Exercising Charisma

The Full Gospel Businessmen’s Fellowship International has grown in sixteen years from a group of Pentecostal laymen in Los Angeles to a globe-encircling ecumenical body. At the fellowship’s recent world convention in Washington, D.C., more than four thousand delegates of all races and denominations (including many Roman Catholics) exchanged embraces under a standard declaring “Our Banner Is Love” while they sang “I Don’t Care What Church You Belong To.”

Dairyman Demos Shakarian, the founding president, explained, “Fifteen years ago the World Pentecostal Conference rejected us. Today 80 per cent of our members are non-Pentecostal. You can’t do this with legislation. True ecumenism is where God pours out his love.”

He noted, “A spiritual awakening as significant as the Lutheran Reformation or Wesleyan Revival has been invading the classical Protestant denominations as well as Anglican, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox churches.… The Holy Spirit is manifesting himself with the same vibrant power and gifts which the early Christians experienced. It means Jesus is coming soon. It means world evangelism now.”

Apocalyptically minded businessmen, possessed with this sense of urgency, described evangelistic “air lifts” to the Far East, South America, and Europe. These annual two-week foreign excursions involved approximately fifty men in grueling three-meetings-per-day schedules. A Harrisburg chiropractor reported a successful “march for Jesus” in Pennsylvania’s capital. Wendell Wallace, black pastor of a predominantly white Portland, Oregon, church told of his 100 hippie church members. Dubbed “happies,” they carry on a ministry to fellow flower children.

Displaying an increasing social consciousness, the board of directors in closed session voted (all decisions are made unanimously) to produce a national ghetto-conscious newspaper. And each day twenty-five businessmen canvassed Florida Avenue, site of the worst burning in the 1968 Easter riots and now the hangout of hippies and black militants, bringing many to the meetings and some to Christ.

FGBMFI members exercised their charismatic gifts of the Spirit in the meetings; on one occasion this prophetic interpretation followed a speech in tongues: “I have called thee into this city and the dead are walking the streets. I would have the lost to be found.” The Full Gospel Businessmen are beginning to look to the streets.

Also at the week-long convention:

• Judge Wilbur Shaw of Cincinnati predicted a change in the Supreme Court: “They’re not going to favor the Communists and the criminals.”
• Shakarian forecasted both the collapse of the American economy within two years and the possibility of a Communist takeover. The root of the problem? “Poor people (especially Negroes) are being gouged.”

The FGBMFI now claims 600 local chapters, 150 of them outside the United States. As it increases in size, ecumenicity, and social concern, the FGBMFI, already the spearhead of the charismatic movement, is coming of age.

ROBERT E. FRIEDRICH, JR.

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