Servants of the Living God [antikvár]

Foreword ' Vti liiii Servants of the Living God is a book about people and God. Ever since », 1 ¦ -j' I first heard my father tell of a powerful spiritual experience, during the mini-revival in Lowestoft in 1922, which changed his life as the then Rector of Pettaugh in Suffolk, and later read From Death unto Life by William Haslam, the Rector of Baldhu, Cornwall, I have always been fascinated by other people's experiences of God. How many people were gripped by the opening chapter of Dennis Bennett's book Nine O'Clock in the Morning where a young Anglican priest comes round to Bennett's house to discuss his worries about a lay couple in his church? 'They've really got me going!' he said. 'Whatever are you talking about?' Bennett asked. 'Well they come to church all the time—they hardly ever came until five months ago—now they are just there looking happy.' 'Looking happy in church? —That is suspicious behaviour!' said Bennett. 'Yes, but—well, the thing that bothers me most is that when Tasked them how come they turn up all the time and look so happy, they said, "We've been baptised in the Holy Spirit!"' 'They've been what in what?' Bennett asked. Whatever the correct theological terminology for their experience of God might be—there were still other good things about them that the young priest wanted to share. This couple readily volunteered to help in any way they could in the church, whilst they tithed ten per cent of their income to its funds. Such a report was enough to provoke an investigation by Dennis Bennett, the Episcopal Rector in Van Nuys, California, whose own story was soon after to make the cover page of Time magazine, telling of his commitment to renewal in the Holy Spirit. For too many years the Holy Spirit has been regarded as the Cinderella