Showing posts with label Roffey. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Roffey. Show all posts
Wednesday, 19 March 2025
Saturday, 2 November 2024
Evangelism Popups , other Kingdom Popups,John Stevens, Pete Goddard, Chris Welch
John Stevens on Roffey , (see the film Clip below)
It’s a longish time ago now but does make one reminisce about Roffey days on mission in teams. In one church we got so fed up with people falling over before they heard the word we replaced ‘catchers’ with ‘standeruppers’ - once they’d heard whatever word we had we’d let them fall. The important thing to reminisce is that we were working sort of apostolically, part of an apostolic band…or the closest I’ve seen to that. It was more than evangelistic, or prophetic, or teachery. But there was a redefining of what is ‘normal’. What became normal was hearing from God & a heightened sense of faith…along with eating whatever food was provided, sharing bedrooms in a range of households, long days out on the streets then evening meetings…but greater sense of reaping what we were sowing.
Dr. Bob Gordon was a Scottish internationally evangelist, Bible teacher and ordained minister in the United Reformed Church. Kerygma Trust, the charity under which he operated, was dedicated to spreading the Word of God in the Holy Spirit power. He was a graduate of Bible Study School in Manchester University, and had a Postgraduate degree in Theology and Religious Education. Before becoming director of Old Testament studies in London Bible College, he was chaplain in Durham University for nine years. He wrote a number of books, including an extensive study on discipleship. A great man of faith, he was at heart a Revivalist Preacher, whose encounter with the Holy Spirit and the Charismatic Revival dramatically changed the course of his ministry. Believing that God could provide every need, he had a particular gift of faith for finance, frequently seeing miraculous and often large financial provision as a result of prayer, (but often at the last minute!) Those who joined him on his ‘team’ were expected to exercise the same faith for their own provision. In 1986 he was the Director of Roffey Place Christian Training Centre, and was extremely charismatic, both in his faith and his personality. The college had been bought for £600,000, the finance for which had been provided without fundraising or advertising, but through answer to prayer by both Bob and his ministerial colleague, Colin Urquhart. His passion and enthusiasm for the Kingdom of God, along with a superb ability to communicate Bible teaching was very infectious. His vision of ‘taking the Gospel to the heart of the nation’ would involve the conversion of five double decker buses, each with a team of evangelists that would tour the country with the aim of not just explaining the gospel, but praying for people in the streets and seeing miraculous results. Here is Bob speaking in 1988 (unscripted!) about his vision for the buses. I made this video on a VHS tape with extremely limited editing facilities. Sadly it was never really used, due to lack of funds. (No surprise!)
It’s a longish time ago now but does make one reminisce about Roffey days on mission in teams. In one church we got so fed up with people falling over before they heard the word we replaced ‘catchers’ with ‘standeruppers’ - once they’d heard whatever word we had we’d let them fall. The important thing to reminisce is that we were working sort of apostolically, part of an apostolic band…or the closest I’ve seen to that. It was more than evangelistic, or prophetic, or teachery. But there was a redefining of what is ‘normal’. What became normal was hearing from God & a heightened sense of faith…along with eating whatever food was provided, sharing bedrooms in a range of households, long days out on the streets then evening meetings…but greater sense of reaping what we were sowing.
I didn’t have a great deal to do with Pete but ‘twas good to read that he designed the interiors to the coaches. Nothing naff. High quality furnishings, the art work was provocative and arresting, good conversation starters. Upstairs for a cup of coffee & a chat. I got used to a ratio of faith. 100 conversations would yield 10 that would lead to some form of receiving from God and 1 would be salvation. So in a typical week long mission I’d see a few come to Christ. Had greatest ‘success’ with nominal Anglicans/ Catholics but not exclusively.
We didn’t carry tracts but believed that God would open up those He wanted to us. Sometimes through good quality sketches/mimes/songs performed on the street.
My faith went from half a mustard seed to not quite African standards. More that could be said but that faith is latent in all of us…I’m realising more and more now that it’s not as simple as differentiating between MY faith and Christ’s but His faith is my faith.
