Some Personal Notes
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)
My
father was brought up on a farm called “Huntstile” in
England near the Somerset towns of Bridgewater and Taunton. My
mother who was of Irish descent, grew up in the Cape Province town
of Ashton, among the mountains near Montague.
I was born in Calcutta, India, in 1921. My father lived in India for eight years,
producing journals for the Indian government on the native states of India. His
occupation gave him many interesting contacts with Indian maharajahs, being entertained
by them and staying in their palaces, where he seems to have been treated as
a privileged guest. Somewhere I have a photograph of my mother seated in a howdah
hunting tiger from the back of an elephant (but I think she was a spectator rather
than a participant).
A few weeks after my birth my parents went to South Africa for a holiday
but on arrival in Durban my father found he was without a job. There had
been some skulduggery by his business associates in India which left him
high and dry.
After a while he became a partner in a firm in Durban of which he later
was sole proprietor. He manufactured disinfectants, soaps and arsenical
cattle dips.
He was an extremely hard-working man but he lacked the necessary acumen
for business. People took advantage of him and he was often cheated. Consequently
I grew up in a home almost perpetually under stress financially.
Emotionally, too, our home could be described as dysfunctional. Although
my father was Anglican and my mother Roman Catholic, religion played only
a small part in my upbringing.
Educationally as well I was neglected. I started my schooling late. At
the age of eight I was left by my parents at a farm school near Ripley
Halt in the mid-Illovo district in KwaZulu Natal. The school was run by
a family who became connected by marriage with my family. In the year I
spent there, I progressed as far as standard four and among other things
I learnt to ride a horse.
The elderly father of the family drummed into me Latin and tried to
teach me to play cricket. He was a Cambridge Blue who claimed he had
been able to do the 100 yards dash in one breath. I remember him as an
embittered old man. His marriage was unhappy. Though his own record was
honourable, scandal had brought his promising career to an end.
He would knuckle me in the chest, calling me a juggins, declaring the
while that the other boys had more cricket in their little fingers than
I had in my whole body, as though that were a crime. But he never praised
me for my ability on horseback.
After a year my parents brought me back home. They sent me to Clifton
Preparatory School, a private school in Durban, and then to Durban Preparatory
High School. From there I graduated to Durban High School, a government
school with a good tradition where I was reasonably happy.
There I admired one master in particular, “Bill” Payn. He
was a notable sportsman and folk hero in Durban and a manly role model
for the boys. I was secretly elated when Bill Payn wrote a commendation
for me using the words “a boxer of considerable promise”.
I cherished the accolade since my schoolboy dream was to excel in the
ring.
In the 1930s my parents turned more definitely to Christian things. They
began attending St Pauls Anglican Church in central Durban. The Rector
in those days was the Arch-deacon Heywood-Harris, a fine scholarly man
who had been decorated for bravery as a chaplain in the First World War.
The Arch-deacon evidently recognised my father’s spiritual need.
Craftily, he asked my father to represent him at a meeting of the Oxford
Group which he said he was unable to attend. Of course my father went,
greatly flattered at the honour. He was not the only person I knew who
began their spiritual journey by attending meetings of the Oxford Group,
a movement started in England by a man called Frank Buckman which later
became known as “Moral Re-armament”.
Thereafter my parents became quite involved in “the group” as
they called it. From that time on I met a retinue of strange characters
who were invited home with us after church for Sunday dinner. Some were
colourful indeed. All had spiritual problems which they sought to solve
by attending Oxford Group meetings.
The Oxford Group was great on open confession of sins. Most confessions
were fairly ordinary; some were quite lurid. I decided that was not for
me. The prospect of my making an open confession of my sins before a
crowd of people was appalling.
In the same period my parents became interested in the “British
Israel Message”, which held that the Anglo-Saxon races were the
ten lost tribes of Israel, and that the Jews as we today know them are
not Israelites at all. The teaching is fanciful, anti-Semitic, and racialistic.
They made bizarre predictions, some based on measurements taken from
the Great Pyramid at Giza. As a boy of 13 or 14 I took their prophecies
very seriously. When they declared that Jesus Christ would return to
judge the world on the 16th of December 1936 I was not merely impressed.
I was deeply troubled. There began in me then a desperate anxiety to
be good. I began to pray “Oh God, make me good before Jesus comes
to judge the world!”
I know now that He did answer that prayer, not by making me good (for
none is good but God) but by showing me that Jesus died on the cross
to save sinners and that he actually loved me, a lost and lonely boy.
December the 16th came and went uneventfully, but by that time I was
no longer terrified by the prospect of His return.
In those days, our family knew nothing about the Assemblies of God or
any other Pentecostal church. I had, indeed, seen a large building bearing
the name “Full Gospel Tabernacle”, but I thought nothing
of it. All it did for me was to provoke an argument with my Latin master
at school when he said the Latin noun ‘tabernaculum’ meant ‘tent’.
I was convinced it must mean ‘church’, for I had seen what
was clearly some kind of church and it bore the name ‘tabernacle’.
Thus ‘tabernaculum’ obviously must mean ‘church’.
So did I reason in my juvenile ignorance.
I think there was some small degree of logic in my reasoning. I merely
was ignorant of all the facts. But my ideas on some other religious matters
were really beclouded. I knew there were boys in my class at school who
were not Anglicans as I was. There were Methodists, even a Dutch Reformed
boy (but he was Afrikaans and the Pentecostals, I felt keenly the irony
of being patronised by people like Methodists and Baptists.
