The Art of Losing Control. Jules Evans

departs. We can easily end up chasing it.

      

       The setting of Anglicanism

      In terms of the ‘setting’ of charismatic Christianity, there are, of course, risks to churches as a place of collective trance. As Derren Brown notes, Pentecostal preachers are highly adept at hypnotising their congregations into giving them money. Forbes magazine estimates the combined worth of five Nigerian Pentecostal pastors at $200 million. Two American Pentecostal pastors attracted ridicule recently when they explained they needed private jets so they could spend more time with God.¹⁴ Church leaders may use their hypnotic influence to increase, then abuse, their power. This is a big problem in some of the Pentecostal ‘house churches’ now booming around the world, where priests have unchecked power. I interviewed one woman who described how she had suffered ‘spiritual abuse’ for 14 years in a London Pentecostal church, under a tyrannical pastor and his wife. She told me: ‘The mind control was very extreme. They’d say the Lord had given them power to come into our houses in the spirit, meaning their spirits would leave their bodies and watch what we were doing in the privacy of our homes.’ Many Pentecostal churches are also profoundly patriarchal and homophobic.

      The Anglican Church seems relatively protected against these risks. Its priests are as poor as church mice, they have to report to superiors and, unlike Catholic priests, they can get married, which is a good, though not sure-fire, protection against sexual abuse. Anglicans have a healthy sense of priests’ fallibility (as Denis Thatcher once said to his priest before a sermon, ‘Padre, most of us know what the Sermon on the Mount is. Twelve minutes is your lot’). HTB has resisted becoming a cultish mega-church partly because Nicky insisted on remaining within the Anglican communion rather than splitting off into an ecstatic sect, like the Quakers or Methodists. He’s avoided the lure of becoming a guru, despite his global fame. He still cycles to church and is nicknamed Humble Gumbel. HTB is not a cult: it doesn’t try to prevent people leaving; it doesn’t try to get all your money; it is open to criticism. I’m grateful to Nicky and his church for being so kind and welcoming to me, and still feel love for the community.

      However, HTB’s methods for soul-farming can feel somewhat industrial. It runs three Alpha courses a year: each convert feels uniquely loved, until the next batch moves on to the conveyor belt. It’s a dubious sales technique to ask people if they want to make a ‘personal commitment to Jesus’ in the middle of highly emotional services – that’s like asking someone to marry you when they’re high in Las Vegas. Like Vegas marriages, some Alpha conversions don’t last – mine didn’t, and the divorce was painful. The little family of our Alpha group didn’t last either. We kept meeting for a few months, but I don’t think any of us still go to HTB (most now go to smaller local churches).

      Perhaps I looked to church for the wrong things – I was more hungry for community than for God. Communities and religions are man-made, imperfect. If you make an idol of church, you’re bound to be disappointed.

      I don’t feel I can call myself a traditional Christian any more, because I decided I didn’t believe Jesus’s death saved humanity or that the only way to God is through Him. People have ecstatic experiences in many different cultural contexts; they don’t always lead to Jesus, but they can still be good for us. I struggle to believe the bold hypothesis put forward by Jesus: that there’s an omnipotent personal God who loves us and all we have to do for grace is ask for it (Matthew 7:7; John 14:13). My near-death experience felt like grace, but I’ve also seen awful suffering in people’s lives, where they have begged God for help, and it hasn’t obviously arrived. So I’m agnostic. Sometimes people seem to access help from beyond, but it’s not reliable, predictable or knowable.