Dick Brogden: Live Dead was birthed out of a desire to see teams planting churches among every unreached people group (UPG) in East Africa. At the time, my wife and I were leading a multi-cultural church planting team in Northern Sudan and our Area Leader (Greg Beggs) asked that we develop that model so that we could reach all UPGs in East Africa.

As we looked across the area, we realized that the unreached were located in places like Somalia, Djibouti, Northern Sudan, the Comoros Islands, and Eritrea – in other words, places that were difficult to access, difficult to evangelize, and difficult to plant churches. The UPG contexts of East Africa were hostile in climate – both physically and spiritually. We further realized that we needed many missionaries for many peoples.

And in the night, the Lord woke Charity up with that expression: Live Dead

To Live Dead is nothing new. Galatians 2:20 talks about being crucified with Christ. This idea is in John 12:24, being the seed that dies to bear much grain. Paul speaks of dying daily. Every Christian everywhere is meant to take up their cross and follow Jesus. If the crucified life is expected of every Christian, then the missionary called to take the gospel to unreached peoples is not exempt. We felt that by challenging God’s people to live dead we could be honest about the challenge and the difficulty of reaching the unreached, while at the same time be unapologetically Biblical.

PneumaReview.com: What is the primary mission of Live Dead?

Dick Brogden: We have one single-eyed focus: Planting Churches among Unreached Peoples through Teams. We call these our non negotiable aspects (CP – UPG – Team). They are undergirded by 12 values that we collect in three core values: ABIDE (intimacy with Jesus), APOSTLE (take the Gospel where it has not gone), ABANDON (pay whatever price is necessary).

PneumaReview.com: You started in East Africa, where in the world are you operating today?

Dick Brogden: Live Dead has eight areas we are currently active in: Sub-Saharan Africa, The Arab World, Israel and Palestine, Central Eurasia, Russia, Iran, India, and China.

Charismatic historian and prayer warrior, William De Arteaga, invites readers to visit his blog and be challenged to rethink how casting out demons can have a powerful impact on your community.

This posting, “Exorcism in Public Places,” is doubly controversial. Some Christians still doubt the reality of the demonic world and the possibility of Christians being infected by demons. Many (especially the clergy) would be horrified at the thought of doing a deliverance out in public. Yet the Biblical evidence shows that the demonic should be confronted and cast out whenever it is encountered. Check it out and add your comments.

Link: http://anglicalpentecostal.blogspot.com/2017/08/exorcism-in-public-places.html

Pastor Wes Shortridge presents a short history of the astounding revival that occurred on both sides of the American Civil War and how it impacted the nation for decades.

Introduction

America in 1861 presents a painful and complex chapter in history. God, however, had a plan for the American people, and God remained present during the painful chapter. God appears most in this period in the soldiers fighting the Civil War. Along the banks of the Rappahannock River in 1863, both armies faced one another in battle; however, both armies also faced a revival of religion. The paradox of revival in two armies facing one another presents an example of God’s ability to use revival to accomplish His purposes in spite of human conflict.

“Prayer in ‘Stonewall’ Jackson’s Camp” (1866).
Drawn by F. Kramer, Engraved by J. C. Buttre.

The Circumstances of the Revival

Pre 1861 America While many modern interpreters of the American situation before the Civil War view the war as a simple moral war in which one party supported slavery and the other party arose as a benevolent deliverer of an oppressed people, the actual situation in America proved much more complex. Americans, from both North and South, had sanctioned or at least ignored slavery for nearly a century. White men ruled the country, and obvious examples of misogyny and racism rarely arose as issues in a land that voiced the values of liberty and equality. The powerful elites from both North and South worked to protect the prominent position of the light-skinned and masculine. The first and second Great Awakenings had revived religion in America, but paternalistic racism remained unaddressed. Religion focused mostly on benevolence within the paternalistic system rather than valuing or empowering all humans.

Slavery in America found support in the hermeneutical principles of American religion in both the North and the South. Mark A. Noll describes the unique hermeneutic of America:

Americans held to a hermeneutic that was distinctly American. The reason they held it so implicitly was precisely that this hermeneutic—compounded of a distinctly Reformed approach to the scope of biblical authority (“every direction contained in its pages as applicable at all times to all men”) and a distinctly American intuition that privileged commonsense readings of scriptural texts (“a literal interpretation of the Bible”)—had functioned as the vehicle through which the Bible was unleashed in the creation of the American civilization.[1]