My Adventures with God Ch 27. Problems at Bayles

Ch 27: Problems at Bayles.

The Bible study group which met each Tuesday night at Ross and Robyn's home was the core group of the Bayles fellowship. Problems started to develop.

Sue and I had been influenced by David Watson who was a leader of the Charismatic movement (but we were not card carrying members of that or any church faction). So I was not unduly alarmed at Bayles becoming more overtly Charismatic. I had even taken Ross and one of the Koo-wee-rup churchwardens up to Sydney to a pentecostal conference on church growth where Paul Yonggi Cho – then pastor of the world's largest church – was the main speaker.

Video players had just become popular and Ross got one so that they could play tapes of Christian speakers. Unfortunately the type of speaker utilising this new technology tended to be radical pentecostals and avaricious tele-evangelists. So Ross and some of the others began a gradual slide into un-Biblical forms of pentecostalism.

This took place very gradually. At first the tele-evangelists – although not my cup of tea because of their cavalier attitude to scripture – seemed harmless. Also I was crippled by Sue's catastrophic post-natal depression and my slide into a sympathetic depression.

One other factor I will mention because it is an important warning to young pastors.

Sue was not involved in Bayles. This is really important! Sue and I acted as a social unit in all our other ministries. New converts like Rosalie knew us as a couple, even though Rosalie and I worked closely together in teaching RE in the schools. And the bonds of friendship and loyalty were to us as a couple. When there was a crisis we had bonds of personal loyalty (strongest in the new converts) and denominational loyalty (strongest in the old parishioners). Loyalties that held even if all else failed. At Bayles when push came to shove I had nothing to fall back on !

True, in church at Lang Lang and Koo-wee-rup I was the priest and in that respect functioned on my own, but in every social interaction Sue was there. Sue had been a doctor in both Lang Lang and Koo-wee-rup and ran Sunday School in Lang Lang and the ladies Bible study in Koo-wee-rup in that sense on her own, but we were still socially interacting with all the people as a couple.

The Youth Bible study was something I was involved in but not Sue (that was a matter of sheer practicality!) Bayles Fellowship was something I was involved in but not Sue. So socially the people in these interacted with me but not Sue: they had no bond to us as a couple. Ross and I worked very closely together but Sue and Robyn did not. The young people of the Bible study, and the people of Bayles had developed their social interactions with Ross and Robyn as the ministry couple.

Back to the story: Unsound teaching started to trickle in. They became hooked on the pentecostal idea that the test of whether a person had the Holy Spirit was if they 'spoke in tongues'. Then came faith healing. I sfor instance one night Ross confessed his “weakness” to the group. He told how he had suffered a painful tooth abscess for three days – praying for God to miraculously heal it. Then the pain grew too much and his faith “failed” and he went to the dentist and had the tooth pulled.

Biblical teaching (which I had also seen borne out by experience) is that God can heal anything. God does still work miracles in our day. But God does not heal everything.

For a fuller discussion see http://lifeuniversegod.blogspot.com.au/2013/08/heresy-miracle-healing-for-all.html )

At Koo-wee-rup one of the churchwardens who was also a Bayles attender became more and more pentecostal. He demanded I cut the “Prayer of Humble Access” from the liturgy because it implied we were unworthy – we shouldn't be humble he said: we should be bold! We should not ask God what he wanted us to do: we should command God what we wanted him to do! (I go through this heresy in detail in my book Colostrum as an example of wrong use of scriptures. You can read the section in http://lifeuniversegod.blogspot.com.au/2013/05/3-things-every-christian-needs-pt-2.html .)

I remember one Sunday after church standing outside, Bible in hand actually showing him the verses that directly contradicted what he was saying. His reply was: “But you only have a small parish ministry, X (the source of this heresy) has a multi-million dollar TV ministry, so I must believe him rather than you.”

A great Reformation catch cry was “The meanest peasant with the Bible is greater than the greatest pope with out it” The Tele-evangelists had turned the clock back to pre-reformation error!

Truth is truth no matter who tells it.

One 13 year old girl who came to Bayles with her mother was using a “King James” translation of the Bible. She was barely literate in modern English! So the obsolescent language of the KJV would have been incomprehensible to her. Of course that is one reason it is favoured by a certain sort of tele-evangelist. Like the medieval church having the scriptures in Latin – it means that people are utterly dependant on the “priestly caste” to tell them what it means. Once again this was something the Reformation tried to remedy. Anyway, I tried to persuade Renee to try a modern English version. She looked at me as though I had spoken blasphemy and replied: “The King James is good enough for Kenneth Copeland (her favourite tele-evangelist) so its good enough for me!”

The crunch was that these little sheep were out of control and unprotected. Enticed by modern day equivalents of the “super apostles” that opposed St. Paul, they were deaf to God's voice through the scriptures and they were deaf to the voice of reason (and hopefully God) through me as His under shepherd. Then along came a real spiritual wolf.

Next week: Rebellion at Koo-wee-rup