Gold Teeth

Can reasonable people with level-heads make space for something miraculous?

Sometimes, salvation splinters. Growing up in a non-denominational evangelical church in the 80s and 90s, I picked up on the belief that certain folks were in the kingdom. Others were, “only God knows,” but … probably out. The top level messaging I learned as a kid:

• Pentecostals may be technically under the evangelical tent, but to be avoided. They were chasing emotions and holy ghost addicts. They missed Jesus because they were looking for some conjured magic.

• Quakers were the same as Mennonites, either overly political or too wholesome and formal. (The concept of a Quaker Clearness Committee wasn’t introduced to me until a grad school class on spiritual discernment. Reading Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline for the first time in my 20s was revelatory.) 

• Catholicism was suspect and perhaps even dangerous. Because Catholics who were crazy enough to believe in transubstantiation—that they were drinking the actual blood and eating the physical flesh of Christ— were clearly not interested in what my family called a “literal” interpretation of the Bible. It’s ironic, because transubstantiation was based on a direct interpretation of scripture in the 800s. (I was also a late bloomer in spiritual formation and Ignatian spirituality. Beginning in my mid-30s, spiritual direction, Lectio Divina, and the Examen had a heavy hand in leading me out of a decade-long spiritual desert.)

Many Evangelical kids grew up in the 80s and 90s with parents who were tepid towards the spiritual and contemplative. So much so that us kids were raised with an impoverished sense of spirituality. 

Without real formation, we weren’t set up to thrive as we entered adulthood and left the cloister of youth groups or campus ministries. And as Gen X and Millennial young adults were starting out in the world, the American Church was becoming increasingly politicized and wrapped up in culture wars.

A differentiator

I grew up in a church that believed in cessationism— the teaching that spiritual gifts ended with the first century church in the apostolic age, including physical healing, prophesy, and speaking in tongues. Cessationists argue that those gifts were needed to give the Christian message a sort of turbo boost, to gain traction, spread, and soothe the doubts of skeptical onlookers. When they were no longer needed, they subsided. It’s notable that this extra-Biblical teaching holds such sway.

Christians feel differently about the issue, and there are Biblical scholars on both sides that make strong cases for the relevance and timeliness of spiritual gifts.

I’ve come to believe that cessationism can dampen the rich work of the Holy Spirit in the Church today. Yet I get it — for Boomers fresh from the fallout of communes and cults and in the late 70s and beyond, cessationism fit the time. 

Carpet time

My father, a die-hard cessasionist, believed that the return of Jesus would happen in our lifetime. When we heard reports of God reviving a charismatic church in the news when I was a teen, he scoffed. 

Dad was dubious of the Toronto Airport Blessing—a revival that began in 1994 at the Toronto Airport Vineyard church. According to the website of Catch the Fire (the congregation that began as the Toronto Airport church) a million people visited their sanctuary from around the world during the first two years of the decade-long revival; the church self-tallied tens of thousands of conversions. Lines stretched around the block that probably looked a lot like Seattleites in line for an ice cream cone at Salt & Straw on a Friday night. Everybody wanted a taste. 

During the early years of the Toronto Blessing, we watched a news report during dinner that showed grainy footage of a man walking on all fours near the church’s altar. “People walking on their hands and knees like dogs on a collar, people roaring like lions,” dad said, disgusted. “One guy said he was drunk on the spirit and literally looked like a slurring drunk preaching on the stage,” he said, rolling his eyes. 

The retired Canadian broadcaster Lorna Dueck was a young reporter covering the Toronto Blessing. In a Christianity Today article on the 20th anniversary of the revival she accounts her experience.

“I ended up attending for a week in the Toronto revival’s early days. On those nights I was prayed for I spent a few hours of my own in ‘carpet time,’ Dueck writes. “Carpet time” she explains, is “the Catch the Fire term for what happens when people are knocked down, ‘slain in the Spirit,’ and leave mysteriously strengthened and renewed in their love for God.”

What would Dad have thought of carpet time, which conjures images of pre-school naps? Yet I couldn’t reconcile why Dad thought reports of miracles at a Canadian church by the airport were fluff and heretical, when on the other hand, he was sure that we would literally float in the sky when Jesus returns for the rapture.

I was taught that dead people would literally leave their graves when Jesus returns, bones from dust to full skeletons with flesh, lifting with millions of others to the sky. Current miracles were unbelievable for Dad, but his clear-eyed view of a mass resurrection of Cinematic proportions was as practical as stocking grocery staples or going to an annual checkup.

There isn’t a ton of footage that was salvaged from that Toronto revival. An archived Christianity Today article culling critics and proponents of the Toronto Blessing claims, “recipients often begin to quiver, go limp, or fall. Others sob or laugh. Some lay in prolonged states of seeming ecstasy.” 

