Developments in the 20th Century

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Developments in the 20th Century

Steve Gregg provides an overview of major religious movements and events that occurred throughout the 20th century. He highlights the rise of evangelicalism from fundamentalism, ongoing debates between modernism and fundamentalism, and the famous Scopes Trial that pitted creationism against evolution. Gregg also discusses key figures like Billy Graham, C.S. Lewis, and A.W. Tozer, who had significant influence in the evangelical movement through their writing and preaching. He concludes with a discussion on the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements, as well as the impact of the Jesus movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Transcript

Tonight, we'll do a quick run through some of the major features, in my judgment, worth looking at that occurred in the 20th century. We'll be talking about developments occurring in this century, which all of them actually, well, almost all of them anyway, had their beginnings in the 19th century, which we have already studied. The 20th century has had its unique features, of course, but much of those things have grown out of movements that began in the 19th century, whether it was in the rise of fundamentalism and evangelicalism, or in the whole issue of revivals and modern missions.

These things we saw beginning in the 19th century, and there's been much of the same, and much development and expansion of the same in this century. It's a frustration to me to have to cover so many things of importance in one session, but it's simply in the nature of our schedule that we have to have only one more session, and therefore, I apologize in advance for the light treatment that I'll have to give to things that I'm sure you will sense immediately are important enough to have warranted more thorough treatment. There are four headings under which I would like to explore the things of the present century, of the 20th century, in the Church.

These things, of course, run parallel to each other in time. We're going to look at them individually. We're taking them topically, in other words, rather than going through a chronological survey of the century.

And so the first of those is the developments within the evangelical movement. Now, the evangelical movement rose out of the fundamentalist movement, and most people who would have been called fundamentalists if they lived a hundred years ago today would be called evangelicals. The fundamentalist movement, as we saw last time, arose in the late 19th century and early part of this century as a reaction to the modernist movement, that which we now call liberalism.

The modernist movement was essentially a denial of the supernatural and a denial of the veracity of Scripture and the authority of Scripture and the inspiration of Scripture, and therefore, a denial of many of the fundamentals of the Christian faith, including the supernatural character and deity of Jesus, his virgin birth, his resurrection, the issue of his second coming. These things were all denied by the schools that came out of Germany and later England and were in America that were of the modernist branch, and in reaction to that, conservative Christians wishing to preserve the fundamentals of Christianity reacted in a scholarly way, writing rebuttals, scholarly rebuttals of the modernist school. These people were called fundamentalists.

Unfortunately, however, in the early 20th century, the term fundamentalism ceased to be associated in the popular mind with scholarship. The early fundamentalists were very scholarly, just like their opponents in the liberal branch were. But there was one event more than any other that gave fundamentalism a reputation for being the movement of the stupid anti-intellectual, which unfortunately, in many circles, the name fundamentalist still conveys that notion to the popular mind, not justly, but nonetheless, that's how many people think of the word fundamentalist.

And that event, that was the turning point, was the Scopes trial, which occurred in 1925. The Scopes trial was the trial of John Scopes, who was a schoolteacher in Dayton, Tennessee. And there was a desire on the anti-fundamentalist side of the ongoing debate between modernism and fundamentalism, a desire to make fundamentalism look foolish and to challenge the authority of fundamentalism in America at that time.

There were in many states in the United States at that time, and in Tennessee, which was one of them, there was a law that forbade the teaching of evolution in public schools. Today there are laws that forbid the teaching of creation in public schools, so it shows how much things have flip-flopped in 75 years or less. But in the early 1920s, there were laws in many states that forbade public school teachers to teach Darwin's views of the origin of species.

And there was a man, John Scopes, a biology teacher in a school in Dayton, Tennessee, who was put up by certain individuals wanting to make a case, wanting to have a test case to challenge those laws. He was put up to teaching evolution in his classroom, and he was therefore fired. And a court case ensued, which became a media circus.

Very seldom would a case about something so minor, a school teacher in a small town teaching evolution and defying the laws against that, become a major media event. But it was deliberately put forward as a test case to challenge the power of fundamentalism in the country. And so the media from all over the country came on in, and in July, in the heat of summer in Tennessee, the courtrooms were packed with journalists and reporters and all kinds of interested parties, as two major contenders debated over the issue of whether evolution should be allowed to be taught in the public schools.

Taking the side of the state against John Scopes, that is to say, taking the side of creationism against evolution, was a man named William Jennings Bryan. And his opponent was a Chicago lawyer and atheist or agnostic named Clarence Darrow. And these men fought it out, as it were, almost literally coming to blows, in a very heated, a very emotional, controversial court trial that was the most publicized in the century, probably.

Well, maybe not as much as the OJ trial. There weren't as many machines of publicity in those days as there are in modern times, but certainly the most publicized trial up to that time. And as it turned out, John Scopes lost.

William Jennings Bryan, the creationist, actually won the trial, and the state won against John Scopes. There was really no question as to whether Scopes had taught evolution or whether he'd broken the law, so it was not really a hard thing to prove. But what Clarence Darrow, the defender of John Scopes, tried to do is not make the trial the trial of a school teacher, but he was trying to put biblical creation on trial.

And that is one thing that drew such attention of the media, that the fundamentalists were still opposing the Darwinist views that were, of course, had already pretty much come to predominate the scientific community, the secular scientific community. And Clarence Darrow sought to show that anyone who still believed in creationism was simply a bigoted know-nothing who was unwilling to acknowledge what science had proven, unwilling to change with the times, and a relic of a former era that didn't belong in a modern world. And William Jennings Bryan, who defended creation, was not really a creation scientist.

Actually, he'd been a politician. Unfortunately, Bryan has been badly portrayed in the memory of many Americans because of a Broadway play and also a Hollywood movie that was made called Inherit the Wind, which was a very, you know, widely seen movie. In fact, I was required to read the screenplay of it in high school.

It was required reading. And Inherit the Wind was a dramatization of the Scopes trial. It didn't have the real names of the real people and the dialogue, and it was not exactly taken from the transcripts of the trial.

But it was inspired by the trial, and it was a take-off on the trial. And so the defender of creationism in the play was not named William Jennings Bryan, and the defender of evolution was not named Clarence Darrow in the play, and the defendant was not John Scopes. But there was no question about it.

The play resembled and was a direct take-off of this trial. And in that play, the defender of creationism is made to look like a blithering idiot, as the atheistic evolutionist is slick, informed, you know, clear in his thinking, whereas the defender of creation is made out to look like a total fool and a buffoon. Actually, in some measure, this is the way the trial went.

Clarence Darrow was the slickest lawyer that Chicago had, probably the slickest lawyer in the country. In fact, when William Jennings Bryan came to Dayton, he said, the only reason I've come here is to save America from the greatest atheist in the country, which was Clarence Darrow, not John Scopes. And William Jennings Bryan himself was an older man.

In fact, he died four days after the trial was over, in his sleep. He was an old man in failing health. His mind was not as clear as it had been earlier in his life.

He had had a very clear mind and was a very admirable man earlier in life. And there's nothing non-admirable about him in the Scopes trial either. He was a good man.

He was actually a three-time candidate for the presidency of the United States. He was a Democrat, not a Republican. He served in the administration of Woodrow Wilson and negotiated treaties, international treaties, because he was a peace-loving man and he wanted to see war avoided.

Later on, he was involved in the prohibition movement to prohibit the manufacture of alcohol. Of course, these days, those who are involved in the prohibition are depicted as narrow-minded, bigoted, fundamentalist wackos who just want to spoil everybody's party. But in the days of the prohibition, those who opposed it, including William Jennings Bryan, did so as defenders of the people.

