Quote:
Originally Posted by Lisbon
A comment on bells in LC meetings.
If the bells hadn't come along the cards would have fallen a long time ago.
My thought is that many many people can take only so much of protracted garbage. I can take maybe one or two ten minute off the wall sermons but after that I'm out. The bells were a real salvation of the LC.
Lisbon
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It is one of the reasons that I am growing less sanguine with the charismatic movement. The arm-waving and yelling got people all pumped up, but for what? Number one it made them susceptible to bad doctrine. If you yelled, "The sky is yellow!" loudly enough you began to believe it was true.
Number two, you get rambling, semi-incoherent, even hysterical messages and testimonies from the saints. They would be so full of excitement they didn't know how to stop. So they had to cut them off with the piano and the bell. This is exactly the kind of disorderliness Paul was remonstrating with the Corinthians about.
Look in the book of Acts. How many screaming, arm-waving testimonies do you see in evidence? They look pretty sober-minded to me; usually paragons of clear thinking and logic. Look at Peter on Pentecost, standing with the eleven. Look at Paul in Athens.
But the charismatic focus makes us emotionally strung out, which leads to the notion that volume in decibels and volume in length somehow equates to "God's eternal economy", i.e. God dispensing Himself into mortal man. And it covers the existence of poorly thought out ideas. That is why anyone trying to think in the LCs got labeled "negative" or "independent" or "questioning." Instead, they want you to just scream whatever Big Brother is speaking.