Whole Lot Of Shaking Going On

We've saved the most visible part of this whole controversy for this lesson. The shaking, the falling, the convulsing - that's what started this conversation back in Lesson One, and it's the image that keeps going viral. But before we can test whether what's happening in Krick's services is genuine, we need to know something most people watching those clips don't: this is not new. Believers have been asking this exact question about physical manifestations for close to three hundred years. So today we're going to do two things - test the manifestations against Scripture directly, and then walk through four documented moments in church history where believers wrestled with the very same phenomena.

What Scripture Actually Says

Scripture doesn't forbid physical reactions to God's presence - there's real precedent for it. When Daniel encountered a heavenly messenger, he wrote that "my vigor was turned to frailty in me, and I retained no strength" (Daniel 10:8). Saul on the road to Damascus "fell to the ground" (Acts 9:4) when confronted by Christ. But Scripture also never treats the manifestation itself as the point, and never asks us to test a ministry by how dramatic its physical effects are. Paul's own test for spiritual gifts is entirely about outcome and order, not intensity: "Let all things be done decently and in order" (1 Corinthians 14:40). But he also tell us to not quench the spirit:  Do not quench the Spirit. (1 Thessalonians 5:19). So there’s a balance here, too. And the standard we've returned to all series long still applies here: "you will know them by their fruits" (Matthew 7:16). That's the biblical framework going into this. The manifestations alone must be tested in the whole of God moving. Are some just people in the flesh? Sure. But are people being changed afterwards? Hold that question for later. What we need now is history's answer to a question Scripture leaves open: has the church seen this before, and how did faithful believers at the time sort it out?

John Wesley: He Expected the Signs

Here's what needs to be front and center: Wesley didn't just tolerate manifestations when they happened - he actively expected them, prayed for them, and was troubled when they didn't show up. A contemporary of Wesley's, the evangelist John Cennick, left us a direct eyewitness account of this. Per Stephen Elliott's research, published at Seedbed, Cennick recorded: "Frequently when none were agitated in the meetings, he [Wesley] prayed 'Lord! Where are thy tokens and signs?' and I don't remember ever to have seen it otherwise than, that on his so praying, several were seized and screamed out." That's not a man cautiously permitting manifestations he couldn't explain away. That's a man who treated their absence as something to bring straight to God in prayer - and who watched God answer that prayer, repeatedly, with exactly the kind of falling, crying out, and shaking that fills Krick's videos today.

There Was A Connection

Wesley connected the miraculous directly to the success of his ministry, not as a sideshow to it. Elliott's research states plainly that Wesley "viewed the miraculous as a sign of God's endorsement of both his call to ministry and the content of his sermons," and religious historian John Kent went further, arguing the miraculous "were at the heart of Wesleyanism's success" - drawing the desperate and the skeptical alike, in an era with no medicine for the plague or smallpox, toward a gospel that offered them supernatural relief the Anglican Church of the day simply wasn't offering. Wesley's own theology of why God did this is worth hearing in his own words: he said the signs existed "because of the hardness of our hearts, unready to receive anything unless we see it with our eyes and hear it with our ears, that God, in tender condescension to our weakness, suffered so many outward signs." Even Wesley's harshest critics, the ones who showed up specifically to debunk him, ended up convinced. One physician attended Wesley's meetings certain the healing reports were fraud - and left, per Elliott's account, having watched a woman healed instantly in both body and soul, "convinced it was not fraud, nor yet any natural disorder... he acknowledged the finger of God." Even George Whitefield, who had serious reservations about the supernatural manifestations, personally experienced trembling, convulsions, and fainting on at least one occasion while Wesley preached.

Discernment Was Still Needed

None of that means Wesley threw discernment out the window - he and his brother Charles still watched carefully for self-induced or counterfeit manifestations, and John himself attributed some displays to immature zeal or outright deception. But that caution was the exception he applied case by case, not his starting posture. His starting posture was expectation - praying for the signs, grieving their absence, and treating their appearance as confirmation his message was landing. That's the balance this series has been building toward, and it's worth stating directly: the caution belongs in the room, but it was never Wesley's main point, and it shouldn't be ours either.

Jonathan Edwards: Neither Proof Nor Disproof

Jonathan Edwards faced this question head-on during the First Great Awakening and answered it in writing, in The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God (1741), built directly on 1 John 4. Edwards' argument, summarized by Founders Ministries, opens with what he called "neutral signs" - phenomena that prove nothing either way about whether a work is from God. First on his list: "bodily effects. Emotional or physical responses such as fainting or shouting aren't necessarily validating signs that the Spirit is moving."

