Paul DeCelles gave this talk at a 1998 Leaders’ Conference for Men. At the time, most of the branches had begun public meetings, were praying with people for more of the Lord and were experiencing many healings. Paul commented on what had been happening, beginning with the 1996 Pastoral Training Institute. He also commented on the first High Country Adventure and how public meetings came about, all the while stressing the importance of realizing that we can act in Christ, as Christ, for the sake of the world.
Transcript
This document is a direct transcript of an audio recording, and may contain transcription errors and other minor edits for the sake of clarity.
[Tape begins after Paul has already begun speaking.]
PAUL: . . . actually happening and taking account of what’s going on. For example, when Jesus explained how he discerned God’s will in the Sermon on the Mount, he said, with regard to whether—how you should treat your enemies, he said, “Well, look! God, our Father, lets his rain fall on the just and the unjust alike. So you should do the same.” It’s a remarkable way of doing—it’s—that’s to say, Jesus said, “Look around. See what’s going on. Join the party, you know; get the picture of what is God actually doing, so that you can discern what God’s intentions are. And then, go do the same thing. Continue down that path.”
So that’s what I want to do here; I want to talk about something like a three-year expanse of what it is that God has been doing. I mean, you’ve all heard it already. I’m going to put it together in a different fashion with some points as I go along. So that’s what I want to do.
I’d say that the main work that God’s been doing so far in us is increasing our faith. It’s interesting; I noticed that in—this is not meant to be a criticism, at all, of the sharings. And also, anybody who speaks always misspeaks himself—I say that eagerly, repeatedly, and often, okay, about myself. But I do want to point out that, even as we were sharing about some things, it’s as though we don’t quite grasp the fact that it is really God who is at work in us. It’s: when you do something, it’s God doing this thing. That’s very important for us to perceive. As opposed to: “I prayed and God went over and did that over there and I’m so grateful.” Or, “When I prayed with this person, I prayed that God would do it.” When, in fact, what was required was that you pray with the person and do it!
Now, admittedly, it’s—you’ve—I mean, we are very conscious of the fact that that has to be God doing this. But there is this incredible mystery at work in our midst, which is: that God and man have become one in us! And it’s just awful to consider—in the sense of “awestruck,” I mean. Full of awe! We should be fearful of it. We—for one thing, I mean, how many of us can even take a step outside the circle and not realize that—you know, give me a break: “God—when I did that, God didn’t do that. I’m a terrible sinner. I know myself.” But you know, if you keep looking at your sins, you’ll never see what God’s doing. You’ll just be—you’ll be hampered, you’ll be tied; your feet will be tied. You’ll be walking like Japanese women, you know, with their feet tied and their shoes too small. You won’t be able to go anyplace. You won’t be able to do what God wants done.
God wants to release his Spirit in us so that we can be Christ in the world today. And that takes a lot of faith. And I think that that’s the first thing that God is doing with us. I think he is, because of all these testimonies and the sharing that we’re having. Let’s keep sharing our faith. St. Paul talks about the—how grace is reflected off of each other, how Christians can look at each other and see the glory of God. Glory is reflected in us. And that’s a lot of what’s going on here. I urge you to continue to do this. I don’t know if you understand what “this” is: that is to say, share your story; share it well; talk about it a lot. And not just the same story. When you keep going out and doing things, listen to other people’s story; build it into your life; see what God’s doing; go do some more. This is a “learn, do, learn, do, learn, do” process.
Many of our branches have had public meetings. I’d like to—I’ll be talking a little bit about them later. The small branches have been having what I would regard as very large public meetings. When you have 40 members in a branch, having as many as 170 or 180 people at a public meeting—you do the arithmetic. If we did the same thing in South Bend, our public meeting would have 3000 people. If you had the same ratio in Servant Branch, it would be about—well, let’s see; I got the arithmetic wrong: 2000 and 3000. Three thousand in Servant Branch, roughly. It’s a factor of four or five. So, when you have 40 people putting on a public meeting with that many people there, that is really spectacular! And I think, you know, just because we’re small doesn’t mean you’re not beautiful. Although it is true, sometimes, that you’re not. But anyway. . . . [Paul and the audience laugh.]
