A netfriend wrote:

I wonder if anyone has done any research on what happens to the people when this perversion of Christianity collapses as they have in the past and this one invariably will. Me thinks that most of that 14,000 (in Australia’s largest Pentecostal church) will be lost to Christianity permanently and there will be a lot of damaged people around.

My response:

I spend my life/ministry talking to ex-Pentecostal pastors and people (among others)…

Anecdotally: the ‘charismatic experience’ cannot be understood apart from some kind of dissolution of emotional/psychic boundaries. What happens later depends a lot on whatever unfinished business preceded that experience, so you can’t generalize.

For some ‘well-put-together’ people they ‘come alive’ (like the 50-ish guy who said that in his Uniting Church he was never invited to verbalize his faith. He went on a ‘mission-trip’ to Indonesia with a local Pentecostal group, ‘gave his testimony’, and that whole experience gave him a new lease on (spiritual) life and he hasn’t looked back since…

All the way to the bunch of Pentecostal pastors I counsel who are addicted to pornography. Why? Mainly ‘cos of unfinished family-of-origin business, which in part accounted for their seeking a Pentecostal experience… But later their past catches up with them…

So it’s not simple…

Rowland Croucher