Why I Left My Charismatic Church and You Should Too IF You see THESE signs! | STORY TIME

hey what's up everybody alan parr here and i wanted to come on and make this short video because the other day i was just thinking about an experience in my life whenever i was in college when i was a part of a hyper charismatic very unhealthy church and at the time i didn't even realize it because i wasn't spiritually mature enough and so many of you watching this you may not know this uh this part of my story and my journey and part of my testimony so i'm gonna share it with you today but the main reason why i'm sharing it is because many of you may be a part of a church that is unhealthy whether it's a charismatic church or whether it's one that's not and i want you to pay attention to some of these signs that are very very subtle and if you're not really spiritually mature you're really not discerning you might just think that it's normal like i was at the time but now looking back i realized it was completely unhealthy so let me set the stage for you before i share with you why i left my hyper charismatic church a long time ago so when i grew up i went to pretty much a traditional baptist church it was frowned upon if you raise your hands if you sing loudly if you shout if you dance like none of that was going on basically you sat down you sang some hymns you uh listened to the preacher preach and i'll be honest with you whenever i was in high school church was boring now now looking back i could go to that church now but at the time as a 14 15 year old kid it was boring so when i got to college and i started going to this hyper charismatic church everybody was singing everybody was shouting running around dancing falling out there was energy emotion and for the first time in my life it felt like church was fun church was enjoyable like wow you can actually go to church and actually have a good time little did i know at the time as a baby christian that many of the things that were going on at that church were very very unhealthy and i'm going to share with you in order some of the things that i started to see and observe as i grew in christ that led me to make the decision to leave this hyper charismatic church and the first thing that i started seeing was that there was this misuse of power or should i say a misunderstanding of spiritual authority and let me explain to you basically in my church at the time there were spiritual leaders and then there was everybody else and if you were not a spiritual leader you were just basically told to submit and listen to those who were in authority over you because hey they are the people they hear from god and you are not and so whatever they say goes and this set up a scenario where they basically kept those of us who were not spiritual leaders dependent upon them what i mean by that is they wanted to play the holy spirit in our lives and they wanted to set up a situation where we always had to go to them to get permission for things so i can remember like you know if i wanted to date somebody i had to go to my spiritual father or my spiritual leader and ask them and if they said yes and gave their blessing then it was okay for me to date somebody but if they said no the lord is leading the lord is speaking to me and showing me this isn't the person for you or i don't discern then either you submitted to them or if you did not then you were deemed as being rebellious you were blacklisted uh you know you weren't submitting to authority and that sort of thing and you were out of line right and so um it just kept you dependent upon these leaders for for basically any decision i can remember a time when we were in college and many of us wanted to go to the beach for a vacation in the summertime it was like 15 of us and we had it all planned out and one of our friends was like well we got to ask elder so and so we got to ask um you know apostles so and so or whatever and whenever we did this person was like no you guys can't go and we didn't go now at the time we thought i thought okay we're just submitting to authority but now looking back i just see how unhealthy that was now another thing that i started seeing is a misuse of certain spiritual gifts and one of the main ones that was happening in this church and many hyper charismatic churches is this misunderstanding of the gift of tongues there was this unspoken pressure in my church at the time for you to have to speak in tongues and get this second blessing and have this baptism of the spirit if you will and if you if you didn't have this then you were seen as being like a second-class christian or a second-rate christian because hey only those who speak in tongues are really able to experience the true power and have the true anointing of the spirit and if you haven't gotten that yet then you know what you just haven't really arrived yet spiritually and this set up a situation in our church where there was division and there was the haves and then there were the have-nots and it created a pressure within me to feel like man why am i not speaking in tongues yet how come i don't have this gift why is it that when i go to church i see everybody else speaking in tongues and seeming to have this ethereal experience in connection with god and i just can't seem to get there and it ended up leading to me being so envious of this gift that i actually ended up faking it for a long period of time just so i could fit in and just so people could see me as being somebody who was spiritual now at the time it didn't feel like it was faking it didn't feel like it was you know something that was an issue but now looking back i was like wow this church set up such a culture that led me to feel like if i didn't have this gift that i really wasn't spiritual another thing that i started seeing that was very very unhealthy in this church and i talked about a little bit in a video that i put out last week in terms of false prophecies and it's somewhat related to this misuse of spiritual authority but it's this emphasis or this uh obsession if you will with the prophetic right and so you had so many people in the church that were basically saying well god told me this god told me that or i'm speaking this over your life or god showed me this about you and god gave me a dream about you and it was constantly going on i mean the spiritual leaders even people who weren't spiritual leaders always felt like they had a word for you or they god gave them something for you and i'm not gonna lie there were some times whenever i didn't really know any better and so i thought these people were really hearing from god and so i made some decisions in my life based on what other people said that they heard from god from me thankfully none of those decisions were super detrimental but i can't say that for some of my friends who basically married people who they really never should have married but the church leaders and somebody in the church said god showed me that that was your husband god showed me that you're supposed to marry this person and because you want so badly to be submissive to authority and you are indoctrinated so much to believe that these people are truly your leaders they're looking out for your best interests they're the prophets they're hearing from god they they know what's best for you that you basically are just and pressured to to blindly submit to spiritual authority so that was one of the things that i saw another thing that i saw and this is one of the things that really started to open my eyes was that uh this i don't know i don't even know how to call this or label this