Rob Moll, “Missions Incredible: South Korea sends more missionaries than any country but the U.S. And it won’t be long before it’s number one” Christianity Today (March 2006), pages 28-34.

This cover story is an informative and encouraging introduction to the place Koreans are taking in global missions. No one that is interested in what God is doing in the majority world or the changing face of missionary effort will want to miss this article. At the time of printing, the full article was available online at http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2006/003/16.28.html along with numerous links to other articles on Korean missionary effort and missions.

Dale M. Coulter, “Pentecostal Visions of the End: Eschatology, Ecclesiology and the Fascination of the Left Behind Series” Journal of Pentecostal Theology 14:1 (October 2005), pages 81-98.

Lee University professor Dale Coulter says that there is a connection between classical Pentecostals’ understanding of the end times and their doctrine of the church. This intersection of bible prophecy and how the church should function was influenced by early Pentecostals’ understanding of divine authority and today influences Pentecostal ecumenical outreach or isolation.

The full article may be available at this internet path: www.brill.com/journal-pentecostal-theology

Stephen Hunt, “The Alpha Program: Charismatic Evangelism for the Contemporary Age” PNEUMA: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies 27:1 (Spring 2005), pages 65-82.

An introduction to the internationally successful Alpha evangelism program.

Greg Ogden, “Breaking Free from Caregiver to Equipper” Enrichment (Winter 2006), pages 34-40.

Is this how things work at your church? “Pastors do the ministry and God’s people receive their pastoral care” (35). Discipleship pastor Greg Ogden challenges church leaders to close the gap between the promise of the priesthood of believers and the spectator reality of everyday church life.

At the time of printing, the full article was available here: http://enrichmentjournal.ag.org/200601/200601_034_BreakFree.cfm

Part 2 of 2

Discover Agnes Sanford’s important influence on the charismatic movement in this article by historian William De Arteaga.

The Healing Light

It was during her ministry at Tilton Army Hospital that Mrs. Sanford wrote her first and most successful book, The Healing Light.²⁷ The book was based on the notes she prepared for an adult education class that she gave during the war. It was written in simple language. In fact, Mrs. Sanford read the text to her nine-year-old niece and was not be satisfied until the girl could understand it.²⁸ The manuscript was finished in 1945, but it was rejected by the major trade publishers. However, several chapters were serialized in Sharing magazine, the organ for the Order of St. Luke, the Episcopal healing order. Professor Glenn Clark, founder of the CFO camps, read the chapters in Sharing and recognized their superior quality. He offered to publish it through Macalester Park, his own publishing house. It initially sold slowly, partly because Macalester Park was not listed in Books in Print, and thus had difficulty in distribution, but word of mouth soon overcame that handicap.

The Healing Light might be termed the crown work of Christian New Thought. That is, Mrs. Sanford appropriated many of the motifs, vocabulary and insights from New Thought writers, but using her biblical knowledge as filter, eliminated the unbiblical aspects of New Thought, such as its drift into radical idealism (evil is unreal, as in Christian Science) and its sub-orthodox Christology. Central to her understanding and theology was the concept that the Kingdom of God is manifest through prayer and power on earth, and is not just “other-worldly.”

Among the New Thought motifs that Mrs. Sanford appropriated was that Christian spirituality could be described as a form of scientific endeavor. This was the initial intent of Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science, and it permeated all New Thought writings. It was common to many movements and ideologies of the Nineteenth Century, such as Marxism and psychoanalysis. In Mrs. Baker’s writings and other New Thought systems of radical idealism, the end result of this quest was little more than a doctrinal mythology with an authoritative, convoluted syntax and pretentious vocabulary that aped the science of the times.

