“You should go on the Walk to Emmaus. It will change your life! There is nothing like it.”

“I think we should send everyone in our church to The Crucible Project. They know how to bring about life transformation!”

“There is nothing like doing that short-term mission trip to Nicaragua to open your eyes to the power of God! This should be mandatory for everyone in our student ministry!”

“I’ve gone to church all my life, but it wasn’t until I got into Celebrate Recovery that I met God. We'd finally change the world if the church could be more like CR.”

“You really need to go visit the Holy Land! Nothing will make God come to life like walking where Jesus and all the other biblical characters walked. God is present there like nowhere else.”

I’ve heard countless statements like this for nearly 40 years of my ministry life. They come from people who have experienced massive life changes at some place/event and are so grateful that they become evangelists for the particular ministry that blessed them. Who wants to pour cold water on the enthusiasm of an experience that brings about spiritual breakthroughs and puts people on a pathway of abundant life? Certainly not me. That said, sometimes people develop unhealthy, exclusive perspectives around their encounters with God that can cause problems if they are not put in perspective.

I have come to refer to the mentality reflected in the opening statements as The Bethel Syndrome. This goes back to the story of Jacob’s encounter with God at Bethel in Genesis 28. Jacob has been every part of the self-serving manipulator his name implied up to this point in his life. He has been such a user, enabled by his mother’s favoritism, that he must run from home to avoid being killed by his twin brother Esau, whom he has robbed through a scheme devised by their common momma. On the way, Jacob stops in Bethel for an exhausted renewal sleep and encounters God through a vision of a ladder or stairway to heaven (and as someone who grew up in the 70s, I’ll always prefer the translation “stairway,” thanks to Led Zeppelin). Jacob encounters God in a powerful way that changes the course of his life. Although it takes him another couple of decades to live into the change begun at Bethel, Jacob has an epiphany that leaves a lasting mark. That’s great. Praise God!

However, Jacob gets up the next morning, confused about where the power of his encounter resides. Instead of being amazed by the God he met at Bethel, he assumes there is something special about the place God met him. He gets up after his dream saying, “Surely the Lord is in this place and I was not aware of it... How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven.” Then Jacob sets up a shrine (a rock anointed with oil) and calls the place Bethel, which literally means house of God. Although Jacob tries to make a self-serving deal with God that reveals he still needs maturing, at least he has encountered God in a powerful way personally.

At Bethel, Jacob made a common mistake we still make often today. We confuse the place we meet God with the God we meet there. We assume there is something about a place, an event, or a ministry that has transformational power instead of realizing all the power is in God.

Some ministries or locations are good hosts for God-encounters. Praise God! We need more, not less, of such things in our world. But there is no guarantee that other people who go to any place or go through any event will have the same kind of God-encounter others did. And other people can have just as profound an encounter with God in another place or ministry we’ve never experienced.

Peter made a similar mistake on the Mount of Transfiguration. Had I been there that day, I would undoubtedly have agreed with Peter’s proposal to build a sacred museum for the glory of God revealed in Jesus that day. But Jesus declined and made Peter go back to the valley. The point wasn’t replicating the experience of Jesus’ transfiguration; it was using the power of God witnessed there to become instruments of transformation in the valley with the people in need of some witness of hope in a broken world. Yet, if you go to the Holy Land, you will see a chapel or even a massive cathedral sitting on just about every significant place mentioned in scripture. The Bethel Syndrome is a powerful force.

So, what is the point of all this? Simple: don’t confuse God with the places God has shown up in your life. Don’t reduce God’s power to magic or mechanics. Don’t assume that the way God broke through in your life is the only way God knows how to encounter others. Is it ok to promote ministries and site visits that have been impactful for you? Sure. There are thin places in this world where heaven and earth touch more closely than others and where many people find God. Some ministries and processes provide hospitable settings to facilitate encounters with God. But God is God, and he shows up when and where he chooses in the lives of others. We can’t control it, predict it, or manufacture it. That is for our good, lest we make our lives templates of all others instead of directing them to the God who is always beyond us.

In conclusion, don’t assume that your Bethel is someone else’s Bethel. The goal is for everyone to encounter God, not just once but repeatedly throughout their life. While we can share stories from scripture or our lives to encourage people to be on the lookout for God and prepare themselves to be in the mindset and conditions to encounter God, none of us controls God’s calendar. We are not God’s booking agents. We are witnesses of the God who met us and still meets people.

Let’s be content to play our role of witnesses and encourage others to seek the God who seeks them without stepping beyond our role and making promises we can’t keep and would be harmful to us if we could. God is God. God does what God chooses to do when he chooses to do so. Blessed be the God who judges justly and moves when and where he chooses to move.