i'll just call it strange experiences right where i can remember one time when me uh where i say my friends and i we were struggling with lust we were struggling with you know just our flesh i'll just keep it very general we were struggling with our flesh and we were doing some things in college that we really shouldn't have been doing as as christians and at the time we were just growing in christ and so the church found out about it and they decided to try to cast out these spirits in us spirit of lust spirit of fornication spirit of whatever it is you want to call it so they took us and they put us in some sort of room and they call themselves laying hands on us trying to drive out these evil spirits of lust within all of these college kids but they were laying on hands with us so strongly that they were actually hitting us they were actually like i don't know what the word is but they were like putting some serious pressure like almost like we were being hazed by like a fraternity or something like that and they were just like really applying a lot of pressure trying to drive these spirits out and um i remember leaving and my friends and i we looked at each other and we like had welts on our back because we were in pain and there was those were type experiences where i'm like okay at the time i was like okay well they're just trying to drive all evil spirits this is how it's done now looking back i'm thinking like that was super unhealthy another thing that was i saw in my church and maybe it goes on in your church i made a whole video on this is this whole slain in the spirit thing right and it was a regular experience for ministers to go around the congregation in the middle of the service and lay hands on people and you were pretty much expected whenever they laid hands on you to just just fall out right round one [Music] fight [Music] [Music] perfect you win but i can remember some times when they would come around to me and they would lay hands on me and i just didn't feel it i i wasn't like i don't know i didn't become unconscious or i don't know i wasn't submitting to the spirit i don't know what happened but i just didn't feel like laying laying down and so i can remember them just pushing pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing and almost to the point of anger that i wasn't submitting to whatever the spirit wanted to to do and so you know after that they just kind of moved on but i remember thinking wow you know if you have to push somebody down is that really what god wants to have happen during a service and there was this pressure once again to have these these spiritual experiences these supernatural experiences these ethereal experiences if you will and uh that if you didn't have them then you were just seen as kind of an outsider another thing that i started seeing is is that this this kind of obsession with emotionalism going on in the church and i'll call it uh manipulating the moment right it's like they kind of knew when the music got going and everybody got emotional and everything was high they kind of knew how to manipulate that moment to kind of get the uh to get the experience uh that they wanted or to to to create the atmosphere that they wanted to see certain things to have happen but it was all driven by like the music getting louder and people shouting louder and people dancing and all of these different things and so um i saw that that was going on as well and then the last thing that i'll share with you is this obsession with signs wonders miracles and healings now i'm not saying that god can't heal and i'm not saying that god can't do miracles signs and wonders i believe god is the same today yesterday and forever right but there was this obsession with it to where it was almost like we have to see this happen during the service in order to believe that the spirit of god is moving it wasn't enough for there to be the word of god going forth which the spirit empowers that it wasn't enough to have people living and exhibiting the fruit of the spirit in their lives it wasn't enough for people to be filled with the spirit of god to be able to resist temptation no the spirit of god had to move in certain ways in that church whether it was through healings whether it's through signs miracles wonders a prophetic word or whatever and it was almost like there was an expectation that these things were going to happen so much so that it felt forced at the time now i share all of that because i trust that some of you right now are probably going to a church that's very very unhealthy and it probably sounds very similar to the church that i just described and let me just say i am thankful that 25 years ago the lord gave me the courage to be able to leave that church how did that happen it happened because i started reading my bible and i started seeing in my bible you know what the word of god had to say about a lot of these things and i started looking at my church and i started saying wait that you know the bible says that uh you know there should be an interpreter whenever people are speaking in tongues the bible says that even if people do speak in tongues there should only be two or three people at the time not a whole church just speaking in tongues with no interpretation not the pastor in the middle of his sermon breaking out speaking in tongues and there's no interpretation right so i started reading these things in the bible and then i started comparing it to what was going on at the church and i said wait a second the bible says the spirit of god wants to guide me and lead me yes i need to be accountable but it doesn't teach that these leaders are the spirit of god and that they control my life right so i started seeing all these things a light bulb went off and god gave me the courage to leave and i used the word courage because my friend when if if you are in a church like this you know how difficult it is to get out you're afraid of being um uh you know seen as um an outsider you're afraid of being ostracized from the community of people that you've been a part of for so long you're afraid of being um outside of god's covering is another word they like to use you know we are your spiritual covering so if you go outside of that then you're not covered and there's a lot of fear that they use to kind of keep you closed in in this cult-like environment but my friend if you can muster up the courage to see that the things that i talked about in this video demonstrate a very very unhurt unhealthy church environment then i encourage you to to uh to step out on faith and leave that unhealthy church because god wants to place you in a healthy bible-based church so my friend that's my story i wanted to come on and share that with you real quick it probably wasn't quick but hopefully that will encourage some of you who might be confused about where you are as it relates to your church at this time so i'll see you in the next video bye for now

Channel: THE BEAT by Allen Parr

Views: 690,839

Rating: 4.8473616 out of 5

Keywords: allen parr, charismatic chaos, charismatic christianity, charismatic church, charismatic church deception, charismatic church doctrine, charismatic church exposed, charismatic church movement, charismatic church music, charismatic church service, charismatic church speaking in tongues, charismatic church vs traditional church, charismatic church worship, charismatic deception, charismatic faith, charismatic faith healers, charismatic false teachers, false charismatic movement

Id: yONvS5fceoM

Length: 15min 50sec (950 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 28 2021