In comparison, Mrs. Sanford was far ahead of her New Thought contemporaries in understudying what true science was and was not. Mrs. Sanford saw that true science was not a new system of doctrines, but a methodology of knowledge that involved exploration, testing, verification (and failure) and humility of spirit with which to attack a problem. Although this is well understood today, it was not so clear when Mrs. Sanford wrote The Healing Light.²⁹ Mrs. Sanford wrote:

“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.” The scientific attitude is the attitude of perfect meekness. It consists in an unshakable faith in the laws of nature combined with perfect humility toward those laws and a patient determination to learn them at whatever cost…Through the Same meekness those who seek God can produce results by learning to conform to his laws of faith and love.³⁰

The title of her book, The Healing Light, points to the main thesis, that the healing power of God is light energy that is accessible to all who understand its lawful application in compassion and love. Agnes speculated that the healing light was the primal light that originated at the beginning of creation, and that this light is everywhere. On the practical level, Agnes guides the reader on how to use the free gift of God’s healing light for healing. This is done by visualizing God’s light flooding the afflicted person or area of disease. To many Evangelical and cessationist-educated Christians this seemed like occult hocus-pocus. In fact, the use of light in prayer is alien to Western Christianity, but common to Eastern Orthodoxy, which has a highly evolved theology of light, especially in reference to contemplative prayer.³¹ What is innovative about Mrs. Sanford’s work it not that it urges the use of light in prayer, but its use in healing prayer.

An examination of Messiah’s night-time trial before the Sanhedrin, pointing to the fulfillment of Messianic prophecy and the travesty of justice that took place.

Then Jesus said to them, “You will all fall away because of Me this night, for it is written, ‘I will strike down the shepherd, and the sheep of the flock shall be scattered.’ But after I have been raised, I will go before you to Galilee” (Matthew 26:31-32).

As we shall soon see, Peter rejected that he would be “scattered,” rather than taking the comfort Yeshua² offered that even though He would be struck down, He would rise again. To further His comfort, the Messiah tried to help them see that this scattering would fulfill the words of the prophet Zechariah (13:7). The coming execution was—as Yeshua had attempted to help them see before—an inevitable part of the noble plan God had ordained before the foundation of the world.

We also see here in Yeshua, a man who is fully prepared to step through the doors of destiny, without flinching, and still filled with compassion for His disciples.

But Peter answered and said to Him, “Even though all may fall away because of You, I will never fall away.” Jesus said to him, “Truly I say to you that this very night, before a cock crows, you shall deny Me three times.” Peter said to Him, “Even if I have to die with You, I will not deny You.” All the disciples said the same thing too (Matthew 26:33-35).

We can learn this much from Peter, at least: it can be all too easy to boast in the flesh, even with the best of intentions. What Peter—and subsequently the other disciples—were saying, was that the prophetic promise of Zechariah and the affirmation of God’s Messiah could be overthrown by their own human strength.

This example of human arrogance and lack of spiritual discernment—even from those closest to the Redeemer—leads to a precarious path upon which we may all stumble if we do not constantly test our hearts and our deeds against the Word and the Word made flesh.

To say, “I would never …” is tantamount to throwing down the gauntlet to the Enemy of our souls, an invitation for Satan to test our resolve. How many times have you heard the words, “Well, I’d never” do such-and-such, only to see that very vow overturned in their life. We are all, in some way or another, like Peter.

Then Jesus came with them to a place called Gethsemane, and said to the disciples, “Sit here while I go and pray over there.” And He took with Him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, and He began to be sorrowful and deeply distressed (Matthew 26:26-37).

Yeshua takes with him Peter, James and John to Gat-Sh’manim in the Hebrew, Gethsemane in its English approximation: the oil press.

In Job 24, we read about the wicked and their sins, and that they produce oil within their walled cities, as at Gethsemane, but in verse 13 we find that they, “rebel against the light; They do not want to know its ways, Nor abide in its paths.”

Here, in the place of the oil press, the Light of the World would feel squeezed. In one hand he held the unswerving loyalty of a heavenly host, and in the other, the impending doom of anguish and humiliation for being nothing other than a healer, a teacher, and a restorer of the Scriptures. God’s unrivaled ambassador, heralding the kingdom of heaven with all its glories, was to face such torture and pain as our modern sensitivities can scarcely imagine.

