"ASSEMBLIES OF GOD" AND OTHER "LATTER RAIN" SECTS
by Paul Stenhouse, M.S.C., Ph.D
The recent announcement by Sydney jockey Darren Beadman that he was giving up his promising racing career to become a minister in the Christian Life Centre (run by the Assemblies of God Pentecostal Church), provoked some predictable regret in the industry and some scoffing in the media. 1
When genuinely sympathetic people find the 'speaking in tongues,' shouting,
visions, trances, jerking, dancing, 'ecstatic utterances,' 'gifts of prophecy'
and 'interpretation of tongues' associated with Charismatic 'religion' too
irrational and hysterical to be credible, is it surprising that the
unbelievers scoff?
The 'Pentecostalists' are part of the 'Holiness' millenarian movement that started in the 1880s in southern California, and for which the 'charismatic' element was dominant.
All members are believed to be filled with, and led by, the Spirit and therefore 'perfect. They practice what they claim to be miraculous healing, and boast of receiving the 'baptism of the Spirit,' and the gifts of the Spirit.' They exhibit an emotionalism that is regarded as characteristic of the extreme Charismatic sects.
The Church of the Nazarene is a 'Holiness' Church founded in Los Angeles in 1895 after three 'Pentecostal Tabernacles' had been set up in Brooklyn, New York in 1894. Through affiliation with other Presbyterian and Methodist Pentecostal Churches, the Pentecostal Church qf the Nazarene arose, and in 1919 'Pentecostal' was dropped, as the members did not favour 'speaking in tongues' which was a practice of more radical Pentecostal groups, the largest of which is the Assemblies of God.
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CHARISMATIC prayer, and 'spirit led' utterances have become a part of the life of many Catholics. In the light of the deplorable alienation from the Catholic Church that too often follows the exposure of Catholics to the so-called 'Pentecostal' religious scene, Annals offers readers an insight into the origin, history and teachings of the most active Pentecostal church today - the Assemblies of God. |
Once part of the phenomenon known as the Camp Creek Holiness Church (1892) the Assemblies of God were incorporated in Arkansas in 1914 and in 1916 the headquarters were moved to Springfield Missouri and the sect was incorporated under the title of General Council of the Assemblies of God.
Described as 'left-wing' by their more conservative former brethren, the Pentecostal Churches, led by the Assemblies of God, grew out of the Outpouring of the Latter Rain, a revivalist movement within the Holiness Churches, led by two Baptist ministers R.G. Spurling Snr and Jnr and characterised by 'baptism in the Holy Spirit' and 'speaking in tongues.'
In 1892 Spurling Jnr and thirty others who had been 'reborn in the Spirit' were expelled from the Baptist Church. They used to meet in the home of a Methodist preacher who lived at Camp Creek in Cherokee county, Arizona, and eventually organised themselves into a Holiness Church.
Four years later, in 1896, A.J. Tomlinson discovered the Camp Creek Church
and in 1903 after joining it, took it over and transformed it into his own
Church of God. In 1908 Tomlinson claimed to have received the 'baptism
of the Holy Spirit', and for the next forty years or so his peculiar brand of
'revivalism' and 'baptism in the Spirit' gained ground, especially among Negro
congregations.
There are dozens of Pentecostal Churches that owe their 'spirit' to AJ. Tomlinson. The Original Church of God broke away from the Church of God in 1917. When A.J. Tomlinson died in 1943 he designated his son Homer as general 'overseer' [the Charismatic substitute term for 'bishop'] of the Tomlinson Church of God. When this move was resisted by other 'overseers,' Homer appointed his brother, M.A. Tomlinson, in charge. Homer was then expelled from his father's Church.
As a result of these divisions, the Church of God Over Which M.A. Tomlinson is General Overseer was founded. Homer Tomlinson, meanwhile founded his own Church of God World Headquarters, with himself as General Overseer.
There are too many Pentecostal sects that are direct or indirect offshoots of the Tomlinson family sects, for us to mention them all here.
Curiously, these Latter Rain sects that started off with an
exaggerated belief in their direct contact with the third Person of the
Blessed Trinity, the Holy Spirit, spawned other sects, like the Jesus
Only sects, which reject the doctrine of the Trinity and baptise only in
the name of Jesus. There are also Father Only sects which baptise only
in the name of the Father.
Other offshoots of the Latter Rain movement include the Non-Digressive Church of God, the Justified Church of God, the Church of God of the Bible, and the Glorified Church of God. This latter Church insists that two persons must shout and dance together and that the congregation will advance money to pay off all the debts of new members.
The Church of Jesus and the Watch Mission is a Pentecostal Church founded by George Luetjen who was converted and allegedly received 'Spirit baptism' when he threw away a cigar while walking the streets of New York in December 1910 when he was suffering from depression brought on by family problems.