Ho-ho-holy laughter

Holy laughter is a hallmark of 90s revivals that started in Toronto and spread. A 1996 Washington Post article with the very witty headline “Filled with the Ho-Ho-Holy Spirit” includes interviews with worshippers who were slain in the spirit and overtaken by laughter for up to several hours. After people come to, they often describe healing from past trauma. One pastor is quoted saying, “I didn't want to turn into a cult … Then I found out about the healing. The laughter is almost an anesthetic while God does His work.”

Later in the article, holy laughter and Toronto Blessing critic Hank Hannegraaf shooed off the phenomenon as classic mass hysteria. “All of the manifestations you see in these churches are duplicated every day by B-grade stage hypnotists. It’s basically mass hypnosis and auto-suggestion. There is peer pressure. . . . Their expectations are aroused, they've read about it in the Christian tabloids. And then there is the star status of the preacher. People work themselves up into an altered state of consciousness.”

Christian folk singer Larry Norman played a concert at Toronto Airport Vineyard the same year as the WaPo article on holy laughter was published. Before beginning his first song, Norman delivered a long message to the crowd. “Your rent, your children’s food, money to repair your car or your teeth, it’s there, it’s on the path, it’s in front of you,” he says, as the crowd begins to softly laugh.

I wondered, is this holy laughter, or nervous laughter, or was everyone just really happy when he told them the holy spirit will provide money for dental work? “I just want you to remember one thing in your life,” Norman says. The crowd continues to laugh, and Norman says, “I’m serious. Just remember: Jesus, good. Satan, bad.” The crowd was exuberant.

Gold teeth, gold dust

At one point during the Toronto Blessing, people reported receiving gold teeth; some 300 fillings turned from plain metal to gold. Some were reportedly shaped like a cross. There were also reports of gold dust; I found a video still of a mound of gold collected on a portly middle aged man’s Bible, him smiling and holding it open. 

A woman reported gold flecks appearing on her hands, which you can see in the above photo. She tried to wash it off, but it would keep coming back. So she turned to other people, taking them by the hand and passing the gift. Jesus, the king who rode a donkey, the carpenter and wanderer who ate with prostitutes. The servant king, two thousand years later, had finally started turning everything to gold. 

A way forward

Regardless of where we fall on the cessationist spectrum — or how skeptical or accepting we are of accounts of modern revivals and healings — as Christians we are welcome to ask. To ask God to work in our lives in small and large ways. Jesus asked to be pardoned from the cross.

Of course God had a different plan, that happened to include his son experiencing an excruciating amount of suffering. But it was not wrong for Jesus to pray for another outcome. And just like we can ask but can’t control God’s will in our own life, we’re called to a posture of non-judgement towards other folks following Jesus. We are not asked to judge who is in or out of God’s kingdom—if someone claims to center their life on Christ and holds different doctrine outside of the core tenets of faith, amen and amen.

Should we be open to spiritual gifts? I think deep down, most of us are. Because whether we say it or not, when someone we love is sick or our own bodies fail, we likely ask for a holy intervention.

Can miracles, today, be true? Is this question dangerous or appropriate? Because miracles can be distorted and commodified to the point they are unrecognizable. The promise of a miracle is used to platform power-hungry preachers and keep ministries solvent.

I for one never want to give up on asking in full faith for God to act. But these days, I’m just as interested in what happens when God is silent, or when an answer takes a long time to come. When it’s hard and gets harder. Because that is where we find character, perseverance, and the wherewithal to keep moving forward.

The disappointment we may feel from God not acting — healing or interceding — can bloom into a spiritual crisis. Still, let’s persist in asking to see God’s goodness in the land of the living. Maybe not gold dust or televised miracles. But certainly we can pray for a flood of peace and restoration from our own quiet room, with the door shut.

In hoping only for God’s will and not trying to direct it, bottle it, or ignore it, we orient ourselves around the vulnerable and expectant posture of God’s great, good story instead of the particular ask.  

Read & Listen

• “Despite the success many Christian artists, public theologians, and podcasters have found in crowdfunding, the model raises questions Christians should consider: What are we selling, exactly?” [CT]

• “This cuts to the heart of the modern American Church story; doesn’t it? We’ve centered ego, persona, and politics in ways that don’t serve “the heart of the ceremony. Instead, they serve us.” [Seth Haines]

• ‘Barry had been ill for a long time, but his death swooped down on us like a hawk, talons first.’ [Granta]

• Your body is not flawed. [Lazy Genius]

• Something wonderful from the Monks of Senegal. [Keur Moussa]