Amen. Thank you for replying rationally to an emotional issue in the body of Christ.
For with stammering lips and another tongue will he speak to this people. - Isaiah 28:11
If I may present my view on the seven churches...
Ephesus - Apostolic
Smyrna - Martyrs
Pergamos - Orthodox
Thyatira - Catholic
Sardis - Protestant
Philadelphia - Methodist / Pentecostal
Laodicea - More Charismatic independent
In which... The main difference in the Sardisean and the Philadelphian is in the 'emotionalism.' The Philadelphian cleaves to 'emotionalism' and the Sardisean avoids it. And it also seems that tongues is unique within the Philadelphian church.
Please note that this is not a put down. I like JV McGee, John MacArthur, Charles Stanley, Billy Graham, and Jerry Falwell. I enjoy going to the Thomas Road Baptist church and was brought up Baptist. I am also a supporter of the BBNRadio. So I consider myself fundamentalist.
It is simply best to stay away from the speaking of tongues if that is not where God called you. There are plenty of churches that don't teach it. Why worry about something that your church does not teach?
I was brought up in the Marine Corps and the Baptist church. I had thought that all Catholics were going to hell and that speaking of tongues was of the devil.
All that changed when I came here to farm-land here in south western Virginia. I started working with mom's kin and the people were very much joyful, happy, and alive. I started going to the Pentecostal church with them and then the Holy Spirit started speaking through me as well. Everything was warm, loving, just like episodes out of the Waltons.
I have come to learn that these type revivals all started with John Wesley. Wesley’s journal from Jan. 1, 1739: “About sixty of our brethren until three in the morning, the power of God came mightily on us, insomuch that many cried out for exceeding joy, and many fell to the ground.” John Wesley prayed, “Lord send us revival without its defects but if this is not possible, send revival, defects and all.”
Whitefield wrote of many falling to the ground, trembling exceedingly with strong convulsions. People fell down, cried out, trembled with convulsive twitchings. Sinners dropped down, shrieking, groaning, crying for mercy, convulsed, agonizing, fainting, falling down in distress or in raptures of joy. The noise was like a roar of Niagara. The vast sea of human beings as agitated by a storm. Seized with convulsive jerking all over. So even in the days of Whitefield and Wesley we had everything but the speaking in tongues.
Virginia come to develop its own unique brand of Methodism. To describe these services I must turn to George Clark Rankin who worked this areas Methodist circuit. Here is the url in which must be opened with IE...(
George Clark Rankin. The Story of My Life Or More Than a Half Century As I Have Lived It and Seen It Lived Written by Myself at My Own Suggestion and That of Many Others Who Have Known and Loved Me) ... And a few excerpts...
I had associated with me that year a young collegemate, Rev. W. B. Stradley. He was a bright, popular fellow, and we managed to give Wytheville regular Sunday preaching. Stradley became a great preacher and died a few years ago while pastor of Trinity Church, Atlanta, Georgia. We were true yokefellows and did a great work on that charge, held fine revivals and had large ingatherings.
The famous Cripple Creek Campground was on that work. They have kept up campmeetings there for more than a hundred years. It is still the great rallying point for the Methodists of all that section. I have never heard such singing and preaching and shouting anywhere else in my life. I met the Rev. John Boring there and heard him preach. He was a well-known preacher in the conference; original, peculiar, strikingly odd, but a great revival preacher.
Page 241 The rarest character I ever met in my life I met at that campmeeting in the person of Rev. Robert Sheffy, known as "Bob" Sheffy. He was recognized all over Southwest Virginia as the most eccentric preacher of that country. He was a local preacher; crude, illiterate, queer and the oddest specimen known among preachers. But he was saintly in his life, devout in his experience and a man of unbounded faith. He wandered hither and thither over that section attending meetings, holding revivals and living among the people. He was great in prayer, and Cripple Creek campground was not complete without "Bob" Sheffy. They wanted him there to pray and work in the altar.
He was wonderful with penitents. And he was great in following up the sermon with his exhortations and appeals. He would sometimes spend nearly the whole night in the straw with mourners; and now and then if the meeting lagged he would go out on the mountain and spend the entire night in prayer, and the next morning he would come rushing into the service with his face all aglow shouting at the top of his voice. And then the meeting always broke loose with a floodtide.
He could say the oddest things, hold the most unique interviews with God, break forth in the most unexpected spasms of praise, use the homeliest illustrations, do the funniest things and go through with the most grotesque performances of any man born of woman.
It was just "Bob" Sheffy, and nobody thought anything of what he did and said, except to let him have his own way and do exactly as he pleased. In anybody else it would not have been tolerated for a moment. In fact, he acted more like a crazy man than otherwise, but he was wonderful in a meeting. He would stir the people, crowd the mourner's bench with crying penitents and have genuine conversions by the score. I doubt if any man in all that conference has as many souls to his credit in the Lamb's Book of Life as old "Bob" Sheffy.
These revivals continued after 1900 in the form of the Pentecostal Holiness church, to which I belong. We still carry the old Cripple Creek camp meeting tradition of men praying on the left side of the church and the woman on the right. No one remember why. It is a Virginia thing that has been passed down since the mid-1700's.
I personally wish someone would revive these old Virginian ways but fear that these things are unique within their dispensation. I have posted the life of RS Sheffey here (
http://www.christianforums.com/t7630646/) in which the good people of Bob Jones have made a movie called "Sheffey.'
