Full Gospel World Conclave: With Signs and Wonders

NEWS

As if in benediction on the week’s activities, what was variously seen as a golden or rainbow-hued halo hovered over the San Francisco Hilton Hotel for two hours during the nineteenth annual world convention of the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship International this month.

Passersby and faithful alike stopped in their tracks to witness the glowing spectacle; Polaroid photos at a dollar apiece were soon selling briskly on the street.

But then, it was a week of wondrous signs and miracles, if you should ask most any of 6,000 delegates who came to hear old-fashioned revival preaching, pray in tongues, be healed in a Kathryn Kuhlman meeting, or simply soak up charisma from a dozen of the nation’s most renowned “full gospel” promulgators.

Healings were reported by the hundreds, even before Miss Kuhlman’s two-day stand July 4 and 5, and at least one hundred swarmed forward for “first-time salvation” when Akron, Ohio’s Cathedral of Tomorrow pastor Rex Humbard packed them into the 4,000-seat grand ballroom two days later.

Impelled by the burgeoning charismatic movement in this country and abroad, the FGBMFI is rapidly coming of age twenty-one years after its founding by California dairy farmer and shopping-center developer Demos Shakarian.

Basically a lay movement, the fellowship is helping to break down denominational walls. It represents a rallying force for “Spirit-filled” converts to evangelize boldly in what are seen as assuredly the last days.

No wonder, then, that spines tingled when speaker Ken Copeland interrupted his sermon July 3 to say that he had a word of prophecy from the Lord: “You will see me within hours!” Or the ready identification of fulfillment with that halo over the Hilton.

Speaker after speaker challenged conferees (who included a rather surprising number of minority persons): “God’s talking to his people today; are you listening?”

The FGBMFI is doing more than admonish its 300,000 adherents in 700 chapters worldwide to listen. As founder-president Shakarian put it in an interview: “God is using the fellowship to bring the Holy Spirit movement and his gifts back to the people.”

By the first of next year, says stocky and genial Shakarian, the FGBMFI’s witness will be “as great as it has been in the past twenty years combined.”

This great advance is expected through a two-pronged attack: expansion of a new half-hour weekly color TV series in newscast form (using laymen almost exclusively) called “Good News,” and an increasingly popular and successful evangelistic airlift operation.

The TV show is now beamed over thirty-four stations, with a goal of fifty by year’s end and 100 by mid-1973. That would be enough to reach 90 per cent of the population, figures Shakarian, whose son, Steve, 24, is in charge of the operation.

Growth of the FGBMFI overseas (there are now six or seven international presidents) is largely attributable to airlifts paid for by well-heeled businessmen who want to spread the word. Art Nersasian, Shakarian’s nephew and administrative assistant (FGBMFI’s leadership is a family affair), describes the airlift: “One man will get a burden or a vision for a country and will invite others to work with him and set up meetings.”

One airlift, with fifty or sixty full-gospel businessmen and their wives aboard, will wing to South Africa and Swaziland next month (cost—$1,975 each). Turlock, California, mayor Enoch Christoffersen recently returned from an airlift he arranged with some 170 FGBMFIers to Europe; there have been five airlifts to Sweden alone since the idea took off five years ago.

Other reasons for the increasing visability of the FGBMFI include its international monthly magazine, Voice, with a circulation of 600,000 in seven languages. A series booklet known as “The Work of the Holy Spirit Today” and tape sales of recorded convention messages all help to swell FGBMFI ranks (“a new chapter is formed every working day,” says Demos) and pump $1 million a year into operating budgets.

A spin-off ministry is fast becoming a pace-setter among youth crusades. Shakarian’s 38-year-old son Richard this year launched an independent ministry called Youth Crusades of America. Recently, more than 7,000 jammed the fairgrounds in San Bernardino, California, for a rally that broke a thirty-two-year attendance record at the auditorium. Some 1,100 young persons reportedly professed Christ at the rally there and in Los Angeles, where Teen Challenge leader Nicky Cruz and Spirit-singer Pat Boone told how Jesus had changed their lives.

A huge sign floated above the speaker’s platform at the Hilton: “His Banner Over Us Is Love.” “That’s the heart of it,” said the senior Shakarian, now 58, who first met with twenty-one businessmen in Clifton’s Cafeteria in downtown Los Angeles in 1950 to form the FGBMFI. “It’s a melting in love by the Holy Spirit.”

Nowhere did that seem more evident than in the reception accorded Father Joseph Fulton, pastor of Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church in Seattle and an ardent spokesman for the Catholic Pentecostal movement. About 30 per cent of the audience the night he spoke was said to be Catholic. Later, several nuns received a very un-Roman communion administered by Shakarian youth leaders on closing night.

Other speakers drawing raves were four-star general Ralph E. Haines, Jr., commander of the U. S. Continental Army Command (an Episcopalian who got the baptism at an FGBMFI military breakfast last year), healing minister Joe Poppell of Jessup, Georgia (he specializes in miraculously lengthening limbs, filling teeth, and restoring eardrums), and converted socialite Eleanor Searle Whitney. Black singer-evangelist Andrae Crouch and the Disciples moved the crowds to loud applause and set a few dancing in the joy of the Spirit. The Living Sound group from Oral Roberts University added a hard-driving, right-on sound lauded by young and old alike.

And Kathryn Kuhlman was at her best. San Francisco Examiner religion writer and columnist Lester Kinsolving exuded in print: “Even the most cynical observer could marvel at this lady’s indefatigable energy and homespun charm.”

