Paul O Lange
Profile by Dr CUTHBERT CHIDOORI
My First General Conference of the Assemblies of God
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
Bhengu’s “Isinthunzi”
- Government and Politics
– Some Faults, Virtues and the Burden
of His Heart
President Lucas Mangope of Bophuthatswana
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
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
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)
I first met Paul Lange in the home of James and Mary Mullan in Walmer, Port Elizabeth. It must have been in about 1945 when I spent a short holiday with the Mullans. A young lady called Constance Iken was staying with the Mullans for a short while as her parents were away from home for a few weeks. Paul Lange was courting Connie.
The night I met Paul, he and Connie were in the Mullans’ lounge
and just about the whole Mullan family were there too. I found the company
quite exhilarating. The Mullans were all good companions. Probably Paul
would not have agreed. As an Afrikaner with a Dutch Reformed Church background
(although he was very Anglicised and people even called his father ‘the
mad Englishman’), he might have wished to be with Connie in some
private place with an “opsit kers” burning. If that were so,
he didn’t show it but chatted away quite sociably, no doubt waiting
for the Mullans’ bed-time when the company would disperse, and leave
him alone with Connie. But that was not to be. Jim Mullan was in ‘loco
parentis’ and keeping his eye on Connie. As the clock struck ten,
he lurched out of his easy chair and said, “Well, Paul, say a wee
prayer for us before you go.”
I must say it took me by surprise. And Paul was astonished. One hears the saying, “His
jaw dropped”. Paul’s jaw did drop. He looked blank, and then he prayed.
What or how he prayed I am sure he never knew.
Paul
lange
In later years I got to know
that Jim Mullan’s action was typical
of him. Both he and Mary Mullan were regulated by the clock, even in church.
No late starting or ending for them. If there was any undue laxity, Jim’s
stentorian, unmusical voice would honk out a chorus to get things moving.
All that happened more than five decades ago. In the years that followed,
I found that Paul and I were destined to be closely involved with each
other in the ministry of the Assemblies of God. My wife, Enid, and I and
Paul and Connie often stayed in each others’ homes and we became
good friends.
On three occasions I have taken over the ministry from Paul as he moved
from one congregation to another. It was always comforting to do so, for
Paul laid a good foundation in an assembly and there were seldom any vexing
problems left behind.
As I write now, I am preparing to travel to East London where Paul is about
to be buried. He died of cancer on April the 10th 1999 at the age of 84.
A faithful soldier of Christ has had his home-call and passes on to his
rest. His passing seems to signal the end of an era. One expects that a
number of ministers will gather in East London to honour someone who played
a significant part in pioneering the Assemblies of God.
Paul lived his life in a flood-tide of activity, but essentially he was
by nature aloof, never truly a people’s person. As a child he was
lonely, longing for affection. His own mother died when he was young and
Neville Lange remarried. Apparently Paul felt that his stepmother (who
was an exceedingly fine woman, may I say) never regarded him as fully part
of her family. He felt excluded. One day as a child of seven or eight,
he was sitting at his desk at school, miserable and lonely. His teacher
noticed him and put her arms about him to comfort him. Her kind act opened
a flood-gate of weeping and bawling in the small boy which was too much
for the teacher. She shoved him away from her saying, “Oh, shush!” The
wound of that memory stayed with him all his life.
God had his hand on the lonely child. Paul remembers as a child of about
five sitting up in bed weeping because he knew he was a sinner. A few years
later he was walking home from school, meditating on lessons he had heard
in Sunday school. He spoke aloud to himself, asking “Why did Jesus
have to die on the cross?” The reply came in an audible voice, “Jesus
died on the cross for your sins.” “Oh” said Paul quite
casually, “Is that why He died?”
There was another occasion when Paul heard the audible voice of God. It
was later in his life when he was treasurer for James Mullan’s group
of assemblies. He was deeply burdened by the responsibility he felt to
manage the finances faithfully. That particular month he feared there would
be no money to meet expenses. As he was in prayer about this, he saw a
vision of a few crumbs of bread, and then a full loaf. A voice said to
him audibly, “Have I ever failed you yet?”