And we have all these people coming forward at the call to Christ. It’s been stunning. This has been a huge reality in the Servant Branch, where we are now having public meetings every week. I don’t know; I didn’t find out exactly what the average number of non-community members are coming to that, but I gather it’s between 200 and 300, easily? Give me another number.
MALE VOICE: Two hundred forty-eight.
PAUL: Two hundred forty-eight; there you go. [Laughter.]
PAUL: Okay. [Inaudible remark from audience.] I was off by two. [Laughter.] Okay. Now this is, however, not happening in a vacuum. And it has a history, also. So let me take you over some of this. First, in—let’s go back to the summer of 1996, when we had a Pastoral Training Institute, for about, I suppose, 70 people who were coordinators and mission branch leaders, who came here. We had the meeting in this room. In general, it was . . . First, it was an extraordinary Pastoral Training Institute. There were three tracks. One track was Kerry’s [Koller] track, called—what—we’ve called it various things over time, but it’s “Scripture and Our Hope as Christians.” Another track was “Christ in You.” And the third track was “Discerning God’s Will.”
I know that some people are still mystified as to exactly why these three tracks were put together. But if you keep thinking and praying about it, it slowly begins to dawn: they actually work together. They’re very important tracks to go together. We’ll come back [in] a little bit to that. Well, after that, the—after the—at the conclusion of the PTI, the head coordinators agreed that we would try everything we could to get these—this message out. We wanted to reproduce this Pastoral Training Institute. There were moments during the Pastoral Training Institute when it was—when the sky just (well, there you go, Kerry, correct me! You know, it’s this two-story language ag-) . . . “The sky opened up and . . .” It’s a—there was this sense of just all—just a—quite an acute awareness of the presence of God in our midst. It was really a wonderful moment, various moments.
So we decided that we wanted to reproduce these talks. And often with our—the Pastoral Training Institute kinds of talks, when we come out of those, we don’t have very much to say. They—like, we’re not going to go back and teach Plato’s Republic, you know, back in the branches, or mission branches. Things like th- —that’s really worthwhile, reading that, to see where Plato was coming from, and where so many people are coming from, etc. But in this case, we really did want what was the message to go out. And that was different than we have. . . .
And also, on other occasions, we’ve wanted the message to go out, but it hasn’t always worked very well, because there’s a lot lost in translation. Sometimes people will come and they’ll hear something new; they’ll be working with it for three days or a week or whatever, 10 days. And then when they go home—I mean, they’ve been thinking about it for 10 days, and they really need to be thinking about it for several years. They’re gonna go home, and they’re gonna teach about this on the basis of 10 days’ experience. It took ’em four days to calm down and one day to hear and three days to pack. So they were [laughter] . . . you know; it’s—it was—it’s not always the best way for us to get things out.
But—so, what we decided was to send people out: Kevin, Kerry, and I, especially, to go out. And sometimes it wasn’t we who did it but Ker- —Joel would give some retreats in some cases; Mary Frances Sparrow gave one of them to the women. And we’ve been getting them to the women’s retreats and men’s retreats throughout the branch [sic; “branches”?]. I think we probably have gone through all of the branches and mission branches with that material.
However, not everybody got all three tracks all the way through, by any means. But one could pick up a lot of the flavor of what was going on by listening to one of the tracks, whatever track was presented to you. In fact, however, that Pastoral Training Institute had its roots in the board of governors meeting—retreat. We—each year, we have a retreat for a week, prior—just prior to whatever event we’re having, like this. And we had such a retreat in 1995, in June. That was a watershed retreat for the head coordinators. And it came—and out of that, to a large extent, came the Pastoral Training Institute in 1996.
So, some of the stuff that we think God has shown us is how to use Scripture more effectively. How—what’s our entry into Scripture? Or, what our attitude towards Scripture ought to be. What is Scripture in relationship to us? Now, we are not following Tom Wright, the noted author, a brilliant writer. But we are using Wright’s work. There’s a big difference between those two things. What we discovered was that Wright was articulat- —articulates very well a lot of what we have already experienced. In fact, as I recall, one of our brothers was with Wright and was explaining some of the things going on, and he was—he marveled that the—so many of the things that he’s been talking about are actually happening in a community like ours. And he was unaware of that.