All my life I have had a temperamental affinity with an Anglican milieu,
and on a purely natural level, even with the soulish worship one can find
in an Anglican church, the pomp and the resounding music. But matters of
doctrine and liturgy forbid that I should ever return to the Anglican fold.
Yet there have been heroes in Anglicanism. What of Archbishop Clayton
who wrote a letter of defiance to Dr Verwoerd when the latter, as Minister
of Native Affairs, wanted to prohibit blacks from attending worship in
any white congregation? The letter was found signed on Bishop Clayton’s
desk with the Bishop himself lying prone and dead on his study carpet.
He had suffered a fatal heart attack in writing the letter.
And of course Archbishop Bill Burnett led a charismatic revival in the
Anglican Church. Numbers of clergy and even bishops jumped onto the charismatic
bandwagon in his day, but once he was off the scene, they (but not all)
relegated the charismatic blessing to but one of several spiritualities.
Nor can one forget the saintly Bishop of Zululand, the late Alphaeus Zulu,
now gone to be with the Lord.
I remember being in St Pauls Church in those early days, drinking in the
splendid images of the four beasts of the Revelation brilliantly emblazoned
on the chancel walls. I felt compelled to veneration by the very physical
vibrations of the church organ pealing forth thunderously. If such remembrance
seems inconsistent for a Pentecostal minister, one can reflect that others,
greater than I, have been just as inconsistent. John Milton the Puritan
poet must have felt somewhat the same, for did he not write the majestic
lines about a church service
“ There let the pealing organ blow
To the full-voiced quire below”?
My father became a sidesman at St Pauls. A sidesman is one who passes
around the collection plate and counts the money.
Quite a storm blew up over the organ playing while he was there. The
organist might have been a bit deaf. Whatever the cause, his playing
was unduly
loud. He ignored all warnings to be more subdued, until one day the exasperated
Church Wardens told him to moderate or be fired. In response the next
Sunday he opened all the stops. The music was so loud nobody could hear
the choir
above it. The whole building vibrated with the
sound. Anything even slightly loose in the church rattled. The quivering
congregants trembled with outrage. The organist was fired forthwith.
My parents (and later I) first came into contact with Fred Mullan because
of their interest in British Israelism and the prophecies of the Bible.
Fred Mullan was giving lectures on prophetical subjects in the Sons of
England Hall in Durban. Week by week he distributed thousands of pamphlets
advertising his subject for the coming Sunday. Eventually the Municipal
police objected to the litter he was causing as people read his pamphlets
then threw them away. He had to desist, but by that time his meetings
were well launched. My parents attended the lectures.
I recall that one Monday morning my mother confided to me that (in her
words) my sister Nancy had “given her heart to the Lord”.
The shock of this information froze my very innards. I pictured Nancy
about
to become a nun and retire to a convent, there to live as a prisoner
for the rest of her life.
My parents then took me to Mr Mullan’s meeting which I enjoyed
very much. The preaching was dramatic. A young man called Royce Kincaid
sang
in a magnificent baritone voice. Week by week I attended, hoping to hear
him sing again. Royce Kincaid later became a celebrated singer in Durban.
He also prospered in business and became mayor of the city.
When Mr Mullan preached he ended with what was termed an ‘altar call’.
Everyone had to bow in prayer with their eyes tightly shut. Then he called
for those who wished to be saved to raise their hands. I was too shy to
raise my hand, but my mother, who doubtless thought I needed a spiritual
transformation, nudged me in the ribs. I raised my hand. But things did
not end there! I heard like a sentence of death Fred Mullan saying, “Will
the young man who raised his hand please step out to the front?” A
memory of the Oxford Group and their public confession of sins engulfed
me. But there was nothing I could do. I had raised my hand and could
not now retract.
Weak at the knees, I was led into an enquiry room. Royce Kincaid happened
just then to walk past me through the room. He flashed me a reassuring
smile and said, “Hello John!” Then Fred Mullan knelt down
with me. He read me some verses from the Bible and made me pray.
Hesitant as I was, in the depths of my heart I had a longing to go the
right way. I count that night as the time when I decided to become a
real Christian and was born again. It took about two months for me to
come out boldly for Christ, but that was the start of it.
At first I resolved to say nothing to my school mates about my experience,
but they noticed a change in me. They became more and more mystified.
I had the reputation of being a very naughty boy, but now I had changed.
They pestered me to know what had happened. At length I promised one
day to tell them when the school bell rang for tea break. At tea time
they clustered about me expectantly. I drew in my breath like a swimmer
about to plunge into icy water. I said, “I have been converted.
I have become a Christian!”
Dumb-struck they stared at me and responded, “But we didn’t
know you were a Jew!” So after all the tension my declaration fell
flat. But at least I had come out into the open as a born again Christian.
I had nailed my banner to the mast.
Though my parents were the ones who had unwittingly introduced me to
the Gospel, they were mightily displeased when they saw how seriously
I was taking the matter, especially when I left the Anglican Church to
join an obscure group of Pentecostal Christians who met somewhere in
a little hall. As a boy of 14 going on for 15, I had a taste of persecution
from my family who strove with me for hours to moderate my Christian
commitment.