Religion For The Strong?

I fear that we have made into a religion for the strong, what was always intended to be a safe place for the weak.
Personally, I remember renewal as being a safe place to open my heart to God, gradually learning how kind he is and learning to trust how gently he would lead me. Yes, I had power encounters too. And I believe in, and deal with, the power of the Kingdom. But what really changed my heart were the deep times. Is there any space left for that in today’s charismatic church? Even one that claims to have been shaped by renewal? (Note I do not use the term “revival”, because I do not think that has happened-- and certainly isn’t happening now. A subject for another time, perhaps.)

Don’t get me wrong. I believe in, have experienced and taught all this stuff myself. Power, faith, the prophetic, miracles-- it’s all part of the Kingdom, and I am a Kingdom person. I have greatly personally benefited (for example) from Bill Johnson’s teachings, from Bethel, from Randy Clark and Global Awakening. But the call to be “a world changer”, the demand that “we owe the world an encounter with Jesus”, the emphasis on a “supernatural lifestyle”, all promote an urgency and a weight of responsibility that seems at odds with Jesus’ call to take his light burden, and wear his easy yoke.

I have observed that these themes, though valid, have often been overly emphasized in reaction to many years of the opposite. And by now it’s almost all I am hearing. I fear that only the young and strong, the bold by nature, and those who have a Type-A personality in the first place can and will respond well for any length of time to such emphases. What about all the rest of humanity?
Often, we in charismatic circles are really inhumane in how we deal with human weakness and frailty. Are you sick? Have faith, get healed. Are you poor? Claim those biblical promises. Are you mentally ill, or emotionally drained? Just snap out of it, God is good, all the time! We demand “faith” in “God’s plan” and by that we seem to mean an emotional commitment and/or strong mental assent to certain propositions, or a desperate clinging to the hope of a particular outcome.

What happens when it all doesn’t work the way we are told it should? And we all know it often doesn’t.
Will we resort again to empty platitudes, or worse, to shame and blame?
Who will be kind to their brothers and sisters in the face of tragedy? Who will be there to carry and comfort me when the promises were not fulfilled, when he/she died (or left me) after all, when I simply didn’t have the strength to “believe” any more, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary? Who in those times will stand by me without either feeling or transmitting shame, without a sense of failure, weeping with those who weep, humanity sharing the troubles of humanity?

Sadly, the non-charismatic church is often far more adept at this “carrying one another’s burdens” than we are. Those of us who claim to know the power of the Kingdom should be the ones who are most able to enter into another’s pain and bring the light of the presence of Christ (who has promised always to be with us, not always to fix our circumstances).
Jesus Christ: the same today, yesterday and forever; fully human, and fully God. May we not sacrifice either one for the other.