Wright’s work reminded us, and gave us a way to talk about what we have known from our experience of community life. Life in Christ is not a two-story house. As Kerry would say, we don’t just get “packets of grace” now and then. The Christian life is not about “getting out of here.” This world, all the stuff of our lives, really matters. Putting roofs on houses; having meals in common; all of our relationships; our headship; and our schools; our computers, even, that we work with; our jobs—all the things that God has given us substantially, materially. All the stuff of our lives is part of what—that’s part of our life. That’s the world in which God and we live. It’s all part of Christian life. It’s a one-story house.
God did not send his Son into the world so that he could leave it. He didn’t come in order to go out again. A lot of times, as this—as Kerry said yesterday, a lot of times Pentecostal preaching involves reminders that this world is going to burn up, that the end is near. We have a different attitude toward that. What Wright has said about apocalyptic language has opened up the Scriptures for us. Not everybody here has been studying apocalyptic language. It’s very—it’s really worthwhile to begin to look into the book of Revelation.
I would recommend to you, by the way, two books; one of them is far superior to the other one. But—it’s by G. B. Caird, C–A–I–R–D, called The Revelation of St. John the Divine. It’s a very long book with an awful lot of footnotes. So, you may not want to read that one. There was another one by Pablo Richard [Paul uses the French pronunciation, “Ree-shard”] or Richard—I don’t know quite how to pronounce it; it is spelled like Richard—called the Apocalypse:A—and then here comes the tip-off: A People’s Commentary on the Book of Revelation. It’s—he’s a liberation theologian, but he’s by no means a Marxist. And it’s—once you get past some of the odd little remarks he makes about—they go in the direction of liberation theology—it’s a very useful book. It’s more serious—it’s a more serious book than it seems. When you read it, you need to read it kind of slowly and look up all the Scripture passages in order to get the most out of it. Actually, what Kerry was doing yesterday with Mark 13 was explaining the apocalyptic language. Where’s Kerry? Okay. Am I right, Kerry?
KERRY: Sure. [Laughter.]
PAUL: Okay. Good. He says, “Sure.” That’s okay. We can go on. What could he say?
MALE VOICE: What could he say to that? [Laughter.]
PAUL: [Chuckles.] Okay, this is important now. Because if we preached the end-time message like say, Pat Robertson does, it would undermine our view about the importance of the world, and our acting in Christ, and as Christ, for the sake of the world. It’s—you might think, “Well, this is just an idea. It doesn’t matter very much.” It’s a huge idea, and it has a huge impact on the way we actually live our lives, and what—how we approach all the things in our life, from the point of view that God wants us involved with this, just this way, and we’re accomplishing God’s purpose with this stuff at this moment.
Because we’re—we were more conscious of how God is at work in history, we were able to see that it’s not just what happens in our soul that matters. So, when you see people falling down, it would be a mistake to say that what they are experiencing doesn’t matter. And that the only thing that really matters is what’s going on in the soul. That’s not true. We have a very different opinion on that. What’s—stuff matters. What’s going on here matters! This is a very different attitude than you find in an awful lot of spiritual writers, who think that this stuff does not matter. What matters is that you remove this—yourself from this, but, you know—say, take something like—what’s that—that prayer—that new prayer—Eastern prayer?
MALE VOICE: Jesus Prayer?
PAUL: Yeah, but what comes out of—what am I talking about? What is it?
MALE VOICE: [Says something but inaudible.]
PAUL: No, those people. . . .
MALE VOICE: Centering?
PAUL: Centering Prayer; there you go. Centering Prayer; you know, in Centering Prayer—I don’t want to talk about it right now. Who brought it up, anyway? [Paul and all laugh.] But there is in Centering Prayer, which is—it’s actually a hugely successful movement, I’d say, or something. It’s—there—I mean, it may not be quite a movement, but there’s some—it’s just catching on with a lot of people. There is this sense that you just let all this dross go—and it will finally get burned up, anyway. And you should remove yourself from that and enter into almost a kind of a nirvana or another state of aloofness from all of reality, really. Anyway, that’s not what we’re doing. We’re not in that direction at all.
