Dallas skies were fair as 4,700 ministers and delegates of the Assemblies of God—all with just as fair complexions—gathered for their thirty-third biennial General Council. They came to sing, speak in tongues, shout “Amen,” and transact a heavy business agenda.
In the last two years, the Assemblies recorded a net gain of 312 churches and of 49,602 members, an 8.6 per cent increase. Not content to stop there, Assemblies leaders unveiled the specifics of a “Five-Year Plan of Advance,” announced last year. General Superintendent Thomas Zimmerman told an enthusiastic crowd that “the movement is virile and moving forward.”
On some actions delegates were united. Zimmerman was re-elected by a 93 per cent vote. Delegates decided their church should be “an agency for evangelizing the world, a corporate body in which man may worship God, and a channel of God’s purpose to build a body of saints perfected in his Son” (all to be accomplished through an emphasis on baptism in the Holy Spirit).
A proposal to levy dues on licensed ministers (who are subordinate to ordained ministers) evoked passionate debate. The fact that licensed Assemblies ministers are not permitted to vote in the General Council brought cries of “taxation without representation” and references to the Boston Tea Party.
Equally provocative was Pastor John Bostrom’s appeal to broaden the Assemblies’ ground for divorce beyond adultery to include “any other condition that is unbearable or incompatible.”
In an unprecedented resolution, the General Council pressed for public legislation banning pornography. It also placed responsibility for sex education in the home and condemned school sex courses “which divorce such instruction from biblical morality.” Finally, it maintained that if school sex education must exist, it should be voluntary.
The General Council’s most dramatic moment came when missions head J. Philip Hogan challenged an all-white crowd of 10,000 with the church’s responsibility to the inner city. “Since 1880, North American Protestantism has been white,” he said. “We ran away from the Irish. We ran away from the Polacks. We ran away from the Central Europeans. Now we’re running away from the blacks. It’s got to stop! We can’t leave the inner city.”
The entire convention seemed to agree. But nobody brought up the subject again.
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