Was I Faking It When I Spoke in Tongues? I Don't Know.

How To Live Without a Breakthrough

The first time I spoke in tongues, I thought I was faking it.

I’m still not sure I wasn’t.

It was a Sunday night service at Christian Life Assembly in Stroudsburg, PA, which was the home church we always came back to when we were state-side from my parents’ missionary work in West Africa. The pastor of the church had visited us in Africa on one occasion, which helped foster a sense of belonging when we’d come back.

I loved that church, but I’d always wished that I could attend it invisibly. Everyone knew me (and my family), so when we’d darken the doors of the church for another brief States-side stint, there was an endless line of people who knew me, but I didn’t really know them.

My entire childhood was people staring at me. In rural Africa, because they’d never seen a little white boy before. And in American churches all up and down the eastern seaboard (as my parents traveled to raise money) because they’d never seen a white kid from Africa.

All I wanted was a place to be invisible even for just a moment. I eventually got there (sort of) once our time in Africa was officially over, about 6 months before I graduated high school. After I made friends, I started to feel like just one of the group, and that was a true gift.

The Sunday night that I “spoke in tongues” was a highlight of feeling too highlighted in public.

I had wanted to speak in tongues for a very long time. In the Assemblies of God, tongues is considered the “initial physical evidence of the baptism in the Holy Spirit.” In other words, they say you can’t claim to have received the empowering Spirit of God until you’ve experienced a gibberish-loosened tongue in prayer.

I was never the rebellious kid. I read my Bible and prayed every day so I could grow (grow, grow…as the song goes). But my relative spiritual maturity didn’t lead me to be puzzled by my lack of tongues-speak. Rather, it convinced me that there was something fundamentally wrong with my spiritual walk. I must have had some sin, some deficiency. I mustn’t have surrendered to God enough.

Sunday nights at Christian Life Assembly always edged toward revival. People wanted it bad. So much so that at times it felt like they were trying to force the move of the Spirit. Once, the pastor took the mic and abruptly ended worship, which meant he had sensed that the congregants were whipping themselves into a frenzy. In his estimation, the Spirit wasn’t in it.

The particular Sunday night that I (think) I spoke in tongues, the pastor definitely felt the Spirit was moving, and so encouraged everyone to lean in. He invited people to the altar while the worship band continued to play. I don’t remember what the call was, but I went down. I never liked going to the altar because I felt like everyone was staring at me (again!). But I also knew there was no way God was going to meet me in my seat, so I had to go down to the altar, where God was. I was sure that he’d at least be pleased with my willingness to be stared at. If it was uncomfortable, it must be spiritual.

Someone prayed for me, gently placing their hand on my forehead. I fell backwards, which might have been a gentle push on the part of the pray-er, or it might have been me wanting to fall over. Or it might have been the Spirit. I don’t know.

In Pentecostalism, we call that kind of falling over being “slain in the Spirit.” It’s not in the Bible, so some Pentecostals always call bull on it. I’ve never been convinced that it’s totally out of bounds, but I still wonder if I should have called bull in the moment, either on my prayer partner or on myself.

I had fallen back into a front-row chair. I remember slumping to the side, and that’s when (I think) I began speaking in tongues. Even while I was laying there, I remember wondering if what was happening to me was real. The testimonies of tongues-speaking that I’d heard from others made it sound like I would actually lose control of my tongue, like being possessed from an outside force. But I definitely felt the whole time I was laying there, slain, that I could have stopped and gotten up, no problem.

Eventually the service was drawn to a close. The pastor took the mic and solicited testimonies from the evening (another very Pentecostal practice). At first he asked if anyone was healed, then if anyone had heard the voice of God. Several people scattered across the sanctuary raised their hands with each prompt. They were collectively acknowledged with a round of applause.

Then he asked, “was anyone filled with the Spirit?”

In that moment, the only thing I knew was that God would be furious with me if I didn’t publicly acknowledge that I’d been filled. I had ironically gotten that kind of idea from the Conservative Baptists who ran my boarding school in West Africa. Fire-and-brimstone wasn’t just for sinners; it was also for people who experienced the work of God and were unwilling to proclaim it. The irony of it all is that the Conservative Baptists would have been scandalized by me speaking in tongues. I had a Bible teacher who told the class that speaking in tongues was actually from the devil.

I raised my hand, expecting to have it receive a passing acknowledgment like the others, but instead the pastor told me to come down to the altar (again) to testify.

As it turned out, I was the only one.

I was mortified.

I was going to get stared at again. I thought I might cry from the terror of being coaxed onto the platform. I was sure my face was beet-red, and thinking about it made it an even deeper beet-red. But I also knew that if I excused myself from the invitation, God would surely be angry with me for not giving him public credit for what he’d done.

The pastor asked me how it was, as if I was leaving a review of the Holy Spirit on Google.

I said, “It was awesome” (5 stars?).

It wasn’t.

It was actually a very mediocre experience. Which is why I wasn't sure it was real.

But now I’d gotten myself into a real pickle because I was sure God was going to be angry with me no matter what.

If it was all fake, I had dishonored God by calling something that wasn't the Holy Spirit the Holy Spirit. And I had even “testified” about it, which would surely make the punishment worse.

If, on the other hand, he had filled me with the evidence of speaking in tongues, I was doubting the experience. Which was equally unacceptable.

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“I learned to live without a breakthrough”—that’s just one of the many lovely lines from Andy Squyres’ “I Sing Your Glory” on his latest EP, Praise Songs.

The line summarizes how I’ve come to appraise my experience of speaking in tongues.

Click for Andy Squyres

I couldn’t consider my slain-tongues-testimony experience a breakthrough, even though it followed the Pentecostal script to a “T.” I lived for the next several years wondering if I was continuing to fake speaking in tongues. And I wasn’t sure I was ever going to make it (as a Pentecostal) as long as I wasn’t sure.

Nevertheless, I learned to live with the discomfort of doubting my own spiritual experiences. It was a tough lesson, but a good one—to hold my experience with open hands, offering it not as a proof of my new-found spiritual state, but as an ongoing reminder of my weakness, self-doubt, and possible hypocrisy.

I still speak in tongues. It never feels super spiritual, but I don’t doubt God is in it.

I got to that place by believing that the entire Spirit-filled life can be lived “without a breakthrough.”

Whether my Sunday-night experience at Christian Life Assembly was real or not, I am filled with the Spirit, and I would have been anyway even if I had never had my beet-red face stared at.

The Holy Spirit doesn’t need to do anything in public. He doesn’t need to be loud, flashy, profound, or indisputable. And God is definitely not angry with me (or you!) about the trepidation of Pentecostal altar calls.

The in-filling of the Holy Spirit doesn’t need to be like gasoline on a fire.

It can be a slow burn.