Coming to Faith in a Pentecostal Church. Part 1.

I became a Christian through a Pentecostal church. It was a decent size church in a country town (around 50 – 100 people would attend on a Sunday). I attended the youth group and sometimes attended the Sunday church gatherings. So what was that all like? How did I become a Christian there and what did it feel like? I thought I’d share my journey to faith through the Pentecostal church and reflect on it all.

I went to church because I was dating a Christian. I was not a Christian at the time and she shouldn’t have been dating me, but I’m very thankful that she did because I came to hear the gospel. I was around 17 or 18 years old and was just finishing high school when I started going to youth group with said lass. I had grown up in a non-Christian family but attended a Catholic school. The Catholic Church services that I attended for school purposes were the limits of my understanding regarding the Christian faith. It was dull, boring, weird, and seemed like a bit of a chore (like many things are to young children).

The Pentecostal youth group I found myself in on the other end of high school was very different. The games were intense. One game I particularly have fond memories of was a timed obstacle course made from chairs and tables. But that’s too ‘meh’, I mean, where’s the blood? Well… we made it all the more exciting by including a pulsing strobe light intermittently scattering your sense of sight and causing mahem as chairs would be turned upside down waiting (even begging) for one of us to impale ourselves on their rusty prongs and cause an insurance nightmare. Fair to say, that was a wild night and that was just one such game.

The music was fun. You could shout out the lyrics, pump your first and jump around. The songs were pretty standard Pentecostal songs. The lyrics had a lot to do with the Holy Spirit, the love of God and praying for stuff to happen like experiencing the power of God. Afterwards there were Bible talks. These were given by our leaders who were themselves just a bit older than us and so they were very relatable people. I felt that they personally cared very much for me and my salvation and so they would preach the gospel to that end as best they could. There were other interesting aspects to the Pentecostal experience as well. There was speaking in tongues, prophecies made, and people getting ‘slain in the spirit’ – the stuff that Pentecostalism is well known for. All of this is to say that I went from a dull and boring Catholic primary school church experience to finding myself 10 years later in the pounding Pentecostal powerhouse. And actually, I never thought too much about that sharp contrast, it was what it was.

I would say I spent roughly a year in this church before I was a Christian. Many times I was called to come to Jesus but I didn’t want to. I posed different arguments against Christianity for many months. But eventually I decided, “I will give this Christianity stuff a go.” So I did. I read my Bible and I prayed. I recall doing this for about 3 months. In my memory I would describe those months as difficult. They weren’t what I was hoping they would be. As I prayed I felt that God was distant and as I read I don’t remember absorbing very much. I’m not exactly sure what I expected the Christian life to be like, but I didn’t really think it would be that ordinary. Especially because I was in a pretty experience-filled church.

There was a turning point, however. At the end of that year there was a conference that our church attended. I could only make the last day and I could only make the night session at that. It was one of those wild nights where there was only music and prayer for hours and hours. As I recall it, there was a man who came in on a wheelchair and left walking! There were people falling down all over the place. It was a strange and crazy experience and I truly don’t know what to make of it all.

But I wound up at this conference on the last night, and as people were getting prayed for I found myself wanting to be prayed for as well. I particular wanted to be prayed for by the man up front (I remember the man particularly – Sanjay). And I particularly remember thinking the thought, “I really want to be prayed for by the man up front.” But I also remember thinking straight after, “But I don’t want to go up the front. Nor do I wanna fall over and look silly.” Because I genuinely thought it looked a bit silly and strange (although you do kinda get used to it a bit). Anyways, I distinctly remember that as I thought these thoughts the man at the front pointed to me and told me to come up to him because he was going to pray for me! I was quite surprised, understandably. Even as I walked up to him from my seat in the crowd I was continually telling myself, “Just don’t fall down, just don’t fall down”. It’s funny looking back on it all now, because that’s exactly what happened. I walked up to him, and he prayed for me (I don’t know what he said), and as he did so I fell over for some reason. I am quite comfortable and at peace with the possibility that I fell over because everyone else was doing the same thing, but in that moment there was also a genuine spiritual experience – especially because of what happened next. For some reason, God was in that moment. I distinctly remember that at this point in my life God went from being a distant figure to a very real and personal figure. It was like God suddenly became real to me. All of this is very hard to explain in words because it’s all subjective, emotional and basically experiential. Nevertheless, I cannot deny that it was a pivotal moment in my life.

Would I call myself a Christian from that day onwards? I don’t know what was even in my own heart through those months and even on that very night at that conference. But in my mind I did become a Christian at least by the end of that night. It wasn’t that I heard the gospel that night. It was more like the gospel became real that night, I believed the gospel that night. How did it happen? I think God used that experience and that prayer in that church, I think God condescended to that moment to work a miracle in my heart and mind, not one visible from the outside, but one that would only make itself known over the coming years as the Christian faith began to manifest itself in my life. But that’s another story to tell…