What Is Assemblies of God? (Feat. The Guy In Charge of Assemblies of God)

hey matt this is the 10 minute bible hour and i am at the assemblies of god headquarters in springfield missouri and i'm told by people who work here that i can just walk through this revolving door right here and they're going to let me talk with the guy who runs this whole thing a man named doug clay so let's go learn about the assemblies of god doug and i introduced ourselves and sat down for just a minute in his office where we got started with a question about taxonomy where does assemblies of god fit and doug in particular wanted to talk about two categories evangelical and pentecostal that could both describe the assemblies of god here's what he had to say i'll put it this way i am very kingdom the basics to me jesus christ savior you know jesus christ baptizer healer coming i believe in the evangelical doctrine the reality of heaven reality of hell the um the infallibility of scripture and the centrality of jesus i put it this way in the 80s we're a pentecostal movement in the 80s when you say well who are the high profile evangelists that took a dive well both of them are pentecostals both of them were associated with the assemblies of god jim baker jimmy swaggart okay i'm glad we didn't erase the word pentecostal just because of that season of times hiccup and association because the word's stronger than that and i would say that the same is true the word for our culture of evangelical is stronger than this season of oh well you're really a voting block aren't you no not really we're kind of a theological family that's trying to push the kingdom needle we made our way downstairs to the chapel where we were set up for the more formal sit-down interview but on the way we just kept talking shop and he said it was fine if i shared this i thought it was pretty good so there's always been a tension between biblical truths and cultural practices so i i think it's just a great day to kind of come back to scripture and quite frankly i don't think i don't think the church legislatively can change the trajectory of morality in our country but i can change the hearts of my grandkids so i'm not interested in you knowing about what i'm gonna picket and protest but i would like you to know here's what's god's word says about human sexuality here's god's word as it relates to who we are and so if i can win the next generation by bringing them into a clear understanding from scripture i got a greater chance of investing in the next generation i was really enjoying doug's casual candor about this stuff as we were hiking around the building but now it's time to sit down and get into my actual list of detailed questions and into the deep waters so here's how that went so what is assembly of god you know the assemblies of god is a a network of churches that's about 105 years old now when he started out of a a revival movement there are people that were very very just hungry to experience god they were hesitant to structure yet the growth they knew they had to do something 300 uneducated diverse group of people said we need to come together and create some commonality and they did what was big in the commonality was evangelism in fact one of our early vision statements after a year of being founded said we commend ourselves in this fellowship to him for the greatest evangelism the world has ever seen so often times when people want to know why is the assembly of god's worldwide global that was a part of why we started we we gave ourselves to that and so 95 of the assumptions of god resides outside of the united states really when you say your ag yeah so we're nearly 70 million what you can count there's obviously those you can't count but 70 million worldwide 3 million usa but that was really a part of this group of people that were hungry for the presence of god and saw scripture they wanted scripture to be their guiding principles not bylaws so there was a real reticent to a formal type of a structure but as growth happened there needed to be some sort of structure as it relates to credentials and church polity but yeah so i would just say this we're a part of the pentecostal evangelical community christ followers okay can i ask you questions about all of those things absolutely okay let's go backwards uh christ followers who is jesus in the mind of the assemblies of god you know jesus is the son of god who is a part of the trinity and he came from heaven to earth he took on the form of flesh he died for my sins he was resurrected he sits at the right hand of god the father and salvation is made possible through him so fully god fully man fully god fully man that's going to resonate with a lot of people from other traditions who would use the exact same language right okay i'm trying i don't know if you want a theological yeah fully god fully man and i think i think as as you're getting to know people from other traditions i mean that's kind of question number one i mean you learn a lot about where people are coming from and i would say that our overlap on our assumptions about jesus are identical sure which is awesome very evangelical uh the deity of jesus right the infallibility of scripture the reality of heaven reality of hell grace i'm all in okay so yeah my next question is what does evangelical mean and it sounds like you're framing that more as a as a historical theological movement than a modern voting block very much so because as you and i have talked about i'm concerned that the evangelicals in the usa today are under an identity crisis you asked the typical person on the street what's an evangelical they'll probably tell you it's a voting block rather than a theological coalition and i don't like that because i like the term evangelical the evangelical is what unites all of the traditions of faith i recently came from a denominational heads meeting where the e3 superintendent or overseer was there and it was sponsored by nae we broke bread we prayed together there was so much commonality there but even in that group because of what's happening politically today there was this just this hesitancy about being identified as