A Life With The Holy Spirit
With Casey Barrett
My mother tells me I was a quiet child. Rarely upset, happy to sit in the buggy for hours entertained by a single piece of Lego, examining it from all angles while my mother and father went about their business mostly uninterrupted. I was their first, and an easy entry to parenthood before my brother 2 years later showed the kind of chaos a normal toddler’s temperament should create.
Academia, while not forced upon us, was important to my parents. Especially for my father – trained in both engineering and law – would ask questions at the dinner table out of a MENSA textbook he had bought for us. Both my brother and I performed well in school and gained entry to academic secondary schools.
Church was central to my childhood from the very beginning too. Sunday mornings meant Sunday school. Our church hosted a pre-school as well, so the building soon became a second home 6 days per week. Later, Friday nights were youth-group, church became both Sunday morning and Sunday evening as well as regular trips away on church camps or youth events. My life was full of church experiences.
The church was Gymea Baptist Church [GBC], a thriving community of circa 500 members with several notable ministries – Christian Surfers, Jesus Racing, and Jesus: All About Life – birthed within our walls. GBC had a strong focus on Bible teaching and theology, and many of us enjoyed studying the scriptures closely, engaging in theological debates and established a firm foundation for our faith.
I’m unquestionably thankful for my parents’ encouragement toward academic success. And similarly, I will forever be grateful for the firm foundations of faith formed in my childhood and teenage years at GBC. But as I left secondary school and became a young adult, I found a growing dissatisfaction with my experience of Christianity. I knew a lot about God, but I was becoming aware that the knowledge in my head was not the same as the relationship with God I sensed I was supposed to have. Several of the friends I’d grown up with in church ended up leaving their faith behind, many citing the same kind of dissatisfaction. But while this upset me greatly, I think I found a determination within me to press in further instead.
In my late teenage years and early 20s, with a small group of friends, we decided to seek a new experience of God, and we did it in the only way we knew. We were academics, amateur theologians, pragmatists; so we found books to read, studied the scriptures, and sought out wisdom from trusted church friends. We prayed together for the kind of experience of God we knew we were missing. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were praying for a baptism in the Holy Spirit.
It's around that time I met a girl called Hannah. Hannah was passionate about God and His church, and operated with a boldness of faith I found equal parts inspiring and frustrating. She didn’t know the Bible as well as I did. She didn’t understand Christian theology as well as I did. She couldn’t recount church history in the way I could. But, she knew God. She had a relationship with God and experienced the Holy Spirit. It was the kind of Christianity I knew I wanted for myself.
Hannah later became my wife. Hannah also went on to study a Master’s degree at Bible College…
In the years that have followed, I’ve experienced a different kind of Christianity – the kind I knew I was looking for. While I still think so fondly of my early years at GBC and the foundations that were laid there, life without the Holy Spirit is only a two-thirds experience of God. Having joined C3 in 2010, my faith feels more alive than ever and I can point to many real-world encounters with God that leave me more assured in my faith than any amount of study could provide. God is real, His Holy Spirit continues to move today, and you can encounter Him too. It doesn’t have to be weird; it doesn’t have to be crazy, but God seeks real relationships with his sons and daughters, and you can find a community of people at C3 London to help you on the journey.
