Leadership Conversation on Spiritual Warfare

I have been asked to participate in an interactive feature of Leadership Journal’s new website: Conversations. According to the invitation I received, “‘Conversations’ will convene leading ministry thinkers to engage in honest dialogue about issues that concern ministry leadership and praxis.” Well, I’m honored to be asked and glad to join in the conversation. I have been reading Leadership, a publication of Christianity Today, for over 25 years. During this period of time, the journal has proven itself to be one of the most helpful resources available for church leaders, including both ordained clergy and lay leaders.

The first conversation in which I will participate is a response to this provocative question:

What is your most intense experience with spiritual warfare?

Before I answer this question, I’d like to say something about the the worldview it assumes. Any answer to the spiritual warfare question rests on assumptions about the nature of world and the reality of evil spiritual forces. For millions of Christians throughout the world today, especially in the southern hemisphere, the reality of supernatural evil powers is assumed. That’s not true for a good many Christians in America and Western Europe, however, who deny the existence of evil outside of that in human hearts and social structures. I was once firmly in that northern, modernist camp. Though I believed in the Triune God, I was agnostic about supernatural evil, which seemed to me both antique and irrelevant. Yet, I found that Scripture kept confronting me with the reality of demonic powers. The Gospels are full of Jesus’ encounters with demons. The Apostle Paul repeatedly underscores their reality. And then there were the stories from trustworthy believers in Africa and South America, for whom demonic powers were as real as socio-economic forces were to me. In the end, I found it impossible to deny the truth of Ephesians 6:11-12: “Put on God’s armor so that you can make a stand against the tricks of the devil. We aren’t fighting against human enemies but against rulers, authorities, forces of cosmic darkness, and spiritual powers of evil in the heavens” (CEB). (I have written more extensively on the topic of supernatural evil in an online article: “Do Demons Exist?”)

Of course, affirming the existence of “spiritual powers of evil” does not require any particular theory of how these powers operate. Though I believe that sometimes these powers manifest themselves in forms of demonic oppression or possession, I am convinced that they usually operate in much more widespread and obscure, and thus more insidious, ways. Spiritual warfare doesn’t always show itself to be obviously spiritual. Satan doesn’t jump out in a bright red suit to tempt or distract or discourage us. In fact, it can seem to us like we’re actually fighting against human enemies, even though Scripture affirms that our real battle is of a different sort altogether.

Thus, when I think of my “most intense experience with spiritual warfare,” I do not remember times when I was praying for people who were literally demonized. Those were intense, but relatively short. By far, my most severe experiences of spiritual warfare might look to the materialistic observer like merely human experiences, with no demons needed. I am thinking of times during my pastoral ministry at Irvine Presbyterian Church when I was deeply discouraged with my ministry, my church, and myself. Now, discouragement is a natural human response to failure and doesn’t require a demonic agent. But, I believe that what I was going through during those difficult times was more than human. Based on my experience and that of so many other Christians I know, discouragement seems to be a powerful and often-used weapon in our Enemy’s arsenal.

To be sure, there were human elements in my discouragement such as exhaustion, failure, and frustration. But things happened that suggested that some other power was working against me. People who had been supportive of me inexplicably turned against me. Church members I had tried hard to love accused me of being unloving. Trusted leaders broke their word and blamed me in order to cover their own backsides. I got so wrapped up in trying to fix things that I spent less time with the Lord. I found myself distracted from the most important parts of my ministry and focused on relatively inconsequential things.

At the time all of this was happening, I confess that I tended to see all of my battles as against flesh and blood. But, in retrospect, I believe that the forces of evil were at work in subtle ways. And, I believe that God was also at work in subtle ways. He was using that which Satan and his minions intended for evil in order to work good in my life and through me in the lives of others. But I sure couldn’t see this at the time.

Again, I realize that one who disbelieves in the literal existence of demonic powers could explain what I experienced in merely human terms. But, if there was a fundamental spiritual dimension to what was going on with me, then any effort to solve the problems with human ingenuity alone was doomed to fail. What I and my ministry partners needed to do was to put on the armor of God, to major in truth, righteousness, peace, faith, salvation, and God’s Word (see Ephesians 6:13-17). Then, fully girded for battle, we needed to pray in the Spirit at all times (6:18). Only in this way were we able to do battle in the right way and to enjoy the rest that comes when we taste in this age a bit of God’s ultimate victory.