The Church of God

I have been working diligently on a paper that will complete the requirements for the class I took this spring. Fuller allows you to work on your paper until the next quarter is completed, so the paper is not due until the end of August. It is the longest paper I've done, now approaching 55 pages with the bibliography and addendum's included. That's longer than the 40 page requirement but the subject has fascinated me a great deal. The final section of the paper has to do with the Church of God and it's foundations. A few of the conclusions I came to might be interesting to note.

1. The greatest influence on D.S. Warner may very well have been the fact that, as he was contemplating his call to ministry while a student at Oberlin College in Ohio, the school experienced two periods of significant revival. A revival is an outpouring of the Holy Spirit that revitalizes the church and the believers while at the same time confronting the unbeliever with the Gospel message. During this time Warner changed his future plans from preparing for a career in teaching to preparing to enter the ministry. It appears that his call to ministry (which has not really been written about at all as far as I can see) came about in the midst of a revival on the campus of Oberlin led by Charles Finney, the great revivalist and theology professor at Oberlin. I cannot help but wonder how much that atmosphere affected Warner and his concept of ministry. It certainly gave him a passion for the lost and, I believe, affected his style of ministry. Finney was so blunt and so single minded in his focus about things that the headstrong Warner certainly found affirmation in the old revivalist or may have been permanently affected by the style of Finney.
2. The Church of God had a camp meeting that created quite a stir in 1886. The camp meeting took place in Bangor, Michigan and the reason for the stir was what took over the camp meeting one night. At a service, a young woman left the service in order to "pray through" some serious questions and issues in her Christian life. Joined by a respected leader in the church, she "got the victory". When she re-entered the service, she gave testimony to what the Lord had done. At the end of her testimony, the Holy Spirit fell on the service and no one could minister for the next hour. People fell to the ground, shouted, testified, and experienced a type of Pentecost-like event that took over the service. This kind of experience transformed the camp meeting from a gathering/preaching experience to a unique outpouring of the Holy Spirit. For the next 100 years, the camp meeting had a special place in the minds of Church of God folk. Part of the reason was that we came to expect or hope for that Pentecost-like moment when God's Spirit takes over. I cannot help but wonder if we have lost that expectation. Do we go to Camp Meeting expecting the unexpected? Do we go to service expecting the Spirit to descend in such a way that priests cannot minister on account of it?
3. The uniqueness of the Church of God is found in what we teach and believe not in our history. I know that seems blasphemous but I think it is true. We have spent too much time trying to find out the uniqueness of our history and of our calling that we have isolated ourselves from the greater history of what God has been doing. For instance, F.G. Smith wrote a book in the early 1900's called "Revelation Explained" in which he made a case for the prophetic calling of the Church of God into existence. It gave the Movement a sense of destiny but it also contributed to a sense of isolation from the larger Christian community. It gave fuel to the doctrine of "come-outism" that helped to isolate us for more than two decades after Smith's book. The frustration I have with this is that our history is really connected on a far greater level with what God was doing in the larger Christian community in the late 1880's. The paper I wrote provides a strong connection between the Second Great Awakening which began at Cane Ridge (I've written about this on this blog) and found a great expression in the revivalism movement of Charles Finney (I have also written about him here). All that connection put us in the middle of the great Holiness revival of post-war America. The movement of the Holy Spirit at Bangor was the same kind of experience that occurred at Cane Ridge. The message of Holiness and Revivalism was the same message as Finney preached - and that message changed the face of America, literally. As part of the Church of God, we were in the middle of all that. God did in us what he was doing in the revival of the nineteenth century. How exciting to be a part of the greater movement of God in America! That's more important than trying to find a dubious interpretation of scripture to justify your existence. Amen.