an evangelical i'm like not me i'm all in from from the theological perspective not necessarily from the trending political uh perspective all right so christ evangelical um missional that's kind of a third element that you've been describing and it seems like that's gone incredibly well 70 million people worldwide it's to god be the glory but it'll blow your mind so that just in the month of february i was in nigeria west africa for a conference for the assemblies of god in an open air under kind of a a-frame building 45 000 were there just kind of go it just it kind of blows your mind two weeks later i'm in seoul korea and there the the great uh full gospel church pastor yongi cho and now doctor you seven hundred thousand and ten nfl games yes exactly exactly but it was loving the lord you know a great evangelical message i would say this we link pretty close together pentecost and mission you know the word pentecost means harvest i think sometimes pentecostals get a bad rap because people want to always focus on the sign gifts tongues interpretation of tongues which are biblical and we believe in but to me if you reduce being pentecostal to just the tongues of fire or spirit inspired speech i think that's an insult to the holy spirit because acts 1 8 you shall be witnesses comes before acts 2 4 the holy spirit descended and came upon so i think part of the part of the dna of the assemblies of god is that we see pentecost and missions being hand in hand you know gathering pentecost and so to me if you call yourself a pentecostal you better be very much interested in the spiritual condition of another person as much as you are the experience of glossolalia speaking in tongues so we we go and do missions what are we hoping to see happen in the lives of people when when you do that what do you hope happens to somebody in nigeria when they hear the message so yeah so missionally we were driven by the indigenous church it's our goal is not to just go over and do ministry and do humanitarian things and go ah we feel good about ourselves it's to go over and equip the national church to become sovereign autonomous that's very not colonial of you very and i pray honestly i pray we never will because the older an institution gets we're 105 years old going into our 106th year it's very easy to become colonial or institutional however you want to say you you get enough money to kind of perpetuate yourself you got to certainly i'm going fact our missions department right now is wrestling through okay what do we do in these countries that are developed fact i ask my counterparts in both nigeria and in seoul i said do you still need american missionaries because here's a cool thing they still look to a.g usa as mama even though they're bigger than uh you know there's something about it all started right here and from here but i thought i would say you know because sometimes you go really dr cho 700 000 do you really need a missionary but both of them were very sincere very oh yes oh yes i know in seoul they were saying we really want to target our colleges can you bring us some missionaries that will focus on the universities and other in nigeria look we need systems for leadership training board training we know how to get a crowd we know how to have a church service and we know how to plant churches we need spiritual formation for leadership in the church so i'm like okay got it so the message that you take out the gospel i i mean what you defined as evangelical everything that's going to sound familiar to everybody what would you say is the gospel like what's the message you want to put in front of people that is where salvation in a relationship jesus comes from man is a sinner and he can't save himself jesus came to forgive us our sins in fact whenever i lead in a either a sinner's prayer or believer's prayer however you want to call it but i started out this way lord i do believe that you came from heaven to earth to die for my sins and i am a sinner so i invite you into my life and with my mouth i confess and in my heart i believe that you are the way the truth and the life so flat out the gospel has nothing to do with church affiliation it has everything to do with the four spiritual laws man can't save himself i'm a sinner by nature i was born into sin christ came from heaven to earth took my sins upon himself and my accepting of christ love into my life is a free gift of eternal life that he gives to me so somebody like me going to a free church where we we don't understand tongues we don't do that like we're still going to heaven absolutely in any of our traditions there's this whole spectrum of beliefs yeah and and so there's a lot of lumping that happens when we don't talk to each other because well there are versions of pentecostals that would say if i don't learn how to do that or if the spirit doesn't give me that gift there's something wrong with that and maybe there's something wrong with them entrance into heaven is through the personal relationship with jesus christ but at the same time for me personally my family and the church i lead i want all that god has for me and i do happen to believe that the work in the person of the holy spirit who is the third person of the trinity and our relationship with him is really important even to salvation that there is an experience called the baptism in the holy spirit that's that provides for me spiritual maturity that provides for me talked about in the old testament fulfilled in the new testament jesus talked about so i want everything the lord has for me but that doesn't make you any less of a christian because either you've not experienced it or hey i struggle with believing that okay you're still my brother in christ yeah i mean we fist pounded it exactly it's there it's there but i i believe it but you know what i'm never going to let that be the thing that keeps me from linking hands with you and say come on uh let's advance the kingdom of god so that baptism of the spirit is that i think there's gonna be a lot of people who aren't familiar with that term sure is that something that happens when people become a christian or is that an experience