Throughout his life Paul was concerned about money. Even after he ceased
to be treasurer, he used to enquire into the finances of various assemblies
and suggest budgets to the ministers. Sometimes his advice earned him a
flea in the ear, proving the adage that “it is safer to take counsel
than to give it”. This grew especially true as the years passed and
increasingly he lost touch with developments in assembly life. He did not
adjust his thinking to changes that crept up on us as the 20th century
ran out. It is not easy to take counsel. But if counsel is ignored, preaching
becomes irrelevant. To a large extent, Paul lost touch.
No doubt his interest in money management stemmed from the years he spent
in banking. Like his father Neville, he became a teller in the bank. His
early ambition was to become the general manager of the Standard Bank.
Had he stayed a bank clerk, perhaps he would have made it, by dint of sheer
application and hard work. Paul was a plodder and any aim once conceived
became his total preoccupation. He would become obsessed by his fantasies.
As it was, his obsession changed. God placed on his heart a burden for
the ministry. His steps into the ministry were gradual. He met Jim Mullan
and fell under the spell of Jim’s considerable teaching gift. It
was not long before Paul was filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke in tongues.
He became an elder in the Port Elizabeth Assembly of God which Jim Mullan
was then pioneering.
Once Jim Mullan moved on from Port Elizabeth to East London, Paul continued,
with several others, to care for the assembly as a team of elders. The
assembly was wonderfully blessed. That created an illusion that assemblies
would grow apace once started if they were put in order with elders. The
fact was that Paul was officially an elder, but in reality he had a divinely
given gift for ministry, and the assembly burgeoned under the effect of
his leadership.
I renewed my acquaintance with Paul and Connie when they left Port Elizabeth
to minister in Durban, my home assembly. I had laboured in Durban for six
years in very difficult circumstances. In spite of difficulties, I had
made a vow to the Lord that I would never leave to go elsewhere while there
were even six members in the assembly who wanted my ministry. Why I stipulated
the number six I don’t know. By a series of events which I recognized
were divinely ordained, no matter how painful they were, I had come to
realise that the whole core of the little assembly of 25 people wanted
a change of ministry. God in his goodness provided a lucrative secular
job for me as a health inspector, which I took while still retaining my
Assemblies of God ministerial credentials.
A man named Sonny Koch came to minister in the assembly. The assembly began
to grow under Sonny Koch’s ministry. It went on nicely for six months.
Then upheavals began. The very existence of the assembly became threatened.
All the while, I used to travel from Pietermaritzburg where I worked, to
worship in Durban at weekends. In the meantime I had married Enid.
The plight of the assembly grew desperate. Sonny Koch (who at least was
on friendly terms with me) and I prevailed on Jim Mullan to assume apostolic
oversight of the assembly.
Jim Mullan arranged for Paul Lange to replace Sonny Koch as minister in
Durban. In those days, Assemblies of God ministers struggled financially.
Coming from his comfortable situation as a bank teller, Paul was appalled
at the living conditions he inherited from Sonny and Joy Koch, a dingy
room in a third class hotel. It was traumatic.
I managed to get transferred from Pietermaritzburg to Pinetown near Durban,
and I threw my whole weight behind Paul Lange in the Durban assembly. Truly,
Paul’s ministry was like a breath of heaven to us after those years
of striving for our very existence. Certain memories live on from those
days.
For instance, there was one night when we all gathered in the Oddfellow’s
Hall for the weekly Bible study. We used to sit in a circle of about 30
people in those days, while Paul addressed us. That particular night we
did not have our Bible study. Paul called us to a preliminary time of prayer,
and the Lord visited us in a wonderful way. It was not noisy or turbulent,
but the presence of the Lord was awesome and ever so real. I have often
wished that I could see Jesus in a vision, but that gift has never been
given to me. Yet on that night, notwithstanding my longing to see the Lord,
I was actually afraid to open my eyes lest I should see Him, His presence
was so real. I have never forgotten the occasion. Theologians would describe
it as an experience of the ‘numinous’.