Arturo G. Azurdia III, Spirit Empowered Preaching: Involving the Holy Spirit in your Ministry (Great Britain: Christian Focus Publications, 1998), 192 pages.

Arturo Azurdia III graduated from Westminster Theological Seminary, California, in 1998 with a Doctor of Ministry in Preaching degree. Azurdia’s book was a requirement for his graduation. (Westminster does not usually allow students to study and write outside of the theological tradition of Reformed Theology).

As a student of preaching, I found greater personal academic freedom in a university setting under a Reformed evangelical homiletician than I did at denominational theological schools in North America. At a denominational seminary a student is usually confined to the tradition of that seminary lest they offend their constituency and the needed support diminishes.

I am therefore pleased and pleasantly surprised that Westminster Theological Seminary allowed Azurdia to study “unction” (Azurdia is from an evangelical Presbyterian tradition). His book presents fresh and welcome instruction to the church. That fact is reflected in the many book reviews written about Spirit Empowered Preaching. The book reviews suggest that there is great hunger for the “unction” in evangelical pulpits. My prayer is that this book will create a strong desire in the hearts of evangelicals who are dissatisfied with purely intellectual Christianity and prompt their study of “unction” more thoroughly.

Azurdia desires to influence ministers to approach their preaching not only intellectually, with a heavy dependence upon biblical languages, exegetical skills and historical research, but to include “unction.” The thesis of his book is “…contending: the efficacious empowerment of the Spirit of God is indispensable to the ministry of proclamation” (13). He seeks a balance between the Holy Spirit and the Word. He proceeds to show the need for the unction and describes the work of the Holy Spirit in preaching, and impresses upon his readers the benefits of being Spirit-filled ministers. His main points are supported by the New Testament and by those people considered to be great evangelical preachers of the past. He shows that the empowering of the Holy Spirit is a sovereign work of God, and that the minister of the Word should be a person of constant prayer. His last chapter, “Pray me full” (164-177) affirms this and is helpful to all ministers.

However, there are three problems with Azurdia’s book: (1) his interpretation of John 14:12; (2) his interpretation of Luke 4:18-19 and 1 Corinthians 2:4, 5 (68, 69); (3) a lack of emphasis on fasting with prayer.

(1) Azurdia’s interpretation of John 14:12 (KJV),

“Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do… .”

Azurdia claims that “greater works shall ye do” refers to the disciples winning more souls than Jesus won (23). There is nothing in this passage to suggest that “greater works” is limited to the preaching of the disciples. “Greater works” is better interpreted to refer to the universal church, meaning that Christians have done greater works than Jesus did, which includes the conversion of non-Christians, and signs, wonders and miracles following the preaching.

Grant McClung, “Pentecostals: The Sequel: What will it take for this world phenomenon to stay vibrant for another 100 years?” Christianity Today (April 2006), pages 30-36.

While some of us who have been reading Christianity Today for years and years—I started in 1961 when the magazine was five years old—may not expect supportive articles on Pentecostal/charismatics, we have now seen several in the past few months. A recent issue featured a nice review on Jack Hayford, the current President of the Foursquare Gospel Church. The November 2005 issue featured Ted Haggard, the charismatic president of the National Association of Evangelicals.

CT’s April 2006 issue contains an article by one of Pentecostalism’s better historians, Grant McClung, who for years has been researching, teaching and writing about Los Angeles’ Azusa Street Outpouring of the Holy Spirit. This article was also timed to coincide with the Azusa Centennial held in Los Angeles.

Since there are now 600 million Pentecostal/charismatics across the world and, according to the article, another 54,000 are being added every day, it is hard for the Evangelical church and one of its finest periodicals to ignore all of us. In less than 20 years, at current rate of growth, there will be over one billion of us, mostly in Africa, Latin America and Asia. In many ways, we are the Evangelical movement. McClung notes that Pentecostals today are more urban than rural, more female than male, more majority world than western, more poor than affluent, more family oriented and more young than old.

