A VISIT WITH OUR FIRST "CHARISMATIC"

 

I do not really know that he is the first among Churches of Christ to have been "baptized with the Holy Spirit" and to speak in tongues, but it may well be that he is, for his experience dates back to 1937 when he was a missionary in Brazil.

 When Ouida comes to my study door and announces that we have company, I never know what to expect, for as often as not they arrive unannounced. I often hear from would-be visitors who say they dropped by only to find us absent from home. We love company since we consider our brothers and sisters as part of the royal family, princes and princesses of heaven. They come from many states and even from foreign countries. We have recently had callers from Canada, England and India. This time the brother and his wife were from Brazil. But I was in for an eerie experience. It was unreal.

 "It is an elderly gentleman" is all the tip Ouida gave me as I left my typewriter and headed for the living room. Was I in for a surprise! It was Alexander Campbell sitting there! He smiled as only Uncle Alex can, and then stood to give me a hearty hand-shake. The mop of white hair, the massive head with receding chin, the angular nose and high cheek bones, the piercing eyes, tall and erect. It was unmistakable. I have studied a dozen photographs of the Bishop, along with my favorite that hangs in my study, and here he stood in flesh and blood. It was uncanny! How could this possibly be?

 He turned out to be Virgil Smith, who was both a student and teacher at Abilene back in the early years. It was while teaching at ACC that he became a premillennialist, which led him finally to our premill coterie of congregations in Louisville, where he studied with R. H. Boll. It was those churches that sent him to Brazil as a missionary, and it was there, famished as he was for meaning in his life, that he was baptized of the Spirit and received the gift of tongues. He has since served for 40 years in that fascinating land where people are receptive of the gospel. He told the churches back home of his new experiences, and they thought he should come home so they could talk it over. Some 15 preachers, all of the premill group, gathered in Louisville to hear his story, including E. L. Jorgenson and R. H. Boll.

 It must have been a beautiful demonstration of the love of Christ in men's hearts, for they listened to him sympathetically and without censure. They left the matter open, bidding him to return to Brazil and preach the gospel and to follow the light as he perceived it on these other things. The churches did not drop his support, but through the generosity of Dr. Horace Wood, a Dallas dentist who took weeks of his time to teach him the rudiments of dentistry, he was soon making his own living in the backwoods of Brazil by filling and pulling teeth.

 The situation on the mission field was such, and his convictions were such, that he decided he should join the Assembly of God church, which he did after a few more years. But he has kept in touch with the folk who bore and bred him, and here he was calling on me. On this furlough from Brazil he has moved among various denominations, including several Churches of Christ. While all the others invite him to speak and to pray and to tell of what God has done through his work, our folk ignore him, even when in the company of kin who are elders in the church. "They want to be brotherly," he kindly explains, "but they dare not," as if I didn't know. We of course are the losers when we shut out everyone who cannot or will not say the right shibboleth. I assured him that we had some churches who would treat him as a brother.

 But I had a problem in listening to all this in view of the likeness he bore to the Sage of Bethany. "Ouida, you know who he looks like?" She didn't until I told her, and then she agreed that the likeness was striking. But no one had ever told him before that he was the spittin' image of Alexander Campbell. I could never quite shake it, even after he was gone. I first thought maybe his visit was divine retribution, that the Lord wanted to shake me up good because of my levity in a recent essay in which I expressed satisfaction that I would not only get a new body in heaven but that I would also get to see Alexander Campbell!

 Apart from whom he favors, Virgil Smith loves the Lord, that's for sure, and I revelled in his visit. He told of those early years at ACC on the old campus, back when Webb Freeman, D. L. Cooper, and George Klingman were all on the faculty ‑ and all three were liberals! Freeman and Cooper both had doctorates from Southern Baptist Seminary and Klingman was the first Ph. D. that ACC ever had. All three of them got the ax, including the president, Jesse P. Sewell, because he would not condemn them. Klingman's heresy was that he would not declare instrumental music to be a sin, even though he chose to be non instrumental. Cooper and Freeman were both beautiful Christians and superb teachers, but they had to leave because they saw the church as much broader than the Texas brand of the Church of Christ.

 I knew Klingman's story but not that of Cooper and Freeman. I asked Virgil to tell me about Klingman as a man. "He was a cultured gentleman," he said, "a lively man, charming, witty, and a musician." And to have a Ph. D. back in the early 1930's was a rarity. Virgil considered Cooper, Freeman, and Klingman as a tremendous Bible faculty, but they had to be sacrificed since they believed there were Christians beside Church of Christ folk, which is what our folk believed almost without exception from the days of Barton W. Stone to the time of David Lipscomb. But the preachers ganged up on the ACC board and the doctors had to go. Surely the record makes it abundantly clear that our Church of Christ folk have been the most unprincipled and asinine educators in the entire history of education in the United States. And I would add that one could take the fired professors from our colleges and build an all‑time, all‑star faculty from them. We have that morbid talent of skimming off the cream and keeping the whey. And we don't seem to care who is hurt in the process. After all, the Christian atmosphere must be preserved!

