🔥 Both
In October 1992, at the Word and Spirit conference in the Wembley Conference Centre in London, R. T. Kendall said what he has been saying ever since. He was the minister of Westminster Chapel. Paul Cain was with him that week. Lyndon Bowring chaired, and Graham Kendrick led the worship. These are Kendall’s words, first spoken that week and later printed in Holy Fire (Charisma House, 2014):
There has been a silent divorce in the church, speaking generally, between the Word and the Spirit. When there is a divorce, sometimes the children stay with the mother, sometimes with the father. In this divorce you have those on the Word side and those on the Spirit side.
He calls the two households Word churches and Spirit churches. Nothing, he says, is wrong with either emphasis. The Word side is right to contend for the faith once delivered to the saints, for expository preaching, for justification by faith, for the sovereignty of God. The Spirit side is right to want the Book of Acts back: signs and wonders, the gifts of the Spirit, a prayer meeting that shakes the room. The trouble is that the children will not learn from each other. Bring them under one roof, and the result, in his words, is spontaneous combustion. That is his name for revival. Only when the two are back together, he has said ever since, does revival come.
Here is what the names mean.
A Spirit church believes the Bible is the Word of God, and lives under its authority. A Word church has the Holy Spirit. Every true Christian is indwelt by Him. “Now if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he is not His” (Romans 8:9, NKJV). The divorce is a divorce of hunger: what a church will crave, what it will fight for, and what it is willing to be ashamed of. One house is jealous for the text. The other is jealous for the presence, the gifts, and a God who still speaks and still heals. Both hungers are holy. We have been living as though the children had to choose a parent.
I have written about the road that took me from a Word church into the gifts of the Spirit. This is the other thing I owe, and I owe it to the house I now love.
You are hungry for the Spirit, and you are right to be. Unapologetically: the supernatural, the powerful manifestations of His gifts. Be just as hungry for the written Word. Just as jealous for it. Just as unwilling to apologise for it. Walk in the fear of the Lᴏʀᴅ.
A dear brother in Christ. I respect him, and I still do. We argued about the Cross, about propitiation: the Son bearing the Father’s wrath. He denied it outright, following William Paul Young, the author of The Shack, N. T. Wright, and that stream.
I opened the Bible. Propitiation offends a 2026 ear. It cuts against everything the West has decided a good God may be. What does the Word of God say?
He refused to look. At the end he said this:
“It just does not jive well with the Jesus I know and walk with every day.”
I was stopped dead. How do you even engage with that?
That sentence is the danger. The walk with Jesus is the centre of the Christian life. Intimacy with God, and the fear of losing it, is the heart of holiness. And if we are not grounded in the Scriptures, the Christ we are intimate with is one we have made.
For if he who comes preaches another Jesus whom we have not preached, or if you receive a different spirit which you have not received, or a different gospel which you have not accepted—you may well put up with it!
2 Corinthians 11:4, NKJV
The written Word tells us who Jesus is. Then the fire of the Holy Spirit falls on that material. He named both.
Jesus answered and said to them, “You are mistaken, not knowing the Scriptures nor the power of God.”
Matthew 22:29, NKJV
In 2026, both means a stand.
The ground is already marked. These are the seven taboos a Spirit church has to teach out loud, the places the age most wants silence:
- Biblical politics. Reject leftism. A free people, a limited state, a man responsible for his own life. The progressive gospel is a refusal of the Word.
- The power of the Holy Spirit. The baptism, the gifts, the power. A Spirit church already burns for this. Burn for the rest of the list with the same fire.
- Israel. Reject replacement theology. God has not finished with the Jewish people.
- The Second Coming and the Millennium. The rapture, then His kingdom in Jerusalem. A holy life now, because He is near.
- Fasting. In secret, and the church together.
- Tithing. To the local church, to mission, and to father and mother.
- The home. Wives submit to their husbands. Fathers discipline their children. Feminism does not get a vote, and neither does the psychology that replaced the rod.
The Korean church has an eighth. Repent of bowing to the Japanese Emperor, and of letting that worship into the Sunday service.
Then act like men. Paul’s word is andrizesthe.
Be on the alert, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong.
1 Corinthians 16:13, NASB
That is the mighty men. Issachar, who understood the times and knew what Israel ought to do. Men of covenant, not of apology. When the men stand, the households follow.
The way I would bring a Spirit church onto that Word is a sermon series. The outline is the long march. Ten sermons. Say the cost first. A tenth of the church may leave. It may be half. It may be nine in ten. Those who leave were never going to see it another way. The remnant that stays will be battle-ready. Radically committed to Christ, not loving their lives even unto death. Gideon’s 300.
The winter makes the army. The sermon makes the church. The ten are the alignment. The three realms, so the church, the civic fight, and the blessed hope stay in their places. The gospel, with propitiation in it. The order of the home. Prayer as connection, and the cry. A Bible you can trust, read through on a plan. How to read this age, and the madness of it. Men who rise. The rapture and the kingdom. A mind pulled off the virtues of the age. Fasting, and allegiance to no king but Christ. Each sermon will offend. Each one is Scripture. I will not water it down.
The offended leave. The remnant remains. God shakes a generation with a remnant.