Are you prepared to deal with questions about Spirits and the Occult?
- Kirsty Birkett
- 12 minutes ago
- 2 min read
I heard the story recently of a young woman who converted to Christianity, having had no previous Christian contact, because she bought a Bible from the internet and read it. She was converted from a background of occult practices.
This is not the first time I have heard such a story in the past year. It is part of the ‘quiet revival’, the unspectacular but astonishing increase of converts who are walking into our churches. And many of them have occult believes or lifestyles that they are leaving behind. This means they come into our churches with specific question and fears, to do with contact with spirits, the results of meditation, the nature of the demonic and what to do with dark forces that were previously part of their everyday life.
How do we minister to these people in particular? Part of it is becoming familiar with what the Bible actually says about the occult. Many Christians are not well taught in this regard. Our beliefs about the occult are shaped by Western cultural assumptions – either materialistic and dismissive of the spiritual world, or overly fascinated and informed by invented Hollywood movies.
At the same time, the occult is becoming vastly more common in Western subculture, promulgated through social media. Many people, feeling a spiritual thirst that materialism cannot satisfy, are turning to occult media or practitioners for answers – and finding very wrong, or very dark, answers to their questions. So what does the Bible actually say?
This Latimer study is based in what the Bible says, the actual language it uses, what reality it is describing and what we are taught to do about it. It challenges misplaced preconceptions, as well as challenging what the academic world says about magic as a cultural study.
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