Back to the Cross by Watchman Nee & Herbert L. Fader

Author:Watchman Nee & Herbert L. Fader
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780935008708
Publisher: Christian Fellowship Pub.
Published: 1988-11-30T22:00:00+00:00

Who Are We?

79

it, you will preach faith.” It was not long after this that Wesley did indeed experience salvation through the new birth. And once saved, these two Wesley brothers immediately began to spread the good

news everywhere. At that time, however, preaching was required to be done in church buildings and certainly never on the streets, for the Anglican Church maintained that the holy word could only be

proclaimed in the holy place. But the Wesley brothers and their

emerging colleague George Whitefield dared to preach in the open

air and led multitudes to Christ.

Now the focal point of John Wesley’s teaching was sanctification.

And as a part of his emphasis on sanctification, an erroneous

teaching concerning the eradication of sin began to develop and be identified with him, although he himself did tell people that

sanctification was by faith.

It was after the death of the Wesleys that the greater movement of foreign missions commenced and flourished. One of the first

missions to be formed in this period was the London Missionary

Society which at first was non-denominational in character but later on became Congregationalist. In 1799 the Church Missionary

Society (C.M.S.) was formed. It was the foreign missions arm of the Anglican Church. The missionary organization of the followers of

the Wesleys (known as the Wesleyans) was further extended and

eventually became known as the Methodist Church.

To sum up this second period of Church history under discussion,

we may say that the reform which marked the sixteenth century was general in nature, whereas that of the eighteenth century was not so general. The earlier reforms influenced not only the spiritual world but the political and social worlds as well. Not so, though, with the 80

Back to the Cross

latter reforms, which had their focus mainly in the spiritual realm.∗

The most notable of the reform movements that flowered during the eighteenth century was the testimony of “the Philadelphia church,”

inasmuch as it gathered up all the principal recoveries of the recent past up to that time.

Now let us turn to the nineteenth century. In this period we have an even fuller recovery. First of all, let us review the recovery that has come to be associated with the name of John Nelson Darby.

In 1827 at Dublin, Ireland, a group of believers, among whom

were Edward Cronin, Anthony Norris Groves and others, saw that

many things in the Church were dead, lifeless and mere rituals. They sought the Lord to show them the Church of God’s thought as

revealed in the Bible. After much prayer and fellowship they felt they should meet according to the principles given in 1 Corinthians

14. They thus began to break bread in a brother’s home. Not long afterwards an Anglican curate by the name of John N. Darby joined them in their meetings and expounded God’s word among them.

Later on, many well-known Bible expositors began to appear in their midst—men such as William Kelly, C. H. Mackintosh, John Newton,

John G. Bellett, and others. Through my own reading of their

writings I myself received much light on the oneness of the Body of Christ as well as on the errors of denominationalism.

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