They saw the issue as big business making money on the misery of the common man. Big business being the alcohol interest and the common man being the addict of alcohol. This was like a war on drugs as far as they were concerned.

And William Jennings Bryan was not a conservative Republican by any means. He was a defender of the common man. He never was a stuffed-shirt, big business, conservative type guy, although he's made out to be that way in the mind of a more liberal America that looks down on that kind of a person.

Anyway, Bryan is not adequately represented or remembered by Inherit the Win, which makes him look like a total buffoon. But because the Scopes trial was so publicized and popularized by the play Inherit the Win, it basically conveyed to the nation, maybe to the world, that fundamentalists who believed in special creation of the biblical account were simply not thinking people. They were not educated people.

They were not honest people. They were not good people. They were a bunch of bigots who wanted everybody to stay in the Stone Age, you know, and not progress into the modern age that the whole world was moving into.

And so fundamentalism got a really bad rap in that trial. That was a turning point in the way that Americans looked at fundamentalism. It's also interesting to note that in the year 1920, just five years before the Scopes trial, that was the first year that the majority that the census in America showed that the majority of the population lived in urban centers and cities.

In 1919, there was still a majority of them in rural areas, but 1920 was the turning point where the majority of Americans moved into urban living situations. So it was a modern, industrial, cidified culture, seeing themselves as very progressive, very liberal, very on forward looking, and fundamentalism just seemed like something that just had to be left behind. And that those who wanted to still hang in there with it, you know, they could go off in their little corner if they wanted to, but don't let them bother anybody else by suggesting that anyone else should buy into their ultra conservative or reactionary viewpoints.

And that is how fundamentalism came to be seen. So that even though William Jennings Bryant and the fundamentalists won the court battle, they lost the public relations battle. And that it was a turning point so that forever afterward, at least up to our present time, the word fundamentalist is usually associated in the popular mind with just anti-intellectual bigotry.

In fact, nowadays, of course, the term is used rarely of Christian fundamentalism at all. Nowadays, when you hear about fundamentalism, there's usually Muslim fundamentalists we're talking about, and they too are considered to be anti-intellectual, irrational bigots and terrorists, you know. I mean, unfortunately, the word fundamentalist just doesn't have a very good ring to it in any of its usages since 1925.

Now, in spite of that fact, there was tremendous progress that took place within evangelical circles, and a lot of people continue to get saved into fundamentalist churches. This was due partly to some very powerful mass evangelists. The 1900s were a century and have been a century of mass evangelism, and three men in particular stand out in this century as having the greatest impact, although there were many imitators of D.L. Moody, who had his ministry in the previous century.

There were three men in this century who really stand out as having had tremendous impact in revival evangelism and mass evangelism. The first of them is R. A. Torrey. Now, R. A. Torrey lived from 1856 to 1928, so he died just a few years after the Scopes trial, but he was an educated fundamentalist, and I mean his educational credentials were second to none.

First of all, he graduated from Yale University, and having been ordained in the Congregational Church as a minister there, he also studied abroad in some of the German universities, and he was a man of impeccable educational credentials, unlike Moody. Moody was an uneducated bumpkin, and intellectuals usually didn't respect Moody's intellectual level, but Torrey joined Moody in evangelistic work in 1889, and later became the dean of Moody Bible Institute and the pastor of the Moody Memorial Church in Chicago. After that, he went to Australia and Japan, where he conducted about two and a half years of very successful evangelistic crusades, and that was followed by a crusade in England, or in Britain, actually, from 1903 to 1905, which was enormously successful.

Many thousands were brought to Christ through those crusades in the early 1900s by R. A. Torrey. From 1906 to 1911, he conducted crusades in the United States and Canada and England. There's a typo there for you.

Scotland and Ireland, and likewise in 1919, he conducted crusades in Japan and China, and he was therefore a very widely traveled man in an age before airplanes were used for world travel. In China and Japan and Australia, these were pretty far-flung regions, as well as Europe, Great Britain, and America and Canada. This man had very, very successful crusades.

He's not usually by the common person, he's not remembered as well as Moody, and I'm not sure why. Moody also was enormously successful, but R. A. Torrey joined him late in Moody's career and served with him, and of course carried on the Moody crusades, as it were, through his own ministry. Another man of the same period, actually contemporary with R. A. Torrey, was William Ashley Sunday, better remembered as Billy Sunday.

He lived from 1862, which means he was born, what, about six years younger than Torrey, and he lived about seven years longer. Died in 1935. Billy Sunday spent four years in an orphan home as a child because his father, who was a brick mason, had been killed in the Civil War in the Union Army.

After spending those four years in an orphan home, Billy Sunday was raised on a farm and went on to finish high school. Now, unlike Torrey, who was highly educated, Billy Sunday did not have much formal education. He had a high school education, then he served as an assistant to an undertaker for a while, and then he became a professional baseball player in 1883.

He played with the team that was then called the Chicago White Stockings, but later that team was called the Chicago Cubs. And so he was a professional player, and while visiting the Chicago Pacific Garden Mission, Billy Sunday was converted and he joined the Presbyterian Church in Chicago and continued playing ball for another four years, after which apparently he left his career as a ball player and served as the secretary of the YMCA in Chicago. Sometime after that, he hit the road to preach crusade evangelism with his wife, and they preached in these massive tents, massive tabernacles that seated thousands of people.

Billy Sunday is remembered as a very sensational evangelist. He did a lot of theatrical things. He would use fireworks and so forth to create shock and get people's attention and so forth.

While he was on stage, he would be preaching about hell and he would be throwing down things behind him that would cause flames to come up behind him and things like that. He danced around the stage. He was a very athletic man.

I mean, he was a baseball player, but he was a very strong man and very athletic, and he did all kinds of things that made his preaching dramatic and sensational. A lot of people, of course, didn't much respect him for that, but he preached over 20,000 times in his career and influenced more than a million people to make decisions for Christ. Now, I don't know whether, I don't know how many of those people continued with the Lord, but I'd be happy if a million people made decisions for Christ through my ministry, even if only 10% stayed with the Lord.

That's 100,000 people. Solid conversions. Very successful crusade evangelist.

The height of his success after a ministry of coast-to-coast crusade evangelism was in 1917 when John D. Rockefeller backed financially a crusade that Billy Sunday was doing in New York for 10 days. And in that 10-day crusade, a million and a half people attended, and 10% of them came forward to receive Christ. So about 150,000 people gave their lives to the Lord at that crusade.

Billy Sunday also in his career was socially active and he played a major role in promoting the prohibition of alcohol in his day. That was a major issue, a moral and ethical issue that many Christians got involved with, and Billy Sunday held meetings promoting prohibition. He worked with those forces that were trying politically to prohibit the manufacture of alcohol in the United States.

Of course, they succeeded. Prohibition did happen, but it never was a popular law, and eventually it was repealed and it was ignored even when it was enforced in many of the states. But for the most part, Christians promoted it.

It might be a good example of what would happen if Christians were successful in legislating Christian laws today. You might get the laws passed, but without popular support, it may well just be something that would be short-lived. I think the social reform is not going to be successful so long as it's done through political means only.

Obviously, people have to be converted, but Billy Sunday did his share of that too, converting people as well as influencing legislation. Well, of course, the best-known evangelist of this century and the most successful in all history was William Franklin Graham, that we better know as Billy Graham. He was born in North Carolina in 1918.

He's still alive, of course, at 80 years old, but his health is failing as we speak. He was converted himself as a youth in an evangelistic meeting with another crusade evangelist, and he turned to the Lord in 1934. How old would he be then? I'm not working.

