Book Review: Moving Right Along in the Spirit

Book Review: Moving Right Along in the Spirit

Author: Dennis Bennett

Date: 1983

Publisher: Fleming H. Revell Company

ISBN: 0-8007-1316-8

Length: 142 pages

Quote: “Let’s keep our balance as we move along in the Spirit, at the right pace, in the right direction, at the right time, in the right way.”

In the early twentieth century, Christian groups who called themselves charismatic tended to be ridiculed as “snake handlers” and “Holy Rollers.” Snake handling was a “show of faith” always rumored to have been practiced by a really weird bunch in the next county, so far as I know, but “Holy Rollers” really did lie down, and sometimes roll about, in the aisles of churches when “slain in the Spirit” during very emotional meetings. Respectable old ladies and gentlemen who went to these churches were reliably reported to jump over pews, scream, shed real tears, and of course “speak in unknown tongues.” By the 1960s and 1970s, a more temperate charismatic movement, often concerned with “inner healing” of emotional and psychosomatic issues, took place. Dennis Bennett was a temperate charismatic writer from the Episcopal church.

Suppose, he said, a messenger was trying to deliver a message, and an enemy wanted to interfere without violence. The enemy might try to discourage the messenger. Failing that, the next move might be to try to make the horse bolt: “If only that horse...will just run like mad...then everyone will think the rider is reckless or crazy, and they won’t believe what he has to tell them!” “So...if all else fails, [the spiritual enemy] tries to get us to go out of control; to be so enthusiastic that we frighten people.”

By culture (he was born in England) and temperament Bennett seems to have been suited to this message of moderation. He warned against the claim that everyone would be healed, but argued that praying for someone to be healed would be more rational than telling people it was God’s will that they be unhealthy.

After a rather long discussion of this idea, shorter passages call for moderation of the demand that schools teach creationism as if it were fact, and a moderate approach to the experience of being “slain in the Spirit.” For those not affiliated with the church groups to whom this book was originally addressed, these chapters read like multiple long postscripts. Presumably they met a need at the time; perhaps, in some churches, they still do.