The Fairview Assembly

Foreword by MICHAEL CASSIDY

Profile by Dr CUTHBERT CHIDOORI

JOHN BOND by Peter Watt

Prologue

Some Personal Notes

My First General Conference of the Assemblies of God

H. C. Phillips

The Congress on Mission and Evangelism held in Durban

W F P Burton and some Congo Missionaries

Nicholas Bekinkosi Hepworth Bhengu
– His Youthful Dreams
– His Preaching

- Bhengu and Education
- Bhengu and Money
- Miraculous Experiences
- Spiritual Happenings
- The Sanctifying Spirit of God
– His Departure

- Mylet Bhengu

Bhengu’s “Isinthunzi”
- Government and Politics
– Some Faults, Virtues and the Burden of His Heart

President Lucas Mangope of Bophuthatswana

Early Days in Durban

The Glad Tidings Assembly

William Frederick Mullan
The Fairview Assembly
Fred Mullan and the Gifts of the Spirit
A Miracle and a Vision
The Revival in Norwood
James E Mullan

Paul O Lange
William Branham in Durban
Oral Roberts in South Africa

Billy Graham in Salisbury and Durban
The American Missionaries from Springfield, Missouri
C. Austin Chawner and the Portuguese Work
August Kast and the Mount Tabor Mission Station

John and Yvonne Stegman

Colin La Foy and the Coloured Leadership
The Work in Zimbabwe
Mauritius and Reunion Island

Special Answers to Prayer – 1
Special Answers to Prayer – 2

A Beautiful Square with Good Vibes
Prayer and the Hippie Revival
The Young Turks
Tensions within the Group
The Split of 1981 – Part One
The Split of 1981 – Part Two

The Beginnings of the Faith Movement in South Africa

The Statement of September 1989
The Charismatic Renewal

The Start of the Pentecostal Revival World Wide and The Swedish Pentecostal Assemblies

Letting Go of the Reins

Epilogue
APPENDIX 1 : How to be Filled with the Holy Spirit

APPENDIX 2 : The National Church by Nicholas Bhengu

APPENDIX 3 : Article from the Argus 5/02/1981

APPENDIX 4 : Pointers to the future of the Assemblies of God in the New South Africa (10/06/94)

When Fred Mullan moved from Durban to Johannesburg, he started meetings in Malvern, a suburb east of Jeppe. The fledgling assembly had to move several times from hall to hall until Fred Mullan bought a property in Fairview and built a church there. At first the new church could only accommodate 200 people but he planned the structure so that it could easily be doubled. Its final size could accommodate some 450 souls.

Prior to moving into the Fairview Church, the assembly had an evangelistic campaign. The speaker was a Canadian missionary named Fred Clark. Marvellous things happened. Remarkable healings occurred in answer to prayer. Although Fred Clark was the speaker, he was at pains to declare that it was Fred Mullan’s ministry in prayer, not his own, that brought about these healings.
Indeed, in the years that I knew Fred Mullan, I came to look on him as having a vibrant evangelistic ministry and a clear gift of healing.
One remarkable healing concerned a young boy who had been crippled by polio. When God restored his legs perfectly, about 12 members of his wider family circle were saved and became staunch members of the church.
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The Fairview Assembly grew under Fred Mullan’s ministry. It became the centre for wider gatherings. Every Easter the Fairview Assembly hosted a convention which was attended by Christians from far and wide. The entire missionary body of the Assemblies of God would attend, some from as far afield as the Eastern Transvaal and Mozambique. Speakers were selected from those attending. The ministry was rich, the worship spontaneous and anointed. It generated in me a lasting hunger for reality in spiritual matters and a discontentment with the shallow manifestations that often pass for Pentecostal worship nowadays.
Fred Mullan himself grew in personal influence in the Johannesburg scene. He was well-known and widely respected. When famous evangelists like Oral Roberts, William Branham and Betty Baxter came to South Africa, he was always on the organising committee and played a prominent role in arranging meetings for them. One could say that he was not only a pillar in the Assemblies of God, but in the wider Pentecostal church as well.
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I consider it a tragedy for the Assemblies of God that the two Mullan brothers were not able to co-operate more actively in leading the Assemblies in the pioneering days. Had they done so, the result would have been a well-nigh invincible stability in the overall work. Divisions which resulted in later splits might have been avoided.
As it was however, Fred and Jim differed radically on a number of doctrinal points as well as on their respective philosophies of church planting and church government. The General Executive made it a practice to downplay disputes which could be viewed as differences of opinion open to varied interpretations; matters like the long-standing contention on “eternal security”. In this respect, Fred might have ranked as a Calvinist; Jim as more of an Arminian. In other words, Fred taught that one, once saved was always saved, even if one backslid. Jim taught that a believer could apostasise and go to hell as a backslider.
Fred was amillennial in his teaching on eschatology. In other words, he did not expect a thousand of years of peace before the final act of Christ’s coming. Jim Mullan expected a thousand years of peace on earth. But both brothers believed unwaveringly that Jesus would come in physical presence. What a pity that they did not leave it at that and agree to differ. Many people felt it was foolish to get heated over an academic question that would only be resolved once the Day came.
Of a more down to earth significance was their dispute over church planting, or the way to found new churches.
Jim Mullan was driven by the view that he was called to start assemblies far and wide wherever there was the slightest possibility of planting a church. He looked after the new congregations by organising a team of co-workers to minister to them and to itinerate amongst them, staying for about two years in any one assembly.
Fred, on the other hand, favoured the model so successfully exemplified in Sweden by the great Lewi Pethrus, founder of the Pentecostal Churches in Sweden. Pethrus built up a mega-church of six thousand in Stockholm, a huge congregation for those days. He did not favour a proliferation of smaller churches in any one city.
Fred Mullan wanted the Fairview Assembly to be a similar mother church in Johannesburg, with any other churches revolving about Fairview as part of the same system.
His vision made him defensive of the whole territory on the Rand. Far from welcoming any effort to pioneer new congregations on the Rand, he opposed such activities as an intrusion. Not surprisingly, fierce contentions resulted in several places.
Probably Fred Mullan failed to grasp that his position and that of Lewi Pethrus were very different. When Pethrus started in Sweden in 1910 there were no other competing Pentecostal churches there. Thirty years later in Johannesburg Fred Mullan had many competing elements to cope with. Even in the Assemblies of God, there were a number of heterogeneous groups forming. Lewi Pethrus was a powerful leader who started clean before other groups were able to form. Fred Mullan came later into a dynamic and heterogeneous situation. He lacked the ability to regulate developments as he wished to do.
The differences between the Mullan brothers spilt over into the Assemblies that inevitably formed around them as dynamic leaders. Bad blood resulted.
As the years passed and the Assemblies of God grew, overseas missionaries, (particularly those from America) lent their voices to the contention. Nicholas Bhengu and his black assemblies also became targeted. Fred Mullan’s sympathies were with the missionaries and against his brother.
But let this be said: Whatever his sympathies were, Fred Mullan was always godly in his dealings. He never used his position as General Chairman of the Assemblies of God in any unfair way to the detriment of Jim Mullan and his group of assemblies. The same can be said of his dealings with Nicholas Bhengu’s black work.
It is a pity and more than a pity that these outstanding blood brothers were not able to accommodate to each others’ foibles and even to their weaknesses and to work more closely together.
With hindsight one has to say that in the main part, the assemblies led by Jim Mullan and his successors prospered in spite of all opposition. The later history of the Fairview connection is sadly different.