William Seymour: Azusa Street Revivalist

The Azusa Street Revival of 1906 in Los Angeles is widely regarded as the key event that launched the twentieth-century Pentecostal and charismatic movements. In itself, however, it is just another in a series of revivals and "outpourings" that had begun in the late nineteenth century. 

What is profoundly different in the case of Azusa Street is publicity. Indeed, it could be argued that this is a revival spurred largely by religious journalism — most notably the widely distributed stories of journalist Frank Bartleman. His accounts of miracles and transformed lives distributed to religious magazines throughout the country and around the world prompt pilgrims to visit and seek the same experiences. Ministers among the crowds return home with Pentecostal enthusiasm and ignited revivals in their own congregations. But Azusa Street remains the "mother" of all Pentecostal revivals, thanks to Bartleman.

God's Word Will Transform Your Life

by Rick Warren

“If you abide in My word, you are My disciples indeed. And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” (John 8:31b-32 NKJV)

Nothing can change the lives of people like the Bible. I’ve seen alcoholics and addicts get their lives sober and clean because they started reading the Bible. I’ve seen God’s Word change self-centered, narcissistic men who abuse and misuse women into godly husbands, wonderful dads, and upstanding citizens in the community.

Media Bias Against Israel

GOOD MORNING!

Did you ever suspect that the media may be biased against Israel? However, did you think that perhaps you're over-reacting because just like everything looks like a nail to a carpenter, everything looks like anti-Semitism to a Jew? To point, the classic story of the stutterer who wasn't hired as an announcer at a radio station because "th-ey-ey are are are anti-se-se-meh-tic!"

For example, do you remember the NY Times photo of the Israeli soldier, club high in the air, with a bleeding young man at his feet? The caption read, "An Israeli policeman and a Palestinian on the Temple Mount." They only made 3 mistakes in the caption: 1) It was an Israeli soldier. 2) It was a Jewish young man who was brutally beaten and barely escaped with his life from an Arab lynch mob. 3) It wasn't on the Temple Mount (there was a gas station sign behind the soldier -- and the one thing that both Arabs and Jews ... and perhaps even the NY Times ... can agree upon is that there is not a gas station on the Temple Mount!

Mark Twain once said, "If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're misinformed." Is media bias against Israel just a matter of sloppy journalism -- or is something really going on?

Celebration and Suffering

There's something odd about seeing someone celebrate over a miracle. On several occasions, I've stumbled upon some people celebrating for whatever reason, and snickered, 'what's happened to them that's worth partying over?' That, of course, is just being grumpy; it seems to come easier with age. But there is a more serious kind of strange feeling over celebrating, a strange feeling that is more relevant to spiritual concerns. Lewis Smedes put the problem this way, when seeing the fuss that was made over miracle healings at his college :

"It was a feeling I could not shake -- not a scholar's argument, more like a mood or maybe an intuition, but in any case a stubborn, uneasy feeling about the fittingness, even the decency, of celebrating far and wide the miraculous healing of a relatively few ailments within a world endemically infected by enormous, intractable, unalleviated suffering. It felt to me like proclaiming that God is alive and well in the world because you survived an airplane crash in which everyone else perished. And proclaiming your personal joy to those who mourned their dead." (*Reformed Journal*, Feb 1989, p.14)

Smedes wasn't trying to be a spoil-sport or a party-pooper by bringing this up. He was trying to remind us that while there are some things to celebrate, our celebration is, at its most, only partial. Suffering intrudes on our joy. What kind of suffering? The kinds that we don't want to have.
loss of jobs
infertility
loss of a loved one
loss of one's ability to do things
poverty
injustice and oppression by governments, armies, economies, or social structures
racism and sexism
the effects of natural disasters
new or renewed illness.

Smedes went on to remind us of some things which we must remember, if not as we celebrate, at least after we do. (You may or may not agree with this, but Smedes sets up the basic context so well that it merits your full consideration.)

