They Moved the Kingdom of God Forward: An interview with Dean Merrill

Dean Merrill — Tue, 13 Apr 2021 14:20:35 +0000

Pneuma Review speaks with Dean Merrill about his book, 50 Pentecostal and Charismatic Leaders Every Christian Should Know (Chosen, 2021).

PneumaReview.com: Please tell us about your own involvement in the Pentecostal Movement.

Dean Merrill: My parents—good Midwestern Quakers—were drawn toward a fuller experience of the Holy Spirit about the time I was born. My personal infilling came while I was still a boy, a year after my conversion. Sensing a call to ministry, I trained at a Pentecostal school (Chicago Bible College) and was ordained thereafter by Philadelphia Church, Chicago. My convictions have remained the same throughout my life, even though much of my editing and publishing work has been in generically evangelical circles.

PneumaReview.com: Where did the idea for this book come from?

Dean Merrill: Actually, it was the idea of the publisher (Chosen Books, part of the Baker Publishing Group). They had published two similar volumes: 50 People Every Christian Should Know (2009) and 50 Women Every Christian Should Know (2014). They approached me to keep the series going.

PneumaReview.com: Were there specific criteria that were used to determine which Pentecostal and Charismatic leaders would be included in this volume?

Smith Wigglesworth, bold as a lion
William J. Seymour, igniting Azusa Street
John G. Lake, making room for the Healer
Aimee Semple McPherson, everybody’s sister
David du Plessis, bridge-builder
Leonard Ravenhill, sounding the alarm
John and Elizabeth Sherrill, scribes of the renewal
Jesse Miranda, up from the barrio
David Wilkerson, straight shooter
Cindy Jacobs, the “general”
– from the Publisher’s page

Dean Merrill: Well, yes—first, as the title says, it had to be people whom “every Christian should know.” (There were some possible names I didn’t want every Christian to know about!) Second, they needed to be people with a credible ministry. Notice, I didn’t say “perfect.” Many of them had flaws and shortcomings (which I don’t gloss over the book), but generally speaking, they moved the Kingdom of God forward. And third, their influence had some breadth to it; they touched people beyond their own little corner of the church.

PneumaReview.com: In the book you mention that you and at least one other family member received ministry from a couple of the people whose stories are in the book. Please tell our readers a little bit about those encounters.

Dean Merrill: I was about ten years old when, at an Oral Roberts campaign in Des Moines, Iowa, my father guided me into the healing line to receive prayer for my enlarged adenoids. It was the last night of the campaign, so Roberts was moving us through quickly, trying to touch everyone who hadn’t been able to come up previously. He laid his hand on my head and prayed a short prayer. My problem went away thereafter, never requiring surgery.

They were confident that the God who saves us is the God who heals.

A year or so later, I was sitting in the row when healing evangelist William Branham singled my dad out of a large crowd at the Chicago Coliseum and said, through the word of knowledge, that his serious ulcer problem would now be healed. We all broke up in tears of joy, since his stomach flare-ups had been just agonizing. That night after the service, we went out to a restaurant, where he had a zesty meal and suffered no ill effects. It made an indelible impression on my young mind and heart.

PneumaReview.com: As you have studied the lives of the leaders who are included in the book, what would you say are some of the key factors that caused them to be so effective?

Dean Merrill:

They were incredibly bold, courageous, “gutsy.” Think about Maria Woodworth-Etter facing down a half-drunken mob intent on burning down her tent. Or David Wilkerson reaching out to hostile New York City gangbangers.
They paid very public, no-apologies attention to the ministry of healing. They were confident that the God who saves us is the God who heals as well.
If they felt God had told them to do something or had promised to provide, they didn’t flinch. No second-guessing.
They had a laser focus on Spirit empowerment, not just human flash and flair.
They prayed like crazy, all the time.

Is there one person in the book that you found to be particularly interesting?

Dean Merrill: Oh, my—that’s like asking a parent which child is their favorite. I’m intrigued with them all!

PneumaReview.com: How can the stories in this book challenge Pentecostals and Charismatics today?

Dean Merrill: They show us that Book-of-Acts Christianity is not just a historical relic. They tell us that it’s not all that important whether we keep our membership in what I call “the evangelical club.” In the book I quote Donald Gee (the British writer/editor), who wrote back in the 1950s, “Revivals are never launched without someone going to an extreme…. There has to be an extremism to move things…. Miracles of healing occur when faith refuses to be logical, and blinds itself to arguments, based on plenty of contrary experience.”

