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The Pentecostal Movement of the late seventeen hundreds caused a stir in the mainline churches – or should I call it a Tsunami? It introduced the doctrine that believers need a second experience, baptism in the Holy Spirit, and that speaking in tongues was the evidence of this experience. In the nineteen sixties the Charismatic Movement embraced a similar doctrine but, unlike the Pentecostal Movement which resulted in new church denominations, the Charismatic Movement impacted all the traditional church groups. Whilst it had a profoundly positive influence on the life of many churches, it did stir up a lot
Published in SATS ‘Pastor to Pastor’ Harold Camping is the Calvinist radio Bible teacher based in California. He has sprung to notoriety by predicting that the Rapture would occur at 6 pm on 21st May, 2011. The day has come and gone and the Christian world is left puzzling over the question of how he could have got it so wrong. . Apart from radically reinterpreting Jesus words, that no one knows the day or the hour, as applying only to the disciples of His time, Camping fell on the sword of his faulty interpretive method. He uses and
Published in SATS “pastor to Pastor’ I grew up in a conservative Methodist home and during my childhood years would sometimes hear disparaging comments about ’holly rollers’ who, I was told, were Pentecostals who rolled wildly on the floor talking in tongues. At the age of thirty I ‘got saved’ and my wife and I started attending an Assemblies of God church. I didn’t see anyone rolling on the floor but I did hear tongues, both spoken and sung. The singing was beautiful and inspiring and I had no idea at that stage that speaking in tongues was a
Published in SATS ‘Pastor to Pastor’ Anyone who has been a pastor for more than a decade will most likely have some of the following concerns: • That, irrespective of the average wealth of the congregation, one third of the income earners supply two thirds of the church’s income. • That no matter how often or enthusiastically the pastor calls the people to weekly corporate prayer, only a handful of people respond. • That, even in a church that teaches believers baptism by immersion in water, so many folk who have transferred in have not been baptized and
Many years ago the Holy Spirit led me into an appreciation of the key dynamics of church life that has served my local church well for more than two decades. I call the concept ROADS – Relationship, Outreach, Anointing, Doctrine, and Structure. How the five dynamics relate to one another Before I develop each of these dynamics, I need to comment on how they relate to each other as parts of a whole. All five dynamics need to be equally strong driving forces that energize the local church. If a church has great relationships both with God and its