how did we get here? Holy Spirit 2
This article is part two of a nine-part series on the Holy Spirit. Here is PART ONE.
Recovering a Fuller Vision of the Holy Spirit
In the first article of this series, we considered Paul’s challenging question to the Galatian Christians: “Are you so foolish? After beginning by means of the Spirit, are you now trying to finish by means of the flesh?” (Galatians 3:3).
It is a question worth asking not only of individual Christians but also of churches and entire movements.
Is it possible to begin with a deep dependence upon God and then gradually become reliant upon our own intelligence, organization, traditions, and methods? Can the Holy Spirit remain prominent in our doctrine while becoming peripheral to the way we actually live and lead?
If we want to recover a more biblical understanding of the Holy Spirit, it helps to understand how we arrived where we are today.
Our instincts about the Spirit did not emerge in a vacuum. They have been shaped by nearly two thousand years of church history, cultural change, theological controversy, and, sometimes, overreaction.
This history should not cause us to become cynical about the church. Nor should it make us ashamed of our heritage. It can, however, help us identify our blind spots and receive the wisdom of Scripture with fresh eyes.
From Vulnerability to Power
The early church described in Acts was dynamic, flexible, and profoundly dependent upon God. I’m pretty sure this is why I find it so inspiring, each time I read it.
The early Christians didn’t always know what the Lord was doing or where he would lead them next. They prayed, listened, discerned, and acted with an expectation that God might interrupt their plans.
It was necessarily unpredictable.
They also lived as a persecuted minority.
Christianity was illegal during portions of the Roman era, and believers had little status, protection, or political influence. They had no powerful institution advocating for their interests.
Living on the margins had a way of removing the illusion of self-sufficiency.
When the church prayed in Acts 4, it did not ask God to make its circumstances comfortable. The believers prayed for boldness, and “they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly” (Acts 4:31).
They knew their mission couldn't be accomplished through social influence or human power.
They needed God.
The church’s circumstances began to change dramatically during the fourth century. Christianity was legalized under Constantine and eventually became closely aligned with the Roman Empire. A persecuted minority gradually acquired social status, wealth, legal recognition, and political influence.
Some of these changes brought genuine blessings.
Persecution diminished, Christians could worship publicly, and the church gained new opportunities to serve society. Organization and institutional structure are not inherently unspiritual. As churches grow, they need trustworthy leadership, sound doctrine, responsible administration, and healthy order.
Yet power also introduced new temptations.
It became easier to identify as Christian without experiencing genuine conversion.
The church increasingly adopted the organizational assumptions of the surrounding empire.
Its leaders gained influence, and the line between spiritual authority and institutional power sometimes became blurred.
Whenever the church becomes secure, respectable, and powerful, dependence upon the Spirit can begin to feel less urgent. It doesn't have to, but it's funny how that happens. Once we believe we possess everything necessary within our structures, resources, and abilities, a vibrant awareness of God’s presence can slowly fade.
This is not just a lesson from history. It is a spiritual danger in every generation.
What Can Be Lost?
The church didn't simply abandon belief in the Holy Spirit.
Christians continued to confess the Spirit in their creeds, prayers, worship, and theology. But over time, several emphases that had been central to the earliest Christian communities became more difficult to see.
One was the expectation of deep personal transformation.
In Acts, conversion wasn’t simply intellectual agreement or cultural identification. People repented, were baptized, received the Holy Spirit, joined a new community, and began an entirely new way of life.
The church’s evangelistic identity also became less prominent.
The earliest Christians understood themselves as a missionary people empowered to bear witness to Jesus. Once Christianity became embedded in the culture, however, mission could easily become one activity of the church rather than an essential part of its identity.
The intimacy of Christian community was also affected.
The early believers depended upon one another because following Jesus carried a real cost. As Christianity became culturally acceptable, church membership no longer required the same kind of mutual reliance.
Most significantly, the church could begin depending upon its institutional strength more than upon the Holy Spirit. Its theology might remain orthodox while its functional center shifted toward clergy, hierarchy, traditions, buildings, or political influence.
None of this happened all at once, and none of it tells the entire story of Christian history.
God continued to work powerfully through faithful men and women, including many who served within highly structured churches. Nevertheless, the shift reminds us of an enduring truth: when God’s people become confident in their own power, their conscious dependence upon the Spirit tends to diminish.
When the Spirit Became Institutional
During the early centuries of Christianity, church leaders wrestled with important questions about the identity of Jesus and the Holy Spirit. The councils of Nicaea in AD 325 and Constantinople in AD 381 helped articulate the church’s belief in one God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
These theological clarifications mattered.
The Holy Spirit is not an impersonal influence or created spiritual energy. He is divine and personal, eternally united with the Father and the Son. We will explore that truth more fully in the next article.
