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New Testament Fire in the Philippines

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New Testament Fire in the Philippines Fire in the Philippines by Jim Montgomery Creation House Carol Stream, Illinois Unless otherwise noted, all biblical quotations are taken from the New American Standard Bible, reprinted with permission © 1971 by the Lockman Foundation Revised Edition © 1975 by Creation House. All rights reserved. Published by Creation House, 499 Gundersen Drive, Carol Stream, Illinois 60187 In Canada: Beacon Distributing ltd., 104 Consumers Drive, Whitby, Ontario L1N 5T3 First edition published by Church Growth Research in the Philippines under the title: New Testament Fire in the Philippines. FIRST UNITED STATES EDITION Printed in the United States of America. International Standard Book Number 0-88419-106-0 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number Contents Foreword Part One - The Fire 1 Reflections 2 In Search of an Apostolic Church 3 The Great Debate 4 Mysterious Bohol Gives Up Some Secrets 5 Filipino Sailors Start It Off' 6 A Handful of Missionaries 7 Sister Evelyn 8 Pioneering in Mountain Province Part Two - Water on the Fire? 9 Lower Class Christians 10 Squashes or Oaks? 11 Exaggerations 12 Sheep Stealers Part Three - Wood for the Fire 13 Presence of the Church 14 Families 15 Breaking with the Past 16 Florencia Europa 17 Baptism of the Holy Spirit 18 Divine Healing 19 Noisy Services and Women Preachers 20 Summary of a Strategy 21 More Reflections: Is It an Apostolic Church? FOREWORD Eight years is a long time. It is time enough for things to become stale. It is time enough for the excitement of past events to fade away. Yet the reflective first and last chapters of the first U.S. edition of this book do not indicate a dampened enthusiasm. Between these two chapters is the account of the author's original research and analysis of the Foursquare Church's burgeoning mission outreach in the Philippines. This part of the Church relied neither on foreign missionary personnel nor on foreign funds for its success; it relied conspicuously on the Holy Spirit. Therefore the lessons which Pentecostals and non-Pentecostals alike can learn from the Foursquare Church are still viable. This is why the present edition of this book should be no less exciting than was the first edition published in the Philippines nearly eight years ago. --The Publishers PART ONE THE FIRE REFLECTIONS Let's get some things straight from the beginning. I am a missionary and a pragmatist. A born-again, Bible-believing, theologically conservative pragmatist, but still a pragmatist. And what I'm most pragmatic about is world evangelization. It might be surprising, then, to learn that this book is "charismatic." But I believe "charismatic" is a term frequently misunderstood and misused today. The charismata are simply God's special gifts to His people. If a believer has the gift of helps, he has a charismatic gift. If God has specially empowered one of His children to be a pastor-teacher, he is a charismatic. Many of these charismatics have been programmed to reject some of the gifts--speaking in tongues, divine healing, visions or prophesying. That's where I was in the fall of 1964 when for one term attended the Institute of Church Growth in Eugene, Oregon (now the Fuller Seminary School of World Mission). The Institute did not make a Pentecostal of me; I'm a member of an interdenominational mission and I like it that way. I went to the Institute as a missionary pragmatist and left as one. I got some pragmatic teaching -some of it quite exciting- about how we can win more people to Jesus Christ than we ever imagined. The Institute's approach included statistical research, anthropological and cultural studies, and carefully planned strategies lifted from the Word, mission experience, and history. I learned of some quite unbelievable things going on in the Philippines. About halfway through the research adventure I will relate in this book, it occurred to me to compare the number of communicant members of six major Pentecostal denominations in the Philippines with six other evangelistically oriented evangelical groups. All the groups had come to the country at about the same time, but the Pentecostal groups showed thirty-six times as many communicant members per foreign missionary involved as did the others. As a missionary in the Philippines, the personal responsibility to see this nation discipled for Jesus Christ weighs heavily on me. I would gladly die if my death would result in a vital, New Testament congregation in each of the 50,000 barrios of the Philippines. What if the many non-Pentecostal missionaries were as effective as the few Pentecostal missionaries? The job could be done, and maybe my martyrdom wouldn't be necessary. Here my pragmatism and the charismatic nature of this book converge. My investigation of the Foursquare Church-- for reasons I'll explain later seemed to pull aside a veil so I could enter a different world. I had always intellectually believed that Christianity was a supernatural religion. But in my research I encountered the supernatural in a way I had only read about, primarily in the pages of the New Testament-dramatic conversions, churches spawning new churches, miracles of healing, speaking in unlearned languages, visions. I actually talked with participants in these remarkable events. Were these things genuine? I had to find out, and for the next two and a half years I devoted a good share of my time to that search. As I write this, eight years have passed. I've had a lot of time to reflect on that exciting period of my life. I've shared the material with hundreds of people inside and outside missions. This "cooling off" period has been good for me, but it hasn't changed the essentials of the drama that unfolded before me. As you relive it with me in the following pages, you too may discover that God is still God, that the Jesus of 2,000 years ago is the Jesus who lives today, that we don't have to settle for a token church in each nation of the world, that the Great Commission can be literally accomplished in our time. For that, I’d gladly be labeled either a pragmatist or a charismatic. Or both. IN SEARCH OF AN APOSTOLIC CHURCH What I found in the Foursquare Church seemed, at times, so improbable and so remote from my own Christian experience that I sometimes had to ask myself what I had gotten into. There was the day I had a talk with a missionary colleague and also received a letter from a pastor friend. The missionary expressed his doubts about the wisdom of studying just one denomination, especially one held suspect by a large segment of the churches we wanted to minister to. He reminded me that the well-known Bible school he had graduated from had placed the Foursquare Church in the same category with all the "other" religious cults. The pastor's warning was no less pointed. I should be careful of any practice that didn't have a firm and broad foundation in the Word of God. "Some churches," he reminded me, "have a tendency to build their doctrine upon experiences in the church rather than on the Word of God." I heard other disquieting things as the months rolled by: rumors of what happened in this place or that place, rumors of what this convert did or that minister didn't do. Almost everyone I talked with outside Pentecostal circles had some unsavory incidents to report. If the incidents were typical of the denomination -the implication frequently was that they were- the whole movement could be discredited. To top it off, I myself had gathered a few stories over the years that led me to mentally shrug off the Pentecostals. They had healing meetings; years ago I had been to some, but left unconvinced. They emphasized speaking in tongues; in school days a friend's zeal to win people to Christ had diminished at about the same time he experienced this manifestation. The group had sprung up from the ministry of Aimee Semple McPherson, who was known in my circles for her sensationalism and for an alleged scandal in the later years of her life. And then, of course, there were the noisy services. My general attitude toward the Pentecostals, until I studied at the Institute in 1964, could probably be summed up in one experience I had while still in high school. A gang of us had skipped the regular Sunday night service at our Baptist church to check out a well-advertised family appearing at the nearby Foursquare church. The main attraction was, as I remember, 263 sleighbells upon which special numbers were played. (The bells were of different sizes and attached to long, graduated leather strips hung from a wooden frame. Melody and even harmony could be achieved by pulling the straps.) For years after this experience, the thought of Pentecostals brought to my mind the picture of a short, countrified barnstormer puffing up and down the platform and milking his 263 strands of sleighbells. All these disquieting images hopped about my mind during my early research. Again and again I had to remind myself of the reason why I had chosen to study the Foursquare Church. The logic of my choice had been clear and simple, and it was a long time before the miraculous element entered the picture. I had just returned to the Philippines from our first furlough, which had included three months of intensive study at the Institute of Church Growth. This study had burned off much of the fog clouding my insights on missionary and evangelistic strategy.
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