Pete Goddard's Blogpage on the Kings Coach Dr Bob Gordon
Excerpt. Many more pics and details on Pete's page , plus his life story
Excerpt. Many more pics and details on Pete's page , plus his life story
Dr. Bob Gordon was a Scottish internationally evangelist, Bible teacher and ordained minister in the United Reformed Church. Kerygma Trust, the charity under which he operated, was dedicated to spreading the Word of God in the Holy Spirit power. He was a graduate of Bible Study School in Manchester University, and had a Postgraduate degree in Theology and Religious Education. Before becoming director of Old Testament studies in London Bible College, he was chaplain in Durham University for nine years. He wrote a number of books, including an extensive study on discipleship. A great man of faith, he was at heart a Revivalist Preacher, whose encounter with the Holy Spirit and the Charismatic Revival dramatically changed the course of his ministry. Believing that God could provide every need, he had a particular gift of faith for finance, frequently seeing miraculous and often large financial provision as a result of prayer, (but often at the last minute!) Those who joined him on his ‘team’ were expected to exercise the same faith for their own provision. In 1986 he was the Director of Roffey Place Christian Training Centre, and was extremely charismatic, both in his faith and his personality. The college had been bought for £600,000, the finance for which had been provided without fundraising or advertising, but through answer to prayer by both Bob and his ministerial colleague, Colin Urquhart. His passion and enthusiasm for the Kingdom of God, along with a superb ability to communicate Bible teaching was very infectious. His vision of ‘taking the Gospel to the heart of the nation’ would involve the conversion of five double decker buses, each with a team of evangelists that would tour the country with the aim of not just explaining the gospel, but praying for people in the streets and seeing miraculous results. Here is Bob speaking in 1988 (unscripted!) about his vision for the buses. I made this video on a VHS tape with extremely limited editing facilities. Sadly it was never really used, due to lack of funds. (No surprise!)
Sunday, 14 June 2009
The Power of Teams
I stayed with my friend John Stevens a couple of weeks back. We talked for hours. I was particularly riveted by his testimony to do with teams. He has kindly reproduced some of it here. Basically this is the issue. Teams have a great supernatural power. Things happen in teams that never happen quite any other way. Peter Stott takes teams with him. The early apostles always made sure there were at least a couple of them and often others too.
One can put a hundred to flight, but two can put ten thousand to flight!
There is something beautiful about a whole team focussed on one goal and working on it together. And it gets especially interesting when it is evangelistic.
Para church movements were frowned upon in the days of “submission and authority and redefining the vision of the local church.”
This is what I think. Firstly until such time that local churches become more balanced expressions of the whole counsel of God, (does this relate with the phrase the 7 spirits of God?)…remember my vision /picture of the Word as a suspended orb between all the Biblical aspects of God’s nature and character)….. we need specific teams and ministries to make up the lack….
Secondly, I have noticed already so far that the Melchizedek order has little human frame of reference. For instance God suddenly sets apart Paul and Barnabas to reach the Gentiles. The rest of the church at Antioch stayed put. In 1969, Arthur Blessitt was minding his own business of preaching to street kids on the Sunset Strip, when God breaks through and sets him suddenly on a 38 year journey to traverse every country on earth – even the closed ones- carrying the Cross. So, I guess there will always be teams called to specific jobs in specific callings….just as it was also for Mel Tari in the Indonesian Revival. The theory that everything will issue logically and smoothly out of local churches, as we thought in the 70s and 80s….well It clearly isn’t so. Perhaps it was good that Morris Cerullo never listened to anyone!!!!Eh!?
John’s piece is so much more though. It is an encouragement that we will never feel right for the job and God understands this as well.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
What works in reaching out with the gospel?
Is it a valid question to ask ‘what works’? As if there is a methodology out there that guarantees success.
I think that it is true to say that presumption the classic fault of the rational man. Once we land on a workable thesis we test it beyond its endurance and suffer the inevitable disappointment when y doesn’t follow x .
