Growing up, there was always one element of my church's services which I found absolutely electric. It wasn't the worship music, even though at the time the songs we sang there were also making an assault on the secular pop charts (Graham Kendrick's 'Let the Flame Burn Brighter' spent a week at no.55 in September 1989), and it wasn't even all the baptising that seemed to go on (so often in fact that I was sure some people were being done several times). No, as a teenager who'd come from outside the Church, the thing that really intrigued me and hooked me in every week was the regular 'Testimony Time'.
Since the practice is far less common these days, let me illustrate: members of the congregation were invited to come forward at an appointed moment, form a short queue and then step up to the microphone one by one. Each would tell a story of how God had moved in their lives that week, or over a longer period. The rules were that simple, so one person might share about how praying helped them with a difficult work problem, while another might talk about how they'd been miraculously healed. The variety was what kept it spicy.
It was risky, it was occasionally messy. There were often stories that would never have made it past an editor; long rambling tales with no discernible middle, end, or indeed point. One instance still lodges in my memory 25 years later, where a well-meaning young man laced his story with so much heresy that he was practically rugby-tackled by the pastor. But this wasn't all we got in those times. We also heard everyday people – lots of them, in fact – talking about the everyday miracles in their lives. Telling the story of God and how he intersects with our lives became the job not just of the minister, but of the whole congregation. It was the clearest signal to me as a teenager that we were a community of faith, not just an audience for the people on stage.
I'm aware that some churches still make space for such times, either occasionally or even as regularly as my old church did. But I'm pretty sure also that this is now the exception, rather than the rule. Broadly speaking, the free-for-all Testimony Time has rather gone out of fashion. And if that's true, I think it's a huge mistake.
I can understand it, especially in a time where many churches are looking to make their services more professional and slick. It's pretty awkward if you've followed up your world-class visiting preacher with an incoherent story from Brenda about how God helped her find her lost cat. When church leaders put so much thought into how the service is structured and run, it's a hard ask to surrender control to a complete democracy. Some churches create a halfway house where those who have something to share have to run it through the filter of the pastor's 'discernment' before they're allowed to take the stage, but of course that naturally means certain people never make it to the stage because of their limited oratory skills.
By largely removing this element from our church services, I think we lose a lot. Giving different members of the congregation a voice, especially those who might otherwise never be heard, is important, but perhaps there's something even bigger at stake. As a teenager listening to those testimonies, I would receive a weekly dose of inspiration from the real lives around me; stories from people I knew and trusted about God had actually made a difference in the big and small parts of their lives. As a part of the bigger picture, it was one of the clearest ways I knew that this faith was worth following; that God was real. I'd gone through what they call a 'rational conversion', so these stories became a valuable supplement to the intellectual decisions I was making.
One of British TV's most popular entertainment shows,The Graham Norton Show, employs exactly the same device to brilliant effect, although not as a vehicle for sharing faith. Members of the audience get a few seconds in front of the camera to share their most hilarious and embarrassing story, and get literally ejected if they bore or appall the host. Viewers love this element because it shares that same sense of electricity and anticipation which I experienced growing up in that Baptist church: you never know what's coming next, but you hope it's going to be brilliantly memorable. And even if it isn't, the fact that Norton allows his spotlight to be shared by Hollywood stars and random members of the public is actually pretty profound in its own way.
What would happen if churches that have abandoned (or never tried) this practice were to experiment with it for a few weeks? How might the chance to share the stories of what God is doing in our everyday lives impact the shared faith, sense of community and even attractiveness of the congregation?
More than that though, I wonder if we've also got out of the habit of telling these stories to each other outside the context of church. In a culture that seems to believe more and more in the idea of private faith, perhaps we've also lost the art of talking naturally to one another about what we believe God has been doing in our lives. I'm not just talking in an evangelistic sense here; do we see the value even in talking to our Christian friends about the ways our prayers have been answered, or the times when we've come out of the other side of doubt, or felt God's presence?
We still sing that great hymn, 'Tell out my soul, the greatness of the Lord.' Perhaps we interpret that in some sort of non-verbal sense. Yet the Bible seems to give us plenty of hints that we should talk about God and what he's done, from Paul's command in 1 Thessalonians 5:11 to "encourage one another and build one another up", to that great old verse in 1 Chronicles 16: "Give thanks to the Lord, proclaim his name; make known among the nations what he has done." When God does something in our lives, I don't think we're meant to keep the news to ourselves.
I'll always be grateful for Testimony Time. It was a bit mad, and sometimes it was abused, but more often the not the words I heard spoken there by ordinary people were the very thing that kept me coming back, and helped me to make sense of living with a faith in the real world. I think it's high time we opened up the mic again.
Martin Saunders is a Contributing Editor for Christian Today and the Deputy CEO ofYouthscape.
