Agnes Sanford
I'm reading Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer's Extraordinary Knowing (which I'll write about in full later, because I'm loving it), but a name she threw out at random in the chapter on healing struck me as familiar in a Pentecostal/Charismatic context.
Yep, there's a link there all right, and I think it's a big one. Agnes Sanford (or at least her Inner Healing technique) is associated with the Vineyard Christian Fellowship (with which I'm very familiar, mostly in a good way), with not a little controversy attached. She also apparently was a prime mover in the Charismatic wave of the 1950s-60s (as opposed to the Pentecostal wave earlier in the century). Her book, The Healing Light, was a how-to manual.
Most of the controversy in evangelical Christian circles that seems to be associated with her centres around her being 'too New Age'. And given this description I guess I can see why:
Agnes Sanford began a healing ministry in the '40s; received Pentecostal exp., in '53/54; pioneered teaching for the "healing of memories"; part of the "positive thinking" movement she presented God's healing work as following the laws of nature and positive thinking; she believed that God could work through "good" spirits as well as the spirits of people who have died; she taught that God used some mediums to heal; she believed that angels and dead saints could "speak and act in and through us."
What fascinates me most, though, looking at this now, is that she represents a line drawn right down the middle of the cluster of Spiritualist, New Thought and Pentecostal phenomena that I've been following from the Fox sisters and Mary Baker Eddy, through Azusa Street and taking in Jungian psychology, Walter Russell, A Course In Miracles and Star Gate remote viewing along the way.
I've been looking for a person who would intersect the set. She looks like being that, as well as a huge historical influence on the Charismatic movement. Interesting indeed.
September 12th, 2007 - 02:41
I only remember one excommunication. I am not in any position to judge the grounds for it. I assume that a decision like that would have involved at least 7 pastors and elders, I don’t know how it worked. I imagine it would be terrible for the excommunicated person, if they feel that they have not done anything wrong.——— In my personal experience again, nobody has been harsh to me. ——– What I find harsh however is the state of affairs after the splintering.
September 12th, 2007 - 02:50
Re: 50kms or is it miles? I was never told anything like it. My husband was not a member, which could have made a difference in that respect. But I remember people holidaying on the Westcoast and in Hamner, even Akaroa is more than 50kms from C. The idea behind such a rule probably would have been, if anyone needed help on holiday, it would not be far away. Are you sure this rule was not just for the young people?
September 12th, 2007 - 03:00
I also cannot judge the marriage bit. From the few cases I am aware of I understand that one of the partners expressed an interest in another and things went from there somehow. It does not seem to me like there were made arrangements totally without the involvement of the parties. But as I said I don’t really know.
September 12th, 2007 - 03:07
It would be ridiculous to think that there are no other Christians anywhere else but in C. I don’t think it was said, that we were the only Christians in the world. We were however more orthodox [hope that is the right word] than most other churches in town or in NZ.
September 12th, 2007 - 09:49
Am pretty sure “orthodox” is not the right word, but you can probably insert the right one here.
September 12th, 2007 - 10:12
I am not “flat out denying other peoples’ grievances” which I am not in any position to judge. I can only speak for myself. Am trying very hard to think of some harm done to me, but all that comes to me is that I was helped on several occasions, when things got into tight spots in my life. I do appreciate your concern though, really.
September 12th, 2007 - 10:52
Don’t know what you mean by “bad remake of 1984″. Do you refer to the book or an actual point in time in C. I was in C. only from 1980-83. And later for short stints around 86-87. Then again 1990 or so. When I said I heard all the sermons, it is because they were kindly sent to me overseas.
September 13th, 2007 - 21:43
“O.K. What was I trying to do? Originally, I was trying to pull you back from a more imminent abyss in your life, than the one mentioned above. One does not necessarily need to get very deep into the occult, just reading books like e.g. Steiner, Blavatsky, whatever is enough to muddle your spirit.”
Yes, that was the gist I picked up of your initial contact to me.
