The Gifts That Make People Nervous

From the series: Empowered — Discovering and Developing Your Spiritual Gifts

Let me name the elephant in the room.

When most Christians hear the phrase “spiritual gifts,” they’re broadly fine — until the conversation gets to the gifts that involve healing, miracles, prophecy and tongues. That’s when the room shifts. Eyes drop. People who were engaged a moment ago become suddenly cautious.

And honestly? I understand that. These are the gifts that carry the most baggage. They are the gifts most associated with manipulation, exaggeration, and theatrical performance. They are the gifts most likely to have caused someone pain, embarrassment, or disillusionment. And they are the gifts most likely to be dismissed by serious, thoughtful Christians who have decided that the safest response is to simply leave them alone.

But I want to suggest that leaving them alone is not the answer. And the reason I think that is not because I am naive about the problems, but precisely because I am not.

Two Equally Bad Responses

Here is the pattern I observe. When it comes to these gifts — faith, healing, miracles, tongues, prophecy — Christians tend to fall into one of two camps.

The first camp marginalises them. These gifts get quietly shelved, perhaps with a theological framework that says they ceased with the apostles, or simply with a practical assumption that they’re not really for ordinary people in ordinary churches. The result is a Christianity that is decent and sincere, but largely explained by natural means. There’s nothing happening that strictly requires God to be real.

The second camp sensationalises them. These gifts get amplified, performed, and made central to the identity of a community. Healings are claimed loudly. Experiences are elevated. People who don’t receive what they expected are sometimes made to feel that their faith was insufficient. The result is a Christianity that is spectacular but fragile — and often harmful to people who were already vulnerable.

Neither response is faithful to the New Testament. And in Empowered, I spend a significant amount of time arguing for a third way.

What If There’s a Third Way?

The book of Acts opens with a remarkable phrase. Luke says he wrote his gospel about all that Jesus “began” to do and to teach (Acts 1:1). That word “began” carries immeasurable weight. It suggests that what Jesus started during His earthly ministry was never meant to conclude with His ascension. It was designed to continue — through His followers, empowered by the same Spirit.

Jesus healed the sick, raised the dead, cast out demons, and multiplied bread to feed thousands. These were not peripheral features of His ministry that we should feel free to leave behind. They were signs of the kingdom’s arrival — visible demonstrations that God was breaking into the broken world with power and love. And His commission to His followers was clear: “Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons” (Matthew 10:8). This was not a suggestion. It was a command, placed alongside preaching and baptism as an essential expression of kingdom ministry.

The early church took this seriously. Luke records it as though it were ordinary. People were healed. Situations were transformed. Items of clothing carried healing from Paul to the sick (Acts 19:12) — and Luke narrates this without apparent embarrassment. For the first Christians, God’s supernatural work through His people was not an extraordinary exception. It was the expected expression of the kingdom continuing through a Spirit-empowered community.

The Wonderful Tension

So how do we navigate this faithfully, without falling into either dismissal or excess?

The theologian Gordon Fee, whose work on Paul and the Holy Spirit is among the most rigorous scholarship in this field, gives us a genuinely helpful frame. He describes the church as living within what he calls a “wonderful tension” between two realities — heaven and earth. We are a community of people who live on the earth, in a broken world where suffering persists and prayers are sometimes not answered the way we hoped. But we are also a community that has already tasted the powers of the age to come, that carries the Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead, and that is called to demonstrate the kingdom’s reality in the present.

Fee’s insight is that this tension, when held well, is not a problem to be solved — it is the normal posture of the Spirit-filled church. If you pull the tension too tight — claiming too much, too fast, demanding results, treating healing as a guaranteed transaction — you end up in dangerous territory. You create an environment where the vulnerable are manipulated and the doubtful are shamed. You make faith into a performance.

But if you let the tension go too slack — settling for a Christianity that expects nothing supernatural, that treats the power gifts as historical curiosities — the church’s witness falls flat. You end up representing a God whose power is entirely in the past tense.

The third way holds both. We expect God to move supernaturally because that is who He is and what He has promised. And we hold that expectation with humility, because we do not control Him, we cannot predict His timing, and we will not always understand His purposes.

Learning to Step Out

John Wimber, the founder of the Vineyard movement and one of the most thoughtful practitioners of healing ministry in recent church history, had a phrase he returned to repeatedly: “Faith is spelled R-I-S-K.”

What he meant was this: every time you pray for someone to be healed, you are stepping into uncertainty. You don’t know what God will do. You don’t know how He will respond. And there is always the possibility that nothing visible will happen — that you’ll pray with genuine faith and the person will leave unchanged. That is a genuinely uncomfortable place to stand.

But Wimber’s argument was that this risk is worth taking. Because something always happens when we pray in faith — it just might not be what we expected. Sometimes the healing is gradual rather than instantaneous. Sometimes it is emotional or spiritual rather than physical. Sometimes the most powerful thing is simply that a person who felt abandoned by God experienced the love and care of people who were willing to stop and pray. That is not nothing. That is, in fact, everything.

Wimber also said something that I find myself coming back to often: “We don’t seek God’s power, we seek His presence. His power and everything else we need is always found in His presence.” That reordering matters enormously. When the power gifts become about performance, about results, about spiritual credibility — they have already gone wrong. When they remain rooted in love for the person in front of you and trust in the God you are bringing them to, they remain faithful.

The Gift of Tongues

Of all the gifts, tongues is perhaps the one that provokes the most uncertainty. It is the gift most likely to make thoughtful Christians feel distinctly awkward.

But consider its biblical framing. Luke traces its origin back to Pentecost — and before that, to Babel. At Babel, humanity’s arrogant attempt at unity through power resulted in the scattering of language and the fracturing of community (Genesis 11). At Pentecost, the Spirit reverses that fracturing. People from every nation hear the gospel in their own language. What divided humanity is being undone. The gift of tongues, in its origins, is a sign of the Spirit’s power to cross the boundaries that separate us.

Paul, in 1 Corinthians 14, addresses its use in corporate worship with remarkable pastoral care. He doesn’t dismiss it — he regulates it, because he wants the church to be built up. Tongues with interpretation can function as a message from God to the congregation. Personal tongues is a form of prayer in which the Spirit intercedes beyond what words can express (Romans 8:26). These are not fringe experiences reserved for a spiritually elite few. They are gifts of grace, given by the same Spirit who distributes all the others, for the building up of the body and the deepening of the individual’s relationship with God.

Where I Land

In the appendix of Empowered, my wife Jeannie tells a story about a period of physical healing in my own life — something that happened after a trip to Rwanda in 2017 that I can only account for by the power of God. I include it not to prove a point, but because I think honesty requires it. I am not arguing for the power gifts from a theoretical distance. I am arguing for them because I have experienced what happens when God’s people hold the wonderful tension well — expectant but humble, bold but not manipulative, willing to step out in faith without demanding a particular outcome.

The gifts that make people nervous are not gifts to be avoided. They are gifts to be approached carefully, biblically, and with a community around you that can help you discern, test, and develop what the Spirit is doing.

The question is not whether these gifts are real. The New Testament evidence and the witness of the global church make a compelling case that they are. The question is whether we will engage them faithfully — neither dismissing what God has given nor using it for ends He never intended.

My invitation is this: don’t settle for a Christianity that explains itself entirely by natural means. And don’t pursue spiritual experience as an end in itself. Seek His presence. Do it with others. Hold the tension well. And be open to what God might do in and through a community that is genuinely available to Him.

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Paul Benger is the lead pastor of Ikon Church and the author of Empowered: Discovering and Developing Your Spiritual Gifts. Find the book here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/s?k=empowered+paul+benger