The Holy Spirit is Not For Sale

CBN.com From the preface to The Holy Spirit is Not For Sale

A Call to Restore God's Fire

Cuban pastor Emilio Gonzales had never heard of the term baptism in the Holy Spirit until one Sunday in the mid-1950s. That was when a Methodist bishop from Mexico visited the Vedado Methodist Church in downtown Havana. The old bishop asked everyone in the congregation to kneel and pray for God’s Spirit to empower them, and Emilio, who was just entering the ministry at the time, followed his instructions eagerly.

What followed was Emilio’s personal version of Pentecost. He described his experience to me in the fall of 1993, when I visited Havana to investigate how churches had been faring since Fidel Castro relaxed restrictions on religion in Cuba.

A frail man with a gentle smile, Emilio told me in vivid detail about his first encounter with the Baptizer.

“I began to feel an electric current go from my head to my feet,” he said. “I lifted my hands and began crying and laughing. I felt I had been bathed in God’s presence.”
After this unusual event, the Mexican bishop left town. Emilio had no one with whom to compare his experience and no access to books about the Holy Spirit. All he had was his Bible.

“I had to judge for myself,” he told me. “I examined everything very carefully. No one else understood it.”
Though it seemed like an insignificant moment, what happened that day at the Vedado Methodist Church would dramatically change Cuba’s spiritual climate. A fire was ignited that would spread quietly throughout the island—a fire that would prove to be unquenchable, even in a country in which Christian belief was discouraged and pastors were routinely banished to prison camps.

In the years following Cuba’s 1959 Marxist revolution, many of the Methodist pastors who didn’t flee their homeland were “strangely warmed” by the same fire that burned in Emilio’s heart. Rinaldo Hernandez, then a young seminarian studying at a Methodist school in the city of Matanzas, discovered the heaven-sent fire in 1979 when a visiting professor from the United States told students at a chapel service that she had been baptized in the Holy Spirit. Rinaldo, his wife and some other students prayed for an infilling of God’s power and began speaking in tongues.

A few months later, before he could finish his studies, Rinaldo was labeled a criminal by the Cuban government and sent to a labor camp. But the fire he encountered at the seminary in Matanzas only burned more brightly during those dark days he spent away from his wife and infant daughter. The Holy Spirit’s presence renewed and invigorated him, and confirmed to him that God had called him to share Christ with his countrymen.

When I met Rinaldo in 1993, he was pastoring a lively congregation of young people—many of them new converts—at the same Vedado church where Emilio Gonzales had been baptized in the Spirit forty years earlier. The Communists were not interfering with the work of the church, and the young people worshiped without fear of recrimination.

“We are not praying for a revival,” Rinaldo told me. “We are in a revival. There is a growing church in Cuba, a powerful and dynamic church. This movement is quiet, but strong.”

Like the majority of Methodist churches in Cuba, Rinaldo’s congregation is fully charismatic in doctrine and worship style. On a typical Wednesday night at the Vedado Methodist Church, the young members clap, shake tambourines and raise their hands as they sing lively praise choruses. Some of them stood in front of the congregation and shared words of prophecy and exhortation.

Just east of Havana in Marianao, Emilio Gonzales was pastoring a large Methodist church, with the same charismatic format. It was in full evidence when I stopped in for a visit.

Charismatic renewal has transformed an entire denomination in Cuba—a denomination not known for the same kind of evangelical fervor in the United States. According to Rinaldo, an estimated 75 percent of Methodist pastors in his country consider themselves charismatic or Pentecostal. It is possible that the entire Methodist denomination in Cuba could be experiencing renewal within a few years.

How did this happen? As renewal fires spread during the 1970s and 1980s, churches began to evangelize in spite of government intimidation. After Castro aired a landmark apology in 1990 for discriminating against Christians, the Methodists started one hundred new churches within three years. Other Pentecostal groups, such as the Assemblies of God and the Pentecostal Holiness Church, were also growing at impressive rates, as more and more Cubans realized they were free to believe.

One night during my visit to Cuba, I drove with Rinaldo to observe what he called a house church located in the Havana suburb of Cojimar. As we drove past crumbling buildings and austere Communist monuments, I imagined that the meeting would take place in a tiny living room with a dozen people. When we arrived, I was surprised to find 125 believers of all ages jammed into the front yard of a modest concrete block home. The worshipers, all of whom had walked or ridden bicycles to get to the church service, were singing when we arrived. Their praises could be heard all over the neighborhood, but no one seemed to mind.

As I took my seat on a cold stone step and began to clap along, I was struck by how joyful these Cuban believers were. Their voices were exuberant, their eyes glowed with radiance and their bright smiles made up for a power shortage that had forced them to meet in total darkness—except for a single kerosene lantern hanging on a wire by the front porch.

As we began to sing a reverent worship song in Spanish, most people closed their eyes and lifted their hands toward heaven. A few shed tears as they praised God for His love and mercy. But I could not close my eyes. I was too busy gazing at the remarkable scene.

How can these people be so happy? I thought. I knew the kinds of conditions they lived in. I knew they had eaten very little that day, except for maybe some rice or bread. I knew that life in Cuba was marked by hardship and pain. Yet these Christians seemed to be living in a realm of faith that was as foreign to me as their language and customs.