I would be interested, though, to hear you define just what you mean by ‘the occult’. A lot of Christians I know throw this word around without at all giving it a definition, and tend to define it by default as ‘anything spiritual I’ve not heard at the particular church I go to or have read in a Christian bookstore’. I’ve given you my definition, now I’d like to hear yours. Are there other writers you would like to add to that rather vague ‘et al’ beside Blavatsky and Steiner? Blavatsky I only know by reputation and I’m not too fond of what I hear. Steiner I have a little more sympathy for, since he was a pioneer in organic gardening which seems very Christ-like to me, but again I have some reservations about what little I’ve heard of the outline of his theology, but I’ve not studied it.
And what exactly do you mean by ‘muddling the spirit’? Is that an experience you have personally gone through, and do you have any survival tips other than ‘don’t investigate the paranormal, don’t read the scientific literature dealing with the afterlife, don’t even think about it’? Do you think the Holy Spirit is able to unmuddle someone who has accidentally got themselves muddled while seeking Him a little off the beaten track, or would that be beyond His powers?
(I may sound like I’m joking, but I am fairly serious about this. I’ve had a huge mental block in me ever since my teens about even confronting this stuff, but now I’ve started reading it I wonder why it took me so long. It feels to me like a duty.)
“Everything you are saying maybe fine and valid and interesting for you, and I appreciate the effort you are making, but ultimately I am not thinking in terms of pentecostal, charismatic, evangelical etc. It is to me just like a lot of noise I can’t be bothered with. Probably sounds proud and arrogant to you again.”
I’m afraid it does, yes, though withdrawal from interacting with the world-as-it-is can be a useful therapeutic stage to go through and I did it myself for quite a while. The problem to me with that ‘leave the world behind’ attitude is that like it or not, these separate church groupings *do* exist, and if we choose not to confront that reality, we are chosing to close our eyes to what God is doing in places beyond our immediate neighbourhood. And, without a wider sense of the scope and history of God’s project in the world, we open ourselves to manipulation by cynical people who claim that their church is the true representation of Christ’s Gospel, when it might not be.
The words ‘evangelical/pentecostal/charismatic’ only really started becoming important to me when I started discovering and visiting *other* church streams, such as the Anglicans, Catholics, and Quakers, and realised that many attitudes and teachings I had thought all my life were ‘Christian’ were in fact merely products of a certain church culture. And I needed words to describe *my* home style of Christianity from the style of Christianity in the church culture in which I was a newcomer, because they meant totally different things. And I had to seriously rethink what I understood Christ to be teaching, because here were different people claiming to be Christians, in all seriousness and devotion, and saying fundamentally incompatible things.
If you haven’t noticed this, then I suspect it’s because you’ve lived all your Christian life in the rather narrow English-speaking, USA-centred evangelical/pentecostal/charismatic sphere and never really suspected that there are much wider theological currents in Christendom. Dealing with this ‘eep, which Jesus? I thought I knew Him already, who’s this stranger?’ problem is a bit of a mind-melter – at least it was for me, and still is quite a bit – so it’s probably not something I recommend you do unless you’re totally prepared to have your life turned upside down. But it can get to be a bit of an adventure.
On the other hand, yes, it’s true that Jesus transcends all the different church pictures we have of Him, and if we’re all looking at the real Jesus (no matter how imperfectly we understand Him) and moving toward Him, then no matter how wide the cultural gulf that separates us, we’re going to end up at the same place eventually. So in one sense it doesn’t matter much, we can stay in our own world and slowly drift to the centre. It just seems to me like it helps speed up the process a bit if we consciously choose to cooperate and do some cultural exploring of our own.
“What I was trying to do in this matter is to get you somehow beyond all the clutter and as you quoted yourself onto some “higher groundâ€?”
What I just talked about is exactly what “higher ground” means to me. What does it mean for you?
“For the record: I had 2 private interviews. I greatly enjoyed them. Would have loved a lot more. Was never told not to tell anything to anyone.”
I’m afraid you had a very different experience to what people I know had.
“I only remember one excommunication. I am not in any position to judge the grounds for it.”
You must have missed the period in 1989 when dozens of people were expelled, I guess.
“I assume that a decision like that would have involved at least 7 pastors and elders, I don’t know how it worked.”
A little startled here. You do realise that there was only ever one Pastor – the old guy WW himself – and that the difference between Pastor and Elder was huge? Power flowed down from the top. However, with WW not really very functional due to his age, DW and a couple of the others made a lot of decisions on his behalf. RT was very influential (he was, I’m sorry to say, just a nasty man. We had a fair bit of dealings with him, and they were neither fair nor reasonable. He was the one guy I was most terrified of him laying his hands on me, because he carried a sort of aura with him which did not feel healthy.)