The grand-ballroom crowd was electrified momentarily when her pianist, Dino Kartsenarkis, reached for two microphones; they short-circuited, jolting him to the floor. After laying on of hands by Miss Kuhlman and prayers in the Spirit by the audience, the young man revived and was helped off stage. He returned minutes later to play—to the audience’s delight and their audible praise to God.

Less sensational but perhaps more significant was the apparent healing of a 3-year-old Eureka, California, girl, Kimberly Pavlich. Her parents brought her to the fourth of July Kuhlman meeting after taking her earlier in the day to the Mount Zion Institute in San Francisco, where she was diagnosed as having lung cancer (an earlier operation had incised her other lung).

When Miss Kuhlman called for “someone with cancer of the lung” to come forward, an usher nudged Kimberly’s parents. Katherine laid hands on the tot as well as her father, Gary, of Catholic background. He soon spoke in tongues, and extensive tests next day at the same hospital reportedly gave little Kimberly a clean bill of health.

When FGBMFI holds its next world convention in New York in 1973, delegates may be looking for something more amazing than a halo in the sky. “Someday,” noted S. Lee Braxton, a vice-president of the fellowship board and president of Oral Roberts University regents, “Campus Crusade for Christ, FGBMFI, and the Billy Graham groups are all going to get together to fulfill the Great Commission.”

Watchman Nee Dead?

Watchman Nee, 71, the noted Chinese churchman and devotional author (The Normal Christian Life), died June 1 in Anhwei province, according to reports received by his British publisher, Victory Press. The sources say he had been released from a Shanghai prison a few months earlier and was suffering from a heart condition. His wife Charity reportedly died last fall.

It had been widely rumored of late that Nee had been tortured and mutilated, but the sources insist the rumors were untrue. Nee was given a twenty-year prison sentence by the Communists in 1952 on apparently trumped-up charges, notably multiple adultery. Formerly a chemist and pharmaceutical manufacturer. Nee is believed to have spent much of his prison time translating science books from English to Chinese.

Nee’s nameless evangelical movement was akin to the Exclusive wing of the Plymouth Brethren in belief and structure (Nee had early ties with them). It was known popularly in Western circles as the “Little Flock” movement, perhaps because of the Little Flock Hymnal used by Nee. The movement grew from three members in 1922 to more than 70,000 by the time the Bamboo Curtain fell. Its members, meeting mostly as cell groups in houses, remained “more numerous than all the other Protestant denominations combined,” observed a Communist source in the fifties, even though 2,000 of its leaders were arrested with Nee.

Nee resisted close ties with Western missions and the denominations they spawned, and he was opposed by these denominations. This proved to be a benefit: after the Communist takeover Nee’s leaders had no connections with the West to confess, and it wasn’t until 1956 that the perplexed Communists finally forced his church into the so-called Three Self Movement (self supporting, governing, and propagating).

Born Nee Tuo Sheng, Nee as a student in 1922 at the Anglican Trinity College in Foochow joined an early version of the Jesus movement (led by former naval officer Leland Wang), complete with Jesus marches, music fests, an abundance of young people, and an absence of church buildings. After a missionary stint to the South Sea Islands, Nee established his own first “assembly” in Shanghai. Advocating the necessity of an unpaid ministry, he built up a successful business to support the burgeoning work. Many of Nee’s people gave up all their possessions and lived communally as they spread revival throughout Shantung province—long before the Communists assumed power and decreed the commune idea.

Nee went to Taiwan in 1949, but not wanting to “desert the brethren,” he returned to the mainland after appointing his close associate Witness Lee to open a new front among the refugees. Under Lee, the movement has spread throughout the Chinese diaspora and is growing even among Westerners.

A spokesman for Victory Press said that partial royalties got through to Nee in prison (his writings predate his imprisonment) but that the firm has not decided what will be done with the balance of the growing account.

Bench, Chair, And Altar

The U. S. Supreme Court’s ruling against capital punishment won applause from many top religious leaders, but at least one influential evangelical group demurred.

The decision did not rule out the death penalty entirely. But for the time being, at least, the complex opinion is expected to have that effect upon lower courts.

Some seventeen or more religious groups had filed briefs urging that the Supreme Court outlaw capital punishment. They represented for the most part the liberal religious establishment led by the National Council of Churches.

In contrast, the National Association of Evangelicals had adopted a resolution this past spring opposing abolition of the death penalty. It was the first time the NAE had spoken to the issue, though many rank-and-file evangelicals are known to have favored retaining the principle of capital punishment. Their view is based primarily upon appeal to the Old Testament, which clearly allows it.

In recent years some evangelicals, particularly young ones, have expressed growing reservations. Their main thought is that poor people are almost invariably the ones who are executed, and that the Bible’s principles of justice are therefore violated.

An NAE spokesman said the court’s decision finding that the death penalty was being imposed in a “capricious and arbitrary” manner was itself “capricious and arbitrary.”

In another major case involving religous interests, the Supreme Court ruled that the arrangement of Senator Mike Gravel (D.-Alaska) with the Unitarian Universalist Association’s Beacon Press to publish portions of the “Pentagon Papers” is not shielded from possible grand jury action. The 5–4 vote held that neither Gravel nor his aides enjoyed congressional immunity in the case.

The nation’s highest tribunal may be asked to settle another church-state issue when it reconvenes in the fall. The U. S. Court of Appeals has ruled that compulsory chapel attendance at the three military service academies is unconstitutional, a move endorsed by many religious groups. The Defense Department may still appeal to the Supreme Court.

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