Andre Pelser

There were warnings everywhere: on TV, in the newspapers, and at airports, but the tornado season didn’t hit the areas I visited. I went to New York, Houston (Texas), via Atlanta (Georgia) to Skiatook (Oklahoma). Security measures have been stepped up at all airports.

Flight diversions by alerts have also increased in the United States. There are 550 000 flights per month in the USA. Last year 15 000 were diverted mostly because of adverse weather conditions but several were because of security reasons. Diversions cost airlines a lot of money.

Hurricanes are on the increase in the United States of America. Fifteen tropical storms have been predicted and named for this hurricane season that lasts from June to November. There used to be 10 hurricanes per year 50 years ago. The record warm water in the ocean is the cause of the increase. Hurricanes need 80 degrees Fahrenheit in water temperature to form. Colorado State University make the hurricane forecasts for the country.

Harvesters in Houston

It was great to see Jako and Elda Filjon and their two beautiful daughters, Danielle and Kayla again. They have survived the long waiting period to obtain their green card as fully-fledged American citizens and Jako is able to do his consultancy work again. Elda is playing tennis like a Pro and clubs are vying for her talents. The kids are doing well at school.

We held a house meeting in their home and several couples attended. Most of them had been hurt by pastors who acted more like dictators than shepherds. We were able to minister to them and share some reformational truths. Jako says the feedback from those people is very encouraging.

The right seat

When I had to go to Tulsa to get to Skiatook, there were only two seats available on a flight via Atlanta to Tulsa.

‘Which one do you want?’ Jako asked.

‘That one,’ I said. So he booked it on the internet.

As we drove past Lakewood Church where Joel Osteen is the Pastor, I told Jako: ‘I sang in his father’s church in the downtown part of Houston many years ago. Then it was known as the ‘tin shanty’ because it was built with corrugated iron. I wish I can tell Joel that I sang in his father’s church.’

Joel bought a basketball stadium to accommodate the 20 000 member church.

As I sat down in the plane the man next to me was reading a Christian magazine. I asked him if he was a minister. I prophesied to him about his life and ministry and he wrote it down. His name is Jim Lewis and he happened to be one of the senior ministers at Lakewood church. He is in charge of the Men’s Ministry over there and was going to Atlanta and Ohio to meet men who wanted to learn from him. The prophecy I gave him covered his outreach and he said he was going to share it with the guys.

Then I told him that I sang in John Osteen’s church many years ago. I gave him one of my blues CD’s.

‘Give me another one and I will give it to Joel. And give me another one and I will give it to Joel’s brother. I will tell them that you sang in their dad’s church.’

Amazing! That morning I was wishing I could let Joel Osteen know that I sang in his dad’s church and now Jim was going to do that for me! Isn’t God’s timing absolutely perfect? My roundabout way of getting to Tulsa via Atlanta didn’t make sense at first, but now it made perfect sense!

‘When you come to Houston again, let me know and I’ll see what I can arrange for you to speak to the men or something else.’ Jim said.

I didn’t have time to see Anton and Esther de Gruchy in Atlanta this time, but we saw them recently when they came to his brother’s funeral here in the Cape. They are both doing fine and settling in very nicely. They found a church they are attending.

A little cowboy town

In Skiatook I booked into the little roadside motel for truckers where I normally stay. I rented a car from the Alamo car rental company for $23 per day! That’s very cheap compared to what we pay for car rentals in South Africa.

Oklahoma is the biggest state in America and the wide open grasslands are like the Highveld in Gauteng. The Osage and the Cherokee Indians come from those areas.

Pastor Jerald Freeman and his wife Dixie, are both doing fine. He was ill before I came but we all prayed and he recovered. The Ascension church in the main road had a big bill board advertising my meeting: Apostle Andre Pelser from South Africa. Many years ago the word ‘apostle’ was anathema. Thank God it is now a normal accepted function in the church again.