(1) Ministries of healing are not the main Christian answer to suffering. At their very best, they eliminate a particular suffering of a particular person. They do not remove all suffering from life, and there are still many others suffering the same suffering that was just healed. The healings are signs "that God is alive, that Christ is Lord, and that suffering is not the last word about human existence" (p.19). But let's not overstate their importance.

(2) Healing from within suffering is as wonderful as healing from suffering. God gives inner strength that compensates for loss, and gives the sufferer resourcefulness to live faithfully and effectively.

(3) The amazing amount of health in this broken world is a greater sign and wonder than an occasional healing from illness. We're so fragile, yet we live, and most of us most of the time live fairly healthfully. We celebrate the healings we get, but what about the healings which, by the grace of God, we don't need, the sufferings that aren't there?

(4) Pray for power encounters between Christ and the devil in the matrix of devilish political systems. As Smedes put it, "Evil empires! Or good empires that bunglers mismanage! Or run-of-the-mill empires that knaves make worse! .... Name your system, and the devil will be there." (p.20) : "I find it strange that governments and societies find it so easy to do things to make the poor poorer and to rob the disadvantaged of what little possibilities they might have. And the churches too often sit still for the creation of such suffering."

Then, Smedes asks for a two-fold change in our way of thinking and doing. The first shift, the same change that churches such as the Vineyard and the COGIC ask for, is to see the world as a battleground of spirits.  The second is a shift away from viewing goodness in life as an entitlement and toward living life as a servant and disciple of Christ. Smedes writes, "If I make the first shift, I am more open to the power of the Spirit to act in response to peoples' suffering. If I make the second shift, I am more open to the power of the Spirit to give me courage to will to suffer when suffering can be redemptive to those who suffer." (p.20) I think Smedes' final observation hits upon what I see as a sore spot with many of the churches that most boast about healings : all too many Christians "expect and celebrate God's triumph over our suffering while we show little readiness to suffer for the people whose suffering never gets healed." (p.21). He's right. Jesus' example is that of putting others first, not ourselves or those we think of as being like us. Jesus spoke endlessly about serving and being a servant, of being a neighbor to others like the Samaritan who cared, of loving others, and most importantly those we find hard to love, with the intensity and single-mindedness with which we love ourselves. Then, He died as a suffering servant, to clear our way to the Kingdom so that even death could not stop us.

"Some of us will not see pain as a gift; some will always accuse God of being unfair for allowing it. But, the fact is, pain and suffering are here among us, and we need to respond in some way. The response Jesus gave was to bear the burdens of those he touched. To live in the world as his body, his emotional incarnation, we must follow his example." Philip Yancey, *Where Is God When It Hurts?*, p.325 (Zondervan; Walker revised Large-print edit., 1996)

What does all this mean? One thing I think is clear : we rejoice too narrowly. We rejoice for our own gain, our own health. But there are examples that point to another way : the songs of the Mothers' Unions in South Africa; the almost constant spiritual singing of the 1950s-60s civil rights movement in the United States; the way that the Bethel New Life folks in Chicago celebrate each small victory for their community. This is rejoicing that is born of other peoples' suffering, taking the signs of relief from suffering as signs that God is mighty busy here on earth, doing a fuller kind of healing.

I suspect that Smedes' strict Calvinist upbringing might have predisposed him to distrust celebration. I think that those personal healings should not just be acknowledged, not just be warmly received, but there really should be flat-out rejoicing. Cut loose, revel in it, praise the Lord 'til you drop! It's the right instinct. Just so long as when we end the immediate rejoicing, we get down to our Christian duty to remember what context the healings take place in -- a hurting, crying, brutal, unhealed world, a world that Christ loved and died to heal. And we then stop and pray that God shows us how to be of service in Jesus' work of bring wholeness where there is suffering.


http://www.spirithome.com/suffering.html

Can the Heart and Blood-Pressure Pill Propranolol Cure Racism?

