Lessons I’ve learned over five decades

As another birthday dawned, I suddenly thought, “I’m the same age as old people!”

It’s now over 50 years since I arrived at Elim Bible College in Capel, in September 1975. That was in a season when Pentecostals were emerging from the evangelical sidelines.

Jimmy and Carol Owens’ ‘Come Together’ albums and concerts were sweeping the nation and people were raising their hands in meetings! I spent my first EBC summer working at Capel which was the forerunner of the Dales and Wales Bible Weeks hosted by the House Church movement in the 70s and 80s, when the raised hands were controversially accompanied by dancing. The 80s also saw the rise of Elim’s first mega church in the meteoric rise of Kensington Temple under the leadership of Wynne Lewis.

The 90s started with major evangelistic initiatives including Elim’s JIM Challenge and Reinhard Bonnke’s Minus to Plus. It was also the decade when some very unusual manifestations were seen in the infectious atmosphere of a Toronto church, where the main teaching was on the Father’s heart, but which had most attention because the hand-raising, dancing congregants were now laughing and falling over.

As a third generation Elimite with burning desire for revival and a love for the presence of God, I was fully involved in all the above, even though some seemed hesitant to embrace anything new in their experience that they were not in control of. I noticed that in Acts 2 when the Spirit fell there were some very strange goings on: ground shaking, fire on top of heads, speaking in tongues with others hearing in different languages.

But when Peter stands up to explain, he first declares ‘who’ is being poured out. I quickly learned that we all had the same questions but remembering ‘who’ was doing this shaped our response.

In the new millennium we held river conferences in St Albans and then started over 20 years of River Camp where thousands of happily hungry souls added sleeping in tents to their CVs.

This article first appeared in Direction Magazine. For further details, please click here.