John,
I must respectfully disagree. I am a Reformed Southern Baptist, student at Southern Seminary, all that, and yet I am convinced that Brownsville was indeed a legitimate revival. My primary reason for thinking this may sound a little subjective, but here it is: I was converted at Brownsville.
Now I mean *really* converted. I had been in an SBC church all my life where my father was the pastor, but all my sinner's prayers and recommitments to Christ through my teenage years never resulted in any life change. I basically wanted to go to heaven but didn't want to live for the Lord. But at Brownsville the message of repentance hit home. I had a road to Damascus experience. I know no other way to describe it. Other family members were also saved there and are still living for the Lord almost a decade later.
You claim that you were "against the laughter, the gold dust, the primal behavior, and the horizontal essence of their circus from the beginning." And I must confess that these sort of charges mystify me. I spent a good amount of time at Brownsville in the years after I was converted there, and I never witnessed any of these phenomena, and as far as I know the leaders never encouraged or supported this sort of behavior in the services. In fact I know they were against any Toronto-type animal noises and other such nonsense and militantly opposed the fruitcakes who tried to bring them in. Their expressed purpose was to keep the focus of the movement on renewed repentance and faith.
So consider my perspective: I go to a service where I am told that I must repent of my sins and place my faith in the atoning work of Christ. I have a powerful regenerating experience of the Holy Spirit. My attitudes, thinking, habits, behavior, relationships all change because now I know personally the God that I have heard about my whole life. And while there were certainly aspects of the movement that now puzzle me (the "slaying in the Spirit" by the laying on of hands that always took place *after* the preaching of the Gospel), they are nothing that I could ever say proves that Brownsville wasn't a real revival. At best I take Edwards' stance to such phenomena: we should not judge a movement by them, either positively or negatively. We should judge by the fruit.
Now, on to the subject of fruit. You claim that the only fruit you see from Brownsville is rotten. But the only fruit I see is good: the fruit in my own life and in the lives of friends and family members who were converted and/or edified at Brownsville. If I understand you correctly, you also claim that the demise of the revival, along with the fact that some people were hurt, is evidence of bad fruit. If these things happen, then therefore it is not a legitimate revival.
But surely this doesn't follow. The seven churches who received a letter from Jesus in Revelation have all since died, and some, like the church in Laodicea, had serious problems at the time of the letter. But surely this doesn't mean that none of them were founded on legitimate moves of God, or that any spiritual power God displayed in them is somehow made illegitimate. Neither does the fact that early Christian leaders had disagreements and fights (think Paul vs. Mark, Paul vs. Peter, etc.) somehow prove that they were not men used by God.
So, with all due respect, I find this argument to be something of a canard. I read alot about the "false doctrine" preached at Brownsville, and yet I have yet to unearth a single instance where the primary revival message departs from Christian orthodoxy. I'm not saying that there weren't problems with the movement, because there certainly were. I still wonder if the episodes where I was "slain in the Spirit" was truly an act of God or not.
And yet I'm not sure that we shouldn't expect these sort of problems in a move of God, among redeemed but sinful and ignorant people. But to me, these problems don't even come close to deligimizing the movement as an authentic move of God.
So, I'm with Grady on this one, as if that wasn't clear enough. =)
Good day.
Brian -
Thank you so much for your thoughtful and reasonable disagreement. It is a blessing to hear from a brother who disagrees from evidence rather than emotion.
I'm so grateful for your salvation at Brownsville. Praise His holy name.
I'm at my home in California this week, back to get another load of presonal belongings and to take care of some honey-dos. So, my blogging is hit and miss at the moment ... that is to say, give me some time to digest your comments and I will respond in more detail. If I'm wrong in my assessment, I'll say so.
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