Hi Family,
How do you identify those who are practicing witchcraft IN the church?
What do you do once you have identified said witchcraft?
How do you address the person?
What responsibility does the pastor have to the congregation to address the issue?
How do you believe witchcraft can impact the church?
~Natsumi Lam~
In reading the comments the answer clearly depends on what one means by witchcraft. And the ideas obviously vary greatly. Here is my take:
The goal/effect of witchcraft is to influence the mind and by extension actions away from God. I believe biblically there can be different "levels", if you will, of witchcraft.
The Bible likens witchcraft to the sin of rebellion. If that's the definition, then heck yeah I've seen it in my church. How do you deal with it? Same as any other sin, on a case by case bases, led by the Spirit and the Word. It depends on if their sin is effecting others in the church or not. I recently had someone "praying" for another person in church after a service in a way that clearly went against our order. This person was trying to do a deliverance without permission and was yelling at the one they were praying for, "you have a secret!" in front of everyone else. We put an end to that very quickly, brought correction, and unsurprisingly the person causing the behavior didn't like it and left.
Some say that Christians can unknowingly perform witchcraft by uttering "word curses". This is something that we have probably all experienced at some point. It is when someone (often someone in a position of trust) says something negative about us that profoundly impacts us and shapes the direction of our lives. If you can think back to an incident or two from when you were young where someone said something negative to you, or about you, that to this day you can still remember vividly, some call that a word curse and thus witchcraft. Regardless if it is witchcraft or not, it isn't good and healing needs to happen. So, in that case, yeah I see that all the time in church and address it in private prayer/counseling time.
Then there's the stuff that everyone thinks of when they think of witchcraft. Openly making potions or casting spells and all that related stuff. I've had experience with that in our church as well. I've had someone leave a dead weasel on our front steps (clearly placed there). I've had people message the church and identify themselves as satanists or witches and ask about attending. And recently had someone attend 3 or 4 times that clearly fancied himself a warlock. He was very distracting during service. He would start up extremely odd theological conversations (even by this forums standards, lol) with anyone who would listen. He would leave odd "tokens" at the church (a common thing for witches/warlocks to do I've learned)... small trinkets that he presumably "cursed". How did we deal with that? 1) serious prayer against it & removing the tokens, 2) we loved on the guy, but used the name of Jesus around him a lot. 3) we made preparations to keep an eye on him and call the police to have him removed at the first sign of trouble. 1 & 2 seemed to do the trick cause after awhile he gave up and stopped coming. I would have preferred him getting saved, but if he wasn't open to that then this was the next best outcome.