One of the most encouraging paragraphs in the New Testament is 2 Cor 4v7-14;
‘But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us…’ That’s verse 7. That’s true revolution. That’s taking the rational western liberal man and consigning the invention of the enlightenment and modernity and post-modernity to ‘an earthen vessel’. For all this progress you are still an earthen vessel. The real secret, hidden from those brilliant thinkers, those philosophers, is the treasure within.
Our fault is when we detach the two and over emphasize our humanity or diminish our humanity in the light of His divinity. The treasure has no value in itself. Only when it can be transported, and for that an earthen vessel is all that is required.
‘We are perplexed but not in despair’ v 8. If verse 7 is revolution verse 8 comes as a shock. Surely, our rational minds feeding on verse 7, say, surely if verse 7 is true it follows that all we have to do is ‘be’ and the treasure will make itself known through our calling, our gifting, our serving, our giving and so on. And yet the apostle is perplexed as is his team. That I find hugely encouraging and liberating!
I’m often perplexed but if the apostle was then I’m reassured.
Story One. I’d been a Christian for a matter of months. I was 18. A friend offered me a lift home. On his car key-ring dangled a picture of a beautiful girl. I asked him who she was. He said ‘My fiancé. But she doesn’t look like that now’. It turned out that she had anorexia nervosa and was close to death. We were both lab technicians for a pharmaceutical company. Our lab leader was compassionate and allowed my friend to spend hours researching anorexia in an attempt to save his girlfriend. Meanwhile God stirred in my heart to offer to pray for her. I spoke to my friend and he agreed and so a few of us at church prayed that weekend. The truth is in fact that having plucked up the courage to say to my friend ‘I believe God loves your fiancé and wants to heal her, will you let me pray for her?’ I forgot all about it. But on the next Saturday morning I was due to go with a small evangelistic team handing out tracts in a local market. As we were praying just before going out, the heavens opened (get literal) and the rain was so loud on the roof we couldn’t hear each other’s British prayers – so we took a very important decision and decided not to do the evangelism. Our leader asked a question. Has anyone got anything from God? I piped up, embarrassed that I had forgotten to pray during the week. I remember praying something like ‘God would unblock the barrier preventing her from getting up and eating’ and everyone said Amen. On Monday morning back at work my friend came in almost jumping with joy as his girlfriend had started eating. She had suddenly got out of bed on Saturday morning at the same time that we prayed. Now that is verse 7.
My rational response was ‘so now everyone will ask me about Jesus and we’ll have revival in the lab…who’s first…’. It didn’t happen. No-one became a Christian. No-one asked about it. Not one soul. I was disappointed, a little angry perhaps, certainly perplexed.
Later that year at Exeter University and in the maelstrom of meeting many people, I often shared my faith sometimes with roomfuls of people pumping me and other Christian friends with questions. I witnessed to a large number of fellow students. I probably told people Story One. Not one jettisoned their agnosticism, atheism, or spiritual lethargy.
I was worn out. I had all this treasure. I was perplexed and more or less I gave up witnessing. The years rolled by. I spoke in tongues. I prophesied. I saw a few miracles of healing. But no fruit from my witnessing. Deep down I was crying to God. ‘This should work. This should work. God what is going on?’
I felt the impact of failure. Then in 1985 I had a fresh encounter with the Holy Spirit and ‘felt’ the anointing in a more tangible way than before. When the Holy Spirit falls on people He often speaks and I had a few verses that came to mind, two from Isaiah and one from the Psalms.
One of the Isaiah verses contained the line ‘and I have given Him to be a witness to the peoples…’ This verse (Is 55v4) refers to the Messiah but on this occasion the Holy Spirit fired it into me – I was the target. And it created faith where presumption had previously been trying and failing to get a foothold.
Within a few months I joined a Christian team taking (mostly non-church) teenage boys on Activity Holidays. The leaders were all baptized in the Holy Spirit and were more or less of one mind in terms of the overall vision for the team and that it must be run by the Holy Spirit.