So, we’ve used Wright. His work is important. It’s not finished, however. He’s still writing; I understand this—he’s, you know, originally projected a five-volume series in this particular thing. He writes a lot of books. They’re all very interesting, I find. But there’s this scholarly thing that he is doing. And he’s written two of them. And the third one is out fairly soon, I think; it’s—within a few months, I think. The next one’s supposed—is due. And I understand that it’s now growing—it’s grown to six; he’s projecting six volumes. So, you know, this may go on for a long time, like Rahner1 or something.
Anyway, it’s very likely that we will disagree with where he ends up. So, it’s not like we’re sort of sitting on Wright’s coattail, just following him. Rather, he’s very useful to us, and he writes very, very well.
Actually, I’m more sure that he would disagree with how we’re using him. For example, when he’s talking about how to read Scripture, Wright uses the example of an unfinished Shakespearean play. He says, suppose there exists a Shakespeare play, most of whose fifth act has been lost. Instead of one person finishing Shakespeare’s play, wouldn’t it be better to give the play to experienced Shakespearean actors, who would immerse themselves in the first four acts and in the language and culture of Shakespeare and his time, and who would then be told to go out and work the fifth act for themselves? This act has to be concluded in an appropriate manner—the play does. The actors would have to improvise a fifth act. A good fifth act would show a development, not merely repetition of what went before. You could say that some fifth acts—of them—that they just don’t fit with the original four acts.
Well, for us, it’s not just a matter of improvising. We would say: actually, Christ is alive today! He’s writing his own play! He’s still doing the will of his Father. We are not left to figure things out on our own.
The Christ in You talks: let me say a few things about them. I think they made us more aware of what the Father has been doing by pouring out his Spirit. Namely, the Father is making his Son present in the world. This, I think, has empowered us to step out in faith, to live the life of the Son of God. It means to live the life of faith. That’s why I’ve been recommending reading Smith Wigglesworth, who is sometimes referred to as the apostle of faith. You know, Wigglesworth was an early Pentecostal preacher. I think he was born in the mid- —you know, give or take a couple years—of the 19th century. And he lived to be 84 years old. So he lived well into—past, I think—even past the Latter Rain Movement2 in the United States, or in the world.
At any rate, he had an absolutely stunning, amazing healing ministry! He was a plumber . . . who had never learned to read or write. His wife taught him to read and write when—after they were married. The only book he ever read was the Bible. As—it’s quite a remarkable story. He had insights into Scripture that are just breathtaking when you read them. You wonder—in fact, various people would talk to him and say, “Where and how did you do that?” He said, “Well, the Holy Spirit in me does that.” So, he talked a lot about faith. And he seemed to know what it means to be a faithful son of God. He really is standing solidly in the position that God is at work in us.
There’s a wonderful story at just the opening paragraph.3 Some of you have heard—have read this already, or heard me read it. This is the first paragraph of this—chapter one.
When Smith Wigglesworth stayed in our home once, he came down early one morning and told me. . . .
He was—apparently had a very huge voice, and he was kind of a very proper man. So he came down with—visiting with his guests, and he stood at the bottom of the stairs, and he said:
“God spoke to me on your bed.”
Which is, I think, a very odd sentence.
“What did he say?” I asked.
He said, “Wigglesworth, I’m going to burn you all up, until there is no more Wigglesworth, only Jesus.”
Standing at the foot of our stairs, he raised his hands to heaven, and with tears streaming down his cheeks, he cried, “O, God, come and do it! I don’t want them to see me anymore—only Jesus!”
If I had to sum up the man Smith Wigglesworth as I knew him, that one statement would be it. He lived so that people would only see Jesus.
