Preach Magazine Issue 3 - Preaching and the Holy Spirit | Page 10

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INTERVIEW

JS When was your first vivid

encounter with the Holy Spirit? What
happened? How did it change you?
I actually came from a Christian
background, my father was a minister
in the Church, but everything about
Church, and my experience of
Christianity at school, had driven me
away. I genuinely found the whole
thing rather boring and irrelevant
and unengaging, and, like countless
others of my generation, quietly
slipped away from the Church. I gave
myself to the world of rugby, and the
occasional bit of academic study,
and general hedonism. It was whilst
playing in a rugby match that I was
injured and became unable to move.
That storm in my life revealed that
I’d been building my life on sand.
I’m so grateful for that experience,
perhaps the most profound of my life,
and particularly so in terms of my
relationship with the Lord.
My parents, who’d never given up on
me and had continued to pray for me,
put a Bible on my bedside table; and
because I get bored easily, I began
to read the gospels. I increasingly
began to realise that I was loved

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by the Father, that that love was
expressed primarily through his son
Jesus coming to give himself up for
me and for the rest of humanity by
dying on the cross, and eventually
I surrendered my life to him and
entered into what has been a lifelong
walk with him. As the Spirit came and
filled my life, I would have to say that
that was absolutely my first conscious
awareness of encountering the Holy
Spirit. But quickly after that, I had
another powerful encounter.
While I had come to faith through
the reading of Scripture, I was still
stuck in bed and unable to move.
Eventually my father managed to get
me to a woman who had the gift of
healing. This woman laid hands on
me and as she prayed for me I felt
this extraordinary bolt of lightning
go down through my body. Where
there had been damage to the base of
my spine, to my pelvis and to nerves
in my legs, there was extraordinary
healing. Within a few moments I
was up and walking around again,
not having been able to do that for
12 weeks. It was a truly powerful,
verifiable miracle. It not only impacted
me but the entirety of our family; but

perhaps most significantly it gave me
a framework for ministry.
I often use the analogy that what
we’re about in the local church that
I lead, and the movement of local
churches called New Wine that I now
head up, is that we are seeking to build
everything we do on the twin tracks of
the Word and the Spirit. If you imagine
the church to be the train, then the
tracks which we have to run down are
the tracks of the Word and the Spirit,
and if you remove one of them, then
we get derailed along the way.

JS The term ‘Charismatic’ is not

used anywhere on the Trinity website
although the Wikipedia entry uses the
label. Is there a reason for not using
the word on the site? What meaning
does ‘charismatic’ have for you?
It’s a good question, and the
reality is that we can’t all control what
goes on Wikipedia. Especially in the
broadest sense of the word, we are a
charismatic evangelical church. But
there is a reason why we tend not to
use the word too often: and that is
rooted in an experience of a friend
that I had been trying to bring along

17/04/2015 15:42:49