Children and Supernatural Ministry, Part 1
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In Acts 1 Jesus tells his disciples to wait in Jerusalem for “a few days” for the coming of the Holy Spirit. About 120 believers gathered there. Were these 120 adults who had no children who gathered, waiting for the Holy Spirit to baptize them? While the adults were meeting in the upper room was there a program going on downstairs for children and youth? In Matthew 18:6 Jesus refers to little children who believe in him. Were some of these little believers among the believers there in that room at Pentecost? When Peter stood up on the day of Pentecost and quoted from the prophet Joel during his sermon saying that their sons and daughters would prophesy, and their young men would see visions, was he actually able to point to some of those children and youth in the crowd? And in 1 Corinthians 12:7 when Paul says that a manifestation of the Spirit is given to each one for the common good, was he intending to say each one of those over the age of eighteen? Acts 21:9 says that Philip the evangelist had four unmarried daughters who prophesied. How old were they when they started prophesying and how old were they when this was written? Of course we don’t know the answers to these questions. My point is that we have for too long read the Scriptures with an assumption that supernatural experiences with the Holy Spirit and supernatural ministry done by the Spirit are things for adults.
Church history tells us otherwise. It turns out that the prophet Joel did mean all flesh, including children. There is no junior-sized Holy Spirit for children and youth. The Holy Spirit is “one size fits all.”
In his “Letter to the Reverend Dr. Conyers Middleton” countering Middleton’s view that extraordinary gifts of the Spirit ceased with the death of the Apostles, John Wesley quotes the early church father Cyprian (c. 200-258) as saying, “Besides the visions of the night, even in the daytime, innocent children among us are filled with the Holy Spirit; and in ecstasies see, and hear, and speak those things by which God is pleased to admonish and instruct us.” This quote from Cyprian so early in church history is a fulfillment of Peter’s quotation from the prophet Joel that “your sons and daughters will prophesy,” and it is evidence that the supernatural ministry of children had begun. Due to space constraints for this article, I will skip over centuries of children experiencing the supernatural and ministering supernaturally and begin with European Protestantism in the 1700s, where we will clearly see the supernatural stream of children’s ministry from which Methodism emerged.
Supernatural Ministry with Children in Europe
Around 1708 there was the Silesian Children’s Prayer Revival in Central Europe. Bruce Hindmarsh wrote that children of Protestant parents began to meet in open fields outside of Sprottau at daybreak and several other times a day (“Let the Children Come to Me,” Christianity Today/Christian History & Biography, May, 2009). They would form a circle and pray, sometimes lying prostrate on the ground. They would sing Lutheran hymns, read Psalms and devotional texts and close with a blessing. Soon adults would gather and form a circle around the children. In some towns as many as 300 children gathered and later an observer reported a thousand. The Catholic magistrates ordered them to desist but the children would not stop. Eric Swensson adds that eyewitnesses noted that a child was acting as an evangelist to the adults telling them that if they wanted to leave their sins God would forgive them (Kinderbeten: The Origin Unfolding, and Interpretations of the Silesian Children’s Prayer Revival). Many adults were moved to tears, not as a result of fiery preaching but by being in the presence of quiet worship by children. Swensson notes a supernatural manifestation among the children when the letters of the prayer books began to irradiate light and doves began flying around the children close enough to be touched. This did not sit well with some of the Silesian orthodox Lutheran clergy. The Silesian Children’s Prayer Revival was incorporated into the church and Protestant pastors fanned it into a regional renewal movement. The nerve center of the revival was the Jesus Church in Teschen, deep in the south of Poland. It was one of the few churches the ruling Catholics allowed the Protestants in the region to have.
Some Protestants in the neighboring region of Moravia were inspired by the revival at Teschen, and fleeing religious and economic persecution they migrated to east Saxony in German territory finding a place of safety on the estate of Count von Zinzendorf in 1722. In the early part of 1727, John Greenfield notes that Zinzendorf began to give spiritual instruction to a class of nine girls between the ages of ten and thirteen years (Power From on High or The Two Hundredth Anniversary of the Great Moravian Revival 1727-1927). He saw no trace of spiritual life among them, so he began to pray for them. The Moravian outpouring occurred on August 13 of that year, but what is often overlooked is the fact that there was also an outpouring among the children. The children, both boys and girls, felt a strong impulse to pray. An eyewitness said, “I cannot ascribe the case of the great wakening of the children at Herrnhut to anything but the wonderful outpouring of the Spirit of God upon the communicant congregation assembled on that occasion. The breezes of the Spirit pervaded at that time equally both young and old.” Regarding the Moravians, Eddie Hyatt writes,
“In 1727 a Moravian pastor was leading a church meeting when he was overwhelmed by the presence of the Lord and fell to the floor. The entire congregation was overwhelmed by the Spirit and presence of God and sank to the floor with him. After that Moravians began to be filled with the Spirit and prophesy. Spiritual gifts were manifested, miraculous cures were experienced, some spoke in tongues'' (2000 Years of Charismatic Christianity).
Moravian historian John Greenfield adds that Christian women and young people were filled with the Spirit and prophesied.