There is a great episode in his life where he was—I think it was in New Zealand—he was coming to a rally that—he was going to speak at some auditorium downtown. And he’d been there a couple days. People knew that he was on—was there in the country. And as he made his way closer to the auditorium, the streets were clogged with carts and carriages, lorries, all kinds of invalids. There was no way he could get to the auditorium. And there wasn’t any more room in the auditorium. There wasn’t any place for all these—it was already full of sick people. And as he approached several blocks away, and he was already—the traffic was backed up and the streets were clogged like this. He took off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, and he just piled into every car, every lorry, every carriage, and he prayed with every single person. He prayed through all the street and went in and continued to pray in the auditorium. And he prayed for everybody, one by one, for healing.
Is—that’s the other aspect of Wigglesworth. He had this enormous love of the hurting person. He was just gonna do it! He was—he was . . . God, there to do this.
The last thing I want to say is that discerning God’s will is playing an ongoing role in our life. Here’s one way to look at discerning God’s will. This is not the way we’ve been talking about it. Let me talk about Scriptures and the gospels. You can think of the Scriptures as being the thing that we need to read in order to boil off lessons from that—from Scripture. For example, Jesus was born in a stable; he humbled himself. Therefore, humility has to be a part of my life. Jesus reached out to social outcasts before—outcasts, therefore I have to reach out to social outcasts. That is, I read it like a—I get these morals out of this; I get some maxims for how to live my life by looking at this. I have to avoid hypocrisy, for example.
These lessons that we distill from Scripture give us a certain independence from God, actually. Isn’t that amazing? Once we know the lesson, we don’t have to refer to God anymore. All we have to do is just do what we’ve learned. Most of the time, we know what to do, right? Sometimes, however, the circumstances are complicated, or the decision seems very important. Then we ask, “Lord, what is the right thing to do here?” It’s too hard for us to figure out. Should I be humble, or accept this injustice? Or should I speak out against it?
Now here’s a better model of discerning God’s will about Scriptures. The gospels are not moral lessons. They are about a moment in history. They are an unveiling of what God is doing. The gospel points to a man on a cross dying like a common criminal. And they say, “See? That’s the day of the Lord!” This is a turning point in the history of Israel, a cataclysmic moment! The story of Scripture is the story of God acting in human history. And the gospels are the story of what God did in Jesus at a particular time and place on earth. He was active in 33 AD, and he is active now. He hasn’t stopped acting in human history. That means that today, now, at this moment in history, we have to find out what God is doing, and ask him what role he wants us to play in his work. The faithful son asks, “Father, what do you want?” In other words, discerning God’s will is not about personal holiness, or as some prefer to say, individual holiness. We might think, erroneously, that discerning God’s will is important because that’s what holy people do: they do God’s will. That’s not it, exactly. Discerning God’s will is important, because what happens in the world is important. God has a plan. He is doing things. We have to find out what he is doing.
Now, in 1996, in December, we began to pray for revival. As we celebrated our 25th anniversary, we began to look at our history. And as we looked at our history, we saw again that our roots are in the Pentecostal revival of 1906, the great Azusa Street Revival. It was great to be reminded of our Pentecostal roots, and it helped us to be on the lookout for more of the Spirit. It also helped us to see how God is very much at work in the world.
There’s a downside, however, to understanding all that is going on with us in terms of revival. That can only—that can make it sound like sometimes God just opens the heavens and pours out his Holy Spirit, and sometimes he doesn’t. If we think like this, then it looks like all we have to do is pray for and wait for the moment when the heavens are opened. We step out of the picture [and] ask God to do his thing, when we might observe it. This way of understanding things can be attractive because it relieves us of the responsibility of being sons of God. As someone shared yesterday about the awesome sense of responsibility that he’s having in what’s going on today among us.
Sometimes psychologically, it does feel like the heavens have been opened and the Spirit has fallen. When John the Baptist asked Jesus, “Are you he who is to come, or shall we look for another?” [Mt. 11:3], Jesus didn’t respond by talking about his experience at the river Jordan when the heavens were opened and the Spirit fell on him, even though that was a big moment in his life. Jesus responded to John’s question by pointing to what was happening, what was going on. Quote from Matthew 11:
Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them [Mt. 11:4-5].
So, in Christ as Christ, we have to step out in faith. That’s what has been happening increasingly in the last couple of years.
