Speaking in tongues: Faith's language barrier?

Speaking in tongues: Faith's language barrier?

 

 

	By Krystal Kinnunen-Harris for USA TODAY
Steve Earnest holds daughters Katielyn, left, and Mary while he and his wife, June, pray during the Mother?s Day service at the North Cleveland Church of God.

By Kimberly Winston, Special for USA TODAY

PLEASANTON, Calif. — On a wave of emotion, the man at the front of the church broke into a language only he and his God could understand.

"Ah le ah ne al la ne," said Bill Siordia, a worshiper at The Pentecostals of Pleasanton, a small congregation in the San Francisco Bay Area. With closed eyes and palms raised skyward, he continued in a whispered rush. "Ma ne ah ne ta la ah ka wa."

Siordia, 44, a warehouse worker, was speaking in tongues, a form of verbal prayer scholars call glossolalia. For him — and a growing numbers of Christians worldwide — the experience is a direct means of communication with God that is a transcendent and crucial part of his faith.

"It is kind of a high," Siordia said later, describing the most common form of speaking in tongues as an indecipherable expression of personal prayer and praise. "It is like being with the Lord. I feel that sense that everything is OK."

This Sunday, Christians will celebrate Pentecost, when the Bible says God sent a "mighty wind" among Jesus' disciples and they prayed in unknown languages. "And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit," the Book of Acts says, "and began to speak in other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance."

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A gift — or a fake?

Though all Christians mark the day, only some speak in tongues. Those who do describe an immediate, ecstatic and personal experience of God. Those who do not have called it phony, weird and even dangerous.

"There is tension between people who emphasize gifts of the spirit and the people who emphasize church authority," says David Roebuck, director of the Dixon Pentecostal Research Center in Cleveland, Tenn.

"It's a range of issues, from whether you are interpreting the Bible correctly to people having an experience that the institution cannot control to a personal dynamic of one group claiming to be more authentic than another."

At the conflict's heart are differing interpretations of the purpose of tongues. Some believe tongues and other "gifts of the Spirit," such as prophecy and divine healing, died with Jesus' disciples. The primacy of the Bible, they say, cancels the need for such gifts. Other Christians — known as Pentecostals, charismatics or, more generally, renewalists — believe those gifts remain available.

"We see it as evidence of the spirit of God within us," says Terry Baughman, pastor of The Pentecostals of Pleasanton. "We see it as filling a God-shaped hole in the heart of man. "

According to a recent Pew Forum poll, renewalists are the fastest-growing religious group, approximately one-fourth of the world's 2 billion Christians. In the USA, 23% of Christians say they are renewalists.

The largest American renewalist denominations are the Assemblies of God, the United Pentecostal Church and the Church of God, which together account for more than 12 million members worldwide. Since the 1960s, the renewalist movement has leapt from these traditionally Pentecostal denominations to mainline Protestant and Catholic congregations. There are tongue-speaking Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians and Catholics.

Unity or division?

"The gift of tongues unites us," says Walter Matthews, executive director for the National Service Committee of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal. Matthews estimates that half a million U.S. Catholics now speak in tongues, and 10 million have been renewalists at some point. "It is meant to bring unity in the body of Christ and, by extension, in humanity."

But it can also bring suspicion. In one form of tongues, one person "translates" the tongues uttered by another, deciphering it as prophecy — a practice that, in the past, has sometimes split congregations that disagree on the prophecy's meaning or accuracy. Some can put too much emphasis on the gift of tongues, critics say, holding it up as evidence that they are more blessed than those who do not engage in the practice.

"If I say 'If you don't have this experience, your Christianity is inferior,' that gets very personal," says Roebuck, who, as a member of North Cleveland Church of God, a Pentecostal congregation near Chattanooga, Tenn., speaks in tongues during prayer. "That is a very judgmental statement."

A Baptist dispute

A major battle over tongues has roiled the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest group of American Protestants. The SBC's International Mission Board does not accept international missionaries who speak in tongues in public worship because it is not recognized as a part of Baptist identity, says spokesperson Wendy Norvelle. Next month, at the SBC's annual convention, a group of pastors will ask the SBC to officially determine whether tongue-speaking adheres to Baptist principles.

"Many in the SBC do not want to accept the inerrant word of God when it comes to praying in tongues," says Dwight McKissic, pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas, and a leader of the tongue-speaking Baptists. "They see it as irrational, but faith is irrational. I think they have chosen to reject it rather than teach it as God's word."

Will Hall, spokesman for the SBC, says the denomination has no official policy on speaking in tongues for its churches or individual members. But there are other signs the practice is gaining acceptance. Dallas Theological Seminary and Campus Crusade for Christ, two strongholds of independent Christianity, have done away with restrictions on tongue-speaking for students and staff.

"I see much more acceptance of it today in America than ever," says J. Lee Grady, editor of Charisma magazine, which covers the renewalist movement. "I see groups that had a hard line against teaching it now do not. There is a relaxing of old tensions."

 

STUDY: 'BIOLOGICAL REALITY' BEHIND THE EXPERIENCE Critics deride it as fake, but new research shows that something authentic happens in the brain when someone speaks in tongues. In 2006, a University of Pennsylvania team headed by Andrew B. Newberg found that the frontal lobe area of the brain usually associated with language skills and willful control of the body slips into low gear when someone engages in this form of ecstatic prayer. "Our findings are very consistent with what people say they are feeling," Newberg says. "That they are not in charge of what is happening and are experiencing an intense sense of themselves in relation to God." Newberg, a neuroscientist and co-author of Why We Believe What We Believe, a book on the biology behind belief, used neuroimaging to track blood flow to the brain. The study's subjects were five women from the same Pentecostal church. They were measured twice: as they sang a gospel song and as they spoke in tongues. The scans found that when the subjects spoke, the frontal lobe showed less blood flow and lower activity than it did during the singing. Newberg previously examined Buddhist monks in meditation and Catholic nuns in prayer. Their brain scans showed that the frontal lobe lit up with more activity the exact opposite of the tongue-speakers. Still, Newberg cautions against using the study as proof that God speaks to people through tongues. "It talks about the biological reality of the experience. It does not address whether there is a supernatural reality," he says. "That question is still left open." - By Kimberly Winston, Special for USA TODAY