Good Things From Strange Fire

John MacArthur recently held a conference called “Strange Fire” to tell as many people as would listen that the Charismatic movement is bad–very, very, very bad (but in a LOT more words than that).

I googled “strange fire” images for this post. Interestingly, I only found images of normal fire. So now the only thing I can ponder is what exactly “strange fire” might look like. Perhaps it looks like little drops of rain? That would certainly be strange. Or maybe it looks like duck-billed platypuses. No, that wouldn’t be strange; that would just be cute. So I’m left all verklempt!

Thanks MacArthur. You’ve ruined my day.

Not only do I think his title is kinda crazy, but I also think his conclusions are significantly flawed. After reading through many of the transcripts from the conference, I completely disagree with MacArthur’s broad, lumping generalizations. They lumped all of us together in sweeping generalizations and demonized the entire Pentecostal and Charismatic movements—literally.

But with that said, in hopes of not adding to the negativity of this whole thing, I pulled a few positive notes from what I’ve read. Here are three observations from MacArthur’s Strange-Fire-whatever-that-looks-like-conference that I think are worthwhile:

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The Umbrella Pickle

John, Bill, & The Umbrella Cleaning Pickle: Effective (and ineffective) Evangelism in Today’s Culture

We all have beliefs, particularly about sin. But what happens when our beliefs about sin become beliefs about people, or worse–about friends? How do we share Truth without looking like cold, uncaring people?

Let’s be hypothetical here, shall we? Let’s say I believe that cleaning an umbrella is wrong. (What, don’t you ever clean your umbrella? No? YOU SICK, SICK PEOPLE!) Anyone who cleans their umbrella is, in fact, “sinning”. So say someone, we’ll call him John, jumps into “sin” and begins cleaning his umbrella every day, even when it’s not dirty.

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