Another memory from that period lives with me. At that time my wife Enid
became pregnant with our first child, my daughter, Aldyth. Imagine my horror
when Enid became ill and was diagnosed as having a kidney stone. I knew
that this meant an operation which would kill the baby. However, God gave
Enid wonderful faith in a situation where she could so easily have panicked.
In accordance with the promise of James 5:14 - “Is any one of you
sick? He should call the elders of the church to pray over him and anoint
him with oil in the name of the Lord”, she called for the elders
of our little assembly to anoint her with oil and pray for her. Paul was
the minister. I was acting as one of the elders. God answered prayer. We
never did find out what happened to that kidney stone. It simply vanished.
The doctor seeing to Enid’s confinement was a professing atheist,
but he had nothing to say when Enid told him we had prayed. He was simply
baffled. My daughter is now a mother with teenage children herself, but
I sometimes gaze at her remembering that early crisis before her birth,
and I give thanks to God for her life.
In fact there is another miracle involving my daughter which in a way concerned
Paul Lange. When Aldyth was about five years old she developed a squint,
and had to wear glasses. Soon afterwards we were transferred from Durban
to Salisbury (now Harare) in Zimbabwe. A couple of years later when Aldyth
was seven, the Canadian evangelist, Lorne Fox had a series of healing meetings
in Salisbury which I had to arrange and in which our assembly took part.
Lorne Fox prayed over our little girl and her squint. There was no immediate
visible result, but the next morning while dressing to go to school, she
asked Enid, “Mummy, must I wear my glasses to school today?”
Enid was in a dilemma. She did not think Aldyth was indeed healed, but
she did not want to give voice to unbelief. She did what many people have
done in similar circumstances. She passed the buck. She said to Aldyth, “If
you believe Jesus has healed you, you needn’t; but if you don’t,
you must.” Aldyth went off to school without her glasses.
At school the teacher asked, “Aldyth, where are your glasses?” Simply
Aldyth replied, not with strict accuracy, I’m afraid, “We believe
the Lord Jesus has healed my eyes”. Neither Enid nor I really had
that child-like faith.
Within three days, Aldyth’s squint was entirely gone.
In her term’s end report, Aldyth’s teacher wrote, “This
child is too serious for her years.” But we rejoiced that Aldyth’s
faith had received a miracle of healing.
In 1963, we were transferred back to South Africa to Pretoria. Aldyth was
now several years older than when Lorne Fox had prayed for her. As a matter
of routine, a school nurse visited the Arcadia Primary School which both
Aldyth and Geoffrey my son then attended. She reported a defect in Aldyth’s
eyes. We were dismayed, especially when the school doctor examined Aldyth
and found the same defect. He referred her to an eye specialist.
Now that is where Paul Lange comes into the story. Somehow or other Paul
Lange happened to be in Pretoria at the time. We appealed to him to pray
for Aldyth. Before taking Aldyth to the eye specialist she received prayer
through Paul Lange.
I took her to the specialist, a youngish friendly man who invited me to
sit in his surgery with him while he examined Aldyth. I felt very tense,
especially when he started his examination. Placing his apparatus on her
face, he asked her,
“ Do you see that?”
“ No.”
“ What do you see now?”
“ Nothing.”
So it went on. I thought it was all so negative and my
heart became like lead. Would the child have to go back into glasses?
But the specialist
turned to me at length and said, “I give her 100 per cent.” I
was dumb-struck with relief. Paul’s prayer of faith had worked
with our faith and Aldyth’s healing of several years back had been
preserved.
Paul Lange was a blessing to us in the while he spent in Durban, but
in a very real sense we were also a blessing to him. Both Enid and I
had struggled
in vain for years to receive the baptism of the Holy Ghost with speaking
in tongues. Paul Lange had come to Durban with specific instructions
from Jim Mullan to pray me through to the baptism. In fact, Jim Mullan
had insisted
that I stand back from all preaching until such time as I had received
the blessing. This was in spite of my being a credentialled minister
with the Assemblies of God.
