God Is Moving?
The phrase, “God is moving,” does not appear in the Bible. Instead, it is a theological abstraction that emerged from the intersection of vaguely scriptural, rhetorical imagery, 19th-century revivalism, and 20th-century Pentecostalism. The lineage of this language follows a distinct path. The expression, wording, or verbiage arose in the United States to describe sudden, communal outbursts of religious fervor. If this was a biblical expectation, one would see it as one in scripture and then witnessed through church history.
Instead of viewing God’s work solely through the lens of steady, established happenings, mirroring biblical assumption, revivalists began to speak of “seasons of visitation.” This framed God’s Spirit as a force that could “sweep” through a region, effectively “moving” from one town to another. The phrase became a staple of the vernacular during the Holiness movement and the subsequent Azusa Street Revival (1906). The “movement” of God was associated with a visible or tangible manifestation of the divine presence.
To say “God is moving” became a way to signify that the Holy Spirit was currently performing “signs and wonders” within a specific region. By the mid-20th century, the phrase was popularized through contemporary worship music. Much of what is labeled a “movement of God” today is actually a manufactured psychological phenomenon. That’s why people will also talk about methodology in relationship to this apparent movement.
The Actual Movement Isn’t God
By controlling variables like lighting (dimmed rooms), acoustics (repetitive chord progressions and swelling crescendos), and “pacing” (the transition from high-energy to intimate), a specific emotional state is induced. When people feel an emotional “high” or a sense of “awe” created by the environment, they are told, “The Spirit is moving.” Because they feel something, they believe the prophecy is being fulfilled, even if the cause is purely physiological.
I minored in speech in college. One of the dynamics of public speaking is the polarization of an audience. You get a crowd of people and then rely on emotion spreading through the group. As it happens, you attribute that to the Holy Spirit, reinforcing that God is working. How and why did the crowd get into the room? Was it through what the New Testament explains or portrays as the work of God? No. Fleshly means, carnal allurements, and marketing. After that, even more manipulation occurs. The focus of this is not scripture, the truth, or the true nature of Jesus Christ. People are not reacting to God and how scripture reveals that He works.
A Self-Fulfilling “Prophecy”
Modern gatherings often utilize expectation-setting to trigger a response. A leader declares, “God is going to move in a powerful way tonight” or “I feel a breakthrough coming.” This creates a heightened state of suggestibility. Individuals begin to mirror the behavior of those around them — eye clenching, hands raised, swaying, and other emotional outbursts. This is often a documented psychological effect called social contagion. When the crowd reacts, the leader points to the reaction as evidence that the initial “prophecy” was true.
People do hunger for an experience with God as authentication of their own spirituality. The Bible outlines again and again the true manifestation of spirituality. When it is a true church with truly converted people, the Holy Spirit is always there. God in fact is always working in true believers. The manipulation of emotional responses as a means of self-fulfilling prophecies is an easy way to impart an experience that deceives people that they had an experience with God. Then someone says, “God is moving,” not in fact looking at the biblical evidence of conversion.
In the realm of mass evangelism and mega-church growth over the last 100 years, success is often equated with the Spirit. Using heavy promotion, the best possible production value, and charismatic personality, a crowd is gathered. Statistically, in a crowd of people someone will have a positive emotional experience or a perceived “sign.” These outliers are then spotlighted as “the movement of God,” ignoring the carnal effort and financial capital used to assemble the crowd in the first place.
The Rise of Pragmatism (And Isaiah 1-2)
The last century saw the rise of pragmatism in the church—the idea that the “fruit” (numbers, excitement, or money) validates the method. This is in fact a carnal metric. A business can use these same methods to sell products. If the “movement” is dependent on the technology, the personality, or the specific music, it fulfills its own prophecy through human effort rather than a sovereign act of God. I am reminded of Isaiah’s critique of the false worship of Israel in Isaiah 1 and 2, ending with the last verse of chapter 2 (v. 22) to sum up those two chapters:
Cease ye from man, whose breath is in his nostrils: for wherein is he to be accounted of?
