My First General Conference of The Assemblies Of God

Foreword by MICHAEL CASSIDY

Profile by Dr CUTHBERT CHIDOORI

JOHN BOND by Peter Watt

Prologue

I attended my first General Conference of the Assemblies of God in October 1945 at Nelspruit in the North Eastern Transvaal. The meetings were held in the little mission church of the Emmanuel Mission. Mr H C Phillips was the missionary who had built it and who lived in an unpretentious house adjoining the church. I was 24 years old, filled with romantic notions about missionaries as being Christians made in the heroic mould; pioneers who had sacrificed all to evangelise the heathen.

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)

Standing - Louis Potgieter, Philip Molefe, Nicholas Bhengu, Alfred Gumede, Johannes Nuku, Luke Mjaji,H.C. Philips,
Seated - W.F. Creamer, Jack Skinner, Fred Burke, Edgar Pettenger, Austin Chawner, James Mullan, August Kast,
In Front - W.F. Mullan.

It was a thrill to be among them and secretly to hero-worship them. It was an even greater thrill to be among the African Christians at the conference. There were not a great many of these. Not even a hundred, I suppose who gathered in those early days. But among them were Nicholas Bhengu, Gideon Buthelezi and Alfred Gumede, all outstanding men in their way.
Bhengu of course, became a world-renowned Christian figure who played a major role in shaping the Assemblies of God, and indeed, in shaping my own life and ministry too. He must have been about 35 years old at that time, just beginning his outstanding ministry. Buthelezi was a very positive, very dogmatic man who loved to argue, but he was a righteous man of high calibre; a gifted teacher. Alas, his dogmatism spoiled his ministry and isolated him from his brethren. He later fell out with Nicholas Bhengu and even obstructed the revivalistic efforts of Bhengu’s tent crusades in Natal, where Buthelezi had his base. When he died, comparatively young, it removed an obstacle from Bhengu’s path. During the middle 1940s when I ministered in Durban, I spent a lot of time with Gideon Buthelezi. He loved to teach and for hours at a time I sat at his feet, so to speak, absorbing his considerable Bible knowledge. It is tragic that a personality defect in this basically good and Godly man prevented him exercising his teaching gift from a wider platform.
Alfred Gumede, too, was a great teacher and a very anointed preacher. He was a dapper, fiery little man who never suffered fools gladly. After I was elected onto the General Executive in 1959, it was an education for me to see Brother Gumede and Brother Bhengu in action there. Those were the days of thorny problems and inordinately lengthy executive sessions. On a number of occasions one endured marathon debates on some or other issue, with the white members always labouring to bring about a solution and the blacks maintaining an enigmatic silence. Then, just when Brother Fred Mullan, the then chairman, was about to wind up the meeting with a solution, Brother Gumede would say in an apologetic tone, “Excuse me, Mr Chairman!”. And then the real debate would begin, the Africans coming out with their viewpoint, going on sometimes as late as two o’clock in the morning. I never understood, nor do I understand now, why the black leaders would allow the whites to talk themselves to exhaustion before themselves entering into the debate, especially since the problems almost invariably concerned the black work. But it happened that way. I fancy it was a deliberate strategy they employed, for reasons I still cannot fathom. Perhaps the answer lies somewhere within the workings of the African mind, which has always been a factor in the affairs of the Assemblies of God.
At one stage, Gumede’s preaching was a feature of our General Conferences. I have been spellbound as he expounded the Word in his genteel, even affected manner, until the Holy Spirit would come down on the whole conference in an uproar of ejaculations and tears. Gumede himself would stand at the rostrum, tears streaming down his cheeks, weeping openly. There would be marvellous prophecies and tongues with interpretation flowing from the conference floor. Then, after about twenty minutes when things calmed down, Gumede would mop his face with his handkerchief and say in a lachrymose tone, “Well, let us continue.” And he would continue perhaps for another hour.
Alfred Gumede was not always so gentle or inspiring. He could in certain circumstances be quite sharp. I think it was he who was interpreting into English at one conference for a rather bombastic preacher whose sermon had in it more physical energy than spiritual substance. Eventually Gumede stopped interpreting while the preacher fulminated on. At length one of the missionaries said, “Hey, interpret for us. What’s he saying?” Gumede expostulated, “He’s saying nothing Sir! Absolutely nothing!” So much hot air was more than Alfred Gumede could put up with. After all, one of his pet subjects as a Bible tutor was homiletics and rightly dividing the Word of Truth.
~
The white ministers of the Assemblies of God have had to take many instances of sharpness from their black confreres. The first such instance I recall actually happened at that Nelspruit conference in 1945. There were not many white missionaries in the Assemblies of God in those days and almost none from South Africa. Most were expatriates, far from home, labouring in trying circumstances. Perhaps some were homesick. In any event, somebody suggested having a meeting for whites only in Mr and Mrs Phillips’ lounge, while the Africans had their meeting in the church. Old Daddy Chawner (Austin Chawner’s father) spoke. He was in his eighties, a mellow, richly anointed old brother, who moved one to tears as he spoke of “Father” and his relationship with “Father”. The meeting, indeed was richly blessed but it had repercussions. Soon the African leaders asked to meet with the missionaries. They said, in effect, “Tell us now, before we go any further, is this going to be a segregated conference like the other Pentecostal churches, or is it not? We want your answer now.” Of course they were right! They understood the issues as the whites had failed to do, but it was a shock for the white missionaries. To their credit, the missionaries accepted the challenge which was in fact a severe rebuke. They resolved never again to have segregated meetings at the Assemblies of God conferences. That event in 1945 set a seal on our church. It was decisive in making the Assemblies of God what it became through the ensuing years. It set the tone for a definite equality of black and white leadership in the affairs of the whole movement. The official relationship between black and white would never afterwards be that of the white missionary and his black evangelist. Blacks and whites were officially equals. The presence in our ranks of a highly gifted man like Nicholas Bhengu kept that perspective true through the years.
In actual effect, perhaps the black influence has been more than equal with the white in the Assemblies of God; it became dominant. So much so that within ten or fifteen years of that Nelspruit conference, serious tensions developed with the American missionaries who worked under the banner of the Assemblies of God in South Africa, leading to their splitting away and forming their own movement in 1964. I think it also was a major factor in the split we suffered in 1981. The mindset in many Pentecostal South Africans, and evidently in the American Assemblies of God, could not relate to the stance of our movement which one could say was an attitude later articulated by people like Bishop Tutu and Steve Biko as “Black Consciousness”. Before these men ever became vocal in the political sphere, Nicholas Bhengu was telling his African converts, “God loves the African as much as the white man. The black man can do things for God by himself; He does not need a white man to do things for him. We want the white brothers’ ministry; but we don’t need his administration and direction; we have our own leaders”.