British researchers found that propranolol, which dials down adrenaline, significantly reduced ‘implicit racial bias,’ but the sample size of 36 people is far too tiny to study this central ethical issue. A century and a half after the birth of Sigmund Freud, our understanding of human behavior remains at the third-grade level. In one camp are the purists who insist we are as we are because of the long-term toxicity of a lifetime's worth of bumps and grinds delivered by parents and sibs and hostile aunts and mean-spirited teachers. We will call these experts the Freudians.

On the other side are the neurotransmitter and synapse people who see behavior as the simple sum of a million-and-one tiny chemical reactions occurring in our brain. For them, understanding people will fall easily into place as soon as we can construct the correct stoichiometric equation.

For the most part, each camp is content to stay in its bunker and bide its time; there they are surrounded by their own peeps who are ready to assure and coddle and encourage them. The great schism is respected, more or less; sure, an occasional brick is tossed by one into the other’s territory but both groups realize there is comfort in living as different sides of the same coin. Sort of like the American two-party political system.

Once in a while though, a radical Tea Party precept appears that so musses up the rules of engagement that even the most sedate pipe-sucking mandarin must respond. Such a perversion is upon us now in the form of a recent report that suggests a “chill” pill can curb racist attitudes.

Writing in the medical journal Psychopharmacology, British investigators found that a veteran heart and blood pressure pill, propranolol, which acts to lower our fight-or-flight response to anything by dialing down adrenaline production, reduced “implicit racial bias” significantly. They ran their study in 36 white 22-year-old volunteers and distinguished implicit associations from explicit racial prejudice. The implicit kind—seeing something that makes you uncomfortable and reacting with a quickened pulse—was the type “improved” while good, old-fashioned explicit racial prejudice was unchanged. In other words, the drug didn’t make you more tolerant, just less physiologically perturbed about the whole thing.

There is much here to upset a person—first is the voracious uptake of the story across countless media sites, new and old (including this piece). But in a post-Kardashian world (or at least a peri-Kardashian world), this is an old complaint. Stories fly left, right, and center regardless of merit or logic. And by consumer and supplier agreement, no fact, factoid, or truthiness is too small to register. After all, silliness is an equal-opportunity includer.

The drug didn’t make you more tolerant, just less bothered about the whole thing.

James Leynse / Corbis

What is genuinely troubling here is the collision between shrink-speak and something as volatile and important as racism. We watch as the central ethical issue of mankind is drawn and quartered into simpering distinctions—the implicit, which is distinct from the explicit, which is apparently distinct from cruel human attitude. We read the parched academic tone of an article addressing so emotional and shameful a topic, treating it as if the study subjects were rats in a maze moving toward a food pellet. And we are asked to entrust our understanding of the human soul to results gleaned from studying a handful of 22-year-old volunteers working a day or two to pick up a few bucks (actually 20 pounds—plus travel reimbursement).

The mismatch in scale is staggering. One could commend the investigators for their audacity, their willingness to use Stone Age weapons in their pursuit of knowledge—but this type of step forward is surely not new, as evidenced by the never-ending supply of self-help, self-knowledge, self-empowerment, self-journey bestsellers. These tomes too deploy fishy metrics and wild assumptions from tiny samples to solve the world’s problems—and make a better and stronger you!

One can really only hope that if the twin pincers of amateur speculation and academic inquiry are going to be applied to the pursuit large truth, the purveyors will pause long enough to consider just what they have gotten themselves into. After all, the old-time Freudians and the veteran synapsers acknowledge what they are up against—a near-blind, inch-by-inch scrutiny of tiny scraps of evidence in hopes of finding the tiniest glimpse at something true.

In contrast, introducing the heart of darkness into the hit-and-run Kardashian news cycle (“chill pill curbs racism”) does a disservice not just to the long-suffering scientific community but to the marvelous complexities of the human being. Perhaps the investigators themselves might be advised to take the same chill pill until a more suitable topic presents itself. 

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Kent Sepkowitz is an infectious-disease specialist in New York City. He has contributed to The New York Times, Slate, and, oh-so-briefly, O magazine. He also writes academic medical articles that are at times pretty tough sledding.

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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/03/13/can-the-heart-and-blood-pressure-pill-propranolol-cure-racism.html