean’s, The Globe and Mail, and many more did stories on the Toronto Blessing.
My Pastor at the time wasn’t impressed. He did a four part series on why the “Toronto Blessing was inappropriate, citing verses from one of Paul’s epistles and using, what seemed to me, very faulty logic. After all, how can a church that believes in Speaking in Tongues and being “slain in the Spirit” have such a problem with these other things? My pastor did his best to base his argument on the Bible, and while I certainly wasn’t into the Toronto Blessing at the time, or any time, his arguments failed miserably in my eyes.
Meanwhile, across town, another church belonging to the PAOC was immersing themselves fully into the Toronto Blessing stuff. IT was know, to us, as the church people went to when they were pissed off at us. There had been a long, terrible relationship between the churches stemming all the way back to it’s beginning, and this only served to drive the wedge further between us.
Eventually, the Vineyard itself had enough. It booted the Toronto Airport Church out of the denomination, but it was careful not to discredit the supernatural happenings. It simply stated that the Toronto church was putting too much emphasis on the manifestations of the Spirit, and not enough on the other aspects of Christian life (ie. The Bible, fellowship, etc.)
By then, I was in journalism school, and I wanted to be a religion reporter. I trekked down to the local Vineyard church to get a local reaction. Most of them didn’t care. One person was particularly dismissive. This was Rock Zilla, and when I met him again a few years later we developed a strong friendship.
What I took away from the whole experience was this: unless you believe in the Bible as a literal, exclusive account of how God can interact with people (or some other document/credo), there is no concrete way to decide what is a spiritual experience and what is craziness. To make it worse, the experiences often seem to send contradictory messages or no message at all. So what you’re left with is a big jumble of different experiences that may or may not be spiritual, that may or may not have something to do with God, that may or may not mean something, and may or may not be a representation of a person’s loose grip on reality.
And since I have no firm theology or ideology with which to interpret them and sort them out, I have a “what the fuck?!” attitude toward all spiritual experiences now, including my own.
People started to make up meanings for the different sounds. Like, if you roared like a lion, it was the lion of Judah, and if you clucked like a chicken, you were giving birth to something spiritually new. These sound extreme, but they were serious interpretations of what was going on. There were more moderate ones, but those ones didn’t get the press.
And there was press. The National, Time, Maclean’s, The Globe and Mail, and many more did stories on the Toronto Blessing.
My Pastor at the time wasn’t impressed. He did a four part series on why the “Toronto Blessing was inappropriate, citing verses from one of Paul’s epistles and using, what seemed to me, very faulty logic. After all, how can a church that believes in Speaking in Tongues and being “slain in the Spirit” have such a problem with these other things? My pastor did his best to base his argument on the Bible, and while I certainly wasn’t into the Toronto Blessing at the time, or any time, his arguments failed miserably in my eyes.
Meanwhile, across town, another church belonging to the PAOC was immersing themselves fully into the Toronto Blessing stuff. IT was know, to us, as the church people went to when they were pissed off at us. There had been a long, terrible relationship between the churches stemming all the way back to it’s beginning, and this only served to drive the wedge further between us.
Eventually, the Vineyard itself had enough. It booted the Toronto Airport Church out of the denomination, but it was careful not to discredit the supernatural happenings. It simply stated that the Toronto church was putting too much emphasis on the manifestations of the Spirit, and not enough on the other aspects of Christian life (ie. The Bible, fellowship, etc.)
By then, I was in journalism school, and I wanted to be a religion reporter. I trekked down to the local Vineyard church to get a local reaction. Most of them didn’t care. One person was particularly dismissive. This was Rock Zilla, and when I met him again a few years later we developed a strong friendship.
What I took away from the whole experience was this: unless you believe in the Bible as a literal, exclusive account of how God can interact with people (or some other document/credo), there is no concrete way to decide what is a spiritual experience and what is craziness. To make it worse, the experiences often seem to send contradictory messages or no message at all. So what you’re left with is a big jumble of different experiences that may or may not be spiritual, that may or may not have something to do with God, that may or may not mean something, and may or may not be a representation of a person’s loose grip on reality.
And since I have no firm theology or ideology with which to interpret them and sort them out, I have a “what the fuck?!” attitude toward all spiritual experiences now, including my own.
posted by deadwriter at 5:10 p.m.
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