My particular role was to lead worship and hill-walking. But when some of the lads responded to the gospel in meetings they were passed on to some of the leaders – including me – and we led a number to the Lord. I was underway.
A year or so later, with my young family, we went to Roffey Place Christian Training Centre in Horsham Sussex.. For those of a certain vintage you might know Colin Urquhart. He and Bob Gordon led Roffey. I left the relative comfort of a ‘charismatic’ church and teaching career to go to Roffey because I was hungry for the reality of what we were preaching but rarely seeing. I loved my church and am indebted to many in that church for their witness and their love. Without them I would not have given Jesus a second glance. But hunger is hunger.
At Roffey I was immersed in an army looking for a battle.
Bob Gordon would often say that we’d been invited to participate in a corporate anointing and that there was no place for any of us to do our own thing.
On missions, sometimes on the streets of villages and towns, sometimes in tents or churches, we were taught not to hand out tracts but to be praying, trusting that it was God who would stimulate conversations and ultimately it is God who saves, heals and so on. All this is great in theory. In practice 2Corinthians 4v7-14 is the reality.
Story Two. Mission in Basildon,Essex. (I apologise if you live in Basildon but it is not a place I would choose to live in. For different reasons it could well have been Monty Python’s substitute for Basingstoke). Nevertheless to Basildon we went. A team of about twenty, for a week culminating in a three large evening services at the hosting church. I was billeted with a Ugandan Christian. We both prayed early in the morning separately before heading down for breakfast with out hosts. At some point he looked up and asked me with a smile, ‘John how many will be saved this week?’ I screwed up my ‘faith’ and said, ‘maybe 10?’ He laughed and said, ‘No John there will be more than this, there will be 120’. My only experience of church mission was maximum effort and minimum fruit, his experience was much fruit. 120 individuals came to the Lord that week.
Few if any were saved in the Meetings, nearly all were through the team on the street. A Catholic member of our team had very little confidence in witnessing about Jesus. But he had felt God calling him to wait in a certain spot. And there he had returned day after day. He was about to give up when one day he stopped a woman to talk to her and her story came tumbling out. She was on her way to a shop to buy a knife to murder her son-in law! She ended up giving her life to Christ. ‘We have this treasure in an earthen vessel that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us’. The week dismantled my defeatist thinking and created a new level of personal expectation but in the context of working in a team. Basildon!
I return to my opening sentence. ‘What works?’ I’m sure the Roffey experience I had is the same that many believers have when they devote their time to a team that is led by the Spirit of Jesus.
What works is hunger. What works is being led by the Spirit. ‘Jesus after He was baptized was led by the Spirit into the desert…’ The Greek for ‘led’ is ‘ekbalo’ and is later translated in the same chapter in mark for ‘driving out’ a demon! It is a forceful word. It can be used to describe kicking a ball. In one translation it says the Spirit drove into the desert’. It’s like that. Something you cannot deny, insistent but good.
Up to that point for 30 years the Spirit had not descended upon Him or driven Him into the wilderness. This is important too. Jesus had a long period of apparent inactivity. We are not called into fleshly busyness. Sometimes saying no is the greatest challenge.
‘…they were forbidden by the Holy Spirit to preach the word in Asia…they tried to go into Bithynia but the Spirit of Jesus did not permit them…’ Acts 16 v 6-10
Paul and his team had come to the edge of the world at Mysia. Somehow they knew the Spirit would not let them travel East or West. South was where they came from and North was Sea of Marmara in the corner of the Med. That night Paul had a vision of a man in Macedonia saying ‘come over to Macedonia and help us’. ‘Immediately we sought to go to Macedonia concluding that the Lord had called us to preach to them’. Across the Med they went.
This aspect dovetails in with “Life In the Order of Melchizedek” series. Morris Cerullo calls revelation a supernatural burst of advanced knowledge. This is very much the realm Nicholas and Pam move in, and it is the hallmark exhibited over and over again in Arthur Blessitt’s picture autobiography The Cross to be reviewed soon. Time and again he finds himself in the midst of world-changing pivotal circumstances….a real life version of the fictional Forrest Gump.