At the same time, the church’s practical understanding of the Spirit increasingly became associated with its institutional life. As the church grew larger and more complex, the clergy assumed greater responsibility for preserving doctrine, administering the sacraments, and maintaining order.
Once again, much of this developed for understandable reasons.
The church needed to protect its teaching, care for growing congregations, and respond to serious theological error. Yet an unintended consequence was that ordinary Christians could begin to see the Spirit’s work as something mediated primarily through church officials and religious ceremonies.
The Spirit had not disappeared, but his work could seem remote from the everyday Christian.
Rather than experiencing themselves as a Spirit-filled people participating together in God’s mission, believers could become recipients of spiritual grace administered by religious professionals.
That temptation remains with us even in churches that reject formal clerical hierarchies. We can still act as though the truly spiritual work belongs to ministers, teachers, and organizational leaders while everyone else receives what those leaders provide.
However, the New Testament describes the Spirit as God’s gift to the entire church.
Every Christian receives the Spirit.
Every Christian is given gifts for the common good.
Every Christian is called to participate in the life and mission of God.
When the Spirit Became Private
The Protestant Reformation brought a much-needed recovery of Biblical authority and the gospel of grace. The Reformers challenged abuses of institutional power and emphasized that ordinary Christians should have access to Scripture.
This also affected the church’s understanding of the Holy Spirit.
The Spirit was recognized as the One who inspired the Biblical text, illuminated its meaning, empowered preaching, brought people to faith, and cultivated holiness within believers.
These were important recoveries.
Yet over time, the Spirit’s work was often located primarily within the individual Christian. He convicted the heart, enabled people to understand Scripture, and nurtured private devotion.
The institutional view associated the Spirit primarily with the structures of the church. The privatized view associated him primarily with the interior life of the believer. Both recognized important dimensions of his work, but neither fully captured the picture we find in Acts.
The Spirit certainly transforms individuals, but he also creates a new community.
He strengthens our inner lives, but he also sends us outward in mission.
He helps us understand Scripture, but he also distributes gifts, forms leaders, directs ministry, breaks down barriers, and guides the church into places it did not expect to go.
The Spirit’s work is personal, but it is never entirely private.
Sadly, the doctrine of the Holy Spirit today is one that points too many people inward, toward intense self-relfection. That is only part of the Spirit's work.
Our Restoration Movement Inheritance
Our own spiritual heritage emerged partly as a response to the religious divisions and emotional excesses of nineteenth-century America.
Leaders such as Alexander Campbell longed to overcome denominational fragmentation by returning to Scripture and restoring the faith and practice of the early church – a good thing.
That desire produced some important and lasting convictions. It gave our movement a high view of Scripture, a determination to examine religious traditions, and a willingness to ask whether our practices could be supported Biblically.
Those are strengths we should preserve.
Campbell and other leaders had also witnessed revival movements in which dramatic emotional experiences were attributed to the Holy Spirit. Some claims appeared manipulative, disorderly, or disconnected from Scripture.
Their concern was understandable: if every personal impulse could be called the voice of God, how could truth be distinguished from emotion, imagination, or deception?
In response, many churches within the Restoration Movement closely identified the Spirit’s work with the written Word. The Holy Spirit worked through Scripture by revealing God’s truth, persuading the mind, and guiding people through biblical teaching.
It became a highly rational understanding of the Spirit’s work.
This “word-only” approach protected the church from some forms of spiritual confusion. It helped produce a people who loved the Bible and wanted their faith to rest upon something more dependable than subjective experience.
But every corrective can become an overcorrection.
When the Spirit is functionally reduced to the words of Scripture, he can begin to seem impersonal. Christian maturity can become primarily a matter of mastering doctrine and applying the correct methods. The church may value what is orderly, logical, measurable, and reproducible while becoming suspicious of anything mysterious, or that can't be easily explained.
Even church planting and evangelism—deeply spiritual and unpredictable activities—can become mechanical. We develop a model, identify the steps, reproduce the methodology, and expect predictable results. We may leave little room for the Spirit to surprise us, redirect us, or show us a different way to reach a particular community.
This doesn’t mean the Spirit leads us away from Scripture. The Spirit inspired Scripture and will never contradict the truth he has revealed. But the Bible itself portrays him as an active, personal presence, not simply as information contained within a text.
The Spirit may lead us in ways that are consistent with Scripture yet beyond our existing plans and assumptions. If we will only accept what fits our previous experience, we may unintentionally resist the very renewal for which we have prayed.
Two Opposite Reactions
The limitations of a highly rational approach have produced reactions in two different directions.
One response has been to untether the Spirit from Scripture.