McClung closes his article with seven prayers instead of predictions. “1. That we may keep Christ and his commission at the center.” “2. That we maintain the dual dynamics of Word (exegesis) and Spirit (experience) as necessary equipping for mission.” “3. That we lift up holiness of character and turn from the carnal display of human charisma.” “4. That we get the life-giving, socially transforming gospel of Jesus Christ out of our sanctuaries and into the streets.” “5. That we humble ourselves and acknowledge all partners in the harvest.” “6. That the Azusa Street centennial will not only be a cause for celebration, but also a time for solemn reflection.” “7. That we will be more excited about the glory of God than about our own accomplishments.”

I believe that we have to go back to our Pentecostal roots to appreciate what God has done in the past, and to wonder with awe what He will do in the next century. The early Pentecostals emphasized that “Jesus is coming soon.” I cannot help but wonder if that coming is a lot closer than we all realize—especially when 54,000 more people will be Pentecostal tonight instead of what they were this morning. In less than a month, everyone in my home state could be a Pentecostal.

Image: Sudiono Muji

from the editor’s desk

Has anyone ever asked you, “Are you one of them tongue-talkers?” After you get your eyes to stop rolling, you have to decide whether or not to do a witty comeback (no, this is not the kind of response I usually choose, but it appeals to my flesh to think about it) “Well, yes, aren’t you? I know if the early church needed it, I sure do.” Or, you may decide to calmly and lovingly offer a defense for what you believe about praying in the Spirit and tongues with interpretation. But what about the out-of-the-blue statement, “All you [insert your “label” here] ever talk about is tongues”? Your mouth drops and you say, “Wait, didn’t you just bring it up?”

In the love of the Father,

— Raul Mock, Executive Editor

Tony Jones, “Inhabiting the Biblical Narrative: How I Learned to Stop Doing Bible Studies and Start Loving the Bible Again” Youthworker (May/Jun 2004, Vol 20, No 5), pages 30-34.

In the midst of serving other people and the details of life, it can be easy to forget that there is one large story of humanity. No other book captures the truth and circumstances of humans better than the Bible. It is the history of the world from family to family to family – the story of the One True God who acted within the timeline of humanity to accomplish His purposes. However, it remains all too easy to concentrate on the minutia of scripture and miss the main story that life is all about.

When you look beyond the rigid study of individual words in the Bible, you come to appreciate how God relates to people. Life is about relationships; living is about people. It really helps to read the Bible with this in mind.

Tony Jones, from tonyj.net

Tony tells us that his adventure into the story of the Bible started when the high school students he discipled did not want to study a Christian pop-culture book. They wanted to really get to know the Bible, even though they feared that, as had happened before, they would fail to grasp the relevance of the Bible for their lives. The students knew that they should be reading and understanding the Bible, and felt guiltily for not making the connection.

Yet, the Bible is the only book that can feed the soul. It is the only book that comforts, that loves, that challenges, that raises questions, and answers the question of why we are here. All of these benefits can be lost when we allow the story that God is telling to stop affecting who we are and what we do.

I’d become a scientist in a lab coat. I’d been taught to take a piece of God’s story and put it in a Petri dish, then to put it under a microscope and get it down to its smallest part, from selection to sentence to phrase to word to syllable. When I read this, I realized the same had been true of me. We forget to think about what culture was like when we read scripture. We forget to think about the smells, the armies, the dress code, the food, and everything else that helps us remember the stories of our ancestors as being real and not a dusty fairy tale wearing a religious mask. Being more serious about the overall narrative will hopefully give us real and vivid images of God’s movement in history to replace the trinkets and bumper stickers that often trivialize the history of God and man.

