“Brother Bouchelle, how do we defeat the Pentecostals?”  This was one of the more surprising questions anyone ever asked me. I was sitting in the the backseat of a four-door pickup truck on a long trip through West Africa back to the airport in the capital city. The question came from one of the preachers who had participated in a conference I had been honored to attend. He was a wise and mature preacher I had come to respect in our few days together. 

I was unprepared to answer the question because I wasn’t sure I understood where he was coming from. So I asked him what he meant and why he framed it that way. As it turns out, the churches of his network routinely lost members to churches that claimed dramatic modern day signs and wonders, some of which might shock Pentecostals of western countries. He told me stories of pastors drinking gasoline or poison on stage and other extreme acts that supposedly demonstrated the power of the Holy Spirit. He had seen people get drawn into churches that promised them health and wealth and freedom from all suffering, which often set them up for disappointments that ship-wrecked their faith. 

I couldn’t give him a simple answer, but one mistake I’ve seen happen repeatedly around the world is to react to one unhealthy extreme by going to an opposite unhealthy extreme. In this case, fearing an abuse of the Holy Spirit’s power can lead us to deny the power of God in the lives of believers. While Jesus called us to a cross and told us that there would be suffering and difficulty in the lives of his followers, he also promised to be with us in the power of the Spirit. Sometimes, the best way to respond to an extreme distortion in one area is to consider if perhaps we need to adjust our message in light of scripture instead. Maybe we are out of balance. Sometimes our people become vulnerable to excesses because they have been denied something legitimate. If we don’t give people what they need, we leave the door open to others coming in who may over-promise and prey on people’s vulnerability.  

In the west, we tend to see the gospel as a response to only one problem: guilt. Western culture, over the last few centuries, has operated with a mechanical world view that makes us doubt that any spiritual beings exist or, if they do, we question if they do anything today. In response, we have often reduced the gospel to things that happen after death and offer people no real hope for this life.  We have then exported a reduced gospel that only addresses guilt problems and offers only an afterlife. 

However, most of the world does not live in a secular world that sees the problem of humanity as only guilt. Most of the world’s cultures are shame based or fear based. They need to hear a gospel that focuses on God’s power to restore our honor and overcome our shame or defeat the forces of evil that threaten us so we can live free of fear by God’s power. In scripture, the gospel addresses all the ways humans experience brokenness, not just the problem of guilt. If we leave people unequipped to benefit from the broader meanings of the Gospel which include God’s solution to shame, fear, powerlessness, emptiness, spiritual oppression, and a host of other symptoms of human brokenness, we leave them vulnerable to distortions. We may bring them in the front door of the church only to have them slip out the back door. 

To people in honor-shame or power-fear cultures, the western guilt-based gospel doesn’t always sound like good news on a deep level. Even those people who come to Jesus to get their sins forgiven so they can go to heaven when they die are left without help when their child gets sick or when they are convinced someone has placed a curse on them. If we don’t know how to preach the gospel of the victorious Christ who overcame the principalities and powers and leads them in triumphant procession, then we are not meeting the legitimate needs of our people. 

I think of another conversation in southern Africa where a brother told me, “The white man has been telling us for years that there is no such thing as spiritual warfare, witchcraft, or demon possession. We smile and shake our heads and when he leaves, we look at each other and say, ‘that man has not had enough experience to know better.’” This leads people to seek Jesus for the afterlife, but to go the shaman or other source when they fear spiritual attack. 

For the first 1,000 years of Christianity, the most common way the gospel was explained was as Christus Victor, or the Victorious Christ, who defeated all the forces of evil and remains the supreme power over all spiritual powers. The New Testament is filled with this good news, but we often look past it in the west as echoes of an earlier era. Yet people the world over need this still-active good news. 

As western culture moves into post-modernity, we need to recapture this Biblical theme…and most of the world has always needed to hear this message. In the west, we really need to broaden our understand of the gospel to all the Bible says it is and does. The good news offers us forgiveness for our guilt, but also removes our shame, reconciles us to others in community, gives meaning to our otherwise meaningless lives, empowers us to overcome overwhelming evil forces, and frees us from the relentless fear of death. While some churches may turn Jesus into a magic genie and ignore the call to take up a cross and endure hardship by God’s power, those excesses should not keep us from preaching the same gospel as Jesus. Jesus accomplished salvation in all the ways we need to be saved. 

I deal with this more in my recent book. I also want to point you to an excellent sermon from Rick Atchley that captures more of how God offers us power to make us stronger than we could imagine being on our own in a dangerous and deadly world.  You can find that sermon here.