Edwards wasn't a skeptic writing from the outside - he was defending the Great Awakening's authenticity against critics who thought the emotional excesses discredited the whole movement, while simultaneously refusing to let supporters treat the same excesses as proof of anything. Per the Banner of Truth's summary, Edwards acknowledged the revival produced real "bodily effects such as tears, trembling and groans," alongside real disorder, and even conceded "some delusions of Satan mixed up with the work" - yet he still concluded the revival overall was genuine, because he located the real test somewhere else entirely: in 1 John 4's actual marks of the Spirit, centered on whether a work exalts the true Christ, opposes Satan's kingdom, produces greater regard for Scripture, leads people toward truth, and results in "a spirit of love to God and man," per Christ Over All. Notice what that means for tonight's question: Edwards would tell us the shaking in Krick's services is not, by itself, evidence of anything - not for her, and not against her. The real test is everything Edwards listed after the bodily effects, not the bodily effects themselves.

The Quakers: Named for the Very Thing We're Debating

The Religious Society of Friends got their popular name from this exact phenomenon. In 1650, George Fox stood trial before Justice Gervase Bennet in Derby, England, and told the court to "tremble at the word of the Lord." Bennet mockingly nicknamed Fox and his followers "Quakers" in response, according to Christian History Institute - and the name stuck for the group's actual worship practice, not just Fox's words. Early Quaker meetings regularly featured trembling and shaking as attendees felt what they described as the direct, unmediated presence of God, per Worldwide Temple of Aurora's account of the movement's early ecstatic worship. Here's the useful part for our purposes: the Quakers are a genuinely mixed case, not a clean example either way. Their radical emphasis on inner experience over Scripture and ordained ministry drew serious theological concern from mainstream Protestants of their day, even as their sincerity and courage under persecution were rarely disputed. That mixture is worth sitting with - shaking under conviction is not automatically wrong, but a movement can still drift on deeper doctrinal questions independent of what its manifestations look like.

Cane Ridge: The Closest Historical Parallel

If any single event in American history looks like Krick's viral clips, it's Cane Ridge. In August 1801, an estimated crowd of up to 20,000 gathered at a Kentucky camp meeting hosted by Presbyterian minister Barton Stone. Stone's own eyewitness account, preserved by Christianity Today, describes people falling "as men slain in battle," remaining "for hours together in an apparently breathless and motionless state." Beyond the falling, witnesses documented a specific, named phenomenon called "the jerks" - according to Methodist circuit rider Peter Cartwright, quoted at Beautiful Feet, people would "stand in one place, and jerk backward and forward in quick succession, their head nearly touching the floor."

What's most useful here is that Cane Ridge's own participants didn't agree on what it meant, in real time. Cartwright himself called the jerks "a judgment sent from God... to bring sinners to repentance," while also - per The Cane Ridge Phenomena - later criticizing some of the wilder "barking exercise" as an abuse that crept into the movement. Barton Stone, the host himself, described being troubled by what he saw even as he ultimately concluded the fruit - genuine conversions - meant there was nothing to fear from the manifestations themselves. That's the same posture Edwards took sixty years earlier: weigh the fruit, not just the shaking.

What History Actually Teaches Us

Four moments, four different postures toward the same question. Wesley actively expected and prayed for the signs, grieved when they didn't come, and saw them as confirmation of his call - while still applying case-by-case discernment against counterfeits, rather than leading with suspicion. Edwards wrote an entire book arguing bodily effects are neutral signs - present in both true and false works, meaning they can't be waved away as fake any more than they can be treated as automatic proof. Cartwright and Stone watched the same jerks at Cane Ridge and still argued among themselves about which parts were genuine and which were excess. Even the Quakers, named for trembling itself, show us that sincerity and dramatic manifestation can coexist with real theological concerns worth examining separately. That's the lens history hands us for Krick's services: the shaking, falling, and convulsing on their own settle nothing. What actually matters - across three centuries of believers asking this same question - is what these three lessons have already been testing: the fruit in changed lives, the doctrine being taught, the handling of money, and whether the title being claimed matches what Scripture and sound teachers describe. On those specific questions, this lesson has laid out real concerns worth taking seriously, real defenses worth hearing. The manifestations themselves were never going to be the deciding factor - and now we know that isn't a modern problem. It's the same question the church has been carefully working through since Wesley's tent meetings.

All Scripture quotations are taken from the New King James Version (NKJV).