Garrett J. DeWeese and J.P. Moreland, Philosophy Made Slightly Less Difficult: A Beginner’s Guide to Life’s Big Questions (InterVarsity Press, 2005), 170 pages.

Over the last two centuries the confidence of Christians in the reasonableness and credibility of their faith has met significant challenges from a number of quarters. With the almost wholesale acceptance of a naturalistic account of the origin of our species, and a growing conviction that science can explain everything about the world without the need to invoke the “spooky” supernatural, the floodwaters of unbelief have been rising about the Church on all sides, greedily devouring the grounds for faith and certainty. All the evidence, we are told, points to the non-existence of a benevolent God, the obsolescence of religion, and the absence of any justifiable grounds for the Christian hope of the resurrection.

However, the authors of Philosophy Made Slightly Less Difficult are convinced that the real nature of the challenge that faces us today “is not really scientific or theological or anthropological, but philosophical.” It is how modern man thinks about science and the universe that skews his view of the Christian faith as something irrelevant and outmoded. We wrestle not against evidence from laboratories, but against materialism, against scientism, against the naturalistic worldview of the West, against doctrines and ideas that have become entrenched in the modern mind chiefly through the Church’s neglect of the intellectual life.

Moreland and DeWeese seek to redress this problem by making philosophy more accessible to laymen, and by providing the outlines of a Christian perspective on a number of important philosophical issues, including ethics, metaphysics, the mind-body problem, philosophy of science and epistemology—all that in a mere 170 pages! As one who is still very much a beginner in these things, I am, perhaps, reasonably well positioned to make some sort of judgement as to whether or not they have succeeded in opening up these areas of inquiry to non-experts.

There are, I think, at least two sorts of pits into which a project of this sort may stray. On the one hand, in its efforts to achieve accessibility it may produce something so superficial that it is basically of no help to anybody; its contents are grasped easily enough because it avoids saying anything very important. On the other hand, in its attempts to attain conciseness, clarity and simplicity may be dispensed with altogether; the writers dash from one difficult problem to the next, without ever really explaining to anybody’s satisfaction what exactly it is they are talking about.

Perhaps it is inevitable that such a project as this one should gravitate towards one or the other of these two extremes. Philosophy is a difficult subject, and a genuine grasp of even the basics is not something to be had in a weekend’s read. In my estimation, Philosophy Made Slightly Less Difficult attempts to bite off more than can be chewed in a single paperback of these proportions, producing an uneven volume that varies noticeably in perspicuity and in its level of difficulty across the different chapters. Whilst some sections should be quite comprehensible for the beginner (for example, the chapter on philosophy of science), other parts prove much less digestible (such as the discussion of the mind-body problem) without a prior acquaintance with the subject matter. This is rather frustrating for the beginner, who might have walked away with a better understanding of some of the issues, had the authors contented themselves with saying a little more about a little less.

Pastor Lathrop reminds us that we should pursue the gifts of the Spirit—especially that we might prophesy—in order to build up the church.

The subject of spiritual gifts is an on-going controversies in the contemporary church. Sincere, Bible-believing Christians are divided over this very important issue. Some in the church maintain that certain gifts of the Spirit, such as tongues and prophecy, are not for today. Others, mostly those that would call themselves Pentecostals and charismatics, maintain that all of the gifts exists, but in some cases they only emphasize speaking in tongues. Paul, who wrote the most extensively about spiritual gifts in the New Testament, would not endorse either of these views. In 1 Corinthians 14:1-12 the apostle Paul offers some counsel that serves as a corrective to both of these positions. Participants on both sides of the debate would do well to read and heed Paul’s words in this passage. In this text Paul commends the gift of prophecy to the Corinthian believers. In the remainder of this article we will examine the passage giving particular attention to the gift of prophecy in order to learn what Paul thinks are the most important issues concerning spiritual gifts. In considering Paul’s words we will note the character of the gifts of tongues and prophecy and the historical context to which Paul addressed himself in 1 Corinthians.