Do the math. Sixteen? Sixteen years old. He then went to several colleges, including Wheaton, which I misspelled in the notes.

He studied also at Bob Jones and Florida. What is that Christian college in Florida, conservative fundamentalist? It is in Pensacola, but yeah, I believe that's where he went. Florida Bible College or something like that? I don't remember the name of it, but he studied a couple other colleges before Wheaton, and then he graduated from Wheaton.

The same year he graduated from Wheaton, he married Ruth Bell, who was the daughter of a veteran missionary in China, and that was the year 1947. I'm sorry, that was the year 1943. He became the first evangelist of the Youth for Christ movement, and that's where he began his ministry as an evangelist, was in the organization that had recently formed Youth for Christ.

They held rallies, and Billy Graham, as a very young man, was their principal preacher. It was at that time that he began to associate with some of the people who became part of his lifelong team, including Cliff Barrows and Grady Wilson and a number of other people who have worked with him through the decades. Working with Youth for Christ never made him world famous, and it was a while before he was ever recognized nationally.

He was made president of Northwestern College in Minneapolis in 1947, and though he didn't hold that post for very many years, that established Minneapolis as his base of operation. Today, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association is still based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was in 1949 that Billy Graham became a household word, and that was a year when he held a very successful and very well-publicized crusade in Los Angeles.

Now, many people don't know this, but the very powerful newspaper publisher, what's his name, Randolph Hearst? What's his first name? William Randolph Hearst. Thank you, yes. He got in his head to publicize this crusade.

He told all of his newspapers that he owned, push Billy Graham. Now, Billy Graham was a relatively unknown guy at that time, but William Randolph Hearst apparently saw some value in him, and that's not at all to suggest that Hearst was a Christian. I don't know what motivated the man, but he told all his newspapers to push Billy Graham.

And so this crusade was published and publicized throughout the nation, received front-page treatment, and there was a tremendous turnout and tremendous success. I mean, Billy Graham did not need William Randolph Hearst to become a successful evangelist. He was already successful leading people to Christ, but he might never have become the household word and the world-famous person that he is today if not for that major publicity thrust in 1949, which changed his whole career.

The next year, in 1950, he formed the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and launched his radio program, The Hour of Decision, which is still, of course, on the air. He then resigned as the college president of Northwestern College to devote full-time to involvement in evangelistic crusades. That was in 1952.

So since 1952, Billy Graham has been a full-time crusade evangelist. He is, as I said, the most successful evangelist in history. Over a million people have been converted through his preaching.

No one knows exactly how many. He has preached to larger crowds and more people than anyone else ever has, and that's even in person, not to say anything about how many people have heard his radio ministry or watched him on television or seen his movies, of which there have been many, or read his magazine, Decision Magazine. He was the first man to preach to, I think it was in South Korea many years ago, to a crowd that numbered a million in one audience.

He has been very, very successful at drawing crowds. There have been suggestions that he has not been very successful in keeping his converts saved, and I've heard statistics that were not real encouraging as to the percentage of people who make decisions at Billy Graham crusades and then are nowhere to be found in the church a few years later. I don't know how many of these statistics come from his critics, because I've heard other statistics that are more favorable, that give higher numbers, but just to say the least, if 1% of the people who came forward as crusades stayed with the Lord, he'd be one of the most successful evangelists in history.

And Billy Graham, by the way, of the men we were considering, is the only one still living, and I feel like I've had the privilege of having my life overlap with his, just chronologically. I've never met the man. I had the privilege when I was 15 years old.

Well, when I was 10 years old, well, let me go back further. The night I was born, my parents had to leave a Billy Graham movie to go to the hospital, so I'd be born. And they didn't get to see the end of it.

That's okay, they were already saved. But when I was 10 years old, he did another crusade in Los Angeles in 1963, and I went there, and I went forward at that crusade, though it wasn't the first time I'd responded to an altar call. When I was 15, he did a crusade in Anaheim, which is near where we live, and I was a counselor at that crusade to children when I was 15.

And by the time I was 12, I had read all of Billy Graham's books, so he was a great hero of mine. Still is. And not just because he preaches to so many people, but because he's one of the few men who's been so publicized, and no one has been able to find any dirt on him.

The man has had the highest standards of integrity in his organization, probably of any Christian organization ever. And when he established his organization, back when he was a very young man, he had the foresight to develop policies that would keep his reputation pure. For example, he will never, as I understand it, never travel alone.

He always has other brothers travel with him. He will never, ever be alone in a room with a woman, without other men or other people present. He just developed these policies when he was young, and he's kept them.

He has proven to be a man of integrity, a man of humility, for a man whose name, he's one of the most admired people in history, or at least alive today in the world, he's one of the most admired people. And he's also been a friend and confidant to many presidents and heads of state in many countries, and yet he's a truly humble man. I remember, there's a magazine out of Southern California called the Wittenberg Door.

Now they just call it the Door. It used to be called the Wittenberg Door, and it's sort of a Christian satire magazine, and the guys who put the magazine together always tried to pick on Christian movements that had something ridiculous about them. This is a Christian magazine, but the guys were fairly irreverent who put out the magazine, and they were known for their satire.

I remember reading once they wrote an article on Billy Graham. They interviewed Billy Graham and did an article, and they said, you know, we were hoping to write an article where we could give you some dirt on Billy Graham, but we actually couldn't find anything wrong with the man. And, you know, of course, they're Christians.

You wouldn't expect them to look too hard for dirt in Billy Graham, but the thing is that even the secular press can't find anything wrong with Billy Graham, which is not to say he's a perfect man, but it's to say that he has been a good testimony for fundamentalism, for evangelicalism, for his long career, which has spanned almost the entire century. His career hasn't been a century. His career has spanned the second half of the century, but his life has spanned the whole century almost.

And as you can tell, I greatly admire him. He has done many other things. He's launched other ministries besides his own.

One of the ministries he launched was the magazine Christianity Today, along with a man named Carl F. Henry, who left a teaching post at an evangelical university or college, seminary, to be the first editor. Christianity Today has been around since its first publication in 1956. It is still the premier periodical and organ of the evangelical movement.

It is unfortunate that in some ways it has not remained as conservative as it could have, but it was nonetheless partially the brainchild of Billy Graham to start that magazine. Also, there's another thing that Billy Graham was influential in beginning, and that was the World Congress on Evangelism, which met first in Berlin in 1966 and then Lusanne, Switzerland in 1974. One of the biggest, well, the very biggest, conferences on evangelism, drawing about a third of the people from third world countries and other places, evangelists, plotting strategies to evangelize the world and so forth.

So Billy Graham has been very influential, and he's practically the symbol of evangelicalism in the 20th century. There have been other men in evangelicalism who've made a mark for themselves and done great service to the body of Christ. Among them have been men who were apologists, that is, men who defended the faith against skepticism.

Now, to list all the men in the 20th century who've been significant apologists would be a very long list. It'd have to include the men of Creation Science Institute, it'd have to include, of course, Walter Martin and everyone else who's written against cults. Probably there are two men more than others who in the middle to late 20th century are remembered as the most influential of the apologists.

One of those would be C.S. Lewis, who was actually a literature professor both at Cambridge University and also at Oxford during part of his career. He was an agnostic or an atheist who was converted as an adult and is remembered for many things he's written. For one thing, he wrote textbooks on English literature, which had nothing to do with Christianity because that was the field in which he was a professor.

But he also wrote many Christian works, and he showed great versatility. Some of them were direct apologetic works defending the Christian faith in a thoughtful and intelligent manner. Some would say an argument that he made arguments that would be very difficult, if not impossible, to refute in favor of the Christian faith.

