If a voice out of the blue speaks to you ...
Is That God Talking?
By T. M. LUHRMANN, NYT
I still remember how startled I was when a young woman I was interviewing told me God had spoken to her, audibly.
I was doing ethnographic field work in a quietly charismatic evangelical church in Chicago. This was the kind of church in which people sought an intimate, conversational relationship with God. It was not at all uncommon for people to talk about hearing God.
This woman, however, said that she had been to a job interview and that later, while tidying up at home, she had heard God say, “That’s not the one” — and that she had looked around to see where the voice had come from. She told me that she heard from God like that many times. The first time as an adult was when she was driving alone in an unfamiliar part of the city — and God spoke up audibly out of the back seat and told her that he would always be with her.
After that, I started to ask people in the church more systematically about whether they had ever heard God speak audibly. About a third said yes. They reported odd auditory events in which God said “Sit and listen” or “Read James” or “I will always love you.”
This woman’s account is a good example: “The Lord spoke to me clearly in April, like May or April. To start a school.”
(More here.)
I still remember how startled I was when a young woman I was interviewing told me God had spoken to her, audibly.
I was doing ethnographic field work in a quietly charismatic evangelical church in Chicago. This was the kind of church in which people sought an intimate, conversational relationship with God. It was not at all uncommon for people to talk about hearing God.
This woman, however, said that she had been to a job interview and that later, while tidying up at home, she had heard God say, “That’s not the one” — and that she had looked around to see where the voice had come from. She told me that she heard from God like that many times. The first time as an adult was when she was driving alone in an unfamiliar part of the city — and God spoke up audibly out of the back seat and told her that he would always be with her.
After that, I started to ask people in the church more systematically about whether they had ever heard God speak audibly. About a third said yes. They reported odd auditory events in which God said “Sit and listen” or “Read James” or “I will always love you.”
This woman’s account is a good example: “The Lord spoke to me clearly in April, like May or April. To start a school.”
(More here.)
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