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The Wimber Years
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About Me
- carlt
- I came to Christ in 1965..I was deeply impacted by the witness and teaching of John Wimber. John was my mentor from that time until July of 1997 and I benefited greatly from this. I have had lots and lots of highs and some severe and serious lows; the church has crushed me like a bug and embraced me and brought healing to me as well. It has been quite a ride. I try in these blogs to reflect on all of this in one way or another.
2 comments:
Carl,
I was at VCF during your time of transition, though I was not a person of influence and you would not be at all likely to recall me. I want you to know that I did ask the leaders with whom I had relationship for reassurance that their approach to church discipline gave proper place to forgiveness and restoration. I accepted at face value their representations that the process had the proper motives, design, and goals. I didn't probe further because I felt that the details of your situation--in particular, the reasons that church discipline was appropriate--were none of my business. In other words, I trusted the leadership. And, they apparently breached that trust.
I don't mean to indicate that I was a person of special prescience or wisdom. On the contrary, I presume that many others asked similar questions. And, I don't mean to indicate that the leaders with whom I spoke gave intentionally misleading responses. It is possible that they misunderstood my question. It is also possible that those leaders with whom I spoke trusted the incorrect or misleading representations of other leaders.
My purpose in commenting is not to condemn those leaders but to let you know that there were those among your flock who, while hurt by your fall, continued--and presumably continue even now--to care about you. I apologize that this wasn't somehow communicated to you. I take personal responsibility for my own message of concern having failed to reach you. Thanks to your blog, I have learned from that experience and will be sure to communicate directly with any future acquaintance who is the recipient of church discipline.
I have observed that God has a habit of demonstrating His glory by bringing goodness and blessing from sin and suffering. My prayer for both of us is that we may see the good that God weaves from the fabric of our failures. Somehow, I suspect that it may outweigh the good that he weaves from our successes.
Blessings,
Bill McCarty
Bill thanks for your comment. It was a bad deal all around. My guess is the people you spoke with were listening to the people above them and trusting that they had our best interest at heart, unfortunately they didn't. But in the end my friend we can all learn from this and hopfully grow up before we grow old.
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