The church has a special rack where they hang their cowboy hats in the church lobby. I made sure I had my jeans, cowboy shirt, boots and hat on when I arrived to fit into the church. They searched me for my holsters! When in Skiatook do as the cowboys do!

On Sunday morning I preached about Elijah who wanted to give up at the brook Cherith (which means ‘a cut’ referring to a cut of a covenant). But God told him his work was not finished yet. He still had to anoint two kings and a prophet in his place before he could leave the earth. Then when he had completed his task, the Lord took him away in a whirlwind.

At the end of my sermon a big old cowboy with a large beard came and hugged me and said with tears in his eyes: ‘Last week I just wanted to curl up and die,’ he told me, ‘but you brought me new life and new hope today. Thanks for coming to us. If you came only for me then it was worth it.’

In the evening I shared on The Substance of Faith. There were several visitors from Tulsa. Two of them came and told me, ‘Tulsa is Faith City. But you should go and preach this message on faith all over Tulsa. They have never heard it the way you preach it!’  I pointed out particularly that faith is not a confession but a substance. We should not put our faith in our confession but in God alone. Jesus asked his disciples, where is your faith? They didn’t know what to answer. The right answer should have been, ‘our faith is in you, Lord!’

‘Whenever you are here there is such a presence of the Lord,’ the worship leader told me.

Another man came and told me, ‘thirty years ago I used to run a radio station to connect missionaries. Your ministry stirred me up to start that up again.’

Another lady took the microphone at the end of the meeting and said, ‘you inspired me to go out and tell people about God!’

Someone else said:  ‘you’ve had such an interesting life. All the stories you tell are amazing. You are so privilege to go around the world and have all these experiences. You inspired us all today.’

False Teaching sweeping through the land like a tornado

Carlton Pearson that used to be one of the foremost Pentecostal preachers in Tulsa is ‘leading people away from God to hell’ according to an older Pentecostal preacher. Carlton lost his church, his salary and all he possessed. A phone call from a pastor in San Francisco who is a lesbian opened up a new door for him to preach his new theory that heaven is waiting for everyone and that hell as we were taught does not exist. Her church consists of people recovering from drug addiction, lesbians and homosexuals.

‘I was hurting man,’ Pearson told the TV interviewer, ‘and these people were singing and washing my feet…everybody became Jesus to me. They healed me! I experienced more love among them than among the Pentecostal preachers.’

Right or wrong, what Carlton said is an indictment against the loveless state of the church. And Jesus said they will know that we are Christians by our love!

The Episcopal Church offered the use of their great cathedral to Pearson on Sunday afternoons. The numbers grew again. It is still the same Pentecostal songs, Hammond organ music and clapping that fills the cathedral but he is preaching a different New Age Gospel now.

‘God is saying something new. Jesus is appalled at what Christians have made of Christianity. Pastors have become dictators and they have frightened the people with hell. There’s a great shifting coming! Oh, I feel the anointing!’ and his loyal crowd agrees wholeheartedly with a lusty ‘Amen!’

 ‘People are hurting. Jesus broke the rules. I am breaking the rules. Mormons, Muslims, Atheists, Gays, Agnostics are all welcome where I preach. As long as we worship Jesus together,’ Pearson says.

Pearson now gets invited to preach around the country.

Although Carlton has lost his way, there is truth in some of the things he is saying. I also believe Jesus is appalled at the state of things in the church and there has to be reformation to re-align the church with its original design as revealed to Paul, the apostle.

Let us pray for Carlton Pearson that he will not continue on this new pathway, but that he will have a Damascus Road experience, where Christ will appear to him and get him back on track.

Firenado: The Great Chicago Fire

William Ogden went to buy a piece of land from a farmer in a swamp area called Chicago and became a millionaire by selling real estate. He also started a mill there. Most of the houses were built with wood that people bought from the mill. By 1871 Chicago was the fastest growing city in the world. It became the funnel of America; everything had to pass through its waterways and railroads.