He also wrote Christian allegorical fiction, including children's genre, the Seven Chronicles of Narnia and a space trilogy, which was written in the science fiction genre. So he wrote a lot of things, a lot of different styles. Very influential.

You very seldom read a modern book written by Christians that don't somewhere quote C.S. Lewis about something or another, because not only was he a good apologist, he was very eminently quotable. Another very influential apologist of this century has been Francis Schaeffer. Francis Schaeffer, I believe, was in the Presbyterian denomination.

And he lived, although he's an American, he lived in Switzerland and started a community called Le Brie. And there he wrote many books. He had people traveling through who would come in and stay for a while, and he'd discuss Christian philosophical questions with them and so forth.

And he actually had a tremendous influence on making evangelicalism respectable to a lot of intellectuals or people who thought they were intellectuals, who thought they were too intellectual to consider fundamentalism. And so these men, as well as many others, have been produced in this century as apologists of the Christian faith and have had tremendous impact. There have also been prophetic voices in the evangelical movement in this century, not the least of which one of my very favorites was A.W. Tozer.

A.W. Tozer was pastor in Chicago and in Canada, mostly Chicago, through most of his career. In his later years, he was a pastor in Canada, and that's where he was when he died. He died in 1963, as C.S. Lewis also died that year.

A.W. Tozer was a pastor in the Christian and Missionary Alliance denomination and became probably the best-known person in that denomination of his generation. The founder of that denomination was A.B. Simpson, a man who had had a healing ministry, and the denomination was founded on the belief in divine healing, although it never became part of the Pentecostal movement, a movement we'll talk about a little later here. But A.W. Tozer was recognized in his generation as a prophetic voice to the church, and this in circles that were not really Pentecostal.

Today, when people talk about so-and-so as a prophet, it's usually the person who's given that label is usually a charismatic or Pentecostal because they affirm the ongoing gift or office of a prophet in modern times. In non-charismatic circles, A.W. Tozer was recognized as a prophet in his generation. He had a cross-denominational ministry.

He spoke in conferences all over the place, wrote many things. Mostly, he didn't write books, though he did write a few. The book, The Pursuit of God, and the book, the sequel to it, The Divine Conquest, which is now called The Pursuit of Man in its latest publication editions, and a book called, a couple of biographies, a missionary biography, and also a biography of A.B. Simpson he wrote.

But most of his writings exist not as books that he wrote, but as collections of editorials that he wrote in the Christian Missionary Alliance magazine, which was called the Alliance Weekly. And he wrote hundreds of editorials, and it is said that that magazine is possibly the only magazine that hundreds of thousands of people read just for the editorials because his editorials were so insightful, so convicting, so pungent. And even now, what, almost 40 years, some 35 years after his death, he is still looked to by many as one of the most cogent thinkers of a prophetic sort to call the church to repentance.

A.W. Tozer actually predicted in his day that there would be a mass evacuation from the evangelical churches by serious Christians. He believed that the evangelical movement was compromised, institutionalized, and carnal. He believed that the evangelical movement in his day had mistaken the doctrines of the Bible for the reality of the Bible.

And it's interesting, if you read his material, you will think he is writing today. If you don't know that this man died 35 years ago, you would have the impression this man was describing the church in this decade. And he was very, very insightful, and I believe that his, the label they gave him, 20th century prophet, which is what people tend to call him, it sticks rather well.

Another prophetic voice in the mid to late 20th century was Leonard Ravenhill, who was actually a British evangelist, but he wrote quite a bit and traveled and spoke quite a bit. He was a friend of Tozer. In fact, Tozer was his mentor.

And Ravenhill also was a prophetic voice for holiness in the church in this century. And another man was influenced by Ravenhill, and that was Keith Green, who it might seem strange to mention a Christian musician in connection with these other powerful names, especially a Christian musician who died young, and in many respects spiritually immature. But Keith Green was definitely in the direct line of influence of A. W. Tozer and Leonard Ravenhill, in that he spoke to his generation briefly, because he died quite young in an airplane crash.

But he was first of all, of course, he first received prominence as a musician, and a rock musician actually, but a Christian one. But his songs, as now, what, 20 years almost after his death, younger Christians of a serious sort typically still look to his music as being the most, well, convicting and spiritually meaty of most available contemporary music. And it's not very common for musicians from the 70s to still be popular among the youth of the 90s.

But Keith Green spoke very critically in some respects, and prophetically against many of the things, especially the commercialism in the evangelical movement in his day. And so God had his evangelists, he's had his apologists, and he's had his prophetic voices in the church, in the evangelical movement. And I've only given, of course, a sampling there.

We could multiply names in these lists, but we don't have the time to multiply it any further. There are other things to consider. Another trend that has been characteristic of the church in the 20th century has been what would have to be called the ecumenical movement, which is the attempt to bring unity between the many disparate denominations.

In the centuries after the Reformation, and up until the 20th century, the trend has been largely to see splitting off, movement splitting off. You know, God raises up some leader in a church to bring change and to rattle the institutional cage and so forth, and he gets a following. And eventually, maybe after his death, maybe in his lifetime, his followers branch off from the institution that spawned him and start their own group and call it a new denomination.

And today, there are thousands of Protestant denominations. And in this century, there have been many attempts on the part of certain interests to join these denominations in some form of unity, not necessarily to abolish individual denominations, but to find some cooperative way in which these denominations can combine their resources and work together to get the job done, whatever the job may be interpreted to be. And a lot of the ecumenical attempts have misinterpreted the job, I think.

But the point is, in this century, there have been many attempts toward unifying churches of different denominations, and this is usually called the ecumenical movement. In 1908, there was formed the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America, which was largely made up of liberal denominations. It was reorganized in 1950 and called the National Council of Churches of Christ in America.

And at that time, it was formed including 33 denominations. Today, it has 49 million members. And it is an attempt, especially among liberal denominations, to find some cooperative way to work together.

In reaction to this somewhat, there has come the National Association of Evangelicals, which is a conservative group. They were formed in 1942. They contain 77 conservative denominations and about 15 million members.

Now, as far as you might say, well, what do these groups do? What are they there for? To tell you the truth, this is an aspect of the church in our time that I have not followed closely myself, because I'm not real interested in their efforts, to tell you the truth. I'm not saying there's nothing good they're doing. I'm just saying that it hasn't been something I've had a great interest in following.

I've read something about them, but it seems to me that these groups hoped to get together to issue statements of a united voice on a certain subject. In terms of some of the National Councils of Churches or the World Council of Churches, which we'll mention in a moment, these are sometimes denouncing Western imperialism or advocating Marxist revolution and liberation theology. There's a lot of liberal things advanced by many of these ecumenical councils, although there have been conservative reactions and groups of conservatives trying to work together, too, as we can see.

The World Council of Churches, which is mostly liberal Marxist in its orientation, judging movements that it supported, it was formed in Amsterdam in 1948 with 147 denominations from 44 countries originally. Today, the World Council of Churches has 300 denominations in it from over 100 countries, and the council has been found to fund revolutionary movements, especially in the third world, in Africa and in South America and Central America, sending money and weapons and so forth to help Marxist factions that are trying to overthrow some kind of a capitalistic regime and trying to promote socialism throughout the world. For this reason, the World Council of Churches has been criticized by not only conservatives, but even the mainstream press, which is by no means conservative, has sometimes criticized the World Council of Churches for its overt support of simply anti-freedom regimes in the name of freedom.

