A Blog Post for a New Year: Reconstructing Charismatic Theology and Practice Around Receiving, Giving and Self-Giving

The famous banner which I reference below is hung in the CTF sanctuary to the left of where I took this picture. It reads "To walk in God's love and to give it away to Toronto and the world."

Happy New Year everyone! Claire and I had a wonderfully restful time over the holiday season. Thanks for checking in to another blog post. As those of you who have been following along will surely have noticed, my spiritual and theological journey over the last 12 or so years has involved some significant deconstruction. Some folks get concerned hearing the word ‘deconstruction’, but I am convinced that it can be a necessary and healthy thing when the person remains connected to the church and to Jesus. One of my pastors, Joyce Rees, points out that deconstruction has historically been a normal part of the collective life of the Christian church. The Protestant Reformers, who I am studying at the moment, experienced a kind of deconstruction, but they remained committed to the church and to Jesus.

Reflecting on all this, I thought that for a new blog post for a new year, it might be helpful to think more intentionally about how we might together go about reconstructing charismatic theology and practice if we have decided we want to let go of things like the health and wealth gospel, NAR teaching and word of faith teaching and other such things (it is worth noting that these three teachings which I oppose here are mostly peculiar to charismatic contexts in North America, rather than in places like the UK where the charismatic movement doesn't tend to have this baggage). I have written a great deal about things that I think we need to examine and perhaps leave behind, and I have also written about the many good parts of charismatic theology and practice that I think we need to hold on to and take with us. But what about putting back together some of the deconstructed pieces into a new, to-be-tested framework?

With this goal in mind, I have been pondering the idea that the related concepts and practices of receiving, giving and self-giving might be a helpful framework to put some of these pieces back together around. What do I mean by receiving, giving and self-giving?

As it turns out, the Christian gospel has a lot to say about these inter-related concepts and practices. Consider our favourite Bible verse when we were five years old - John 3:16. When John writes that God “so” loved the world, the ‘so’ in this particular context does not refer to degree (how much God loves us, the extent or scope of his love) but to manner (the way in which God loves us). So, we could rephrase John 3:16 - ‘For God loved the world in this way, he gave…’. The whole gospel, the news about what God has done to redeem all of creation through his Son, began with and is continually constituted by his decision to give his Son for us.

What about another famous verse, Galatians 2:19-20. This was a very important verse for the Protestant Reformer Martin Luther. In the NRSVUE it reads “For through the law I died to the law, so that I might live to God. I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” The esteemed New Testament scholar whose work I love, Michael Gorman, has argued that the final line could be paraphrased ‘who loved me by giving himself for me’ [footnote 1]. Christ’s ultimate act of love was the giving of his very own self that we would be saved and made whole. Note that with the John 3:16 verse we have the whole of humanity and creation in view, and in Galatians 2:20 we have one of the very few places where the New Testament actually does focus expressly on the individual - Christ gave himself for ‘me’.

But what about charismatic theology and practice specifically? The two verses above are core reference points for the theology of almost all Christian traditions in some way or another. Lately I have been unable to get Catch the Fire Toronto’s famous tagline out of my head “Walking in God’s love and giving it away to Toronto and the world”. I think there is something truly profound about those simple words which have been made very real in the lives of millions of people through Catch the Fire, myself included, over the past 30-something years. With this constantly in my mind perhaps by virtue of the Spirit’s voice, I thought of Matthew 10 where Jesus gives his disciples instructions as the first messengers of his good news sent out by him. Verse 1 (NRSVUE) says, “Then Jesus summoned his twelve disciples and gave them authority over unclean spirits, to cast them out, and to cure every disease and every sickness.” It is verses like this that have resonated with millions of people all over the world in the charismatic world, thinking along with leaders like John Wimber ‘when do we do the stuff?’, when do we actually do the miraculous works of Jesus that the gospels and Acts are packed with? Look now at the specific command that Jesus gives related to the miraculous working of God through these first messengers in verse 8 (NRSVUE) “Cure the sick; raise the dead; cleanse those with a skin disease; cast out demons. You received without payment; give without payment.” Jesus specifically frames the authority he gave them in verse one with the idea/practice of receiving and giving, and with giving of a certain kind (free and generous, not for self-gain). As charismatic Christians we know that God has given authority and empowering in the Spirit to all his people to do the works of Jesus alongside our proclamation of his words. As a movement of like-minded people, we have emphasized that the words and works of Jesus must go together. As the church, we have received both the authority and power to preach the words and do the works. The former won’t be as successful as God wants it to be without the latter. But as we preach the words of Jesus and attempt in faith to do his works, what we are doing is giving away what we have been given. And what is it that we have been given ultimately? Christ himself. The gospel invitation is not ‘Come, get a clean slate, stay mostly the same, and feel slightly better about yourself’, the gospel invitation is ‘Come to Jesus, he has given himself to us, and he wants to do the same for you in the context of the church. He has made the way for you to be reconciled to God by being joined to him through faith and thus becoming a part of his body, the church’.

One final text for you that refers more obviously to the charismatic movement - Acts 3:1-8 (NRSVUE “One day Peter and John were going up to the temple at the hour of prayer, at three o’clock in the afternoon. And a man lame from birth was being carried in. People would lay him daily at the gate of the temple called the Beautiful Gate so that he could ask for alms from those entering the temple. When he saw Peter and John about to go into the temple, he asked them for alms. Peter looked intently at him, as did John, and said, “Look at us.” And he fixed his attention on them, expecting to receive something from them. Peter said, “I have no silver or gold, but what I have I give you; in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, stand up and walk.” And he took him by the right hand and raised him up, and immediately his feet and ankles were made strong. Jumping up, he stood and began to walk, and he entered the temple with them, walking and leaping and praising God.” Again, this verse is framed in terms of Christians having received something and then being compelled by God’s love to give it away. The charismatic contention that the gifts of the Sprit are still fully in operation as they were in the early church is essentially the theological belief that Christians have been given more than a powerless gospel elevator pitch and general niceness with which to evangelize the world. Another thing that my pastor Joyce Rees likes to say is that “People don't come to Jesus by osmosis”, by which she means people won’t come to know that there is a God and that they can know him and be made whole by him just by Christians being generally nice people and perhaps tipping slightly more than average. We have been given authority and empowered by the Spirit, and we need to give that away. A river grows stagnant and unhealthy when the water stops flowing. We need to give away all that we have been given, not just some of it.

But how does all of this relate to my hope that I and others can try to rebuild something from the broken pieces of our charismatic Christianity? I think that the idea that Christians have received much from God that is often neglected in many church settings and that we need to give this and everything else Jesus has entrusted to us away freely and generously is a key contribution the charismatic movement can make to the global Christian church. I’ll end this blog posts with one of my favourite verses from Paul which shows that his ministry was much more than him being a theological talking head on a stick - 1 Thessalonians 2:8 (NRSVUE) says “So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you have become very dear to us.” I wonder if where charismatic theology and practice has gone wrong at times is where we try and give away what we have been given in selfish or thoughtless ways. Instead, we need to remember what we have been given, and remember how Jesus modelled giving away both what he had and his very own self - selflessly, other-focused and not for his own gain.

Blessings on you all as we move into 2026. I always welcome thoughts on my writing, agreeing or disagreeing, both in the comments here on the blog and on socials. I would love to hear from you!

Footnote 1. Michael J. Gorman, Inhabiting the Cruciform God: Kenosis, Justification, and Theosis in Paul’s Narrative Soteriology (Eerdmans, 2009), loc. 528-39 of 2795, footnote 48, Kindle