After we finished singing, several people stood to give testimonies about how God had helped them walk through the trials of the week. One young woman said she had been converted because some women from the church visited her in the hospital and prayed for her healing. God delivered her of cancer, she said, adding that she went home and destroyed her Santeria idols and other occult fetishes. Later, in his lengthy sermon, Rinaldo used the woman’s story to illustrate that God wants to perform miracles today just as He did during Jesus’ earthly ministry.
When we closed the service with more singing, I studied the scene again in amazement, tears filling my eyes. Never in my life had I witnessed a more genuine expression of Christianity. This must be what the New Testament church was like, I thought.

When I returned to my hotel room, from which I could look out over the city of Havana, I pondered what God had been doing on that isolated island over the past forty years. In spite of scarcity, Marxist control, officially sanctioned atheism and total isolation from the United States, the fire of God’s Spirit had been sweeping the country. The blaze of spiritual renewal that began in the 1950s had proven more powerful than Castro’s regime. I knew it would outlive Marxism in Cuba.

Before I left Havana, I sat down with Rinaldo Hernandez and the bishop of the Methodist Church of Cuba, Joel Ajo. We talked about the revival and about the needs of the churches there: training for ministers, youth ministry materials, Sunday school literature and, most of all, simple encouragement. Eager to take advantage of new opportunities to minister in Cuba, the bishop extended a warm invitation to American church groups to visit his country.

Suddenly I was disturbed. I wanted American Christians to see for themselves how the Spirit was transforming the churches of Cuba, yet it pained me to think we might infect Cuban congregations with the same disease that has quenched and snuffed out the fires of revival in our own country.

These Cuban church leaders have more to offer us in the United States, it seemed to me, than we can possibly offer them. Perhaps it would be better for Cuban pastors to come to America, I thought, and teach us what the Holy Spirit has taught them.

I breathed a prayer of desperation as I imagined a worst-case scenario: Lord, don’t let us charismatics bring our money-centered gospel to these starving people. Don’t let us mislead these precious saints with our own misguided doctrines. And most of all, Lord, don’t let us duplicate our denominational divisions here in a place where every believer needs the support of the entire Body of Christ.

As I boarded my plane at José Martí Airport in Havana and returned to Miami, I thought much about the state of the churches in my country. I was haunted by one question: What happened to the fire in America’s churches? Thousands of pastors in America have been “strangely warmed” by the same Holy Spirit who impacted men like Emilio Gonzales and Rinaldo Hernandez.

Hundreds of thousands of charismatic churches have been started in the United States since the early 1970s. Yet church growth has stagnated in recent years. In most American churches, the fire of Pentecost is no longer blazing.

If Cuba’s churches were languishing today, their leaders could easily blame their condition on a lack of resources. It has only been since 1990, after all, that Bibles became available there in government-run stores. But the spiritual coldness that exists in American churches cannot be blamed on a lack of resources. We publish more Bibles, hymnals, Christian books and church literature than any nation on earth, and we use most of what we publish within our own borders. We spend millions of dollars on church buildings and denominational facilities. We have conferences on every imaginable topic, and we offer programs designed to cure every spiritual problem. But our churches are not on fire for God.

Why does spiritual revival seem so elusive to us?

I have pondered that question for several years, since I was once part of a revival movement that collapsed because of human weaknesses. Although I believe that God sovereignly gives revival, I also believe that revival cannot occur unless God’s people are committed to following not their own agenda but the agenda of the Holy Spirit. Too many times in this century, movements that were born of the Spirit ended up as spiritual miscarriages. And in every case, men and women were responsible for derailing God’s holy purpose.

The thesis of this book is simple: Charismatic churches in America today are laden down with tons of baggage that needs to be thrown overboard. If we would reject our misguided mysticism, our smug elitism and our hollow egotism, I believe our churches would be aflame with holy zeal. If we would renounce our bizarre infatuation with money and success, I believe, God would grant us true passion for the Savior. If we would stop mistreating the flock of God, He might give us many more sheep to tend. And, most importantly, if we would stop building our own human-centered kingdoms, He might afford us the honor of playing a part in building His.

I am not a theologian or pastor, so I do not offer in this book an exhaustive scriptural thesis on how we can secure spiritual renewal in this country. But I have made it my business as a journalist to observe the charismatic renewal movement—a movement of which I am part. This book is my admittedly feeble but honest attempt to identify some of the reasons our fire is not burning brightly like the fire I witnessed in Cuba—a fire that is also blazing in many other parts of the world today.

Some two millennia ago the apostle Paul urged the Christians of Thessalonica to keep their fire white-hot. “Do not quench the Spirit,” he told them (1 Thessalonians 5:19, rsv). The Living Bible translation says, “Do not smother the Holy Spirit.”

Yet since the first century men have frustrated the work of the Spirit with their own carnality. In this book, I point out ten specific things that have smothered the Spirit in charismatic and Pentecostal churches in America, including mysticism, elitism, separatism, authoritarianism, egotism and greed.

My simple prayer is that God would purge us of all these things, so that the Spirit can have His way. May God ignite a new fire in our midst and grant us a new Pentecost.

Order your copy of The Holy Spirit Is Not For Sale: Rekindling the Power of God in an Age of Compromise by J. Lee Grady, Chosen Books.

More Church and Ministry

More from Spiritual Life

J. Lee Grady is contributing editor of Charisma and author of the new book The Holy Spirit Is Not for Sale. You can learn more about his ministry at www.themordecaiproject.com.