Within the past thirty days no fewer than four people have asked me the same question: “Can we talk?”
All had just finished reading They Speak with Other Tongues for the first time and all wanted to know what had happened in the forty years since this book was written. I will bring the story up to date in the final pages, but it was these four people’s questions, and not my answers, that have given me a new perspective.
The first questioner was a young computer programmer from California who wanted to know where he could find a charismatic prayer group in his area. I had a few suggestions, but when he tried to thank me, I thanked him for helping me. If a new, fresh and exciting life in the Spirit is going to be more than a phenomenon of the ’60s, I said, then it must speak to each generation in its own language. The eagerness in the voice of this 26-year-old told me that the Holy Spirit is always up to date.
The second questioner was a plumber who had come to our house to repair a broken pipe. A copy of They Speak with Other Tongues was on my desk as I worked on the update and he seemed intrigued with it. I gave him a copy, and a week later he appeared at the door bursting to talk. “Most of the people in it were not professor-types, but guys like me,” he said. Again his comment gave me new insight, this time about the wide educational spectrum of people whose lives are being transformed by an encounter with the Holy Spirit.
The third person wanting to talk was a young woman from the Caribbean. She had seen They Speak with Other Tongues discussed on a television show and wanted to know more. In her home church she had never heard about the charismatic renewal and felt that her family there would resist it. The Pentecostal movement of today, I told her, began in an African-American church in Los Angeles. The determination in this bright young person’s eyes told me the Spirit leaps racial, cultural and geographic divides as readily as educational ones.
And the fourth conversation was initiated by a deacon in the Episcopal church. “Let’s have lunch,” he said. Reading the book, he had wanted that kind of life in his home parish. Because I have always felt that the renewed life in the Spirit should never be the province of splinter groups or a denominational label, but be integrated into the work and worship of all churches, the deacon’s inquiry especially delighted me. Never worry that I will divide, the Spirit seemed to be telling me. My work is always to bring together.
So, four questioners, four encouragements. Now let me narrate how this all began.
John Sherrill