The World Council of Churches is heavily weighted, of course, with third world country delegates, and that being the case, many of the third world countries are angry at the U.S. and the Western Church in general because we have more than they have. And so the pronouncements of the World Council of Churches has often been very anti-American, anti-Western, very unbalanced, critical of America, and very supportive of socialist Marxist type movements in third world countries. Another ecumenical movement that has arose in this century was Vatican II, which was a Roman Catholic ecumenical council.

It met in four sessions between 1962 and 1965. It was a somewhat more, it's sort of a kindler, gentler Roman Catholicism that was, that came out of that council. They actually invited non-Roman Catholics to participate in the council, which was very unprecedented.

In the end, the council reaffirmed all the essential Catholic doctrines, including the infallibility of the Pope's authority. But it did have a friendlier approach to non-Catholics because what the Catholic Church had always called heretics, previously, they decided to use a different label for people like you and I. Before 1962, people like you and I, who are not Roman Catholics but are Protestants, would have been called heretics. But the Church decided that Protestants are not heretics, they are separated brethren.

And so the idea was to recognize that those who have left the Roman Catholic Church may not really be under God's wrath as heretics, they may be just brethren who have drifted from the Church, and the Church needs to reach out in a more considerate fashion to them to win them back to the fold of Christ. The decisions of Vatican II led to a greater flexibility in the Catholic Church itself. Among the things that changed in Roman Catholicism because of Vatican II were that they permitted the churches to use the language of the people in the mass, the vernacular, instead of Latin.

Until the Vatican II, all masses were to be conducted in Latin, even though most of the people in the Church couldn't understand Latin. When I was a child, I remember my Catholic friends, their church service was held in Latin. They didn't know any Latin, so they didn't know what was being said, but it was nonetheless required.

But Vatican II changed that. The local vernacular of the parishioners could be used in the mass, which doesn't sound to us as a great magnanimity, but that was a big improvement. Another thing was that they included permission for the laity, that is the non-clergy, to receive both elements of communion.

Prior to that, only the host was given to the laity, and only the priest could drink from the cup. But there were many voices against that for a long time in the Church, even going back to the days of the Reformation. And Vatican II finally changed that policy in the Roman Church, and allowed the layman to drink of the cup and eat the host.

And also, a greater place was given in the Church to biblical teaching and congregational singing. The Catholic Church before that did not really involve congregational singing as a major feature of worship, but that changed, and they were given more place in the Church after this. And biblical exposition.

Prior to Vatican II, Catholics who were raised in the early part of this century were discouraged, in many cases, from reading the Bible. The position of the Roman Catholic Church was it's kind of dangerous to read the Bible because you can't understand it unless you have adequate theological training. You might end up being another Martin Luther, who by the way had plenty of theological training.

He was a professor at a Catholic college. But they were afraid the common man, if he read the Bible, might begin to question some Catholic doctrines, so they strongly discouraged that practice. But in Vatican II, they realized that the Bible is a good thing and people should be allowed to read it more, and it was brought to greater prominence in the Catholic Church.

Also, Vatican II determined that the Catholic Church could cooperate somewhat with non-Catholics in various ventures, and so the Catholic Church kind of got a little closer to being joined to its separated brethren, the Protestants. In the fundamentalist camp, there arose an ecumenical movement in 1979 called the Moral Majority. The founder of this movement was Jerry Falwell, who is the pastor of the Thomas Rhodes Baptist Church in Lynchburg, Virginia, still is there.

For about 10 years or so, he had this alliance which included several million people, I believe, who were mostly fundamentalist. I think there were 72,000 pastors in the alliance from different denominations, and their main agenda was to promote political action on the part of conservative Christians. They were concerned that Christians in the fundamentalist stream had withdrawn too much from social concerns and that the whole political arena had been taken over by immoral people.

But his assumption was that the majority of Americans still had moral values different than their leaders, better moral values, and that the moral majority needed to reassert itself in the political sphere. And there were certain issues that particularly were important to the moral majority, reaffirming the sacredness of the family and of human life, especially, of course, the pro-life anti-abortion convictions. Also supporting a strong national defense and supporting the nation of Israel were important issues to the moral majority, as well as opposition to certain blights on society like pornography and illegal drugs.

This group was disbanded by its founder in 1989, but when it turned out that no one picked up the torch, as it were, Jerry Falwell reorganized and started a new organization, basically along the same lines as the moral majority, and called it the Liberty Alliance in 1992. One other ecumenical movement should be mentioned. It's a brand new one.

It has arisen in the late 90s. Certain evangelical leaders and Catholic leaders have promoted it. Chuck Colson is one of the main evangelical leaders involved in this.

It's called Evangelicals and Catholics Together. And the main idea here is that Chuck Colson and others are concerned about what they call the culture war. It's not even so much political like the moral majority.

It's more of a cultural concern. Still, the concerns are for the same kinds of issues, abortion, gay rights, those kinds of things, drug abuse, immorality. And Colson and other evangelicals have believed that we are missing out by not enlisting the help of Catholics who hold some of the same values, the resources, both human and financial and so forth, and that we should work together with the Roman Catholics to win this culture war.

And so there is this association beginning to form, even as we speak, of Catholics and evangelicals. They call it ECT, Evangelicals and Catholics Together. There is a reaction against this on the part of many fundamentalists like R.C. Sproul and John MacArthur and James Kennedy.

Some evangelical leaders are very much concerned about this development, feeling like it minimizes the theological distinctives between Roman Catholicism and Protestant Christianity. So these are some of the things that have developed in this century in the way of churches trying to kind of undo the schisms of denominationalism by uniting for some kind of common cause. Whether this uniting is good or bad, everyone must judge for himself.

Of course, it depends on what the basis is, who is uniting with whom, and what they're hoping to accomplish. It would seem clear that for Christians to have a spiritual unity, and perhaps in some ways a cooperational unity, is not a bad thing. In fact, Billy Graham has promoted that kind of unity for a very long time.

I mean, Billy Graham's association, his crusades, have deliberately employed the use of pastors of many denominations locally whenever he's coming to an area. It doesn't take a council of churches or something to get real Christians to cooperate with each other for the kingdom of God's sake necessarily. But when it comes to political agendas, sometimes these ecumenical attempts are really, I guess I hate to say it, but kind of power plays, sort of an attempt to get more clout to promote a political agenda, whether it's Marxism in the World Council of Churches or right-wing conservatism in some of the other groups like the moral majority.

But in any case, this has been a feature of the church in our time. Okay, I want to talk about a couple other things in this century, some of them that excite me considerably more than the ecumenical movement. There have been revivals in the 20th century, just as there have been in the 19th century.

The revivals, many of the big revivals, Finney and Moody and so forth of the 19th century, have their counterparts in the 20th century. But the principal revival movement, unless, I mean, if we're not talking about crusade evangelism, and by the way, we're not. Crusade evangelism is not the same thing as revivalism, although of course revivalism had its crusade evangelists.

But if we're talking about the church being spiritually renewed and people getting serious about God and people finding a new dimension of spiritual life that transforms the way they live, that kind of revival has occurred in the 20th century largely in connection with the Pentecostal movement and its daughters. The Pentecostal movement traces its official beginning to the year 1906 when the Azusa Street revival began and continued for three years, Azusa Street, Los Angeles, that is. It was not the first time that speaking in tongues had come to be known in the modern history.

Actually, Edward Irving in the 1830s in England or in Britain had the phenomenon of speaking tongues in his church. Also, the Christians of Armenia, who had been driven out of Armenia 20 years before this time and had come to Los Angeles, had known revival in their midst that had included speaking in tongues. But the Pentecostal movement at Azusa Street, the revival at Azusa Street in 1906 was different because it received greater publicity than any of these others and it attracted people from all over the world.

