My Bookshelf has Died
Treasures old
My heroes are all dead. The book of Joshua in the Old Testament starts with the words Moses:
‘Moses, my servant, is dead. Now, therefore, arise, go over this Jordan.’
The heroes I am referring to here are all the twentieth-century ‘apostles’; apostles in the sense that in their wake new Charismatic churches came into being that would not have done so otherwise.
Many wrote influential books, and I must have read most of them from the mid-1970s onwards, firstly as an antagonistic agnostic, then, later, as a believer.
This is a roll of honour but with a prophetic bite:
David Watson – CofE Vicar in York (d.1984)
Arthur Wallis – pioneer of Restoration churches (1988)
John Wimber – Vineyard Ministries, in UK via 1984 London and Brighton conferences in (1997)
Bryn Jones – Harvestime churches in Bradford, Restoration Magazine, and Dales Bible Weeks (2003)
Michael Harper – CofE Vicar who started The Fountain Trust and Renewal Magasine (2010)
David Wilkerson – American Pentecostal ‘Cross and the Switchblade’ (2011)
Lance Lambert – Halford House church Richmond then ministry on Israel (2015)
Barney Combes – Salt & Light ministries (2018)
Michael Green – CofE Vicar – apologist e.g. Runaway World (2019)
Francis MacNutt – Catholic author with a healing ministry (2020)
David Pawson – pastor, prophetic preacher, and author (2020)
Colin Urquhart – CofE Vicar, author of ‘When the Spirit Comes’, later Kingdom Faith churches (2021)
Juan Carlos Ortiz – an Argentinian Pentecostal wrote ‘Call to Discipleship’ (2021)
Yonghi Cho – largest church in the world in Seoul, Korea (2021)
Gerald Coates – Pioneer Churches (2022)
You may wish to add others. Terry Virgo of ‘New Frontiers’, survives them all.
In the UK, all of the ‘new churches’ can trace their roots back to at least one of the above, many of whom left denominational churches to form what became known as the Charismatic churches – ‘charisma’ being Greek for gift and in this context the renewal, restoration, or rediscovery of the gifts of the Spirit as, for example, in 1Corinthians12.
We are, therefore, at a Joshua moment, ‘Moses’ in the form of all of the above charismatic pioneers, has died. They have brought us so far…where now?
For many, I suspect, the answer will be ‘more of the same’ in honour of those who pioneered for the previous generation an their convictions, visions, and faith.
But there are two problems with this:
1. The Danger of Getting Stuck in a Rut - Denominational ruts.
When asked whether he thought the Vineyard Movement would become a denomination John Wimber gave the answer ‘Probably’. None of the above espoused denominational thinking and, rather, sought to be a blessing to the whole body of Christ. All the early conferences and bible weeks drew Christians from all denominations, Baptists, Anglicans, Pentecostals, Brethren…but over time their ‘distinctives’ have become denominations colloquially called ‘Streams’. Each stream having its own organisation, conferences, leadership training programs, bible/theological seminaries, church planting programs and so on. And they are all present in the major cities and towns across the UK, each one vying in the spiritual marketplace, if not for pre-eminence, certainly to make their mark. ‘Celebrations’, or city-wide gatherings, which used to draw Christians from all denominations no longer exist; attempting to have the above streams share one platform is problematic.
Each stream has become unmoored from its original purpose and fallen into the Wimber trap.
They will continue to reproduce their own.
The reality of the kingdom of God, however, is that it cannot be contained in old wineskins.
2. Gap in the teeth – theological gap
In May of 1738, John Wesley wrote in his journal: "In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate, where one was reading Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed.” He had discovered, like Luther before him, that salvation, or a restored relationship with God, is obtained by faith and not by ‘works’ or human effort. Whilst he wished to remain faithful to the Church of England as one of its ministers, in the end, because of the hostility of much of the established Church towards his preaching, he ordained his own ministers and preachers, and the Methodist Church was born. At the heart of his preaching was the substitutionary sacrifice of Christ on the cross: Christ died ‘for us’, in our place. It is faith in this aspect of Christ’s death that leads to an individual’s salvation and being born again according to John chapter 3 ‘Unless a man be born again, he cannot enter the Kingdom of God’. By the end of his ministry approximately 70,000 had been ‘born again’ in England when the population was 8 million. Preaching themes such as ‘Justification by faith’, and ‘Under grace not under law’ flowed from this theological foundation.