that happens further into yeah so we do believe that that experience follows salvation you know first of all someone you might ask well didn't i get the holy spirit and i got saved absolutely you know the holy spirit comes into our life convicts us of our sin and establishes himself but we believe according to the book of acts and in a pattern there that after salvation there is an experience that the holy spirit comes upon and out of that experience one is receives the receives a spirit-inspired speech but i want to be careful because i think sometimes people focus more on the tongues and the spirit inspired speech than they do what we call the coming upon or the infilling of the holy spirit yeah okay what purpose in the life of the christian and this is an honest question from somebody who just doesn't know because i i haven't had that experience what purpose in the life of the christian do you feel like the the sign gives particularly the gift of speech sure what does it accomplish yeah i i just spoke on this last uh friday night in south texas with a bunch of hispanics 120 some were or filled with the holy spirit and i end my presentation on why do i speak in tongues yeah you know just well i think first there is a demonstration that there is a there's a power for witnessing and a power for living i i think i can only speak for me my own willpower doesn't give me the ongoing strength to overcome sin i need a i need a strength outside of myself and i see that that's what the holy spirit does in our life secondly i believe there's a there's a power in a relationship with the holy spirit particularly as it relates to spirit baptism that helps us in our in the fulfillment of our ministry so when paul in acts i want to say 19 when he was traveling through the interior and he came into the uh ephesus area he said hey have you received the spirit since you believed they said we didn't even know there was a spirit and so we just got that baptism of john that's kind of where we're at exactly and then he unpacks about that so you know what you look at that then you look at the gifts listed now here's something that's very important that i would want to share with my pentecostal friends if you're not careful there's a tendency to want to put these sign gifts as wow these are the these are the all-american gifts they stand up here better than maybe these other six i don't see it that way sometimes we fixate we fixate on tongues interpretation of tongues and prophecy well they're spectacular they're fascinating even if you don't do it they are i mean if i come to an ag church that's what i'm paying you see i want to know how that works i'm wildly curious and frankly anything that in any way is even the slightest demonstration of the supernatural in a tangible way yeah is going to be fascinating and i think on the day of pentecost there was a lot of people fascinated because when the upper room experience was going on peter emerges and all these people are going hey what what's that what's that he says well this is that was spoken of by the prophet joel referring back to joel 2 the in last days and and then he starts to unpack this so there's always been a curiosity i think with with tongues what do you hope is is the legacy of your church my quest and my passion is to take this 105 year old fellowship and move us forward in the following areas bible engagement spirit empowerment and missions participation you know as 105 years old we've kind of learned how to do a few things right we know how to do some missions right we know how to church plant right we got the strategy we've got the system but i feel a passion to call this pentecostal church back to a to a real understanding of the word um i think as opposed to what as opposed to being really good in worship as opposed to really being good in community transformation as opposed to being really good at hey i can build a crowd but do you have biblical worldview followers of christ see i i think the pentecostal church is attractive just by its liveliness you think about it in the 80s during the charismatic renew or catholic charismatic renewal we experience a lot of growth because we have these sunday night services and a lot of mainline people go all right i want to go over there we really like the music we really like the music and so we've kind of had lively spontaneous but i want my kids to have a biblical world view i want my kids to understand human sexuality not from a disney channel but from scripture i want my kids to understand politics not from fox or cnn but from scripture so so coming back i'm not saying being fundamentalist yet i i like that word i i don't that word doesn't bother me don't forfeit on anything i don't you're going to allowing a pentecostal movement to have more fundamental understanding of god's word god's word god's word so that's what i mean and how do i engage this church known as the a.g of being really known as a word church but then secondly i want to follow that up with spirit empowerment that that we don't have to shy away from being pentecostals we don't have to i don't want i don't want weirdos and wackos defining what it means to be pentecostal i want a healthy expression of a biblical understanding and a healthy practice oh okay i see what that means wow you feel the holy spirit calling you and leading you and okay i get that and then our mission is participation i don't want to rest i don't want to go okay yeah we're in a couple hundred different countries we're doing now there's still more there's still more unreached people groups there are still more uh countries that that there's very little of any presence of a christian witness so that's my heart and you know what i think both within our tribe the assemblies of god that has a lot of different expressions and outside of our tribe be it efree or my friends from the wesleyan or my friends in certain baptist group bible engagement spirit and part missions participation are things we can grab a hold of and say yeah yeah we're in yeah i think they're going to be a lot of people who listen in our conversation and are startled by how enormous the shaded area in