Just at this time a book fell into Enid’s hands. It was written by
a man called Stiles, and it taught how to be baptised with the Holy Ghost
without tarrying. Up to that time “tarrying” was the accepted
way Pentecostalists went about seeking the gift of the Holy Ghost.
Enid was so impressed with Stiles’s teaching that she gave a copy
of the book to Paul Lange. He studied it avidly. Then he put it into practice
by applying its principles to me. He would come to my lounge in Rapson
Road, Durban, where Enid and I were living. We would pray together for
hours seeking the infilling of the Holy Ghost. Paul would kneel beside
me with Stiles’s little book in one hand, peering at it short-sightedly,
and laying his other hand on me. He’d say, “Stiles says you
must do this. Now do it! Breathe! Don’t talk in English!”
This went on for quite a few weeks. I would often go numb and tingle
under the power of the Spirit. Eventually I did speak in tongues. One
could say
that I was the guinea pig and Stiles (or his book) was Paul’s tutor.
Paul had a talent for writing down a Bible study in very clear explicit
notes. He did this with Stiles’s teaching and applied it with good
success wherever he went throughout South Africa. I have decided to include
in the end of this book as an appendix, some notes on how to receive the
Holy Ghost Baptism setting out Paul’s teaching which he culled from
Stiles’ book. It could help someone who is seeking the baptism in
the Holy Ghost.
I must say that Paul developed great faith in ministering the Holy Ghost.
To the end of his life he exercised a ministry in this regard with energy
and compelling faith.
After Paul and Connie moved away from Durban, they settled for some time
in East London. The impact of Jim Mullan’s ministry still lived on
in East London even after he had left there. An atmosphere of revival existed
in the city, and also in the surrounding country districts. Thus Paul entered
a situation where he had an influence as far afield as Cala and Elliott
in the Eastern Cape mountains. He had a series of evangelistic meetings
in the East London Drill Hall which made a powerful impact. Numbers of
long-standing Assemblies of God members came to the Lord in those meetings.
God prospered the assembly. A church site was purchased at Belgravia
Crescent, and Paul led the way in building one of the first Assemblies
of God church
structures in South Africa. It stands today and houses a congregation
of several hundred people. Later he also built the church at Harfield
Road
in Cape Town.
Paul was probably the first minister to team up with James Mullan, serving
under his leadership in the Group. Perhaps this led him to suppose he
would be the natural successor to Jim Mullan when the latter passed from
active
ministry.
It was in about 1970 that Jim Mullan felt he had to retire. By that time,
a number of strong leaders had come onto the scene. Jim Mullan named
five men who in his judgement had potential for apostolic leadership.
They were
Paul Lange, Mike Attlee, Noel Scheepers, Reg Ben-Dickson and myself.
He called upon assemblies and ministers to make a free choice which of
these
nominees they wished to link up with. As it happened, only three assemblies
elected to take Paul Lange as apostolic leader.
Let it be said Paul Lange had outstanding gifts enabling him to build
up and teach a young assembly in formation, but he was not gifted for
overall
leadership in a movement. He lacked the theological grasp, the broad
vision, the personal interest in existing ministries and the appreciation
for brother
ministers which were necessary to fit him for national leadership. Moreover,
he lacked entirely any ability or desire for cross-cultural fellowship.
One has to suppose Paul was grieved and even stung by people passing
him by as they had done. In the event, he withdrew from even those three
assemblies
that chose to work with him. He embarked upon an itinerant ministry under
his own auspices.
To my mind, he made a mistake in doing so. At his height, Paul Lange
was second only to Jim Mullan in building up a new assembly from the
grass-roots.
As an itinerant, his ministry declined. He fell into a snare. He took
to repeating old sermons and never preparing new ones. He also suffered
from
a fantasy in believing he was destined to bring revival to South Africa
on a national scale. Blessed as his ministry was, it never matched those
heights.
While Connie was alive, she was able to keep his feet on the ground and
to curb his eccentricities at least to some extent. But when left to
himself, he had the sad experience of finding doors close on him. He
had increasingly
to find openings overseas, and in the end even these failed.