In April 1906, the Azusa Street Revival led by William J. Seymour, an African-American preacher began in California. On the night of April 9, 1906, Seymour and seven men were praying, "when suddenly, as though hit by a bolt of lightning, they were knocked from their chairs to the floor" and began to speak in tongues and shout out loud praising God. The news quickly spread; the city was stirred; crowds gathered; and services were moved outside to accommodate the crowds; people fell down under the power of God; were baptized in the Holy Spirit, and the sick were healed. The Pentecostal experience, seemingly lost since the days of the Apostles, had returned. Many were rejected by their denominational churches and were forced to form their own assemblies which later became the Pentecostal Churches.
If ‘salvation by faith alone’ was restored to the church by Luther in 1500s, and then re-introduced in the UK in the 1700s through Wesley, ‘baptism in the Spirit’ was restored by events in Azusa Street in 1906 and brought to the UK via Pentecostal churches and, later, by Michael Harper in the mid-1960s in setting up the Fountain Trust meetings to which thousands of leaders and members of all denominations attended and received the baptism in the Spirit for themselves.
The gap
The theology underpinning much of the Reformation, and the Pentecostal and Charismatic movement is founded on the substitutionary death of Christ on the cross. There were always theologians such as Watchman Nee that called for this theology to be seen as one-half of the message of the cross, but this fell, largely on deaf ears. The other half, according to Nee and others, involves considering the scriptures that portray the death of Christ and His resurrection as inclusive as well as substitutionary. In simple terms, if the substitutionary sacrifice dealt with our ‘sins’ and procured for us the forgiveness of sins, the inclusive sacrifice of Christ on the cross secures our deliverance from sin. In the first, the sinner is forgiven, acquitted, and justified. In the second the sinner is crucified with Christ, is removed altogether only to be raised, in Christ, as a new creation. The first dealt with sins once and for all; the second dealt with the sinner once and for all.
A cursory inspection of two well-known Systematic Theologies, by Louis Berkhof and Wayne Grudem, will confirm that the main scriptures that deal directly with the inclusive nature of the crucifixion (Rom 6v1-6; Gal 2v20; Col 3v3,4) are either not mentioned or given very little importance and quoted as supporting scriptures of substitutionary atonement.
To quote Watchman Nee (The Normal Christian Life) ‘That Christ has died is a fact…and that you have died is a fact also. Let me tell you You have died! You are done with! You are ruled out!’
Galatians 2v20, for example, encompasses both aspects of the cross of Christ:
‘I have been crucified with Christ, it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me. The life I now live, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave Himself for me’
The Son of God…who gave Himself for me – substitutionary
I have been crucified with Christ – inclusive
In closing
If we are to fully receive the gospel of the kingdom as revealed in the New Testament we must be able to answer Paul’s question posed in Romans:
‘Do you not know that as many of us as were baptised into Christ Jesus were baptised into His death…knowing this that our old man was crucified?’ 6 v 3,6
This is the question facing the church at the present and, just as Seymour’s students grappled honestly with the question ‘Did you receive the Spirit when you believed?’ until the gift was poured down upon them from on High if we wish to make progress this question must be answered. It will herald a fresh understanding of our union with Christ in His death and resurrection and herald a fresh release from our attempts to ‘run the show’. And allow elders and leaders of churches to die to any notion of eminence or pre-eminence in their location and free them to seek out their brothers and sisters, fellow leaders, across a region so that the whole body of Christ is built up and freed from human control, knowing that Christ is our life, and that Jesus really is Head of the church.
In 1 Corinthians Paul makes it clear the church in Corinth had slipped into ‘streams’, each stream looking to an ‘apostle’ for their distinctive identity – ‘we’re with Paul’, or ‘we’re with Cephas’. Paul corrects them; it was never Paul’s ministry, or Peter’s mission. In our day we’re not to say, ‘we’re with New Frontiers’, or ‘Vineyard’, or ‘Kingdom Faith’…or the ‘CofE’, or ‘The AoG’, or the various African denominations. All those means of identification died in Christ. They may have a legitimate place in the blend of churches in a location, but it is ‘unto Him that the gathering of the people shall be’. Locked away in our streams and older denominations we are like Ezekiel’s rattling bones, and we face a choice, just like the people of God faced a choice once Moses had died; whether to cross the Jordan and press on. In this new day we can either stay put as rattling bones in the graveyard of our pioneering and apostolic heroes of the past or yield afresh to the Lord Jesus and all He has done for us on the cross and in His resurrection, believe that when He died, we died, that we are one with Him, and one with all who are in Christ. Christ is our life.
My bookshelf still has several of the books I read in the 1970s. They’re a bit battered now. Yellowing Sellotape holds some pages and spines together. Treasures old. But this is a new day when new treasures are being mined, new books will be written (e.g. Lance Lambert’s final book ‘Jacob I have Loved’), new songs sung, and churches will spring up that are as different as rock was to jazz, mobiles to landlines, or electric to petrol cars.
‘Moses, my servant is dead. Now, therefore, go over this Jordan’