At the turn of the Twentieth Century, one of America's leading newspapers addressed the following question to many notable people of that time: "What in your opinion is the chief danger, social or political, that confronts the coming century?”  General William Booth, founder of Salvation Army, was one invited to reply to this question; he sent this reply:

“The chief danger that confronts the coming century will be religion without the Holy Ghost, Christianity without Christ, forgiveness without repentance, salvation without regeneration, politics without God, heaven without hell.”

Last post dealt with Politics without God. This post I want to look at Religion without the Holy Spirit.

When I came to know that Jesus was alive and well and wanted to come live in me, we were attending, (with some regularity), a church that we thought was non-denominational. They said they were non-denom. We sat in that church for over 3 years mostly to let our children be exposed to Christianity and to let them make up their own minds. We were not swayed but quietly sat there without anybody bothering us. We later found out that this contemporary church was indeed tied into a denomination called The Christian Missionary and Alliance Church. This post is not about the story of our salvation but of the removal and dumbing down of the Holy Spirit in our churches. We were saved by the Holy Spirit moving and not by this church or their teachings. As we later found out, what we came to believe in short order was not what this church believed or at least taught.

The C&MA was a church founded by a man named A.B. Simpson back in the late 1800's and was not intended to be a denomination when it was formed. Simpson went on to open higher education sources and mainly focused on healings, miraculous signs and wonders associated with the Holy Spirit of God. He started out as a Presbyterian minister and became frustrated working within the restrictive doctrines of that denomination. He resigned from the largest Presbyterian chuch in NYC and started reaching out to the poor and neglected of the city. He founded the New York Tabernacle and what is now Nyack College and Alliance Theological Seminary. 

Simpson was intrigued by a new movement in his time called the Holiness Movement which gave birth to the Pentacostal movement. His school trained many of the Pentecostal preachers in the early 1900's. They were what is now called Fourfold Gospel believers, believing in divine healings, miracles, signs and wonders. Everything Simpson stood for was founded in this movement. They had one division within the leadership... the gift of tongues being the main sign of indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Simpson fervently believed that you were not fully baptized in the Holy Spirit until you could speak in tongues.

Soon after his passing in 1919, the leadership of the C&MA approved the removal of this doctrine and as a result a more conservative Christian doctrine slowly took over the C&MA. This denomination is no longer associated with healings, miracles, signs and wonders it was founded upon. It is a great evangelical church and funds many missionaries around the globe. I am not coming down on this church or denomination in any way. We need many parts of the body to make us whole. My main point is that which William Booth said would happen did happen.

The Holy Spirit has been removed from many churches and the way they operate. Services are an hour to an hour and 15 minutes so we can make it home for the football games. Every part of the service is planned out ahead of time. Many have timetables so the next service can be started on time... When we look at the book of Acts and what happened to the group waiting upon the Helper, the whole of the city came to see what that sound of rushing mighty wind was about and found what looked to them as drunks in the street. The only thing about the scene that really perplexed them was the fact that the "affected" ones were speaking in every tongue known to the inhabitants of the city. In that day and age, there were many different tongues and dialects and it was impossible for these Hebrews to know them all, yet they were speaking in the tongues of strangers so that they understood them.

In the mid 90's there was a movement of the Holy Spirit that fell upon a church in Toronto, CA. Called The Toronto Blessing, it was marked by uncontrollable laughter, animal like noises and unexplained incredible joy. People coming into the church were suddenly overtaken by great joy, and sometimes great grief and emotional agony but always in a repentent way. It was also accompanied by all types of miraculous healings. People in wheelchairs would walk, the blind were having their eyes opened, the deaf could suddenly hear. It was a great movement of the Holy Spirit and He came to a place that welcomed Him with open arms. Much of the body of Christ has condemned this because they didn't recognize it since it didn't look like what they thought was a dignity and reverence of God.

As I wrote last post, we live in Pennsylvania. The majority of the people living here in the 17th and 18th Century were known as Quakers. The reason they had that nickname was because of what happened to them in worship. They quaked! Their bodies were known to shake uncontrollably and could not be stopped until they stopped worshiping. That is what the Holy Spirit looked like when it came upon them. The Holy Spirit moves in such mysterious ways and we can't explain why or what He is doing... but we've seen someone knocked down by His power and what takes place in a person in 20 minutes on a floor equals what an average person could get from therapy in 10 years. 

The thing about the Holy Spirit is He can make a religious person very uncomfortable because they don't understand Him... just as they didn't understand or recognize Him in the 1st Century when He first came. As many Christians knew for many centuries before, He is a great mystery and a welcome counselor. In the 20th Century, just as William Booth prophecied, the church mostly decided to try to keep a lid on The Holy Spirit and get comfortable in their doctrines.

But He is making a comeback in the 21st Century. Anyone walking into our church on a Sunday morning is going to encounter Him. Our youngest daughter is in Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry in Redding, CA (where ironically they have Simpson University named after A.B. Simpson.) learning how to take this Fire of the Holy Spirit to others. She is learning to cultivate gifts she has for seeing illnesses on people. She can look at a perfectly normal looking human and tell them things that she couldn't possibly know without the aid of the Holy Spirit. This gets a person's attention very quickly as we've seen. It sometimes makes people uncomfortable, but always they leave healed of whatever ailment they had.

I'll finish with my favorite story of hers. One of the first times she was aware of her gift, she was in a parking garage in Baltimore, MD around midnight with her older sister and some friends. They were parting and hugging and praying for each other as a group of young teens on skateboards came by. They stopped to harrass our daughters and friends but Jess disarmed them quickly as she saw words that said Heart Problems dancing over their heads. So she just  yelled to them which one of you has a heart problem? (She was all but 15 years old.) They stopped suddenly and quietly one of them started shaking his head and cursing no !@@#ing way! How could you know that?? She told Him God just told her and that if he would let her pray for him God would heal it for him right now. He told them he had a big hole in his heart that the doctors wanted to repair once he was done growing. He said it was skipping beats all the time that he always felt and just grew used to. She prayed as the other kids got nervous and left. Immediately he felt the power course through his body and again started cursing no f.... ing way! repeatedly. When they got him calmed down he admitted that the skipping in his heart just stopped. He couldn't believe it but left them a changed kid.... and as he was leaving she told him she saw him as a grown man and he was going to be a preacher of an awesome church but not in a building but a new kind of open air church... I believe she was right.

This is what A.B. Simpson believed in during William Booth's day and what he taught until his death when his church decided to remove much of it. A. B. Simpson was healed of a dire disease just like this kid was when he was young. It is what drove him to explore and find just how the Holy Spirit wants to work in us. So get ready people, there is a train a comin... and you don't need no ticket, you just praise the Lord. And if you get a chance, go see the last of the trilogy from the filmmaker Darren Wilson, Father of Lights.