I want to say a few things about Brownsville. In the late spring of 1997, I sent some people to Brownsville to see what type—what one type of renewal would look like. So, I want to make some comments about that. There is no question God is at work there. Adulterers, thieves, drug addicts, alcoholics, homosexuals, are being set free. Community members who have visited have been personally blessed, or at least have—at the least had a good time. The experience of Brownsville is very much, however, a “God and me” experience. It’s not community life. Although it is very interesting that when a group—one group went down there, they sensed that their call to be in community was greatly enhanced because of the experience that they had shared together at Brownsville.
Actually, the comments that I’ve been hearing—some of these things that people get when they have been prayed with at Brownsville, when the pray-ers come and pray: they say wonderful things. But actually, they’re kind of common-sense remarks, this kind of worldly wisdom. I don’t mean worldly in the bad sense. It’s just like—it’s not exactly the kind of thing that we encounter in good pastoral care, as you can expect, because they’re talking to a bunch of strangers all the time.
Now, we have a lot of new music. You may notice that if you look at this—at the fine print,
a lot of it is Vineyard music. This is sometimes called Brownsville music. But actually, the music is coming from Australia; it’s coming from. . . . What we’re doing is: we’re going to take music, good music, wherever we can find it. By good music, I don’t mean that this is a competition with Mozart or Beethoven. This is from a certain point of view, bad music. [Laughter.] But it has an amazing effect. And we cannot withdraw ourselves from the fact that God is accomplishing all kinds of things in people like us through this music. It’s having a huge impact. The impact that it seems to be having is primarily coming through the verses. And the verses are primarily coming from Scripture. But they are especially anointed, it seems to me, for the moment. And we will, as is our custom, use whatever we can to take this world captive for Christ. Amen! [Enthusiastic applause.]
A lot of the preaching at Brownsville comes out of and reinforces a two-story universe. They talk as if Christian life is about “getting out of here.” They have a lot of things right. In spite of what they say, they act in Christ and as Christ, setting people free. And they’ve got this right: we all need a lot more of the Lord. [Scattered “amens” in audience.]
I want to say just a couple of words about the High Country Adventure.4 I’m going—this is kind of somewhat chronological, you may have noticed. I cleverly put the dates in there to give you a clue. [Laughter.] In the summer of 1997, we had the trip for our high school kids, those who could come, to Colorado. It had a big impact on the teenagers, and also on the counselors who went. I know that in various branches the teenagers came back from Colorado really affected. And the effect that it had on them spilled right over into the community that—the branch they were returning to. So that—so much so, that it seems to me from the stories—I mean, I don’t know that all of you would agree with this; this is just my opinion—it looks to me in some ways that we will be led by little children. This thing opened up because of their enthusiasm to receive this. And more and more of the adults back in the home branches received it, and, in fact, were just so thrilled to see their kids excited for the Lord, that they have become more open to it. So I really thank God for the High Country Adventure. It has affected our whole branch—all of our branches, and it’s enlivened our worship.
It—well, let me say something about teachings and healings. About this time, more healings, especially healings in the South Bend branch, became very common, I mean, frequent. And I want to make just a—this doesn’t have anything to do with the history; I just want to make a comment about healings. It’s important to realize that—I’m just observing a fact—that not everybody who is prayed with gets healed. In fact, it’s clear to me that someone with perf- —as much faith as I can imagine anybody having, coming forward praying with someone who has as much faith as anybody I can imagine having: they pray. They do all the canonical things. They do it in right order. They do in the right place, at the right time, the right music’s on, whatever. . . . [Laughter.] And . . . okay? And noth- —and the person doesn’t get healed!
And you say—and then the next person comes up, and it’s the same deal, and this person is healed. And you wonder, “What in the world’s going on here?” You know, like, “Well, it must be that there’s some deep, dark, secret sin this person has. It isn’t me, because I got somebody healed, right? Whew!” [Laughter.] So . . . no, that’s not the case. All I can say at this point, for sure, is that it looks like healing is not deterministic: that when God and man are working together, things don’t automa- —they don’t happen automatically. It’s not like there is a mechanical law from Newton that says, “You do it this way and everything just falls into place.” It doesn’t work that way, even with regard to the question of faith and healing. So, if somebody isn’t healed when you pray with him, urge him to be prayed with again. I’d say it looks to me like it’s somewhat statistical. So I’d say, increase your chances! [Laughter and applause.]