For three years, there was tremendous publicity of the outbreaking of spiritual gifts in this Los Angeles area and people from all over the world came, hundreds of people came from all over and they took it back to their own lands with them so that there became Pentecostal movements in basically every continent. In places like Latin America and Africa and Korea, the Pentecostal movement is the predominant form of Christianity, well, at least of Protestant Christianity. In Latin America today, conversions to Pentecostalism from Catholicism or from some other thing are happening at a rate that's three or four times that of the population growth.

Latin America has seen tremendous growth of the Pentecostal movement. Now, the Pentecostals grew out of two streams that had existed before. One of those streams was the Holiness movement.

The Holiness movement traces itself back to, of course, John Wesleyan. We've talked about that. The Methodists, the Nazarene, the Salvation Army, these are part of the Holiness movement and the Holiness movement had always taught that there is, in addition to salvation, another step, another work of grace called sanctification.

Many of the early Pentecostals also believed that sanctification was a second work of grace, but they believed that the baptism of the Holy Spirit with speaking in tongues was a third work of grace. Many of the early Pentecostals believed in three works of grace because they came out of the Holiness tradition and they believed that conversion was the first work of grace, sanctification the second, and the baptism of the Holy Spirit was the third. Now, other Pentecostals gave up the second and just jumped to the third.

They gave up the holiness or the sanctification issue as a second work of grace, and they said, the second and only remaining work of grace after conversion is the baptism of the Spirit. There were, of course, holiness preachers before the Pentecostal movement who actually referred to sanctification as the baptism of the Holy Spirit. So the terminology had different meanings to different people.

But what actually broke out in Azusa Street in 1906 was that a group of Christians praying began to experience speaking in tongues among themselves. To a large extent, they were not expecting this. It was something that came upon them.

They were praying and seeking God, and they began speaking in tongues. And the movement grew out of holiness roots, but there was another set of roots that grew. There was another group of churches that were not necessarily in the holiness tradition, but they were the healing revivals.

People like A.B. Simpson and a lot of people in the 19th century were healing evangelists, and they had practiced divine healing. Now, speaking in tongues was not a part of the healing revivals, but the Pentecostal movement picked up on much of what had been taught in the holiness movement and what had been taught in the healing revivals and then added another feature that neither of those groups had had before, and that was speaking in tongues. The Pentecostals formed as an official doctrine what is called the initial evidence doctrine, namely that speaking in tongues is the initial evidence of the baptism of the Holy Spirit.

The largest Pentecostal denomination is the Assemblies of God in the United States, and there are quite a few other Pentecostal denominations. Some of them are quite large, also. You may be acquainted with the Four Square Gospel Church is another Pentecostal denomination.

About 25% of Pentecostals are what we have to call Jesus-only. The largest denomination of Jesus-only is called the United Pentecostal Church, and this 25% of the Pentecostal movement of this branch are not Trinitarian. Apart from the Jesus-only, the Pentecostal movement basically adhered to all Orthodox theology and are Trinitarian.

The Jesus-only are modalistic. They do not believe that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are individual persons coexisting at the same time in the Godhead, but they believe that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all different manifestations of one person, and that person is Jesus. So the United Pentecostal Church holds that view, but about 75% of Pentecostals are Orthodox Trinitarians.

But the emphasis of the Pentecostals was on the experience of the baptism of the Holy Spirit, and whereas Roman Catholics emphasized mediation of a relationship with God through a mass and through a clergy and through an institutional system, and Protestants tended to mediate one's relationship with God through the Bible, the Pentecostals tended to mediate it through an experience, and that was the experience of the baptism of the Holy Spirit. And out of that grew many denominations and many branch movements. The Word of Faith teaching of Kenneth Hagan and Kenneth Copeland, for example, is in some ways connected to the Pentecostal movement, not directly.

Kenneth Hagan, who is principally looked at as the founder of the Word of Faith movement, although he was himself a follower of E.W. Kenyon, Hagan was a Baptist when he received a healing as a youth, and the baptism of the Spirit and so forth, and he later became associated with the Assemblies of God. Another branch of the Pentecostal movement that eventually rose up in the 40s was called the Latter Rain movement, and it had as one of its major leaders a guy named William Brannan, whose theology was somewhat unusual. He was reputed to be the Prophet Elijah, and it is said that when he spoke, people could see a halo around his head.

In fact, photographs have been taken of him that are reportedly unretouched, and you can see a halo around his head. Apparently he had very powerful healing and deliverance ministry, but he was non-Trinitarian, and he believed in the Serpent Seed doctrine, which was that modern Jews were descendants of a sexual union between Eve and the serpent. So this is a really bizarre doctrine, obviously taken over in modern times by white supremist groups like the Aryan Nations and neo-Nazis and so forth.

Not to say that William Brannan was himself a neo-Nazi or a white supremist, but he did believe that strange doctrine. There have been many strange things in the Pentecostal movement. There have been many aberrations, but there's also been some real power, and there's been a tremendous number of people saved who are serving God today through the influence of this Pentecostal revival.

Some of the early ministers in the Pentecostal revival that are worthy of note, I've mentioned in my notes, the list could be extended extremely long, and even the names that I could tell you something about from personal knowledge would be probably five, six times longer than this list. But very early on, a man named John G. Lake was a leading healing Pentecostal preacher. He came out of the healing movement.

Back in the year 1900, a man named Alexander Dowie had purchased something like 6,000 acres outside Chicago and built a community called Zion, where about 10,000 people lived with him. Eventually, he was practicing polygamy and some other things, but he had tremendous healing ministry. And out of Zion, Dowie's ministry, there arose a number of gifted ministers, one of which was John G. Lake, who rose out of that ministry, and that was out of Chicago.

And he went to Africa. He apparently had a vision of a ministry in Africa and God showed him specific things he would do and accomplish, and he went for five years to Africa and did that. Wonderful miracles were done through him, and interestingly enough, Andrew Murray, who of course was based in South Africa, said of Lake that he was the man, he says, the man reveals more of God than any other man in Africa.

Later in his life, Lake pastored in Spokane, Washington, and there is said to have been 100,000 healings recorded in his church in five years. He apparently preached in Portland also, from what I understand, some of his writings are available at Portland Bible Temple, because I guess he made some predictions or something related to Portland. I don't know what they were, but he was an early Pentecostal evangelist.

Another early Pentecostal evangelist in the early part of the century was Smith Wigglesworth. He was British. He was an English evangelist, but he was a miracle worker.

He had been, what was he, a plumber? He was a plumber, wasn't he? He couldn't read. He was illiterate, but God taught him how to read the Bible, and the only book he ever read was the Bible, and he never went anywhere without a Bible under his arm. And he became in demand as a Pentecostal preacher and healer, and all kinds of miracles have been claimed for this man, including several cases of raising the dead and almost every kind of healing imaginable.

The man had an international ministry, apparently a very humble and likable guy, though a bit flamboyant in some of his things. Some of you who know about Smith Wigglesworth may remember stories about how he'd heal people by punching them in the stomach, and when asked why he punched people, he said, I'm not punching them, I'm punching the devil. But I don't know if there's any recorded people who've sustained long-term injuries from his healing methods, but as a matter of fact, people usually got healed.

In fact, one story is told of him raising the dead in the case where he was actually confronted with the dead body of a woman who brought him to raise. He picked her up by the shoulders and threw her against the wall, and she slumped down dead on the floor. He picked her up and threw her against the wall again.