“Re: 50kms or is it miles? I was never told anything like it. My husband was not a member, which could have made a difference in that respect.”
Oh my goodness, yes! You would have had a VERY different experience if that were the case. The church didn’t have nearly as much power over people who weren’t completely in. And if you had the freedom to come and go as you pleased – that would have been huge. Being born in it was a TOTALLY different situation.
“But I remember people holidaying on the Westcoast and in Hamner, even Akaroa is more than 50kms from C. ”
Yes, the rule, like many other rules, changed at different times from year to year and without justification, and we were expected to obey immediately and without question. The holiday rule was imposed later in the 1980s, I believe – earlier on things were less strict. As did the rule about not being allowed library cards.
If you didn’t experience these rules yourself I can understand why you might find it difficult to believe me.
“I also cannot judge the marriage bit. From the few cases I am aware of I understand that one of the partners expressed an interest in another and things went from there somehow.”
Yes, I suspect you didn’t hear all of the things I did. It wasn’t widely talked about; we lived in a cone of silence, and ‘gossip’ was strongly discouraged. But again, you’ll have to believe me that I am not making these things up. I am in contact with people who currently go to that church and lived through that era and are very happy with the changes. You don’t seem to have talked to many people from there since 1989, so I guess I can understand your disbelief a little better now.
“It would be ridiculous to think that there are no other Christians anywhere else but in C. I don’t think it was said, that we were the only Christians in the world. We were however more orthodox [hope that is the right word] than most other churches in town or in NZ.”
It is very sad to me to hear that you think that. In what way do you think we were orthodox? (I think it’s the right word, and I take it to mean ‘closer to true Christian thought and practice’). And what kind of church do you go to at the moment that you still think that that’s the case? When I first went to, for example, New Life Church in 1989, or Living Springs or Lifeway I couldn’t believe the difference – it was like night and day. For the first time I felt I understood what a real church could be like. It was nothing like the Temple. There was freedom; we weren’t wearing black suits and hiding.
Do you think at the moment, for example, that the prohibition on wearing the colour red was orthodox? Or that women should always wear a hat in church?
“What I find harsh however is the state of affairs after the splintering.”
I don’t understand what you mean. From what I understood, the church healed after 1993, it became more mainstream, it became more orthodox, it integrated with the wider Christian community in the city, everyone became much happier, people had the freedom to leave and travel with the others’ blessing if they wished. A small faction (including the classmate I spoke of earlier) splintered off, wishing to continue the old ways and feeling threatened by the new freedom, and closed themselves off from everyone else. But even though there was a scattering of people across the world, I didn’t think it was a *splintering*; as far as I knew, people weren’t separated because of bitterness over the changes, just because they had dreams they had long repressed and wanted to explore.
At least that’s how it was for me and it’s how it is for the people who have left who I have still remained in touch with. A bunch of us from the school communicate occasionally on the net and have been talking vaguely about a school reunion. Although I stopped attending services in the early 1990s, I remained in touch with members I knew until my Dad died in 1997, when I started to drift out of contact. I made the choice in 1990 to stay in Christchurch rather than move to Auckland exactly so that I could remain in contact with the church and help during the transition phase – I have often wondered since if that was the right decision and if I wasted personal growth opportunities by not moving away, but it felt like the right thing at the time.
But from what I hear you saying, you experienced the restructuring and the new era very differently, as a painful splintering. Can you tell me more about that?
“Don’t know what you mean by “bad remake of 1984″. Do you refer to the book or an actual point in time in C”
The book. The “I see four fingers” scene. Got that feeling many, many times in that church. Mum and I and my brother would see something wrong, Dad and the eldership would say “no, you don’t see that, everything’s perfectly fine” and I’d start to wonder if I were insane.
September 13th, 2007 - 22:50
Oh, and when Mum died in 1994 the outpouring of love from the church was huge. Her funeral was, paradoxically, a very healing time.
