I’m gonna guess that eight out of ten of my readers have never heard of a woman named Jessie Penn-Lewis. That’s ok. I’m writing today to introduce you to her ministry.

Actually, I don’t know a whole lot about Mrs. Penn-Lewis’ personal history. I’m aware there is some controversy surrounding her teachings, associated as she was with the Keswick convention and other “deeper life” movements of her day. She did seem to be a little overly obsessed with Satan and demonic activity, in my own opinion. Otherwise, what little of her stuff I’ve read has the imprint of Christ all over it, no doubt about it.

In particular, allow me to direct your attention to a little booklet entitled The Centrality of the Cross. Only 142 pages long, including ten brief, easy-to-read chapters which explore various aspects of the cross and its relation to the spiritual life of a believer, this little work is a gem. The book begins with a quote from Henry C. Mabie and goes on to further unfold the meaning of what he said, from the author’s own experience:

The Greek word used by Paul in First Corinthians 1:18 is logos… [not] ‘preaching but ’the subject matter of preaching; with the very essence of that which was to be preached; with that ‘Logos’ of the cross which constituted its rationale, its Divine reason, a reason which… he declares to be ‘the wisdom of God’…

This ‘Logos of the cross’ is conceived by Paul to be the key which unlocks the riddle of the universe, solves all mysteries, and reconciles all things…

I believe this book is actually a transcription of spoken messages delivered by Mrs. Penn-Lewis in conference. I’m not sure if it is still available through mainstream distributors, but fortunately the seeking reader always has Amazon for all of his out-of-print needs.

Also, for those who enjoy exploring the various historical connections between past servants of God, I know that T. Austin Sparks was briefly associated with Mrs. Penn-Lewis in her “Overcomer” ministry toward the beginning of his own public foray, and that her writings were likewise influential in the early formation of Watchman Nee’s thought as a young man. Again, I’ve not read much of Penn-Lewis other than The Centrality of the Cross, but I highly recommend it. If any of you are familiar with other of her works, I’d love to hear about it.

An old friend recently asked me about a book called The Torch of the Testimony by John W. Kennedy. I assume he’s thinking about reading it, so I figured what the heck, I’ll do a review. The following quote is taken from the back cover and I think sums it up pretty well:

The 2,000 year history of those Christians-and churches-that have stood outside the Protestant-Catholic tradition. This book was originally published in India in 1964 and is little known in the western world. Beginning in the first century John Kennedy traces the history of Christian groups who remained outside formalized religion down through the ages. A stirring, passionate and sometime heart-rending story of suffering to the centrality of Christ within the Body of Christ.

I first got my hands on a copy of this book about seven years ago, sometime during my tenure at Bible college. I wasn’t nearly as interested in history then as I am now-hardly at all, to be honest-so nothing about the Torch really stood out to me at that point in time. I was a little intrigued by the thought of believers coming together outside of formalized religion, but I knew so little of what that meant that I wasn’t really compelled to give Kennedy’s book the time it deserved. All I remember from my brief perusal was being struck by a passing comment the author made about the testimony of the Moravians fading away because they did not have an adequate wineskin to contain the flow of spiritual life they were experiencing. I found this interesting, but I just wasn’t ready to hear it.

Add a couple more years to the journey, throw in some fresh light on the Lord’s eternal purpose, not to mention an experience of fellowship in the Body of Christ that cut straight across the grain of everything I formerly associated with the word “church,” and I became ready for the message of this book.

Kennedy begins by exploring the origin of the Jewish synagogue and the historical context of the first Christian communities. He highlights how God was pressing on from the day of Pentecost to gain a full and undivided expression of His Son through the church, which He found first at Antioch and then in the Gentile assemblies spread throughout the Empire.

Chapters three and four examine the spiritual life and order of those churches, as best as they can be garnered from scripture, and the signs of declension which were in evidence as early on as the Jerusalem church. Ultimately threats of division, self-appointed leadership, and false teaching culminated in a widespread departure from primitive order stemming from the loss of spiritual life among the people. The development of the clergy system, consolidation of power in a single man, the rise of a federated church system-Kennedy shows how all these were unfortunate reactions of human expediency against the many perils facing the community of believers.

From there he goes on to consider the triumph of Constantine and his alliance of church and state, various reactions against the ensuing spiritual fornication of the “church” (so-called) with the world, and then the long and often overlooked history of the “torch bearers”-nameless groups of believers who held to the primitive testimony of Jesus Christ as preeminent over all things. Here is where the story gets especially bloody.

Eventually the path leads us to the Reformation of the sixteenth century, the believers called Anabaptists (independent churches who received as much persecution from the hands of the Protestants as they did Catholics), and a number of other groups who sought namelessness but were again and again labeled by their accusors according to the name of some outstanding figure among them or some practice which roused the particular hatred of the establishment. Sadly, according to historian Will Durant, “the church has killed only two types of people: those who do not believe in the teachings of Jesus and those who do.” And again, from Philip Schaff: “More Christian blood has been shed by Christians than by heathens and Mohammedans.”