In this view, the Spirit is understood as working broadly throughout the world, often wherever people experience inclusion, liberation, creativity, or social progress.
This perspective frequently grows from genuine compassion. Christians encounter people who have been wounded, marginalized, or rejected and recognize signs of goodness, courage, and love in unexpected places. These experiences can soften our hearts—as they should.
Christians should expect God’s common grace to be visible throughout his world, including among people who do not yet follow Jesus. We should listen humbly, serve compassionately, and acknowledge truth wherever we encounter it.
But compassion doesn't require us to separate the Spirit from Christ or Scripture.
Jesus said that the Spirit would glorify him and guide his disciples into truth (John 16:13–14). The Spirit may challenge our interpretation of Scripture, expose our cultural prejudices, and lead us into relationships we have avoided. But he will not contradict the character, teaching, and redemptive mission of Jesus.
A second reaction is found in Pentecostal and charismatic Christianity.
These movements sought to recover the power and expectancy of Acts, emphasizing the Spirit’s active presence, spiritual gifts, healing, prophecy, and bold witness.
The explosive growth of Pentecostal Christianity, particularly in the Global South, should cause the rest of the church to pay attention. Its emphasis upon prayer, spiritual reality, divine power, and expectation resonates deeply in places where people do not assume the material world is all that exists.
There is much we can learn from this tradition. At the same time, charismatic expressions can become unhealthy when the Spirit is treated like a force that can be summoned, controlled, or demonstrated through extraordinary experiences. Spiritual gifts can become measures of faith, and leaders who claim supernatural authority can avoid biblical accountability.
Once again, the answer is not rejection but discernment. We should neither deny the Spirit’s power nor attempt to possess it. The Spirit is not a power we control; he is God, to whom we surrender.
Toward a Biblical, Discerning, and Missional Faith
Okay, that’s a lot of background information.
What, then, are we seeking?
We are seeking an understanding of the Spirit that is deeply biblical.
Church history and Christian tradition can offer valuable wisdom, but Scripture must remain our authoritative guide. We should not restrict the Spirit to what we can explain rationally, but neither should we attribute to him ideas that contradict God’s revealed truth.
The Spirit is not confined to the pages of the Bible, but his work will always be consistent with the God revealed in the Bible.
We are also seeking a faith shaped by discernment. Scripture tells us not to believe every spirit but to “test the spirits to see whether they are from God” (1 John 4:1). Discernment involves prayer, Biblical wisdom, mature community, humility, and patient attention to the fruit an idea or direction produces.
Learning to follow the Spirit is not merely an individual undertaking. We need one another.
Together, we ask whether a direction reflects the character of Jesus, agrees with Scripture, produces the fruit of the Spirit, strengthens the church, and advances God’s mission.
Finally, we are seeking a missional understanding of the Spirit. The Spirit should turn us outward, into a hopeless and broken world.
The Spirit forms Christ within us so that the life of Christ can be displayed through us. He does not transform us merely to make our private lives more peaceful. He makes us holy, loving, courageous, and compassionate so that we can participate in God’s work in a hurting world.
This applies to the church as well. We need wise plans, sound structures, and clear goals. But we must remain humble enough for God to interrupt us. Spirit-led leadership means planning prayerfully, listening carefully, and holding our strategies with open hands.
Grateful for Our Heritage, Open to Growth
Recovering a fuller understanding of the Holy Spirit doesn’t require us to reject our history.
We can remain grateful for a heritage that taught us to love Scripture, pursue discipleship, share our faith, plant churches, and sacrifice for the mission of God.
At the same time, we can acknowledge that our emphasis upon action and human responsibility has sometimes made it difficult to recognize how completely we depend upon God. We may have spoken often about what committed Christians must do and less frequently about what the Spirit is doing within and among us.
This is not an invitation to become less committed. It is an invitation to become differently empowered.
We want to be a people whose love for Scripture makes us more receptive to the Spirit revealed in Scripture.
We want to become Christians whose actions flow from communion with God rather than anxiety, pressure, or self-reliance.
We want to be a church that plans faithfully but listens attentively, moves courageously but remains humble, and pursues the mission without imagining that the mission depends upon us.
The Spirit is not restrained by the limits of our understanding, but neither is he disconnected from the character and mission of Christ. He works within the great redemptive story revealed in Scripture. He forms us into the likeness of Jesus. He creates a holy community. And he empowers the church to embody and announce God’s kingdom.
Understanding how we arrived here is valuable. But the greater question is where the Spirit may be leading us now.
Daren
Daren is a Senior Leader at Anchor Point Church in Tampa, Florida. He has been in ministry for nearly 30 years, and holds a Master’s Degree in Missional Theology.
You can contact him at