One can put a hundred to flight, but two can put ten thousand to flight!
There is something beautiful about a whole team focussed on one goal and working on it together. And it gets especially interesting when it is evangelistic.
Para church movements were frowned upon in the days of “submission and authority and redefining the vision of the local church.”
This is what I think. Firstly until such time that local churches become more balanced expressions of the whole counsel of God, (does this relate with the phrase the 7 spirits of God?)…remember my vision /picture of the Word as a suspended orb between all the Biblical aspects of God’s nature and character)….. we need specific teams and ministries to make up the lack….
Secondly, I have noticed already so far that the Melchizedek order has little human frame of reference. For instance God suddenly sets apart Paul and Barnabas to reach the Gentiles. The rest of the church at Antioch stayed put. In 1969, Arthur Blessitt was minding his own business of preaching to street kids on the Sunset Strip, when God breaks through and sets him suddenly on a 38 year journey to traverse every country on earth – even the closed ones- carrying the Cross. So, I guess there will always be teams called to specific jobs in specific callings….just as it was also for Mel Tari in the Indonesian Revival. The theory that everything will issue logically and smoothly out of local churches, as we thought in the 70s and 80s….well It clearly isn’t so. Perhaps it was good that Morris Cerullo never listened to anyone!!!!Eh!?
John’s piece is so much more though. It is an encouragement that we will never feel right for the job and God understands this as well.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
What works in reaching out with the gospel?
Is it a valid question to ask ‘what works’? As if there is a methodology out there that guarantees success.
I think that it is true to say that presumption the classic fault of the rational man. Once we land on a workable thesis we test it beyond its endurance and suffer the inevitable disappointment when y doesn’t follow x .
One of the most encouraging paragraphs in the New Testament is 2 Cor 4v7-14;
‘But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us…’ That’s verse 7. That’s true revolution. That’s taking the rational western liberal man and consigning the invention of the enlightenment and modernity and post-modernity to ‘an earthen vessel’. For all this progress you are still an earthen vessel. The real secret, hidden from those brilliant thinkers, those philosophers, is the treasure within.
Our fault is when we detach the two and over emphasize our humanity or diminish our humanity in the light of His divinity. The treasure has no value in itself. Only when it can be transported, and for that an earthen vessel is all that is required.
‘We are perplexed but not in despair’ v 8. If verse 7 is revolution verse 8 comes as a shock. Surely, our rational minds feeding on verse 7, say, surely if verse 7 is true it follows that all we have to do is ‘be’ and the treasure will make itself known through our calling, our gifting, our serving, our giving and so on. And yet the apostle is perplexed as is his team. That I find hugely encouraging and liberating!
I’m often perplexed but if the apostle was then I’m reassured.
Story One. I’d been a Christian for a matter of months. I was 18. A friend offered me a lift home. On his car key-ring dangled a picture of a beautiful girl. I asked him who she was. He said ‘My fiancé. But she doesn’t look like that now’. It turned out that she had anorexia nervosa and was close to death. We were both lab technicians for a pharmaceutical company. Our lab leader was compassionate and allowed my friend to spend hours researching anorexia in an attempt to save his girlfriend. Meanwhile God stirred in my heart to offer to pray for her. I spoke to my friend and he agreed and so a few of us at church prayed that weekend. The truth is in fact that having plucked up the courage to say to my friend ‘I believe God loves your fiancé and wants to heal her, will you let me pray for her?’ I forgot all about it. But on the next Saturday morning I was due to go with a small evangelistic team handing out tracts in a local market. As we were praying just before going out, the heavens opened (get literal) and the rain was so loud on the roof we couldn’t hear each other’s British prayers – so we took a very important decision and decided not to do the evangelism. Our leader asked a question. Has anyone got anything from God? I piped up, embarrassed that I had forgotten to pray during the week. I remember praying something like ‘God would unblock the barrier preventing her from getting up and eating’ and everyone said Amen. On Monday morning back at work my friend came in almost jumping with joy as his girlfriend had started eating. She had suddenly got out of bed on Saturday morning at the same time that we prayed. Now that is verse 7.
