"The fire must be kept buring on the altar continuously..."—Leviticus 6:13
The Gospel—Gimmickry or Integrity? Mr. Finney, Meet Grandpa
Flim-flam gone mainstream | Media matters
There was enough gimmickry around in the heyday of tent revivalism, but not in Grandpa’s meetings. This may have been why he remained mostly unnoticed, navigating the backwaters of the revival circuit. He had as exciting a testimony as any around; but he shared it simply and quietly and let it work as God willed. Grandpa did not promote Pentecostal phenomena; he preached Jesus.
The gimmickry you did see in certain supposed "revivals"—demons coughed up and captured in bottles; pictures of fire claiming to be Moses’ burning bush duplicated; braces and crutches propped around the platform as if cast off by cripples having been healed, but there always more props than people claiming to have been healed; etc.—did not come prepackaged with the Pentecostal phenomena. Where they were so packaged, you could be sure Finney’s "new methods" carried to logical extremes were at work; that is, the charismata were always stuffed twisted, crooked, and forced out of shape into the gimmickry by man not God. So it was the deliberate application of forced Finney-emotional-marketing-methodology to the charismata that too often turned real Pentecostal revival into charismatic kookiness.
So when Dr. Michael Horton states, "Finney became the father of the antecedents to some of today’s greatest challenges within evangelical churches, namely, the church growth movement, Pentecostalism and political revivalism," he commits what N. T. Wright would call a fundamental "category error." He mixes apples with oranges. Finney did not father Pentecostalism; he fathered applied evangelical humanism, the methods of which some Pentecostals, like other evangelicals, may ill-advisedly employ.
Of Magic Lanterns and Missional Communities
On God’s silence | On human hearing You’ve heard of magic lanterns, and missional communities have been a hot topic for quite awhile. But what does one have to do with the other? Not much, unless someone makes a deliberate connection. Or unless Joe and Melissa Johnson of Watching Theology, found on Steve Brown, Etc., reminds us quite unintentionally that they might have quite a bit in common; and in reminding us, offer a graphic lesson in how to do church for the church that really wants to be Jesus’ church—which is, by the way, a missional community. However, such lessons were not the intent, as far as I can tell, of Watching Theology in their review of Winter Light, a film by the noted Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007), who made a career of convinving us God was gone—away on business, as Tom Waits sings. The review was just the first thoughtful piece in an ongoing "Silence of God" series that film, theology, and philosophy buffs should check out. Even so, if you make a ripple in the pond you have to accept disturbing a leaf floating by as a consequence. And if that leaf floats a little sideways anyway...
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