The Corinthian believers were no strangers to spiritual gifts. In 1 Corinthians 1:7 Paul says that they, “do not lack any spiritual gift.” They were charismatic and they knew what prophecy was. This is evident not only from the mention of the gift in chapters twelve and thirteen and the instructions regarding its use in chapter fourteen but also from the instructions that he gives concerning women prophesying in chapter eleven. Since the church seemingly had a wealth of spiritual gifts, why does Paul single prophecy out and give the teaching that we find in 14:1-12?

One possible reason for Paul’s instruction was that the Corinthians’ understanding of the gift of prophecy may have been colored by the pagan exercise of prophecy, most notably at Delphi.³ New Testament scholar Craig S. Keener, however, does not see cultural background as being especially important in reference to this issue.⁴ So, the idea that Paul wrote as he did to counteract pagan ideas regarding prophecy is not entirely certain.

Ergun Mehmet Caner and Emir Fethi Caner, Christian Jihad (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2004), 240 pages. 

The Caner brothers have written a provocative book that is perhaps even prophetic. I mean provocative in the sense that it is sure to provoke strong responses, whether in agreement or disagreement, and prophetic in the sense of the Hebrew prophets’ issuance of a call to righteousness. We most certainly need to hear, and to heed, the word they bring us. First of all, Christians, then all religious believers, and finally anyone actually or potentially affected by religious violence can benefit from reading this book. In a post 9/11 world, that pretty much means everyone. Christian Jihad is concerned with the role of war and religious violence in Christian history and theology as played out in actual practice. The Caners, two former Muslims who are now Christian pastors and seminary professors in the USA, share unique insights on what may be the most pressing problem of our day. The book is exceptionally well written, reading at times more like a novel than non-fiction, yet packed with profound analysis. In an easy to understand but carefully researched style, and armed with a unified historical, political, and theological understanding, the Caners’ message is as up to date as Homeland Security and as urgent as the promise of Heaven.

Caner and Caner chronicle historically the Church’s incremental movement from an original tendency to pacifism, into gradual, qualified acceptance of Christian participation in the military, and finally spiritually sanctioned warfare and bloodshed. When Emperor Constantine took over the Church, it began an adulterous affair with the State including intoxication with wealth, power, and the use of force. The “Sanctified Slaughter” of the Crusades, inaugurated by Urban II and his Church-run State, was an eventual consequence (p. 104). In a bloodcurdling comparison, Urban’s call for warriors in a holy war and that of Osama bin Laden’s are shown to be very similar (Appendix B). Soon “Christian” warfare on Islamic “infidels” was not enough; Roman Catholicism began holy war on Christian “heretics”, known now, infamously, as the Inquisition. Later, Protestants joined the journey toward jihad, violently reeking vengeance on religious others—Roman Catholics, Jews, even on other Protestants, such as Anabaptists—under the auspices of a State-run Church. According to the Caner brothers, today’s tensions between Christians, Jews, and Muslims, and between rival Christian sects, have been almost insurmountably set in place by religious violence perpetrated in the name of “holy war”—or a Christian version of Islamic jihad.

Though lifting up America as an example of religious liberty, and therefore comparatively exempt from religious violence, Caner and Caner fear an erosion of the essential religious liberty the nation was originally founded upon. Even in early America there was a struggle between Church and State involving persecution occasionally erupting into violence. The USA, however, initiated an unprecedented experiment: religious liberty. Freedom of religion is a basic value for Americans. But, according to the Caners, that very value is in dire danger today. Real religious liberty, that “grants all worshipers of every faith complete and equal treatment and allows each person and group total freedom to worship how they choose without any fetters, biases, or coercion from the government” is in danger of being replaced with so-called religious tolerance, “an arrogant rule, stipulating that government will put up with what it considers inferior, inadequate, or incorrect practices—but only to a certain point” (p. 178). They therefore argue persuasively for a less politically correct, more practically applied view of Separation of Church and State.