the venn diagram is between their traditions sure and yours yeah thanks for being willing to articulate it yeah a little bit more here even though you already wrote the whole thing thanks for being interested you know it's good to have a an interest and i pray god's best for you and your journey and that what you do here helps to do a couple of things brings the body of christ together you know because we still have a lot more commonality in the body of christ and we have separation and if we can in a time in our culture where even inside the body of christ where we're polarizing because of political perspectives or cultural the body of christ can come together this is a strong strong movement to advance the kingdom of god and so thanks for the part that you play and sort of hey let's pull these tribes together and talk and focus on and i'm i'm pleased with that i think in some circles i'm i'm very pleased with check your denominational badge at the door make sure you have your jesus badge on scripture is is foundation and i think in these last days if i can use that expression and there's no doubt about that um i'm hoping more and more that the body of christ will be strongly unified for the end result of seeing more people come to faith in christ i'm on the same page thanks for helping me take a swing and do a little bit of that yeah i so appreciate your time thank you thank you all right doug really impressed me and me being impressed it's not like some kind of gauge of whether or not something's a good idea i just really like the guy i like that he is so clear on what the assemblies of god is what it has been he has such respect for that now that he also has points of emphasis that he wants to press on moving forward and he was very clear on how to communicate that stuff i mean within like two minutes of me meeting him he was already talking about you know the the world right now is so overrun with political madness and strife and the church plays right along with that you know maybe we've done too much of that in the past that is not where we want to be you know speaking generally about christians and you know a.g maybe outsiders look at us and they think we're part of a political voting bloc and that just can't be that's not what we are it's not our calling and we want to be a church that is about the bible and if we happen to think something that overlaps with the political party here political party there fine but most of all we want people understand that about us because of our loyalty to the bible to the text that's pretty cool that you come out guns ablaze and you want to tell me that stuff right up front i also appreciated that at every turn he was gospel gospel gospel and i know that word might mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people i believe the way he was employing that idea and that term was to say that he wants the a.g assembly of god church to be arrow pointing out at all times we're gonna go do stuff now this is interesting and compelling to me on a couple of different levels because one i am a part of a tradition that highly values the life of the mind and maybe my expression of christianity a little over self-importantly at times fancies ourselves to be super intellectual and good at solving the deep intellectual theological quandaries of history and so we like our large reformed beards and our frosty pints of beer and then we sit and we think and then we'll go out and we'll do things later that is a gross over characterization of people who come down on the reformed or reformed-ish side but i think there is a reasonable contrast here with what i just saw at a.g there's i mean these are smart people that think about theology and care about theology but whereas the more reformed confessional tradition might be a little more inclined to be like no we're gonna be the keepers of the flame on the theology thing here and when we have that right then we're really ready to take that message out the ag looks like they're more willing to say yeah some of those theological questions are hard and we think about it and we care about that and also we got to go do things right now because there are people who need the gospel and we're going to put it out there i'm sure there are exceptions both ways please don't take offense to that evaluation one way or another but doug really characterizes this impulse to say arrow pointing out all the time let's go we're going to be a bible church and the gospel church so that's one of the things it's kind of the elephant in the room contrast between my assumptions coming in and what they're going for the other elephant in the room thing is well i got to frame it around this pentecostal term i'm not pentecostal the pentecostal emphasis on the holy spirit and particularly the manifestations of the holy spirit that they see biblically prophecy uh healing tongues miraculous stuff things like that i don't know i i've never seen anything like that that i thought was credible i've seen people do things that look to me like an attempt to imitate that and i've seen it up close but for me it was not compelling it looked like it was well intentioned and meant to be honest but what i have seen can't speak for everything but what i have seen has not compelled me to think that there's a lot of that going on what i read in the text does not draw me to that conclusion as we've established earlier i am wrong about tons of things and if i knew which things i were wrong about i'd already change them because i don't i don't want to be wrong about things but i don't know which things i'm wrong about so then sometimes i probably keep thinking things that are actually wrong so i got to be patient with myself i got to be patient with other people that is my presupposition their presupposition is no miraculous stuff happens and we think it looks like this and we think it can be inspect expected in these different ways so doug talks about the baptism of the holy spirit as being a secondary thing that happens beyond the moment of salvation and doug talks about these miraculous manifestations but what i loved is that knowing full well where this video is going