They assure us that the wind of the Spirit still blows in our time, if we will only take notice.

But then he goes on to add: “We need the extremist to start things moving, but we need the balanced teacher to keep them moving in the right direction.… Only a wisdom from above can reveal the perfect synthesis.”

PneumaReview.com: How can the accounts in this book encourage Pentecostals and Charismatics today?

Dean Merrill: They assure us that the wind of the Spirit still blows in our time, if we will only take notice. The Holy Spirit has not gone off, like a grizzly bear, into a long hibernation. He is alive and active wherever given a welcome. Those who listen to him can do remarkable things for God’s cause.

Publisher’s page: http://bakerpublishinggroup.com/books/50-pentecostal-and-charismatic-leaders-every-christian-should-know/404900

Recent Cessationist Arguments: Has the Storm Center Moved?

John Poirier — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 12:03:29 +0000

John C. Poirier looks at recent trends regarding those Christians who say the supernatural gifts of the Spirit have ceased, and what their arguments are today.

Hurricane Isabel (2003) as seen from the International Space Station. Image: Wikimedia Commons

As I write this, cessationism is in the news for an apparent slippage in its subscription base: on June 1, 2007, the Research Division of LifeWay (the former Baptist Sunday School Board) released a study indicating that 50% of Southern Baptist pastors believe that God has given a “private prayer language” to some people. Wanting to mitigate the damage of this news, cessationists immediately questioned the way LifeWay worded the corresponding question in its poll (see Yarnell 2007b), but the question as it was actually asked seems to be well written: “Do you believe that the Holy Spirit gives some people the gift of a special language to pray to God privately? Some people refer to this as a Private Prayer Language or the ‘private use of tongues.’” Certainly, most fair-minded reviewers will have a hard time believing that anyone misunderstood the question in any way. The poll, I take it, is probably right in what it suggests: that the traditional cessationist arguments are losing their hold. But that, I submit, is something that the cessationists themselves had already noticed, even if they (like everyone else) were genuinely surprised by the poll.

“Do you believe that the Holy Spirit gives some people the gift of a special language to pray to God privately?”

One does not need a poll to see that a change has taken place. If recent arguments for a cessationist understanding of the gifts of the Spirit are any indication, there has been a remarkable shift in the strategies and concerns of cessationists, a shift that would seem to indicate that Pentecostals and other continualists have finally (!) won the battle over the correct interpretation of 1 Corinthians 13. The issue with the obsolescence of tongues has always been one of timing: What is meant by “when that which is perfect has come”? In the past, cessationists have claimed that this refers to the Bible, but the problems with this view are perhaps too obvious for a new generation of readers. If Paul was referring to the arrival of a “New Testament,” then he was speaking utter bathos both from his own perspective (seeing that he had no idea that there would ever be a New Testament) and from the Corinthians’ perspective (as it is even more problematic to assume that the Corinthians would have understood “that which is perfect” to refer to some future closing of a further canon of Scripture). In other words, the cessationist reading of 1 Corinthians 13 requires that Paul was writing about something that he knew nothing about (prophetically, of course), and that he was writing to people who also did not know (but for whom their not knowing was trivial enough to warrant Paul not giving them any illumination on the matter, almost as if Paul was not even writing to them). The only way to get around that conundrum is to assume that somehow Paul did know that there would be a New Testament, and that he had explained that to the Corinthians at some earlier time. My own guess is that a new generation of readers has recognized that that was a pretty tall order, and that the continualist reading of 1 Corinthians 13 makes a lot more sense: the more natural way of interpreting “that which is perfect” is to see it as a reference to the parousia. That is more consistent with Pauline theology in general, and has been the way (B. B. Warfield and his followers notwithstanding) that 1 Corinthians has been read throughout history. And certainly the parousia makes for a better referent of “then we shall see face to face” (v. 12). It is asking a bit much to suggest that, with the arrival of the completed New Testament, Christians were made able to see “face to face.”

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They Moved the Kingdom of God Forward: An interview with Dean Merrill

Recent Cessationist Arguments: Has the Storm Center Moved?