My rational response was ‘so now everyone will ask me about Jesus and we’ll have revival in the lab…who’s first…’. It didn’t happen. No-one became a Christian. No-one asked about it. Not one soul. I was disappointed, a little angry perhaps, certainly perplexed.
Later that year at Exeter University and in the maelstrom of meeting many people, I often shared my faith sometimes with roomfuls of people pumping me and other Christian friends with questions. I witnessed to a large number of fellow students. I probably told people Story One. Not one jettisoned their agnosticism, atheism, or spiritual lethargy.
I was worn out. I had all this treasure. I was perplexed and more or less I gave up witnessing. The years rolled by. I spoke in tongues. I prophesied. I saw a few miracles of healing. But no fruit from my witnessing. Deep down I was crying to God. ‘This should work. This should work. God what is going on?’
I felt the impact of failure. Then in 1985 I had a fresh encounter with the Holy Spirit and ‘felt’ the anointing in a more tangible way than before. When the Holy Spirit falls on people He often speaks and I had a few verses that came to mind, two from Isaiah and one from the Psalms.
One of the Isaiah verses contained the line ‘and I have given Him to be a witness to the peoples…’ This verse (Is 55v4) refers to the Messiah but on this occasion the Holy Spirit fired it into me – I was the target. And it created faith where presumption had previously been trying and failing to get a foothold.
Within a few months I joined a Christian team taking (mostly non-church) teenage boys on Activity Holidays. The leaders were all baptized in the Holy Spirit and were more or less of one mind in terms of the overall vision for the team and that it must be run by the Holy Spirit.
My particular role was to lead worship and hill-walking. But when some of the lads responded to the gospel in meetings they were passed on to some of the leaders – including me – and we led a number to the Lord. I was underway.
A year or so later, with my young family, we went to Roffey Place Christian Training Centre in Horsham Sussex.. For those of a certain vintage you might know Colin Urquhart. He and Bob Gordon led Roffey. I left the relative comfort of a ‘charismatic’ church and teaching career to go to Roffey because I was hungry for the reality of what we were preaching but rarely seeing. I loved my church and am indebted to many in that church for their witness and their love. Without them I would not have given Jesus a second glance. But hunger is hunger.
At Roffey I was immersed in an army looking for a battle.
Bob Gordon would often say that we’d been invited to participate in a corporate anointing and that there was no place for any of us to do our own thing.
On missions, sometimes on the streets of villages and towns, sometimes in tents or churches, we were taught not to hand out tracts but to be praying, trusting that it was God who would stimulate conversations and ultimately it is God who saves, heals and so on. All this is great in theory. In practice 2Corinthians 4v7-14 is the reality.
Story Two. Mission in Basildon,Essex. (I apologise if you live in Basildon but it is not a place I would choose to live in. For different reasons it could well have been Monty Python’s substitute for Basingstoke). Nevertheless to Basildon we went. A team of about twenty, for a week culminating in a three large evening services at the hosting church. I was billeted with a Ugandan Christian. We both prayed early in the morning separately before heading down for breakfast with out hosts. At some point he looked up and asked me with a smile, ‘John how many will be saved this week?’ I screwed up my ‘faith’ and said, ‘maybe 10?’ He laughed and said, ‘No John there will be more than this, there will be 120’. My only experience of church mission was maximum effort and minimum fruit, his experience was much fruit. 120 individuals came to the Lord that week.
Few if any were saved in the Meetings, nearly all were through the team on the street. A Catholic member of our team had very little confidence in witnessing about Jesus. But he had felt God calling him to wait in a certain spot. And there he had returned day after day. He was about to give up when one day he stopped a woman to talk to her and her story came tumbling out. She was on her way to a shop to buy a knife to murder her son-in law! She ended up giving her life to Christ. ‘We have this treasure in an earthen vessel that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us’. The week dismantled my defeatist thinking and created a new level of personal expectation but in the context of working in a team. Basildon!