Though I did personally feel like I was struggling in a vacuum all through the 90s, and harsh is one word that could describe it. But to me it was more a sense of feeling like I didn’t belong anywhere than anything else, and my experience happened as far as I could tell because a lot of unrelated things all contributed to my being isolated: one brother got married, the other moved to Brazil, my parents died, I lost touch with my church-school friends. I had a brief lonely embarassing crush on a classmate (the one who got married and dropped into the other splinter cult); I said ‘I love you’, she said ‘Goodbye’ and that ended that.
It was three years before the church reformed; I tagged along with my parents, somehow, thinking I was helping do spiritual warfare. I think maybe I was. I fasted one day a week for a while. Stuff happened, the church opened up, it was like a miracle, a huge reunion. The Temple was looking for a pastor; I went to the New Life bible school and studied for a year under the guy who became new pastor (and still is). I didn’t think of taking my pastoral studies further; a year of Diploma of Christian Ministry was enough to make me more confused than ever about theology and decide that whatever I wanted to do in life, it wasn’t to help pastor an evangelical/charismatic church, even one I knew as well as the Temple. I wanted to do Christian art and combine it with computer programming, but I didn’t know how to make that dream anything like reality.
Mum died the next year. I was still unemployed as I had been for seven years, I still somehow had no network of friends I could call on, even though I used to visit some of my Temple friends and even the teachers from the school. But nothing gelled somehow. Have you ever had that? I could feel myself like I was falling in slow motion, struggling with depression, couldn’t get up in the morning; but I felt perfectly well, I just couldn’t… somehow… parse the world. Everything seemed unreal, in a fog. I wanted to write. I didn’t know how. I needed to get a job. I looked at the want ads in the paper and I’d go into panic mode. Without my brothers around I was pretty much stuffed. I’d always lived in a very close family and it was gone. I’d worked for a year in a computer company without pay. I hated the experience. I felt crushed by an invisible weight and couldn’t explain. I went to Christian seminars, church youth meetings, Sunday services. I met friends, they were happy to see me, we drifted away, different orbits. Nothing stuck.
All this time my Dad was still working with the church, helping it restructure, helping redecorate. I still felt somehow arms-lengthed, sleepwalking. My emotional core was gone, I had no anchors, no friends – despite being surrounded by people I knew. In 1995 the new church regime generously paid for counselling for me. It was the second time I’d seen a counsellor in five years, the first one wasn’t a Christian and scared me. It was slow but it helped me work through some of my inner terror, as well as the Fidonet poetry group (hi Terry!). Somehow by early 1996 I managed to become well enough to get a job.
Yeah, it was a bleak time for me, and maybe the church restructure had something to do with making it bleak – but it never felt that way to me. The restructure felt warm. It was the world that was cold, it was the lack of there being a purpose in my life any more now that the one goal I had thought was impossible had happened. I even felt like I wished I could blame someone, anyone, for what I was going through – but there was nobody, except the past, and that was gone. All the rest was culture-shock, learning how to watch movies (my first was in 1991), watch TV (first in 1993), listen to popular music (didn’t really start until 1997 – I used to be terrified when rock songs would play over the speakers in malls, didn’t know any of the history of music, didn’t know any songs except hymns). Was too afraid to go to restaurants if they had a bar in it until the late 90s, was afraid of going to concerts or conventions. Scared of backpackers and hotels (hotels serve alcohol; they’re sinful places). A role-playing game convention in 1996 was I think the first non-church social event I went to, and RPGs and computer bulletin boards and were a thin sliver of connection to the secular student world. I was still too afraid to go to university; I could cope with Polytechnic and (eventually) with working there, but not a degree. I still feel afraid of going job-hunting because I don’t feel like my tertiary education, my resume or my interpersonal skills are up to scratch and I’m terrified of that depression coming back and making me unable to work, because I still live with it today. Still the fear comes, in waves. You’re guilty. You’ve failed. Even God can’t help you now. I push it back, it’s not like it’s part of me any more, but it takes mental effort and it slows me down, burns energy.
It is hard to find words to describe who I was to people who didn’t come up that route. It feels like it’s taken as much time since the Temple as I lived in it to come to terms with the world and who I am. It’s why I put so much emphasis on finding things out, learning the names, learning the words – I had to do it the hard way just to learn how to function like a normal human being in New Zealand culture, and I still feel behind the emotional curve. The effect has been to make me a little like a person with autism; I can overcome it, I can make myself function in public and meet strangers, but it takes focused energy and I can’t always do everything I want to all at once.