Almost everything in those two chapters is about methodology. In a reaction to exposure of the deceit of false or aberrant spirituality, the leader defends by saying, “The message is the same, but the methods change.” Both of those are in fact not true. The message definitely changed, and the change in methods directly related to it. The methods do matter as seen all throughout scripture. True New Testament churches through history titled this, the regulative principle of worship, which says that God also regulates the methods.
Charles Finney
Charles Finney, the author of much of the trajectory of the unscriptural methods today, called them “new measures.” Because he was Pelagian and did not embrace the biblical teaching of man’s spiritual deadness or utter depravity, Finney used new emotionally compelling music unlike anything in the history of the church and other carnal means of attracting and moving an audience through an orchestrated campaign. Finney denied the doctrine of original sin, arguing that sin is a choice of the will rather than an inherited nature.
To compel an immediate moral choice, Finney initiated the “anxious bench,” a seat at the front of a building for individuals who had a movement of God on them. His tactic was a direct application of his belief in the use emotional and psychological pressure to break a person’s incalcitrant will. The new measures included prolonged meetings, shouting, and intense personal appeals (praying for people by name), which were designed to “get up” a revival through human effort and emotional atmosphere. Do you understand that “God is moving” through Finney directly related to his new measures, which were truly changes in methodology?
“The Message Is the Same, But the Methods May Change”
The concept that “the message is the same, but the methods may change” is also a foundational pillar of modern evangelical pragmatism. While it is often presented as a common-sense adaptation to culture, its historical roots and its relationship to the manufacturing of spiritual experiences are deeply intertwined with the 20th-century shift toward sociology and marketing in the church. When people are exposed to these methods, they think they’re getting something, but in reality they are just “getting gotten” by something then labeled, ‘that God did it.’
Often called the “Father of Church Growth,” Donald McGavran was a missionary who applied cultural anthropology and sociology to church planting. He argued that the barriers to the Gospel were often sociological, not theological. He pioneered the “Homogeneous Unit Principle,” suggesting people like to become Christians without crossing racial or social barriers. McGavran’s work shifted the focus from faithfulness to a message to measurable effectiveness of a method. This birthed the idea that methods are neutral tools that should be swapped out based on what “works” to produce numerical growth.
Carnal Methods
No doubt the purveyors of the church growth movement cloak their methodology in theological and religious terminology. Proponents of this concept almost universally use verses out of context to justify it, such as 1 Corinthians 9:22:
I am made all things to all men, that I might by all means save some.
In history, true biblical churches interpreted Paul’s words as a call to personal sacrifice and cultural humility (e.g., a missionary learning a language). The modern twist on the Apostle Paul in the last 100 years reinterprets him to mean methodological innovation. The “all means” are now seen as technology, psychological branding, and entertainment-driven liturgy. This even and especially occurs in small town churches by a medium sized fish in a small pond.
The danger of methods-change philosophy is that it assumes methods are theologically neutral. However, as media theorist Marshall McLuhan famously stated, “The medium is the message.” When you change the method, you also fundamentally alter the message being received. If a church adopts the “method” of a rock concert (lighting, bass-heavy music, emotional crescendos) to deliver the “message” of the Gospel, a specific psychological response is guaranteed. The “method” (the music and atmosphere) produces a physiological release of dopamine and oxytocin.
Actually a Psychological or Physiological Response
Because the “message” (the lyrics) is religious, the person attributes their physiological response to the Holy Spirit. This method creates a feedback loop. A church sees the emotional response and says, “Our method worked; God is moving.” This reinforces the prophecy that God moves when these methods are applied. For most of church history, the methods were not considered interchangeable. They were called the “ordinary means of grace”: The preaching of the Word, the administration of the ordinances, and disciplined prayer. With this, Jesus and the Bible were sufficient. This is the Isaiah 2:22, “cease from man.”
