Personal Position on Tongues

I've had a number of emails come through my inbox lately concerning tongues and this blog. So let me just make my personal position very clear: I believe tongues exist and are still an important gift to the body of Christ, BUT not all tongues are appropriate at all times. This is NOT an anti-tongues blog at all.

I believe in two types of tongues for the modern church: a private prayer language and public tongues used for communicating in different languages. Both of these are still regularly experienced in the church and in my personal opinion are supported scripturally.

Public speaking in tongues where many members of the congregation are all speaking in tongues at the same time are inappropriate. I Corinthians 14 is really the end-all passage concerning tongues for me. I encourage everyone reading this blog to click that link above and read the entire chapter. Here's a short excerpt from verses 26-28:

“What then shall we say, brothers? When you come together, everyone has a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation. All of these must be done for the strengthening of the church. If anyone speaks in a tongue, two—or at the most three—should speak, one at a time, and someone must interpret. If there is no interpreter, the speaker should keep quiet in the church and speak to himself and God.”

If anyone is confused by this scripture, well, I'm sorry because you need more help than I can provide from this blog. But a quick Google search for Sylvan Learning Centers would be a great place to start...good luck with that.

Why is this relevant?
At the Rock, the entire congregation would regularly speak in tongues as a group with no interpretor, no order, it was just a group of people walking around speaking in indiscernible words. This was a pattern for years while I attended and is still reportedly the pattern.

Why is this an issue?

We were often taught at the Rock to ignore the inconsistencies with the doctrines being preached from the pulpit with scriptures because we all spoke in tongues corporately. You could expect to hear from members trying to explain away doubts, “We must be walking by the Spirit since we're all praying in tongues.” But this is not a fair or correct method of discerning whether or not doctrine is accurate.

Final thoughts
Again, this is my personal opinion supported by both my personal experiences and scriptures. A very influential article I read a few years back by Lehman Straus can be found at Bible.org and I strongly encourage anyone reading this blog to review that article AND I Corinthians 14. The article is a bit lengthy but worth the read.