And all the time I feel guilty, and have done since 1989, since the Temple as a present restraint on my life was no longer an excuse, because I feel like I am being lazy and immature and slow and wasteful and unfocused and dreamy. I don’t know how to speak to women; I don’t know how to date; I don’t know how to dress; I’m in my mid-thirties now, and I’m angry at myself all the time because I feel like such a miserable failure. I should have pushed harder, I should have learned faster, I should have just sucked in the fear, I should have travelled more, I should have been more assertive. But I did. I prayed and I fasted and I screamed at God and I read the Bible and I did counselling and I went to church – oh my Lord did I go to church, and oh my Lord did I hear so many sermons – and I went to youth camps and retreats, until I was too old to go to youth camp, and I got prayed for in altar call lines and I got prayed for deliverance and I got prayed for emotional healing and people prayed words over my life and give me prophecies and said I had a great destiny. I got hands laid on my by Roberts Lairdon and fell over in the Spirit and I caught the Toronto move and I caught the laughing revival and I helped be a ‘catcher’ behind an big Pentecostal evangelist, and it was sometimes great and it was sometimes fun and it was never quite enough.
But some of these things helped, and some of those words and prophecies I remember to this day, and the power of the Spirit was genuine when I fell over, and the Toronto move in 1996 was the one I remember the most and it really fixed some stuff inside me, but for the rest of it it was slow, hard slog, day by day, trying to be a little more human, wondering why it was taking so long, where my life was, why I couldn’t just heal and be over and done with it and get on with it. And I tried not to feel guilty and I tried not to feel regret and I tried not to feel angry and I tried to praise God and I tried to count my blessings and I was very happy indeed that I had food on my table and didn’t live in India and still, I was lonely, and out of sync, and slowly, so slowly, I gradually healed.
And here I am, 36 on Monday, could be worse, but still bench-pressing that invisible weight inside, still no girlfriend and no immediate prospect of one, still feel it’s my fault that I don’t fit in the world, that I haven’t tried hard enough all through my 20s and that I’m never going to make it (and I’m feeling desperately guilty right now that I haven’t worked hard enough to organise a local body candidates meeting, that I’ve failed a deep obligation, that nothing I do can ever make right my basic lack of being good or useful).
And you want to add another thing to the list of things I’ve learned not to be afraid of? But you’re going to have to do better than that. I’ve been terrified of ‘slipping and going to hell’ since I was maybe four or five; earliest nightmare I can remember. I’ve been scared of occult literature since maybe twelve. I read Jack Chick comics in my teens. I was scared of the Antichrist, scared of the Lake of Fire and the Second Death, scared of FEMA internment camps, scared of grey aliens, scared of hypnosis and mind control, scared of witchcraft, scared of Maitreya, way before X-Files was a glimmer in Chris Carter’s eye. I used to be scared of A Course In Miracles and The Message of the Divine Iliad by name before I even knew what they were. I heard voices in my head at age 14 saying they were the devil and that I was doomed to hell, and by the way Christianity was all a lie. (Wasn’t pleasant. Don’t recommend it. But they went away.)
You can’t work harder than I used to at making me scared. Been there, done that. The God I know is the opposite of fear.
September 13th, 2007 - 23:03
Did you know that in the Temple school, they used to edit out the School Journals with black pen and white-out? We’d laugh about it at home. But of course you couldn’t say anything about it to any of the teachers or elders – that would be disobedience.
They would delete any reference to the word ‘dancing’, among other things (we could hold the page up to the light to see what was behind it before they twigged to using black pen as well). Sometimes we’d get the Journal and whole entire stories would be either cut out or the pages glued together. We never knew what was in those.
In my last high-school year – age 17, 1988 – our copies of the Red Cross First Aid manual had the entire section on childbirth cut out. So that we wouldn’t learn anything about sex.
Our school library had no children’s fiction written after about the 1950s.
Did you know any of these things, at the time, while you were in the Temple?
September 15th, 2007 - 01:49
What’s the rush to get your mind polluted?—— We did not even have a school library.