Apparently he did this a few times, and finally she sprang to life. Maybe I would, too. I don't know.

I might get tired of getting thrown against the wall. But the fact of the matter is he did very controversial and strange things, but he got really remarkable results. Because of the flamboyance and unusualness of Pentecostal ministry, obviously it has remained very controversial as to whether it is of God or not.

There are non-Pentecostals who believe that the miracles associated with the Pentecostal movement were simply spiritual counterfeits, the working of Satan. And they point, in order to support this notion, to several things. One is the absurd theology that has often been found in Pentecostal ministers.

Another is the bizarre methods of people like Smith Wigglesworth. And another is the immoral lives of some of the leading Pentecostal evangelists. Now, obviously those are pretty bad things.

But I'm not sitting here saying that I would join the ranks of the non-Pentecostals. I myself would be in the Pentecostal tradition in my own belief. But there have been many scandals associated, not the least of which was that of Amy Semple McPherson, who is the founder of the Foursquare denomination, one of the major Pentecostal denominations today.

She was a Pentecostal preacher in the early days of Azusa Street. She actually, about 15 years after Azusa Street, really, she was preaching in Los Angeles. She was a preacher at Angelus Temple, where there is still a Bible college, a Foursquare Bible college there.

And there were scandals associated with her. For several years she disappeared. And when she reappeared, she said she'd been kidnapped.

But there are reports that she actually had run off with a man other than her husband. And no one knows, I guess, for sure. Well, maybe someone knows for sure, but I'll just say the general public doesn't know for sure exactly what happened in her life.

But she was just one of many Pentecostal leaders who had sexual scandals and other kinds of scandals in their lives. Now, one of the daughter movements of the Pentecostal movement began in 1960. It was called, and is today called, the Charismatic Movement.

Originally it was called the Neo-Pentecostal Movement. And the reason it differs from the regular Pentecostal Movement is that Pentecostals is a term that is usually used for someone who belongs to one of these denominations that arose out of the Pentecostal Revival. Someone who is in the Foursquare, someone who is in the Assemblies of God, someone who is into the United Pentecostal.

These are denominations of Pentecostals. The Charismatics actually belong to non-Pentecostal denominations, but have experienced a Pentecostal experience. And this is a movement that began in 1960.

Actually, Smith Wigglesworth walked into the office of David Duplessy, who is an executive in the Assemblies of God. He didn't even introduce himself. He just walked into the office of David Duplessy and prophesied that David Duplessy would travel around the world introducing non-Pentecostal people to the power of God and to the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

Then Wigglesworth walked out and then almost as an act, he walked in and introduced himself to Duplessy since he had neglected to do that before. But David Duplessy did become a major spokesman for the Pentecostal experience in many denominations and a speaker for full gospel businessmen and so forth, and had a lot to do with promoting this experience among people who were in the non-Pentecostal denominations. But the Charismatic movement among the non-Pentecostal denominations can't be attributed to David Duplessy's efforts alone, because there was some just sovereign phenomena that occurred.

In the year 1960, in an Episcopalian church in Seattle, Washington, pastored by a man named Dennis Bennett, certain parishioners just began in their devotional life to experience the phenomena of speaking in tongues. These were not people who were getting it from contact with Pentecostals, it was just something as they were seeking God, they began to speak with tongues, almost surprisingly. Their rector of their church, Dennis Bennett, allowed this to be encouraged and eventually there was a full-blown Charismatic movement in his church.

And Dennis Bennett wrote some of the early books that were mainstays of the Charismatic movement as well, as did David Duplessy and others. But after this time, the Pentecostal phenomenon of the baptism of the Spirit with speaking in tongues spread to virtually every Protestant denomination and Catholics too. In fact, the Catholic Pentecostals are perhaps the most theologically sound of all the Charismatics in a sense, I mean, because some of the best theologians in the Catholic denomination, if we can call it that, Catholic religion, have looked into this work of the Holy Spirit and have issued statements favorable to the baptism of the Spirit.

Even some of the Popes have spoken up in favor of the Charismatic movement in the Catholic church. But the Lutherans and the Episcopalians and some of the older Protestant mainline denominations, they were among the first of the non-Pentecostal denominations to experience it. It was still resisted for a long time by groups like Baptists and the Methodists and some of the more evangelical churches on the grounds that they felt that these gifts were a thing of the past and didn't belong to the church after the time of the Apostles.

But even now, virtually every denomination has had its Charismatics. I served for a while as youth pastor in a Charismatic Baptist church in Southern California and there are Charismatic Methodists and Presbyterians and almost every other kind too. And the reason these are not called Pentecostals is because they don't belong to any of the church movements that arose from the Pentecostal revival of 1906.

But they are still parts of other communions, but they have the same Pentecostal experience. Now, the stepchild of the Charismatic movement, which to my mind is the most impressive revival of all, maybe I find it most impressive because I had the privilege of being a part of it, was the Jesus movement that arose in the late 60's. The Charismatic movement was still very young when the Jesus movement arose and it's very difficult to trace the exact origins of the so-called Jesus movement because it happened almost spontaneously in a number of centers, a number of places.

The precursor to the Jesus movement was the secular movement called the Hippie movement or the flower child movement. And in the 60's there was a social movement largely motivated by resistance to the Vietnam War of young people who, some of them probably for entirely selfish reasons opposed the war, they didn't want to be drafted and go there and die. Others were somewhat more philosophical and idealistic and said the war is an immoral war and we oppose it on moral grounds.

And some said, we oppose all war. And they adopted the slogan, make love not war. And they suited the action to the word.

Not only did they not go to war, they made love a lot. They actually became a very promiscuous movement, throwing over almost all sexual morals. It was a movement which I'm sure most of you know introduced hallucinogenic drugs into the mainstream culture of a generation.

This movement was largely promoted by the popular music scene, especially groups like the Beatles had a very profound influence on introducing the hippie philosophy. The hippie movement had a precursor in the beatniks back in the 50's who were also rebels against the conventions of the former generation. But the hippies were not exactly like the beatniks.

They didn't just sit around playing bongo drums with their goatees. They grew their hair all the way out. They protested war.

They marched for peace. They confronted resistance from the police and so forth with a peaceful resistance and so forth. They adopted new age religious eastern philosophy, used drugs, gathered together in communes where they basically shared their mates fairly freely with one another.

And they sought reality. And they didn't find it. And much of the hippie movement was centered, although it was a worldwide movement, it was centered largely in Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco.

It's also in Haight-Ashbury that the Jesus movement began during the hippie movement. In the latter years of the hippie movement, in the year 1967, there was a man named Ted Wise who got saved. He was a hippie.

Someone led him to the Lord. And he and his wife began to witness to their neighbors and friends, their fellow hippies in Haight-Ashbury. And a small group of them came to the Lord, got saved, and started meeting together for Bible study.

Eventually they opened a coffeehouse in Haight-Ashbury which was called the Living Room Coffeehouse. And that was a place where hippies could come in and rap, you know, and talk about the things of God. And quite a few people got saved there.

One of the guys who got connected with Ted Wise and the Living Room Coffeehouse in Haight-Ashbury was a guy named Lonnie Frisby. When Ted Wise met Lonnie, Lonnie was spaced out on LSD, speaking unintelligibly about Jesus and UFOs and things like that. Lonnie happens to be the man who laid his hands on me when I was baptized in the Spirit.

But Lonnie was flaky, let's put it that way. He was a hippie. And through the influence of Ted Wise, he came to become a little more normal.

I don't think Lonnie ever became completely normal. He died a few years ago, quite young, of AIDS, allegedly of having been raped, homosexually, but it's uncertain exactly what happened. Lonnie was a flaky guy.