I return to my opening sentence. ‘What works?’ I’m sure the Roffey experience I had is the same that many believers have when they devote their time to a team that is led by the Spirit of Jesus.
What works is hunger. What works is being led by the Spirit. ‘Jesus after He was baptized was led by the Spirit into the desert…’ The Greek for ‘led’ is ‘ekbalo’ and is later translated in the same chapter in mark for ‘driving out’ a demon! It is a forceful word. It can be used to describe kicking a ball. In one translation it says the Spirit drove into the desert’. It’s like that. Something you cannot deny, insistent but good.
Up to that point for 30 years the Spirit had not descended upon Him or driven Him into the wilderness. This is important too. Jesus had a long period of apparent inactivity. We are not called into fleshly busyness. Sometimes saying no is the greatest challenge.
‘…they were forbidden by the Holy Spirit to preach the word in Asia…they tried to go into Bithynia but the Spirit of Jesus did not permit them…’ Acts 16 v 6-10
Paul and his team had come to the edge of the world at Mysia. Somehow they knew the Spirit would not let them travel East or West. South was where they came from and North was Sea of Marmara in the corner of the Med. That night Paul had a vision of a man in Macedonia saying ‘come over to Macedonia and help us’. ‘Immediately we sought to go to Macedonia concluding that the Lord had called us to preach to them’. Across the Med they went.
This aspect dovetails in with “Life In the Order of Melchizedek” series. Morris Cerullo calls revelation a supernatural burst of advanced knowledge. This is very much the realm Nicholas and Pam move in, and it is the hallmark exhibited over and over again in Arthur Blessitt’s picture autobiography The Cross to be reviewed soon. Time and again he finds himself in the midst of world-changing pivotal circumstances….a real life version of the fictional Forrest Gump.
Thursday, 22 January 2009
Colin Urquart has helped breed some interesting people
Colin Urquart is one of two people I particularly listen to on Premier Radio, the London Christian station that peters out at Hindhead mid-sentence!!!! The other show is Witness Lee, comrade alongside Watchman Nee.
All that to say Urquart's work has helped spawn some interesting people over the years. One is John Stevens. In case you did not catch his comment I am repeating it here:
A lecturer at Roffey once threw this remark into the ring 'the christian life is a series of revelations about what Christ achieved for us at our conversion'. I've pondered on the scriptures at the end of Luke and beginning of Acts where post-resurrection Jesus 'opens their minds to the meaning of the scriptures concerning himself'. Usual thing: just when they'd got it buttoned up and come to terms with having breakfast with a resurrected Messiah He goes and does that! And then in Acts Peter 'gets it' about the gentiles. Same for us. For me the sudden realisation that in Christ I am something that is impossible for us humanly - to be simultaneously a servant and a son - shattered my son-centric faith and released me to love others more freely.We can get an inkling of something in Christ that seems just out of our reach and then 'pow' the penny drops, we see, and it's easy. The preliminary stage is awkward, frustrating, no-one can help us, we're locked into a struggle, not making much sense to ourselves, unable to articulate much to God except staring at scriptures that seem to be impenetrable and then kazoom revelation and we're there! And then the learning begins. Your biblical heroes get updated, all is new. At the top of my list now is Abraham's servant. After years of trusted servanthood he is entrusted with finding a wife for Isaac. Once he is successful he fades into the background job done. And Abigail who knelt down before David and said I am a servant of your servants and won his heart.So about the sacramental article. I'm sure that will stir up the 'yes but I don't quite get it if I'm honest' reaction in readers. But one day the Spirit will do His work and take that which is His and declare it to us' and we'll realise that it's not something we have to do but that Christ has achieved it already - it just has to dawn on us and then watch the fruit grow! Enjolyed the article. Keep it coming.
