About / The Author’s Story

The Author’s Story

One Sunday in September, and twenty-three years of settled theology.

I didn’t go looking for any of this. I went to church on September 1, 2013, the way I had every Sunday for twenty-three years, and I came home with a question I couldn’t put back down.

The Turning Point

Our pastor mentioned, almost in passing, an experience he’d had with the Holy Spirit — something he and the church staff had started calling “Brown Smoke Sunday.” He didn’t dwell on it. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

My Story

I’d built a good, careful theology over twenty-three years — the kind you build from sitting under solid teaching, reading solid books, and trusting the people who taught you. It had real strengths. It also had a shape I’d never examined from the outside, because I’d never had a reason to. That offhand remark from the pulpit was the reason. Not long after, an associate pastor handed me a book: Surprised by the Power of the Spirit, by Jack Deere. I read it mostly to refute it.

My Box

Deere’s central claim was uncomfortable: that our theology is shaped far more by our environment, our theological traditions, and our teachers than we like to admit — and that most of us mistake the shape of our box for the shape of the truth. I wanted that to be wrong. Instead, the more I traced my own convictions back to their source, the more of them I found standing on inherited assumption rather than direct study of the text. Isaiah had already said as much, centuries before I needed to hear it:

“…for just as the sky is higher than the earth, so my deeds are superior to your deeds and my plans superior to your plans.”Isaiah 55:9, NET

I had quietly assumed my theological box and God’s actual character were the same size. They weren’t.

One Experience Away

What followed was a long season — longer than I expected, more disruptive than I wanted — of reading everything I could find on the Holy Spirit, on the spiritual gifts, on what it actually means to hear God’s voice. I had held, without ever quite deciding to, a cessationist position: the view that the miraculous “sign gifts” — healing, prophecy, tongues — were given to authenticate the apostles and the writing of Scripture, and effectively ended once that job was done. I didn’t abandon that position because someone argued me out of it in a debate. I abandoned it because I went back to the text itself, without the box, and found it saying something wider than I’d been taught. I came out the other side holding a continuationist conviction instead — that the Spirit’s gifts didn’t expire with the apostles, and that the door Scripture describes is still open. The distance between those two words turned out to be the distance between a Kingdom life read about and a Kingdom life lived.

My Purpose

That’s the story behind every course on this site. Not a theory about the Holy Spirit, but a conviction, tested against Scripture and against my own resistance to it, that the life Jesus described and the life His first disciples actually lived is available now — not only after we die.

“Not that I have already attained this — that is, I have not already been perfected — but I strive to lay hold of that for which Christ Jesus also laid hold of me. Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself to have attained this. Instead I am single-minded: forgetting the things that are behind and reaching out for the things that are ahead, with this goal in mind, I strive toward the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”Philippians 3:12–14, NET

I’m still in pursuit of it, same as you. These courses are what I’ve actually experienced and built along the way — not because I’ve arrived, but because I know the box I used to live in, and I’d rather help you out of yours than leave you to find the door on your own. This passage is my motivation:

“Go and stand in the temple courts and proclaim to the people all the words of this life.”Acts 5:19–20, NET

— Dave Wessels
Flagstaff, Arizona