Posted by MD on 4/13/2002, 2:43 pm

As for what I thought used to happen in the early Lutheran churches, it wasn’t until sometime in the next decade (in fact, I remember the year, it was 1983) when I learned that interesting thing the Lutheran missionary from Georgia told me. (Bill Boyle was his name; he wouldn’t mind me saying it on this board.) One Sunday afternoon after morning service, we were taking a walk around the neighborhood before the evening service at the independent charismatic church where he was ministering (and where I was visiting and had met him, because my boss at work, who was a relative of my girlfiend’s, had invited her and me to come). There were some things about Pentecostals and Pentecostalism that he didn’t like, and he would criticize them (some of the things were present at that church), though he believed in speaking in tongues and in the exercising of the spiritual gifts, including prophesying, which he did himself. There was kind of a park-like area by the parking lot of a shopping center beside the highway, and there were people there gathering around a group of Pentecostals who were ministering out in public, preaching in Spanish to the crowd. We stopped to watch for a moment, and I was watching the faces of the people as they watched them (including a group of policemen with their machine-guns strapped onto their backs, who had been casually making the rounds of the neighborhood and had stopped to watch them for a while, gazing intently at them—they also taking in the message that was being preached). He commented to me, “You can tell they’re Pentecostal when he breaks into tongues as he’s preaching. There are a lot of things you see that are Pentecostal traditions.” He said something about the falling under the power of the Spirit, or suposedly so, which many Pentecostals did, and which he didn’t think was such a great thing. I told him what I used to hear Don Barnett say about that—that originally once, or a few times, when the Spirit of God was present at a service and people weren’t yielding themselves and their lives to God, it would happen, a reaction to fighting against God—which God really only intended to take place that once when he led it—and then afterwards, the people just repeated it under their own power and established a tradition out of it (which really shouldn’t go on that way if it isn’t being led by God anymore). It was then that he told me about how originally at the beginning of Lutheranism, about 500 years back, the Spirit of God used to be present in the liturgy of the Lutheran church services, because Luther and his men prayed and prayed and prayed to God for it, and how once he had been present in a modern-day Lutheran liturgical service where the people had been born-again and Spirit-filled, and had prayed and prayed and prayed for the presence of God in their services, and he said it came and was as plainly present to him there as it is in some Pentecostal church services. Maybe back in Chapel days some of us would have foolishly and arrogantly rejected the idea that the Spirit of God could ever be present in a Lutheran liturgy service, but in that moment, I could then see how it could have been, and it changed my viewpoint on it. Ever since, I have believed what he told me, about how the Holy Spirit was originally present in the Lutheran liturgy, though it wasn’t because of the liturgy, but because of their asking and believing God for his presence (and how a few times, even today, it still is there—and I accept that too). A few days later he brought up again what I had said about how in Pentecostal churches, sometimes God originally moved in some way, and then the people repeated in in their own power, as God had not intended for them to do, and he was saying how that gave him a new point of view—other than that it was all just a bunch of crazy hype made up by the Pentecostal people, as he had thought before. Now that I think back on it, I think we were both giving a revelation to each other. ---------- To Steve [Part 3] Posted by Marvin on 9/28/2001, 2:38 pm , in reply to “To Steve [Part 2]” I have no unpleasant feelings towards any Lutheran churches or people, and I don’t think I ever have had. But if there had been some Lutheran people who had done something to hurt me sometime, and now I was starting to think God could never have been present in any Lutheran church because I was angry at those people, I would have to go over my thoughts again. That can turn into a serious thing, refusing to recognize God’s presence somewhere, because you’re angry at someone among them who has done something to hurt you. In my last post, trying to be as courteous as possible, I said it sounded to me like you were angry, and the reason appears to be that some of the people at Chapel have done something to hurt you. And as I said, I sympathize with you in that; I’ve suffered it too. “The people I’ve kept in touch with from the Lutheran church are much more stable and mature than the people I’ve kept in touch with from Community Chapel. That’s all I’m saying. I didn’t have to search the entire Internet to find examples of whacko theories espoused by ex-Chapel members (like you did for Lutherans you don’t even know).” Yes, and I tell you, I did not enjoy doing that Internet search and finding and pulling together all that garbage. But it had to be done to demonstrate a point: if the fact of such things going on refutes that God has ever been present at Chapel, it would have to refute the same thing in the Lutheran Church, and I do not believe it does that about either of the two, or any other group for that matter. There are other criteria with which we must make our evaluations. I think I succeeded in getting that point across. You ask: “But having once responded, what kind of foundation will they receive for a real life of faith? Not much of one, according to my observations.... Who is the most successful in building churches (that is, in creating the relationships in an assembly of believers that produce a living body of Christ as it is manifested locally) that last? I think the evidence is against you here.” And I have to disagree with you on that too. You’re going by the statistics in the United States alone. Worldwide, they are very different, and in our theologies about the salvation of mankind, we must consider the entire human race, not just those in the country we are from. Here in Latin America, for example, the statistics are completely different from in the U.S. There are massive revivals going on in these lands down here. In the country I’m in—which has already had two Pentecostal/charismatic presidents since the 1980s (one elected, the other installed by the army in a coup d’état, without his foreknowledge nor prior intention, after they had knocked out the dictator before him [and both were also taken out by force by the military; one is now in exile in Panama and the other now occupies the country’s third-highest position, in an elected government])—the percentage of born-again, Spirit-filled Pentecostals is estimated at about a third of the country’s population. In the U.S. it’s estimated at about 15 to 20 percent born-again and about two to four percent Spirit-filled Pentecostal. Down here there are some Baptists, Presbyterians, Nazarenes, Mennonites, etc., but about 95 percent of all Protestants are Pentecostals or charismatics. (They don’t use the word “Protestant,” because in Spanish “protestante” means “a militant protester against the government.” Back in the fifties, the Catholic Church used to use that to get the governments riled up against them, which sometimes resulted in Protestants getting shot and killed in the streets—and when it was reported in the mainstream media in the U.S., it was said that the right-wing governments were killing “communists” or “protesters” during “protests” in the streets. The American reporters were told that “protestante” was supposed to mean “communist.” In Colombia, a paramilitary organization that wore a quasi-ecclesiastical uniform was even permitted by the Catholic Church to have its soldiers positioned up in the church towers with their machine-guns to shoot at them. So in the sixties, I think it was, they all got together and agreed to start calling themselves “evangelicals” and not “Protestants,” borrowing the word Martin Luther first coined in German when he said not to name the movement after him.) When I was here in the early eighties, when they were estimating that about one out of every six people in the country had converted to evangelical (with the high percentage among them Pentecostal/charismatic) and when I met these evangelical converts and they used to ask me how long I had been saved, when I told them 10 years, as it was at that time, they were usually amazed. Most of the people I met at that time had only been saved for about a year or two. So I got to wondering, If we have a country full of new converts, is it just going to be a temporary thing in this land? Ten years from now are all these millions who were saved at Pentecostal revivals still going to be walking with God? Or is it something they just got excited about for a while, but then are going to lose interest in it later? Well, now it’s been almost 20 years, and I see today that the numbers have not declined; in fact, they have continued to increase. In the country I’m in, I have heard some estimates saying up to half the population, though I have a hard time believing that. If that were true, you could take a survey, and every other person you stopped walking along the street and asked, on average, would be evangelical (unless there are great majorities out in the rural areas, but I doubt that too). But a third of the population does seem plausible, although probably the maximum possible. (Continued)