All that to say Urquart's work has helped spawn some interesting people over the years. One is John Stevens. In case you did not catch his comment I am repeating it here:
A lecturer at Roffey once threw this remark into the ring 'the christian life is a series of revelations about what Christ achieved for us at our conversion'. I've pondered on the scriptures at the end of Luke and beginning of Acts where post-resurrection Jesus 'opens their minds to the meaning of the scriptures concerning himself'. Usual thing: just when they'd got it buttoned up and come to terms with having breakfast with a resurrected Messiah He goes and does that! And then in Acts Peter 'gets it' about the gentiles. Same for us. For me the sudden realisation that in Christ I am something that is impossible for us humanly - to be simultaneously a servant and a son - shattered my son-centric faith and released me to love others more freely.We can get an inkling of something in Christ that seems just out of our reach and then 'pow' the penny drops, we see, and it's easy. The preliminary stage is awkward, frustrating, no-one can help us, we're locked into a struggle, not making much sense to ourselves, unable to articulate much to God except staring at scriptures that seem to be impenetrable and then kazoom revelation and we're there! And then the learning begins. Your biblical heroes get updated, all is new. At the top of my list now is Abraham's servant. After years of trusted servanthood he is entrusted with finding a wife for Isaac. Once he is successful he fades into the background job done. And Abigail who knelt down before David and said I am a servant of your servants and won his heart.So about the sacramental article. I'm sure that will stir up the 'yes but I don't quite get it if I'm honest' reaction in readers. But one day the Spirit will do His work and take that which is His and declare it to us' and we'll realise that it's not something we have to do but that Christ has achieved it already - it just has to dawn on us and then watch the fruit grow! Enjolyed the article. Keep it coming.
Monday, 24 November 2008
"Can't see the join"- email from John Stevens
Got this email from John - ex Exeter Uni
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Heaven's a wild place - like it.
Today's bread: was running with a friend this morning getting shockingly cold but he's inspired to use Sun a.m. runs to share his life and interrogate me about a statement I'd made about having 1 and a half encounters with angels. Anyway I started to remember what it was like as a child listening to NT stories about Jesus at school and at church and yet not knowing anyone who could point to the reality on earth until I met a fellow under age drinker who knew the Lord. No-one in my family ever spoke about Jesus so it was all a bit bewildering. Then into a charismatic church at home and Uni tentatively teaching and exploring, as you say, salvation/baptism in the Spirit. And then wanting to reproduce the teaching in my life in greater reality receiving more through the Wimber years and at Roffey. But at Roffey having another big jigsaw piece falling into place all about being crucified with Christ not I etc Gal 2v20 Prob said all this before.
The point is that telling my friend all this reawakened that initial thirst from childhood and I realised afresh this morning that I have a chance in this life to live the very life of Jesus and just how amazing that is. In fact there is no other life to live.
Eric Morecombe (a third Level comic!) got it about right looking closely at Ernie Wise through those oversize glasses 'Can't see the join'
John
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Heaven's a wild place - like it.
Today's bread: was running with a friend this morning getting shockingly cold but he's inspired to use Sun a.m. runs to share his life and interrogate me about a statement I'd made about having 1 and a half encounters with angels. Anyway I started to remember what it was like as a child listening to NT stories about Jesus at school and at church and yet not knowing anyone who could point to the reality on earth until I met a fellow under age drinker who knew the Lord. No-one in my family ever spoke about Jesus so it was all a bit bewildering. Then into a charismatic church at home and Uni tentatively teaching and exploring, as you say, salvation/baptism in the Spirit. And then wanting to reproduce the teaching in my life in greater reality receiving more through the Wimber years and at Roffey. But at Roffey having another big jigsaw piece falling into place all about being crucified with Christ not I etc Gal 2v20 Prob said all this before.
The point is that telling my friend all this reawakened that initial thirst from childhood and I realised afresh this morning that I have a chance in this life to live the very life of Jesus and just how amazing that is. In fact there is no other life to live.
Eric Morecombe (a third Level comic!) got it about right looking closely at Ernie Wise through those oversize glasses 'Can't see the join'
John
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)