Perhaps nowhere does the phenomenon of claiming non-revelatory non-charismatic divine leadings happen more frequently then when a fundamentalist pastor stands up to preach and informs the crowd that his message tonight comes straight from God for reasons totally unbeknownst to the speaker.
Notice how the evangelist says that God is leading him to preach a message next week but that God may change His mind sometime before next week.
If you’d like to listen to the rest of this sermon entitled “Why Isn’t Someone Yelling Rape?” (which actually includes the use of the phrase “as frustrated as a bald-headed hippy” ) you can find it here
Fundamentalists not only believe that the sign gifts of acts have ceased, they also believe that those who practice tongues, prophecy, and healing gifts in the modern church are actually empowered by dark forces of evil. To prove this point beyond a shadow of a doubt, there is a great illustration that has been floating around fundamentalist circles for about forty years now that goes something like this…
A missionary from some faraway dark place that is just lousy with demon activity comes back home from the field and goes to a church service where people are speaking in tongues. As he listens suddenly he turns white as a ghost and yells at everybody to stop because unbeknownst to them they have been blaspheming fluently in a foreign language!!!
The key here is that the language must be very obscure and known only to the missionary who tells the story. The devil is sneaky enough not to make people blaspheme in something so common as Spanish or Italian. It must be some strange dialect that is only known to a few natives in some place like Africa, China, or Boston.
But no matter how apocryphal the circumstances there’s no doubt in any fundamentalist mind that such a thing could happen and indeed probably did happen. Who knows? One supposes that if an infinite number of charismatics held and infinite number of services anything is possible.
As a secret house-church begins it service in a village in Communist Russia (or China, or Vietnam…), two soldiers burst in brandishing machine guns.
“This is an illegal meeting,” they scream “and we’re going to shoot anybody who won’t deny Christ and leave right now!”
A few folks tremble with fear and deny Christ and run out into the night. The rest sit resolute without moving.
The soldiers then lower their weapons and say “We want to be saved but first we wanted to get rid of any spies and informers who might be in the audience.”
There are countless variations on this tale such as this one. As always it has all the hallmarks of a dubious illustration. It involves a place far away, it involves no actual names of people, the church, or anyone who knows someone involved. Last but not least it involves Communists. If you can’t work Africa into your story, throwing in a few Communists is the next best thing.
Missionary stories are a great source of apocryphal illustrations…
A missionary came back from Africa and went to some churches that had supported him.
At one of them, he told of how at one point, he had camped in the jungle overnight.
The next day he came into the nearest village, where the people came out to greet him in fear.
They told him that they had heard he was on his way, so the night before, they had gone out to kill him and steal his money and medicine. But as they approached his camp, they saw that his tent was surrounded by twenty-six armed guards. They asked him where those guard were.
“I don’t have any guards.”
But the people continued to insist that they had seen them.
At this point in the story, a man jumps up and says, “Can you remember the date that that happened?”
The missionary tells him.
“Well,” the man says, “that morning I was playing golf and felt this over-powering need to pray for you. In fact, I called into church and had them put you on the prayer chain. I wonder how many people here got that message and prayed for this missionary?”
The missionary was moved to tears as 26 men in the congregation stood up.
Among the ranks of shock-jock evangelists perhaps none have aspired to the verbal exploits of “Dr.” Phil Kid. Popular with many fundamentalist churches of more militant type, Phil is the master of Hair-Raising Sermon Illustration. It’s a rare event when he manages to make it through a sermon without some apocryphal tale of tragedy and gore.
And then there are his screaming rants against all manner of other ungodly things like Nintendo video games and interracial marriage…
Fundamentalists not only believe that the sign gifts of acts have ceased, they also believe that those who practice tongues, prophecy, and healing gifts in the modern church are actually empowered by dark forces of evil. To prove this point beyond a shadow of a doubt, there is a great illustration that has been floating around fundamentalist circles for about forty years now that goes something like this…
Among the ranks of shock-jock evangelists perhaps none have aspired to the verbal exploits of “Dr.” Phil Kid. Popular with many fundamentalist churches of more militant type, Phil is the master of