The Apostolic Faith Mission founded by Miss Minnie Hanson and Mrs M.
White is a Pentecostal sect that, like many others, thinks it is not a sect
and actually wants to get rid of sects. 'The phenomenon,' writes Elmer Clark,
'of groups splitting off from sects, perfecting definite organisations and
even securing legal incorporation and themselves splitting and re-splitting
until they have spawned a multitude of well-organised bodies all firmly
convinced that not only are they not sects but are eradicating sectarianism,
is a psychological peculiarity difficult to understand.' 2
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"My son, it is for the last time you see your mother. I am about to die; your turn will one day come, when you must render an account of your actions to your Judge. You know that I was a Catholic, and that you have induced me to abandon the religion of my fathers. Tell me now, for God's sake, in what religion I ought to die." Melancthon answered: "Mother, the new doctrine is the more convenient; the other the more secure." - Melancthon's reply to this dying mother's question about the truth of the 'New doctrine' taught by Martin Luther. See Aegidius Albertinus in IV Thiel des Deutschen Lust-Hauses v.143. |
The Assemblies of God have as central to their creed 'baptism in the Spirit attested by speaking in tongues.' They preach a puritanical morality, believe in divine healing and preach the imminent occurrence of the 'end-times.'
Writing of a white Holiness sect that she had contact with in the 1920s, Margaret Bourke-White, eminent Life Magazine photographer who spent years chronicling the miserable lives of poor share-croppers and tenant-farmers in America's southern 'bible-belt' commented,
'... the whole business is so sordid and desperate and out of place. It isn't as if their church played any role, as we know religion. Its just a place where people go to shout and scream and roll on the floor. They are so beaten down and their lives are so drab and barren and lonely that they have nothing. This terrible thing every Sunday is their only emotional release.' 3
The appaling impression made by the Holiness Charismatic movement on Margaret Bourke-White accords with the judgement of many others who have approached the beliefs and practices of the evangelical 'born again' sects with openness and an almost painful desire to be fair.
Early Charismatics not only shouted, sobbed, leapt in the air, writhed on the ground, fell like dead persons and lay insensible for considerable times. They also screamed out a 'holy laugh', barked, fell on all fours, yelping and barking and snapping like dogs, shook and jerked in every joint, the body violently bent double, the head thrown backward and forward and from side to side with great rapidity. The body would be thrown to the ground where it bounded about from place to place like a ball, or the feet would be affected and the victim would jump about like a frog. 4
Clark comments: 'Of these unusual phenomena, few have persisted saved the glossalalia or gift of tongues' - a distinguished mark of the Assemblies of God - 'A repetition of the phenomenon requires only an unstable nervous structure, an intense expectancy and longing, a high degree of suggestibility and the proper setting for the operation of crowd psychology'. 5 'Even the time of day chosen for the 'revivalist' meeting, or the 'Spirit-led' prayer, can be important to the outcome:
'It seems,' writes one well versed in manipulating people's minds and souls, 'that in the morning and even during the day men's will power revolts with highest energy against an attempt at being forced under another's will and another's opinion. In the evening, however, they succumb more easily to the dominating force of a stronger will. The superior oratorical talent of a domineering apostolic nature will now succeed more easily...'.
Those are not the words of a back-woods revivalist 'charismatic' preacher, but of an Austrian-born painter and decorator turned Millennialist, whose mad dream of a 'thousands year Kingdom' brought death and misery to tens of millions of innocents.' 6
Students of psychology and sociology would no doubt see parallels between
the so-called 'Kentucky Revival,' when, according to the 'Rev' John McGee
'many, very many, fell down as men slain in battle, and continued for hours
together in an apparently breathless and motionless state... the floor was
soon covered with the slain,' and the effects of mass hysteria at Rock
concerts, or in Sunshine Coast Christian schools that are impressed by the
'Toronto Blessing.' 7
Sir Edmund Gosse (1849-1928) described his relationship with his father, a member of the Plymouth Brethren sect (founded in 1827 by an Anglican minister John Nelson Darby), in his 'Father and Son' first published in 1907. In this work he describes a solicitor who belonged to the same sect. Accused of having drawn up a fraudulent will by which he claimed to be the sole heir of a rich and deceased client, the solicitor not only admitted the crime, but gloried in it:
'He could be induced to exhibit no species of remorse, and to the obvious anger of the judge himself, stated that he had only done his duty as a Christian, in preventing this wealth from coming into the hands of an ungodly man who would have spent it in the service of the flesh and of the devil. Sternly reprimanded by the judge, he made the final statement that at that very moment he was conscious of his Lord's presence, in the dock at his side, whispering to him. Well done, thou good and faithful servant. In this frame of conscience and with a glowing countenance he was hurried away to penal servitude.' 8
The guilty solicitor, whose later career is tantalisingly hidden from us, was being perfectly logical: as long as you accepted his claim that the Lord was his constant mentor, and his unproven (and unprovable) premiss that ungodly people had no rights.