On 5^th October 1871 a fire broke out in Peshtigo, a small lumber town. The winds travelled at 35 miles per hour and drove the fire throughout the region. They saw how fire embers created pools of fire around the drought ridden Mid-West. Woods took flame, igniting everything. Flames gathered momentum and travelled at 100 miles per hour. People fled. They were struck dumb by terror. The Peshtigo River was the only refuge. Animals, children, boats were fighting for space in the river.

A million acres of land were destroyed. Over a thousand people died in the fire. Several towns destroyed.

The high winds spread the fire to Chicago. A spark of fire in the O’ Leary barn ignited the fire in Chicago.

The Court room House Bell Tower rang out a warning to the city dwellers, tolling out the city’s doom. The wind and fire created its own up draft causing air to rush in and to magnify the fire. Such fire storms are called a FIRE NADOES.

People jammed together on the bridges. Dust and smoke made it difficult to breathe. Animals were stampeding and trampling on people. The Chicago River caught flame because of the oily residue on the water from all the industries on the river’s edge polluting the river. People could not dive into the river which was their only refuge from the flames.

The intense heat of the fire melted brick and metal, limestone and marble. The inferno chased people north. They dropped everything they could no longer carry. Dolls, furniture, dogs got left behind. The Fire Brigade’s water pumping station caught fire and burnt down. All hope to save city went up in smoke. Families were torn apart and people ran for safety. They kept on running all the way to Lake Michigan.

Yet Mrs. Martha Wing Robinson and her family remained in their little Chicago home, praying throughout the firenado. Her house was the only house left standing after the flames subsided.

One of my teachers at Miracle Valley Bible College, Dr. Ernest Oldfield knew Mrs. Robinson well. He and Dr. Waldvogel that taught Dr. Gray, both ministers in New York, visited Mrs. Robinson in Chicago and knew her reasonably well. She taught them a lot of things they taught us at Miracle Valley.

The Simon & Garfunkel song, ‘Mrs. Robinson’ allegedly refers to Martha Wing Robinson, ‘and here’s to you Mrs. Robinson, Jesus loves you more than you would know, wow-wow-wow!’

Martha Wing Robinson’s biography is called, ‘Radiant Glory’. It tells of a woman who had a desire to be like Jesus. She used to pray over certain scripture verses until they became part of her being. She would take I Corinthians 13 and pray over that chapter, verse by verse, for a year or two, until it manifested in her life. The word became flesh.

One day she saw Jesus and he walked into her body and disappeared. For a few weeks she seemed to do everything perfectly. She cooked perfectly: her family commended her on the best and tastiest meals she had ever made. People came to her door from great distances and said they received visions to come to her address. And then she would have words of wisdom and knowledge to give direction to their lives. People were miraculously healed just by coming into contact with her. It was as if she could not put a foot wrong. And then Jesus left her body again and told her: ‘this is what the end-time saints will experience!’

So in a topsy-turvy world where very little makes sense at the moment, we have something glorious to look forward to: Christ in us, the hope of glory to be revealed through us, supernaturally, for the greater glory of God and the betterment of other people.

A city on the mend

In New Orleans, a city flattened by hurricane Katrina, they are building state-of-the-art energy efficient homes for lower income groups with features such as solar panels and rain catching cisterns. New Orleans has become a leader in green housing. Homes go for $120 000 and energy bills are 75% lower than comparable homes in other states.

The Colleges in New Orleans have also given student grants which attracted some of the top students and sportsmen around the country and their sports teams have competed with the best in the nation.

It is wonderful that a city that was devastated can rise up and be on the mend again.

There is a message in here somewhere: if the enemy tried to flatten your life, there is hope that it can be reconstructed, in the Name of the Lord! All things are possible to those who believe.

Let us pray for a church plant in America. It would be great to have a Harvester Reformational Church in that great country! We need about $5 000 to register the church in the USA.