If it quacks like a duck… it’s probably Pentecostal

I have in mind the Toronto Blessing and similar phenomena in my title. Thinking in some recent posts about the singing of Bethel songs in non-New-Apostolic-Reformation Evangelical churches, I’ve thrown around the names of a few of the “big players” that many conservative believers think should be avoided, such as Bethel, Elevation, and Hillsong. But it’s instructive to look at some of the most popular “worship songs” not emanating from those sources.

I was discussing with a friend a couple of Bethel songs that have slipped past the discernment barrier in my own church, and my discussion partner said that I’d failed to mention “Waymaker,” a song popular partly because (I am told) it is one of the few “worship hits” coming from Africa rather than America or Australia. In fact it turned out that I’d failed to notice it has a Bethel publishing credit, as had folks at the church, who were under the impression (mistaken, I’m sure) that the version they were using wasn’t covered by Bethel copyright. That’s the kind of confusion, I suspect deliberate, that I alluded to in this post.

The song was in fact written by a Nigerian lady of the Igbo tribe (a people much admired by my father from his wartime stint at RAF Ikeja), with the stage name of Sinach, conjuring for Western minds the image of a purer kind of origin than the commercialised world of Contemporary Christian Music.

However, it only takes a trip to Wikipedia to discover that she’s a member of a Pentecostal prosperity gospel megachurch that has been criticised for opulence amid poverty. Sinach was “anointed” as a worship leader by the celebrity Pastor who founded the church, and who has, like other megachurch leaders, expanded his brand across the world. That includes the founding of a “School of Healing” which sounds remarkably comparable to Bethel Redding’s “School of Supernatural Ministry.” Benny Hinn was the guest speaker at the wedding of the Pastor’s daughter, and the Pastor’s personal wealth is estimated at between $30m and $50m. The average income in Nigeria in 2011 was $1,663 per year. Given the financial structure of CCM, Sinach is probably doing pretty well too, and has certainly earned enough to get involved in setting up healthcare facilities. That background puts a particular gloss on the “miracle worker, promise keeper” lines of the song’s chorus.

I won’t say too much about my theological and musical assessment of the song (though the same four chords endlessly repeated is enough to put me off playing it), but I will quote one of our teenagers who, I’m told, said to her mother that she dislikes the song because Jesus isn’t a waymaker, but the Way. That seems a valid spiritual insight to me.

But it’s still an incredibly popular song, however doctrinally lightweight, adding to the impression that virtually all the modern songs in use now stem from theologically Pentecostal sources. If you exclude Stuart Townend and the Gettys, in fact, it’s quite hard to think of any popular worship songwriters who aren’t Charismatic (though I’m open to being enlightened). Indeed, even the very few traditional hymns that appear in the CCLI hit parade tend to have had verses added by the usual suspects in order to “improve” them, which in practice means bowdlerising them and changing their original meaning. Plus enabling a copyright fee, of course.

I want here simply to raise a question of correlation, and leave the work of explanation to you. But if we put to one side ultra-conservative Reformed churches rejecting new songs on principle, it is somewhat odd that non-Charismatic, bible-based Evangelical churches should appear to be drawn almost exclusively to songs primarily from Pentecostal megachurches whose teaching and practice they completely disagree with. After all, most English Evangelicals do not believe in grave-sucking, in fire-tunnels, in prayer decrees, in positive confession, in angel-feathers falling from the church ceiling, or, come to that, in quacking in the Spirit.

Here’s a parallel. You can easily search on “Jehovah’s Witness songs” and find websites of the hymns sung in Watchtower Kingdom Halls. They appear to be, by and large, rather conservative hymnody, but for the most part they might be slipped into a sound church’s repertoire unnoticed. Yes, they have a high incidence of “Jehovah” for God, but then so does “Guide me, o thou Great Jehovah.” The mentions of Jesus are noticeably few, but then the same is true of “Immortal, invisible” or “O worship the King” … not to mention “Waymaker” and “The Goodness of God.” But I’ll wager I would soon get some pushback if folk discovered I had introduced songs from an Arian cult into my church, however orthodox the song’s theology.

How much more weird would it be if you visited a church, didn’t recognise any of the hymns, and found they’d all been lifted from the JW website? Would you not be entitled, for all their minister’s protestations of Baptist or Methodist biblical orthodoxy, to reply that if it quacks like an Arian duck, it’s probably an Arian?

If you sing mostly Pentecostal songs in church, your church is Pentecostal. Prove me wrong.