But I knew him rather well. Actually, when I first encountered the Jesus Movement, I greatly looked up to him. He was a bit older than I was.

Long hair, long beard, dressed like a hippie, speaking to crowds of thousands and hundreds of them coming forward when he gave his invitations. Me coming out of a Baptist background where one person per six months got saved, hearing this guy preach and seeing all these people get saved, it was very impressive to me. Later time, when his marriage broke up, and mine did too, we, through some providence, ended up in the same small church in Santa Cruz and we became friends.

But I always loved Lonnie and looked up to him in some ways as a man that God really used, but he never really got very normal. In fact, Lonnie had his ups and downs. He backslid from time to time.

And when he was on for God, miracles were done. The eyes of the blind were opened. People had their teeth cavities filled in his meetings.

And he wasn't a dentist. It happened when he didn't, you know, there were miracles done, not irregularly, but quite commonly in his meetings. There is even some reports that the dead may have been raised from him.

He ministered in Sweden also and in Africa, but he got saved through contact with Ted Wise in Haight-Ashbury. Later, Lonnie moved down to Orange County, California, wanting to kind of duplicate what had happened in San Francisco. And he met a guy named John Higgins in Orange County, and they started a Christian communal house together in Costa Mesa.

Then they started another one in Santa Ana called the House of Miracles. The first one was called the House of Acts, and then the second was called the House of Miracles. And Lonnie met up with a pastor out of the Four Square background in his mid-forties, about my age, named Chuck Smith.

And Chuck had started out a short time earlier with a brand new church he had formed called Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa. And it was a small building. Chuck had, with volunteer members of the church help, he had built this little adobe building on the outskirts of Costa Mesa, California.

And Chuck was a Bible teacher, and he had about 12 people in his congregation. And he began to teach the Bible day by day, and he met Lonnie Frisbee, who was wandering around somewhere down there in Orange County. Chuck took him home, and Chuck had always been critical of the hippies.

Chuck was a very conservative man, very straight. He didn't like the hippie movement much. But then he began, I think his daughter became friendly to some hippies or something, and he began to be curious about what made these people tick.

He'd go down to Newport Beach, and he'd sit in his car and watch the hippies and just say, what are these people into? What are they doing? And he met Lonnie Frisbee and brought him home. And Lonnie had been a hippie, and Lonnie told him about the hunger that many of these hippies had. And in the very year that the hippie movement carried a coffin full of flowers through Haight-Ashbury to declare that the flower child movement was dead, that same year, Calvary Chapel opened its doors.

And with Lonnie and Chuck both preaching, Lonnie bringing all his friends, all his hippie friends, the church grew in about two years to about a thousand members from 12. And then it just kept going up and up from there. I started going to that church in 1970.

It was already close to a thousand people in it then, and within a short time they were baptizing a thousand new converts every month. And the movement grew so rapidly there that it got the attention of the major media. They had to hold their baptisms, that's where you could put a lot of people, like out on the beach at Corona del Mar.

And approximately 10,000 people came to the monthly baptisms, and about a thousand were baptized every month who were being converted in the Jesus movement. And Time magazine, Newsweek magazine, Life magazine, and other major magazines got wind of it, and they came, sent their camera crews, and there were front page photos on the front page of all these news magazines in the early 70s showing Chuck Smith and Lonnie Frisby out in the water baptizing some of these people, hippies. And through this media coverage, the Jesus movement became well publicized worldwide.

When I went to Germany in 1971, the Jesus movement was the subject on the cover of the German news magazines as well. And so the Jesus movement became well known through what was going on at Calvary Chapel. Calvary Chapel became the hub of the Jesus movement.

Eventually over 600, I think, other Calvary chapels were spawned out of it, and many of them have thousands of members now. Chuck Smith's Calvary Chapel is now the third largest church in the United States with something like 13,000 or 15,000 members. And it is one of the few charismatic churches that has remained Bible-centered.

Chuck Smith had come out of Pentecostalism, out of the Foursquare denomination, and it was one of his complaints about Pentecostalism that it did not have a strong biblical emphasis, and so he emphasized the Bible, and his movement has remained Bible-oriented. Out of that movement arose the contemporary Christian music movement and the modern worship music phenomenon that has impacted the whole church to this day. The Jesus movement only received publicity for a very short time, but it impacted permanently the church and the way we think about church and the way we think about worship and the way we think about evangelism and the way we think about casual dress and the way we think about a lot of things in church.

That all changed because of the Jesus movement, and one other thing that changed is that many thousands of people got saved, not just to American Christianity according to the status quo, but they got saved into more of a primitive Christianity. The Book of Acts became the norm for people trying to define their Christian lives, and so there was much less of a materialism for a while among the converts there. Eventually some of these got caught up in it.

Some of the people did backslide, but to this day there are still many thousands of people who were saved in that movement who have come to follow Jesus in the same way that the primitive Christians did and have remained relatively unspoiled. There were other centers of the Jesus movement. In Hollywood there was a publication called the Hollywood Free Paper put out by Dwayne Peterson.

Arthur Blessed was the evangelist of Sunset Strip. Dwayne Peterson was sort of the leader of the Hollywood Jesus people. Larry Norman was the musician of that sector.

That was a Jesus movement separated from Orange County by about 40 miles, but culturally more separated. Orange County was more of a Bible-based, you know, hippie, flower child kind of a Jesus movement. In Hollywood it was more of a more hardcore street person, drug addict kind of type that was getting saved there.

It had a very different flavor than the Orange County Jesus movement. There was also a Jesus movement centered in Chicago. A guy named Glenn Kaiser and some others started a Christian community there called Jesus People USA.

They became well known outside of Chicago largely through the magazine they published called Cornerstone magazine and also through the rock band that Glenn Kaiser himself is the leader of called the Resurrection Band or Res Band it's called. This movement has remained probably more than any other of the more radical Jesus movement types has remained unchanged for almost 30 years. It's still pretty much based on rock and roll and a rock and roll culture.

Therefore it's quite different than some of the other sectors of the Jesus movement. The Jesus movement had charismatic factors in it, but the main thing about the Jesus movement was a movement to the youth that did not call them to the old-fashioned evangelistic ideas that Jesus saves and Jesus shaves, but rather that Jesus saves and you can shave if you want to, but you don't have to. You can grow your hair long too.

In Calvary Chapel for example, bare feet and jeans and t-shirts and so forth were very common to be worn and that was not the case in church, any church before that time. There's a story told by Chuck Smith of how he came one day to the meeting about a half hour before the meeting was to start and there was a sign on the door that said if you have bare feet and jeans don't come into the church. Chuck tore the sign off the door, went in and asked who put the sign up and one of his associate ministers said I put the sign up.

And he said why did you do that? And the guy said because their bare feet are dirty, they're soiling the carpet, the rivets on their Levi's are scratching the wooden pews and Chuck Smith said we'll tear out the carpets and the pews, but the Jesus people are staying. And it was that radical willingness to accept people as they were, as they were coming to Christ that caused I believe a great blessing to come on Calvary Chapel and the Jesus movement to grow as it did. And that was the last great revival I'm aware of in this century.

There may be another one yet to come before the century ends, but the Jesus movement was a great one. There have been other things that are sometimes advertised as revivals since then, but I have not myself been convinced that they are true revivals in the sense that some of the historical revivals are. I've run out of time, unfortunately, for our talk and perhaps that's not a bad note to end on, though I would like to have gone into a discussion of missions in the 20th century and as you can see in your notes, I've given you some information of how the missions movement progressed.