There’s an interesting—there’s a really interesting case . . . of Ralph Whittenburg. He shared a little bit about that already. But, you know, Ralph went out to be prayed with for healing of his deaf ear and narcolepsy. And God healed his narcolepsy, but he didn’t heal his ear! And so—he’s like—he’s a miniature community in himself. Some people get prayed with and they’re healed, and some don’t. And Ralph: some got healed and some didn’t. [Light laughter.] Part of him is healed and part of him isn’t.
Okay. Let me say a couple things about some happenings in Servant Branch. Although it’s awfully hard to keep up with it. [Laughter.] I do know that the 1996 Pastoral Training Institute had a huge influence on Bill Rademacher. And it had a huge influence on all of us. But I think Bill really did capture the sense of Christ in you, Christ alive. And there were just all—I mean, we were all influenced by it.
Louis [Grams] was healed [of advanced Churgg-Strauss disease] in the summer of 1997. In the fall of 1997, I sent some of the coordinators and their wives to Brownsville from Servant Branch. And after they came back, they wanted to pray with the branch and anyone else for more of the Lord. And I said, “Go ahead and see what happens.” They didn’t just wait for the heavens to be opened and the Spirit to fall on them. In Christ, as Christ, they stepped out in faith. They caught on to what St. Paul talks about in Ephesians 1:19: “the immeasurable greatness of his power in us who believe. ” And they began to have public meetings.
In December 1997, we had a Teaching Review Seminar which was not a Teaching Review Seminar. It was like this; in fact, this meeting is modeled on the Teaching Review Seminar.
What we did was to try to call together representatives of all the main leaders throughout the community: get us all in one room and just take the temperature, take the pulse, see what in fact was going on. What is God doing? And it was an amazing moment in our life. Because clearly, God—I mean, all these things I’ve already been talking about, God has been doing. People reported on this. And we had this sense that God is moving us all forward.
It was really great. And we also had a chance to pray for more [of the Lord] there. And out of that meeting, we developed—well, we had kind of running stream-of-consciousness commentary, also, through that Teaching Review Seminar. So that—a lot of things we kept commenting on: this is what’s going on; this is what we think it means; this is how we understand what’s happening; this is how we can keep going; this is how we can benefit more from what’s going on.
Well, the board met over the course of that weekend, and we decided to have a prayer meeting, and to pray for more of the Lord, and in fact, to do this throughout the whole community. So this was a decisive moment for us. We also agreed at that point that we would have Louis [Grams] go out, and—to all the mission branches, and other branches. The idea was: as fast as we can, let’s get what’s going on here, out there, so that there aren’t—there’s—that we eliminate this time lag. It was the same sort of thing, in the same spirit, as what we did after the Pastoral Training Institute.
Louis [Grams] has gone out in—working with Kevin [Ranaghan]; Kevin also goes out, and he’s been giving—running—speaking at public meetings and addressing the branches, mission branches, that he’s relating to. And all this continues to develop. And it’s developing—I think we are—by the end of November, at any rate, every mission branch will have—Louis will have been there, or there will have been a public meeting or a chance to be prayed with.
Where is he? Is that right? By the end of November.
So, praise God.
[Applause.]
Endnotes
1. Karl Rahner, S.J., was a German Jesuit priest and theologian who is considered to be one of the most influential Roman Catholic theologians of the 20th century. Return to text
2. Latter Rain Movement is an early name for the Pentecostal movement within U.S. Protestantism; it began in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and took its name from the “latter rain” referred to in Joel 2:23. Return to text
3. From the book Smith Wigglesworth: A Man Who Walked with God, by George Stermont. Return to text
4. The community held two High Country Adventures, which were gatherings in the Rockies of high-school-aged youth from around the community; one in 1997 and a second in 2001. Return to text
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