September 15th, 2007 - 01:56
And if we did, I was oblivious of it, because I had nothing but boys and dancing in my head. There you go.
September 15th, 2007 - 02:00
End of comments
September 27th, 2007 - 04:22
I think this word “orthodox” still needs repairing. What is actually meant is “strict”. Like there are 3 kinds of Judaism for example. The strictest of which is orthodox Judaism. So if you replace orthodox with strict on Sep.12 at 3.03 you’ll get things the way they were meant, which should probably change your reaction.
November 17th, 2007 - 13:45
Yes, ‘strict’ can mean a *very* different thing from ‘orthodox’, depending on whether you think that orthodox Christianity (the original/true teachings of Jesus) was strict or liberal. In terms of sexuality, for instance, the story about Jesus pardoning the woman caught in adultery suggests that Jesus was very liberal, more in line with the broadest of today’s secular thinking; but the comment that ‘to look at a person with lust is the same as to commit adultery’ suggests that he was ultra-strict even by the standards of modern conservative Christian sects. Jesus is a very strange puzzle in many ways.
November 17th, 2007 - 13:54
And of course orthodox Judaism is not at all the same thing as orthodox Christianity, which is not at all the same thing as the Orthodox Church; and what is considered ‘orthodox Christian theology’, by which is meant ‘what most Christians through the centuries have believed’ is not necessarily the same thing as ‘what Jesus himself actually taught’.
The big idea of the Protestant Reformation was that ‘Christian orthodoxy’ had become corrupted sometime after the insititution of the Roman Catholic Church, and that ‘sola scriptura’ – reading just the Old and New Testaments and ignoring all of the church tradition up to the 1500s – is the only way to find true orthodoxy.
But that idea itself might not actually be completely correct.
November 17th, 2007 - 16:00
Aug.9 at 10.10 pm:….”When Paul says, “If I or an angel from heaven teach a different gospel, let him be accursed”– to me this suggests, that the important factor in judging the acceptability of a spiritual teaching is its content, not its apparent source.>>>>>>>>Subject: MEDIATORSHIP>>>>>>>>’For there is one God and ONE MEDIATOR BETWEEN GOD AND MEN, Christ Jesus;’………In contrast to: Mary and the “saints” are Mediators……….Two opposing contents here.
November 17th, 2007 - 20:27
“The story about pardoning the woman caught in adultery suggests that He was very liberal”…………It might suggest that, but on closer inspection one finds that He acts here in accordance with His own Word. The answer to the puzzle can be found in the woman’s address of Jesus. She calls Him “LORD”………….It seems to me that the acid test lies not in whether someone calls Jesus the Son of God, but if someone calls Him Lord according to 1.Cor 12:3 “….no one can say that Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit.”……….I was wondering how could He pardon her, there was no repentance mentioned…No, but she must have had a revelation of who He is, because she called Him Lord. In other words she spoke by the Spirit, und subjected herself to His Lordship. Right after that He calls Himself “the Light” of the world. The woman recognized the Light and walked in it. “If we walk in the light, as He is in the light, we have fellowship one with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin.” So Jesus by not condemning her acted in accordance with His Word. He has to because He IS the Word.
November 18th, 2007 - 07:57
That’s certainly a novel interpretation of that story and one I had not heard before.
And how do you reconcile that view with Jesus saying elsewhere that it’s *not* those who call him ‘Lord’ who are saved?
November 18th, 2007 - 08:50
CALLING Him Lord is not enough, one needs to act like He is Lord, i.e. obey.
November 18th, 2007 - 15:12
You are probably referring to: “Not everyone that says unto me Lord, Lord..” They are just saying it. The repetition suggests a respectless, lighthearted, superficial address.
November 18th, 2007 - 15:56
That makes sense.
November 18th, 2007 - 18:06
Thank you
October 31st, 2010 - 10:25
I AM a Catholic and the Church is ABSOLUTELY against necromancy (seances etc., mediums et al). We DO believe that the saints of Jesus not in their bodies ARE with Him and DO pray with and for us. They are not dead since Jesus said that “whoever believes in Me will NEVER die”. I ask the saints to pray with and for me….just like I ask Christian brothers in this world. No more…no less..and ALWAYS it is known that it is to JESUS that all our requests are made known.