 I told Alexander Campbell ‑ I mean, Virgil Smith ‑ that the "liberal" dimension in our history must be unique. I would that one of our graduate students would do a thesis on the "liberals" in Church of Christ history. ACC has always had them and still does, and they were among the early evangelists, such as T. B. Larimore. R. C. Bell of ACC is one of them that managed to survive. A researchist could seek to explain how the "liberal" persuasion has always been with us and why some have prevailed and others haven't. It is unique for a church, which presumably began as a fundamentalist, reactionary sect, to have such a consistent and continual representation of highly educated and responsible leaders, an august group, one would have to say, albeit they have come to be known as liberals. This is not the case, for instance, with the independent Christian Churches, for it takes a fine‑toothed comb to come up with a "liberal" among them. Part of the answer may be our emphasis on liberal education, which we've always wanted but have not been willing to pay the price for it. But more important, I think, is that all along much of our leadership has had the more open, freer approach, which means they have been more in line with the spirit our Movement had from the beginning, but they have allowed themselves' to be kicked around by a vituperative minority of reactionaries. In other words, from the outset the Churches of Christ had a substantial carryover of the more liberal spirit of the Stone‑Campbell movement and was never the completely reactionary, sectarian group as their break with the Disciples would indicate. After all, many never left the Disciples, but simply found themselves on "the right side" by virtue of circumstances.

 Well, I am toying with an essay on The Liberal Church of Christ and these are simply some of my first thoughts. We'll have to see what jells, if anything. For years I've had a sneaking suspicion that the majority in the Churches of Christ believe like I believe and would really support the positions set forth in this journal, if the winds were favorable. It is a leadership that fears the old myth that "it will lead us too far" that keeps much from happening, but that will not prevail much longer.

 By liberal I have no reference, of course, to the Bultmann‑Tillich kind of theological interpretation so common in Protestant circles, for we have almost no one who is liberal in that sense. I simply mean that most of our people believe, like I do, that we do not have all of God's people in the Churches of Christ, and, like old Dr. Klingman of ACC, they do not believe that instrumental music is necessarily a sin, and they would like, if no one would spank them for it, to fraternize with their religious neighbors and think of their Baptist friends as brothers.

 And they would like for the Virgil Smiths to be treated like brothers in our churches. Our people are not basically the narrow and bigoted sectarians that they appear to be. We are really better than we sound! We let the bruisers and howlers and browbeaters lead us around by the nose. We don't like to be called names, so we capitulate. But that is changing.

 Well, I encouraged Virgil, now well into his 70's, to tell me why and how he made the change, for he kept talking about the "new vision" that came into his life. By the way, I did encourage him to talk about it, while most "charismatics" can't talk about anything else. Down in Brazil he found himself without power and vitality. He had not learned how to pray and knew almost nothing about trusting in Jesus. The "new vision" came when he began to plummet the depths of God's grace. That, by the way, is the key to most "liberal" thinking among our folk. Whether it is Klingman or Larimore, or R. C. Bell or K. C. Moser, or Wes Reagan or Roy Osborne, to get more recent, it is a story of a man discovering the grace of God. So it was with Virgil in Brazil. He saw the grace of God, to use a scriptural phrase. His "charismatic" life has lasted for 40 years so far!

 Virgil says we Church of Christ folk do not really pray, do not even know how, just as he didn't. We are prayerless Christians, he kindly charges, and do not even begin to understand the power of prayer. He said his life was changed by reading R. A. Torrey's Power of Prayer. He also discovered the glory of praising God, which is part of seeing more deeply His grace.

 The missionary has not found the Assemblies of God perfect, to be sure, and he is convinced that no one group has a corner on sectarianism, but they have been good to him and have left him reasonably free. He is impressed with their mission program in Brazil, where they have a church in every village, town, and city, the most successful missionary effort of any denomination anywhere in the world, and yet even that represents only 4‑5% of the population of the country.

 Our brother lost his wife in that distant country many years ago, and now the woman at his side is a native Brazilian. She is of a quiet and gentle spirit, a credit to her country as well as to our Lord.

 There they were at our door, and just as soon they were gone. We had not seen them before and may never see them again in this world. But when they left something of ourselves went along with them. It was one more lesson in the meaning of brotherhood and but a foretaste of the fellowship of heaven, where there will be no more goodbyes. The way old Virgil talked to God in our behalf before he left was evidence that he had learned to pray, and I was glad.

 Our first "charismatic," but that really was neither here nor there. Nor whom he favored! He was a brother who had given his life to Jesus in a foreign field, and it had not been easy, and I loved him for it.

 Oh yes, the thing that impressed Ouida the most about Virgil Smith's visit is that he is spending his furlough in the States visiting with his kin, far and wide, to see if he cannot urge upon them a closer walk with Jesus. That is what brought him to Denton, so that he might trace down a niece and share with her his love for the Savior. Since many of his relatives are Church of Christ folk, you can see that he is going to have his hands full. — the Editor

Religion, like poetry and most other living things, cannot be defined.  — Gilbert Murray

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction. — Pascal

I take it for granted that every Christian that is in health is up early in the morning. — William Law