to go and that you're going to be sitting in the audience and they're going to be people in the audience who have the same kind of skepticism that i would maybe have and maybe even some of you are a little more openly frustrated and burned by this stuff maybe even a touch hostile toward those kind of miraculous claims i mean he knew that then he still invited me into his office he's still inviting you into his office he still did the conversation and he just owned what he thinks like this is who we are this is where we're coming from this is what we believe but i loved the way that right after just clearly and eloquently explaining his position on the thing he then pivoted to a place of saying and also grace to you man grace to you people on the internet you don't have to think the same stuff or experience the same manifestations we believe we experience in order to be christians there's like a fist bump in there like okay cool one of the things that i'm probing for in all of these videos sometimes overtly sometimes a little more subtly as we talk is i want to know what each of these churches ethic for what if we're wrong is like to what degree does your theology afford you some humility buffer some theologies just logically the way they're built can afford no humility buffer you must be right because the authority of your theological position would be obliterated i mean it would be house of carded if you were wrong about anything so some systems just don't lend themselves to allowing for that possibility other systems do allow themselves more of that possibility maybe so much so they could even become vacuous i did not sense that here but that's what i'm trying to feel out what's your ethic of what if we're wrong and another thing i want to feel out is what's your ethic of what happens and what do you make of everybody who disagrees with you and so i thought it was really cool that there was room in this theological system for a degree of humility and that there is room in this theological system for of course you don't have to think the same things as us i think doug went out of his way to hit that point because there are expressions of pentecostalism where adherents would say no you get this second baptism of the holy spirit and when you do if it's not confirmed like we see in a couple examples in the book of acts through miraculous signs maybe you don't have the holy spirit and maybe you're not even a christian i think that's a minority position and if you hold that position i'm not offended that you don't think i'm a christian we we're past that we can get along just fine but it was good to get a sense of that and i could tell the doug wanted to really nuance and clarify where ag fits in this pretty large and pretty disparate branch of the christian family tree that we would call pentecostalism but again he goes from here's exactly what we think and why he pivots from there to and also you don't have to think the same thing as me or experience the same thing as me to be a christian and then he pivots from there right back to his point of emphasis all along we want to be a church that is not about political power and voting blocks we want to be a church that is not first and foremost known for our hype and our energetic worship though we are into that or our sign gifts though we do believe those are real we want to be a church that is known as being people of the book bible people and people of the gospel message people who are out trying to do transformative things and put the message of jesus and his kingdom in front of people i just don't know what more you could ask from a visit like this than total honesty crystal clear communication and grace on the stuff that for a lot of christians might seem a little bit different or a little bit uh beyond what they've encountered themselves i loved my day in springfield missouri hanging out at two churches hanging out at headquarters look i say this pretty much every time but it's a risk right you're smart you're on the internet you know how these things work i mean i suppose that if somebody came in with a camera and wanted to make everybody look like a clown and be a jerk and try to do damage i suppose you could do that well i want to do that i want to make this whole thing awesomer and i want to understand each other better and i want to be pushed because i want to understand the grand questions of life and faith and god and death and what the heck am i doing here better and i think this is benefiting me i am growing i am changing and i hope that it's benefiting you to do the same and so every time somebody is willing to take the risk of opening up about who they are and what they're doing that's a gesture of trust but it's also a gesture of grace because it's an investment in me it's an investment in you and hopefully you find this kind of thing to be as rewarding as i find it to be there's a reason i can do this stuff and it's because some of you a fraction of you have decided to go to patreon.com the no not no no i got this patreon.comtnbh that's the one and and support the program you don't have to do that it's free it'll always be free but wow it just opens up the world to go and do stuff like this it makes it affordable and possible so have this happen because you all do that thank you very very much for those of you who are the majority of the audience who don't do that uh it's fine that is completely fine i just can't tell you how grateful i am that you're up for this kind of conversation that you're here that in and of itself is enough thank you i'm matt this is the 10 minute bible hour let's do this again soon

Channel: The Ten Minute Bible Hour

Views: 58,770

Rating: 4.8969884 out of 5

Keywords: Bible, Theology, Study, Matt Whitman, TMBH, No Dumb Questions, Matthew, Jesus, Doug Clay, Assemblies of God, Springfield, Missouri, Pentacostalism, What is an evangelical, What is a Pentacostal, Speaking in Tongues, Miracles, Healing, Prophecy

Id: rRIPIKPC9bo

Length: 32min 29sec (1949 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 22 2020

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[u/DimesOnHisEyes]

I shall fill the void