In February 1933 at Inez in Kentucky a Pentecostal group, after a period of fasting, dancing, incantations and talking in unknown tongues that went on for nearly a week, selected a 72 year old woman, Mrs Luanda Mills as a human sacrifice. Her son, John choked her to death. Three other women had been selected for a similar fate. They were all arrested. 9
'The prisoners include Mrs Mills' two sons, two daughters, two sons-in-law, her daughter-in-law and her grandson... Some of the arrested persons are reported to have told the police that they had received a divine command to make a human sacrifice and that the lot fell upon Mrs Mills. A son-in-law is alleged to have said that he wanted to prevent the sacrifice, but he had a feeling that he must not.10
These bizarre phenomena would no doubt by disowned by Charismatic
'believers' but one must still ask, with Ronald Knox, 'how are we to argue
against such a "feeling" if it is accompanied by the conviction that the
inner-light is something that no Bible, no Church, can legitimately
gainsay?'11 In other words, once you grant the Charismatics'
assumption (unproven and unprovable) that what the individual believer 'feels'
must be respected; and that all 'born-again' individuals are being directly
guided by the 'Spirit,' who can blame ignorant and unstable people who
'believe' themselves to be guided by God's Spirit, for acting contrary to
commonsense and reason?
On March 21, 1895 the first issue of a new periodical appeared in Paris: Entitled Le Palladium régéneré et libre, it predicted that the Anti-Christ would appear in 1995, and that the Pope, a converted Jew, would abandon Catholicism. These events would be followed by a year of war in which all Catholics would be exterminated. Then will come a celestial battle resulting in a victory for Lucifer, and the banishing of the enemies of evil to the planet Saturn.
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A 'Spirit inspired utterance' from a charismatic sect? No, the alleged author of these 'prophecies' which were worthy of Jimmy Swaggert,12 or Barry Smith,13 or of the Ministerial Association of the Seventh Day Adventists,14 was a Miss Diana Vaughan.
In reality 'Miss Diana Vaughan' was Gabriel Jogand-Pages, also known as Leo Taxil, a con-man, violently anti-clerical, a publisher of obscene and blasphemous material in the sordid Librairie Anti-Clericale.
Pentecostal sects thrive in a religious world where 'private interpretation' is the norm, and the opinions and beliefs of 'good' but ignorant people must be accorded the same value and respect that Catholics would normally only grant to the writings of the Fathers of the Church, or to theologians like St Thomas Aquinas, of St Alphonsus Ligouri.
It is not just 'tongues' are unloosed by the 'Spirit' in sects where 'feelings' reign, and where the moods and pathogical aberrations of unstable individuals pass too easily for 'Spirit-led' utterance.
Once you grant these inadmissible premises, how can you distinguish the
'prophecies' of Leo Taxil, a shameless liar, or the New Age prediction that
between 1980 and 1997 the Christian religion will disappear, the Vatican will
be destroyed. New York, Los Angeles San Francisco Vancouver and Seattle will
be destroyed in earthquakes,15 from the 'ecstatic
utterances' of a sincere but misguided 'bible Christian' like William Miller,
who thought that the world was going to end on October 22, 1844?
Footnotes:
- See, for example, the letter by John Waters in the Sydney Morning Herald, August 13,1997.
- The Small Sects of America, by Elmer T. Clark ed.cit. p.112.
- Quoted Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans, 1969 Panther ed. p.412.
- See The Small Sects of America, by Elmer T. Clark, ed.cit. pp.92-93.
- Ibidem, pp.93-94.
- Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, Hurst and Blackett ed. 1939, p.710.
- 'Whole lotta shaking going on at Christian College,' in The Weekend Australian July 26.1997.
- Father and Son, first ed. p.261ff.
- The Small Sects in America. Elmer T. Clark, p.98.
- The Times, February 9, 1933. Quoted Enthusiasm, by Ronald Knox. 1950, p.582.
- Enthusiasm, loc.cit.
- See Armageddon, the Future of Planet Earth, 1987 p. 142 where we read 'We know that the Anti-Christ will declare war on the Soviet Union.' Unfortunately for Jimmy, his prophecies came out two years too early. The Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1989.
- See Warning. 1984 ed. Note the timetable for the 'end-times' on page 163. Also Second Warning. 1985 ed. passim. Catholics will be surprised to learn that 'their ancestors h[ad] no bibles at all.' p. 110. Martin Luther would be astonished too. See his Comment in Johan xvi where he says of Catholics, 'They possess the Word of God which we received from them: otherwise we should know nothing about it.'
- See Seventh Day Adventists Believe... 1988 ed. pp-341,343.
- See Les Derniéres propheties pour l' Occident, by Guy Tarade,
Paris 1978, pp-239-240.
From: Annals Australia, October 1997
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