Pastor and author Tyler Staton believes the Holy Spirit is one of the most misunderstood and sidelined aspects of Western evangelicalism — and as a result, many believers neglect this essential part of the Trinity to their spiritual detriment.
“There are dual misconceptions about the Holy Spirit,” Staton, the lead pastor of Bridgetown Church in Portland, Oregon, told The Christian Post.
“Some of us think that the Holy Spirit is a force or a box of magical powers by which God is proving that the Gospel is true to the watching world, or others believe the Holy Spirit was that, and now we’re beyond the need for that today.
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“But when Jesus talks about the Spirit in John 14-16 […] He repeatedly references the Spirit as the One who will not teach anyone anything new, but remind them of the things that He has been teaching them. The Spirit, therefore, is the kind of translator between the head and the heart and the modern disciple.”
Staton’s latest book, The Familiar Stranger: (Re)Introducing the Holy Spirit to Those in Search of an Experiential Spirituality,seeks to address these misconceptions and help believers develop a deeper, more authentic relationship with the Spirit. In it, he contends that Western culture, with its strong bias toward cognitive learning, has shaped a church environment where theological knowledge is emphasized over lived spiritual experience.
Staton, who also serves as the National Director of 24-7 Prayer USA, attributed much of the modern church’s difficulty engaging with the Holy Spirit to cultural and historical factors.
“If the primary way the Holy Spirit teaches is not cognitive learning, but through experience in relationship, then I would say we have been culturally set up with bias against the Holy Spirit and bias toward the Holy Bible,” he told CP.
The pastor, who has studied under theologians including Tim Keller, contends that this bias has led to an over-intellectualized Christianity, where ministries can flourish and seem “successful” due to numbers and programs without an evident reliance on God’s presence and power.
“It is very possible to do all of that without actually needing God to act in any clear or decisive way,” he warned. “It’s hard to choose to put yourself in the vulnerable place of need, when you are willingly choosing it, not desperately choosing it, and that’s where we’ve been in the last couple hundred years of the American church.”
In The Familiar Stranger, Staton traces the role of the Holy Spirit throughout Scripture, illuminating biblical metaphors that reveal the Spirit’s nature and role. The book also addresses how the Spirit brings discernment, access to God’s power and the ability to partner with God in His work in the world.
Staton also weighs in on how the modern understanding of discipleship falls short of what Jesus intended. Today, discipleship is often reduced to structured Bible studies or small-group discussions, he said, while Jesus modeled a more immersive approach.
“If you read the Gospels, the way Jesus is going about discipleship is pretty different from the way that word is typically used in the modern Evangelical church,” he says. “Today, at least in the West, we are profoundly cognitive as a culture. And therefore, if someone says to you, ‘Hey, are you being discipled?’ They’re actually using that word in a tense that it’s never used in the Bible. The disciple is a noun, not a verb. It’s an identity, not an activity.”
“Jesus is also sending out His disciples two by two on multiple occasions with the authority to do the very things that they’ve seen Him do, and then breaking down their experience after the fact,” he continued. “Jesus seems profoundly concerned with His disciples having the lived experience of His life.”
This experiential dimension is crucial for understanding Scripture as an invitation to live out the faith rather than merely study it, he stressed: “The Bible is not a greatest hits record of the most profound acts of God in the lives of a few people throughout history. It’s an invitation to experience. We should read Scripture as people who are being called and invited to the very life that we see on the pages of Scripture.”
Staton, who shares three young sons with his wife, Kirsten, said he sees positive signs of change, particularly in the younger generation’s openness to experiential faith.
“The book that I just wrote would have been a pretty controversial release 25 years ago, and it is not at all a controversial release today,” he said. “There’s much more openness […] a growing safety and hunger with interacting with ideas that are not a part of one’s tradition and upbringing, and that applies to people who are coming from both sides of the aisle.”
Beyond theology, Staton speaks from personal experience. Having battled cancer, he understands the struggle of inviting God into moments of deep pain. He reflected on the role of the Holy Spirit in suffering.
“Talk to God like you think you’re not allowed to, and give Him the chance to surprise you,” he advised. “To be in the midst of suffering, battling doubt, and not express yourself to God in the most honest and raw way possible is to hold back in your own prayer what God is waiting and wanting you to express to Him.”
“God is a Father who wants you to express yourself to Him. And if you do, I think it allows space where God can surprise you or disappoint you,” he added.
Leading a church in Portland — often perceived as a secular stronghold — has shaped Staton’s approach to ministry. Unlike cities in the Bible Belt, where Christianity is embedded in the culture, Portland, he said, requires believers to make a deliberate choice.
“Being a pastor has never won me any popularity or respect. It has been the opposite, and the people who attend my church follow Jesus because they mean it,” he said.
Pastoring in a largely secular environment has forced him to communicate the Gospel in ways that resonate beyond religious jargon, the Praying Like Monks author said. “It has caused me to need to articulate the Gospel in language that is not culturally conditioned by an upbringing in the church,” he shared.
Through his latest book, Staton said he wants to call believers to a faith that is not merely intellectual but deeply experiential, stressing that the Holy Spirit is not just a theological concept but an active presence meant to guide and transform believers.
“I’ve come that you may have life and life to the full,” he said, quoting John 10:10.
And as younger generations seek more experiential faith, Staton stressed there’s an opportunity for church leaders to rethink discipleship.
“We need to lean into more experiential methods of discipleship in the days ahead in order to form people in an increasingly changing culture,” he said. “In the same way that a missionary contextualizes a ministry to the culture that they find themselves a part of, we’ve got to contextualize to a changing Western culture.”
Leah M. Klett is a reporter for The Christian Post. She can be reached at: leah.klett@christianpost.com