Supernatural Ministry Among Methodist Children
After John Wesley’s experiences with the Moravians aboard a ship to Georgia and in Georgia, and after his experience at a Moravian meeting at Aldersgate Street in 1738, he went on a trip to Herrnhut to see for himself what the Spirit was doing there. Wesley spent months in Herrnhut witnessing the Spirit moving not only among the adults but also among the children.
Wesley had a particular tenderness for children. When ascending the pulpit of a church in which he was often allowed to preach, a child sat in his way on the stairs. Rather than demonstrating annoyance, he bent and kissed the child. (He was in his 80’s at the time). On entering Oldham he found the “whole street lined with children;” they ran around him and before him on his way to the spot on which he was to preach, and after the sermon “a whole troop, boys and girls, closed him in, and would not let him go till he had shaken each of them by the hand” At Stockton-upon-Tees, as soon as he came down from the desk, he was enclosed by a body of them; one after another sunk down upon their knees, until they were all kneeling: he kneeled down himself, and commenced praying for them. Multitudes of people ran back into the houses. “The fire,” Wesley said, “kindled and ran from heart to heart, till few, if any, were unaffected. Is not this a new thing in the earth? God begins his work in children. Thus it has been in Cornwall, Manchester, and Epworth.”
Children were as liable to fall over under the power of the Spirit as were adults under Wesley’s preaching. He wrote in his Journal, May 21, 1739,
“In the evening I was interrupted at Nicholas-Street, almost as soon as I had begun to speak, by the cries of one who was ‘pricked at the heart,’ and strongly groaned for pardon and peace…. Another person dropped down, close to one who was a strong assertor of the contrary doctrine. While he stood astonished at the sight, a little boy near him was seized in the same manner. A young man who stood up behind fixed his eyes on him and sunk down himself as one dead.”
Wesley also shared stories about children and youth who were involved in supernatural ministry. Wesley wrote in his Journal about a seven-year-old child who saw visions: “When Sermon was ended, one brought good tidings to Mr. B. from Grandchester, that God had there broken down seventeen persons, last week, by the singing of hymns only; and that a child, seven years old, sees many visions, and astonishes the neighbors with her innocent, awful manner of declaring them” (Journal July 14, 1759). A few days later he wrote,
“Now too came good news from several parts, especially Grandchester; where ten more persons were cut to the heart in singing hymns among themselves; and the little child before-mentioned continues to astonish all the neighborhood. A noted Physician came some time ago and closely examined her. The result was, he confessed it was no distemper of mind, but the hand of God” (Journal July 22, 1759).
He comments in his journal entry of June 5, 1772, “Yea, many children here [Weardale] have had far deeper experience, and more constant fellowship with God, than the oldest man or woman at Everton which I have seen or heard of. So that, upon the whole, we may affirm, such a work of God as this has not been seen before in the three kingdoms.” And on January 27, 1771, Wesley wrote: “I buried the remains of Joan Turner, who spent all her last hours in rejoicing and praising God, and died full of faith and of the Holy Ghost, at three years and an half old.”
In other places Wesley wrote about a thirteen-year-old suicidal boy who was changed and healed by a vision; a ten-year-old girl who experienced a trance and a vision; a fifteen-year-old girl in a trance and experiencing a vision; a fourteen- or fifteen-year-old girl with an angelic encounter. In his Sermon 98, “On Visiting the Sick,” Wesley charged parents to train their children in visiting the sick as well as saying their prayers and going to church.
On April 27, 1768, James Hindmarsh wrote a letter to Wesley about a remarkable work of God that had broken out among the children of Kingswood School. He said that God broke in on the boys in a surprising manner. While they were in their rooms the power of God came upon them even like a mighty, rushing wind, which made them cry aloud for mercy.” A number of the boys came to know Christ as their Savior. Wesley has numerous subsequent entries about the supernatural workings of the Spirit of God among the children of the Kingswood School including accounts of the children evangelizing their caregivers, who gave their lives to Christ as a result of the ministry of these children.
John Wigger notes that Francis Asbury had no qualms about appointing two teenagers to a large circuit (American Saint: Francis Asbury & The Methodists). Thomas Lyell was only fifteen years old when he preached before a crowd of four to five thousand people at a quarterly meeting in 1790. After saving enough money to buy a horse, Lyell joined the traveling connection in 1792. His first appointment was on the Frederick circuit in Virginia with Thomas Scott, who was only twenty-one or twenty-two and who had joined the traveling connection three years before. Between them, “a circuit of very considerable extent, and of very great importance was committed to the supervision and care of two youths—or rather a youth and a boy,” Lyle later remembered. Membership increased by two hundred within the bounds of the circuit during the year, but this success notwithstanding Scott located in 1795.
Part 2 of Children and Supernatural Ministry will appear in next week's edition of Firebrand Magazine.
Frank Billman is the Pastor of Pine Creek Valley United Methodist Church, Gaines, PA. Mentor for the DMin in Supernatural Ministry at United Theological Seminary, Dayton, OH. Author of The Supernatural Thread in Methodism: Signs and Wonders Among Methodists Then and Now: Revised and Updated. Scholar in Residence for the Methodist Church of Barbados.