The methods in the modern church growth movement are seen as divinely appointed, not humanly invented. The “methods change” philosophy essentially argued that these ordinary means were no longer effective in a modern world and needed to be supplemented or replaced by attractional methods. This followed along with the innovation of Charles Finney and his aberrant theology and gospel. By decoupling the message from the method, many churches inadvertently created a system where the movement of God is actually the movement of the crowd responding to sophisticated psychological triggers.
“Don’t Curse the Darkness; Light a Candle and Step In!”
Another typical unbiblical, albeit religious sounding, rebuttal to the criticism of carnal methods, then attributing them to God is this quote: “Don’t curse the darkness; light a candle and step in!!” This phrase—often attributed to Peter Benenson (founder of Amnesty International) or Eleanor Roosevelt—is frequently co-opted by proponents of pragmatic methodology to deflect criticism. It implies that the “darkness” (the declining culture, the unchurched, or spiritual apathy) is so dire that any attempt to fix it is better than no attempt at all.
The use of the quotation says, “The critics are just ‘cursing’ the problem, but we are actually ‘lighting a candle’ (using our methods) to solve it.” In so doing, it deflects and frames the critic as someone who enjoys complaining about the problem but refuses to help. It forces the critic to prove he has a “better” method that produces the same numerical results, rather than allowing the critic to question the biblical validity of the current method. By categorizing criticism as “cursing,” proponents label theological scrutiny as an act of hostility rather than an act of protection.
The Benenson or Roosevelt quote (two theological liberals) creates a false dichotomy: you are either an innovator (lighting a candle) or a complainer (cursing the darkness). It then discourages true biblical churches from exercising their historical duty of testing the spirits. If you point out that the “candle” is actually a manufactured psychological fire, you are accused of trying to “extinguish the only light we have.” The phrase relies on the emotion of urgency. If a room is pitch black, you don’t care if the candle is made of paraffin or beeswax; you just want light.
False or True Light? Appearing as an Angel of Light?
Pragmatists argue that because people are “going to hell,” we don’t have time to debate the nuances of music theory, lighting, or psychological triggers. However, if the “candle” being lit is a carnal imitation, it provides a false light. It makes people think they have seen the glory of God when they have only seen a clever production. It also ignores the fact that many critics are stepped in—pastoring, teaching, and praying—but they are doing so through the scriptural and ordinary means of grace, which do not produce the immediate, flashy so-called “movement” that the pragmatic methods do.
Historically, those in the true biblical line of churches and faith would respond that God’s Word is the only candle. “Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto my path” (Psalm 119:105). From this perspective, using manipulative methodology isn’t “lighting a candle”; it’s turning on a spotlight that blinds people to the actual light of Christ. They argue that when the church steps in using carnal means, it stops being a “city on a hill” and becomes just another theater in the valley. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 11:14 that Satan Himself appears, especially in false churches, as an angel of light.
A Challenge
The deflection from practices in rebellion against the Bible and true spirituality mean to allow continued disobedience to God. That isn’t light; that is darkness. The pragmatism is and should be the enemy, not something a biblical church would embrace. It does more to create false converts and fraudulent sanctification. As Jesus said, people become twice the child of Hell that they once were. It is a scourge on a region and the entire nation. If it is contending for the kingdom, it isn’t the kingdom of Jesus Christ, but the kingdom of this world.
I am making a challenge to anyone reading. What would happen if for a year you just offered the Word of God? Everything was scriptural. Is the Bible good enough? When God is moving, isn’t that better or more powerful than carnal, fleshly means? Let’s find out if God really is moving. This would a very good test for you. The Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 1-2 limits the means of church growth to the true biblical message, what will not make any sense to the mighty, the noble, the wise, or let’s say, the pragmatist, of this world. Let me know if that’s what you’re going to do.