An Earnest Appeal to People Who Give a Darn about the Spiritual Senses

In which I bless the rains down in Africa

It’s my second day in Kenya. I’m here to teach pastors in Nairobi. It’s been a few years since I’ve spent time in Kenya. Coming from a leafy midwest autumn into the perpetual motion of Nairobi is jolting. Cars, buses, large trucks, motorbikes, bicycles, and pedestrians crowd together in the streets, weaving back and forth, yelling and blowing their horns and swerving, missing one another by inches. Lining the roads are ubiquitous stalls selling shoes, clothing, toys, vegetables, jewelry, and furniture—blocks and blocks of furniture, so much furniture you think there can’t possibly be one more stall, but there it is, and then another. Men in the long white robes of Islam and women in corresponding dress with heads covered mix with multitudes in jeans and short skirts and t-shirts and ballcaps. Trees with bright purple blooms hang over the streets and drop their petals on the passers-by. Words fail me as I try to describe the energy and joy and desperation and beauty and chaos of Nairobi.

I breathe in diesel fumes as we turn into a neighborhood full of children who stare and wave at the mzungus in the car. We stop at the office of Global Methodist conference here. I suspect the needs of the conference will soon require a larger space. Nowhere on earth is Christianity growing more quickly than in sub-Saharan Africa. Kenyans tend to be deeply religious people. Whether Christian or Muslim or adherents of some indigenous religious practice, Kenyans believe in the world of spirits. They know there is a God. They know there is a transcendent realm that comes to bear on their lives in tangible ways.

The students I’m teaching here are curious about America, and particularly the American church. Why does America seem to be losing its faith? Do American Methodists believe in being filled with the Holy Spirit? Is it true that Africans are now re-evangelizing America? What is so different between Kenya and the U.S. that the Kenyan church is growing while the American church is declining, seemingly in the thrall of secular agendas?

It’s hard to explain these things. I’m not sure I know the answers. In fact, I’m sure any answer I give will be inadequate. I tell them that Methodists in America (many of them at least) believe it is important to be filled with the Spirit and receive the gifts of the Spirit. They’re encouraged by this. I also talk about the spiritual malaise from which so many in the U.S. suffer. My students are unsurprised. I ask if I can pray for them and they receive it like daily bread. I pray for them and lay hands on them. The Spirit is palpable, electric. It was not exactly a physical sensation, but one perceived through spiritual senses. If the notion of the spiritual senses is unfamiliar, it’s because we in the West have by and large lost our awareness of them. Yet this is a fairly recent development. Wesley himself was aware of the importance of the spiritual senses and wrote about them in “An Earnest Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion.”

It is necessary that you have the hearing ear, and the seeing eye, emphatically so called; that you should have a new class of senses opening in your Soul, not depending on organs of flesh and blood, to be the evidence of things not seen, as your bodily senses are of visible things; to be the avenues of the invisible world, to discern spiritual objects, and to furnish you with ideas of what the outward eye hath not seen, neither the ear heard.

In other words, the natural senses perceive material things, and the spiritual senses perceive spiritual things. Apart from the acuity of the spiritual senses, we cannot hope to perceive the things of God. He continues,

And till you have these internal senses, till the eyes of your understanding are opened, you can have no apprehension of divine things, no idea of them at all. Nor consequently, till then, can you either judge truly or reason justly concerning them: seeing your Reason has no ground whereon to stand, no materials to work upon.

I think the spiritual senses are real, though I won’t suggest that mine are finely attuned. I wonder if I suffer from a more common Western condition whereby we have dulled our spiritual senses through a steady diet of skepticism and distraction. Without question, I believe in the gifts of the Spirit promised in Scripture. My faith is the center of my life. I attend church, search the Scriptures, and pray, and yet when I’m in places like Kenya and Cuba I feel like a spiritual cinder block. Experience tells me I’m not alone in this regard.

Broadly speaking, I don’t experience Kenyans as living with an “immanent frame,” to use Charles Taylor’s term. Their framework for understanding the world tends naturally to draw upon the transcendent. The spiritual world is immediate. It is part of everyday lived reality. This seems far less common in the U.S., where we function in light of the immanent cause-and-effect of the natural world. We don’t tend to think of the spirit world as exerting influence over day-to-day events. To draw a different analogy, we Westerners have commonly let our muscles of spiritual perception atrophy. We don’t employ these senses, and thus they weaken. Use it or lose it, so the saying goes.

Rediscovering the spiritual senses will be a vital project of the church in the days ahead. While the West is no longer Christian in the way it once was, neither is it truly secular. It is a hodgepodge of beliefs and practices. This situation is both a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is to bring people who are used to bespoke religious practices into the ordered worldview of Christian faith. The opportunity is that they already acknowledge the transcendent, and perhaps have even had transcendent experiences. So we can build upon those experiences and invite them into a relationship with the living God.

I’ve only been here a short time, but my experience has already been rich and life-giving. I love the people with whom I’m working. I love what God is doing. Every time I come to Africa I soak up more than I can possibly process. But you can bet, as I do, I’ll do so right here on the ol’ Substack.

I’m so jetlagged now that my brain feels like it’s filled with Elmer’s glue. Time to log off and try to sleep. Blessings!