Kennedy concludes with a general history of the Plymouth Brethren in the mid-1800′s (I’m still waiting for someone to take up the story from there) and a summary chapter on some of the lessons we may learn from both the mistakes and triumphs of the past. ”The denominations of today are often the churches of yesterday,” he reminds us, and declares to the reader in no uncertain terms that

The testimony of the church is positive, not merely reactionary… It is a testimony to the truth that all who are born of the Spirit into the family of Christ are one, and must grow and witness together in the fellowship of the church where the Lord dwells in their midst. The church meets on that positive ground, neither adding anything to it, nor taking anything away. But it entails sacrifice. It means the taking up of the cross, the cross of misunderstanding, of shame, of being called ‘separationists.’ Yet every spiritual movement has begun in sacrifice. That is another of history’s lessons.

The true church is the scene of a continual spiritual struggle for its own existence… If we do not hold firmly on to the fellowship of the church, it will slip from our grasp. It is of all things most vehemently assailed. It is tempted to compromise with organized Christianity. It is tempted to organize itself in order to conserve what it has gained. It is tempted to sectarianism by limiting its growth to a certain emphasis of Christian truth. When it succumbs to any of these temptations, declension follows, for progress has been limited, and when it has reached the end of its possible progress, it must fade out as a spiritual power.

There are just so many lines like this one to quote from The Torch of the Testimony that I have struggled with what to leave out and what to include in this review. At any rate, I highly recommend this work to anyone who is interested in the history of the church in the margins. You will be convicted, intrigued, inspired, and challenged by the witness of history, whose testimony unequivocaly declares, in Kennedy’s own words, that

Churches as they were in the times of the apostles have never ceased to exist… wherever God works through the power of His unchangeable Word, people made partakers of the divine nature, anxious to obey the Word which has shed a flood of light into their souls, have gathered together and are gathering together as the disciples did in Acts.

Most people are familiar with Brother Lawrence’s classic work from the 17th century, The Practice of the Presence of God. Less well-known are the writings of Frank Laubach from the early 20th century in which Laubach-a missionary to the Philllipines and author of over fifty books-chronicles his own journey of seeking to maintain a constant fellowship with the Lord. Seedsowers has put these writings together for us in a single compilation entitled Practicing His Presence. ”This book,” according to the foreword,

carries the testimony of two men’s unique relationship with God… walking in the awareness of the presence of Christ… just a Christ walked about on earth, constantly aware of His Father.

The editor immediately challenges us as to whether such a relationship is really attainable in life, if it is to be desired, and asks if such an experience is actually central to all that we know of the Christian life.  However our own stories may read up to this point, the testimonies of Lawrence and Laubach answer a resounding “yes” to each of these questions.

Reading this book is like searching through a chest full of treasure. Every page is an open window into spiritual reality. Best of all, it is not only spiritual but practical. Both Laubach and Brother Lawrence offer practical tips on how to find and cultivate the kind of fellowship with an indwelling Lord that they themselves enjoyed.

Personally, I benefited more from Laubach’s portion than I did Brother Lawrence’s. Listen to these quotes from Laubach, taken from letters he wrote to his father while living as a missionary on the island of Mindanao:

It is… that ‘moment by moment,’ every waking moment, surrender, responsiveness, obedience, sensitiveness, pliability, ‘lost in His love,’ that I now have the mind-bent to explore with all my might, to respond to Jesus Christ as a violin responds to the bow of the master.

Why do I constantly harp upon this inner experience? Because I feel convinced that for me,. and for you who read, there lie ahead undiscovered continents of spiritual living compared with which we are infants in arms.

I have tasted a thrill of fellowship with God which has made anything discordant with God disgusting.

Oh, this thing of keeping in constant touch with God, of making Him the object of my thought and the companion of my conversations, is the most amazing thing I ever ran across. It is working.

The most important discovery of my whole life is that one can take a little rough cabin and transform it into a palace just by flooding it with God.

It is our duty to live in the beauty of the presence of God on some mount of transfiguration until we become white with Christ. After all, the deepest truth is that the Christ-like life is glorious, undefeatably glorious. There is no defeat unless one loses God, and then all is defeat, though it be housed in castles and buried in fortunes.

If there is any contribution that I have to make to the world that will live, surely it must be my experience of God on Signal Hill.

If that isn’t enough to stir your hunger to read the book for yourself then I don’t know what will.  Brother Lawrence brings us more of the same in the second section, only now we have it in a modern English that is very easy to read. Practicing His Presence is volume 1 in a library of spiritual classics released by the publisher. The front cover touts it as “one of the greatest pieces of Christian literature of all time”-a lofty status, but well-deserved in my opinion. Get this gem online, or better yet through your local bookstore. Or give me a call and I’ll let you borrow my copy. Whatever you do, just get your hands on this book.

Ever hear of a guy named Ernest Loosley? Me neither. Whoever he was, though, he wrote one heck of a good book. When the Church was Young was originally published in 1935 in London, England, then edited and revised in recent years by Seedsowers publishing house. In this little offering, not even 100 pages long, Mr. Loosley takes a refreshing look at the early church, setting her example over against the traditional church of his (and our) own day.

Before you stand back in fear, however, let me assure you that the author is no advocate of New Testament blueprint-ism. His aim is not to show us some cookie cutter pattern of first-century church life and demand that it be replicated in our day. As I said, his approach is wonderfully refreshing, even liberating, and bears not a touch of that “here’s how they did it, so we should too” mentality. All throughout the book his emphasis is not so much on form but on the indwelling Spirit who guided our spiritual ancestors, with a call for us to abandon ourselves to follow that same Spirit. In the foreword Mr. Loosley states,

The experience of the early church was very much like that of a young and growing child. There was newness and freshness in her. She knew exploration, experiment, discovery and wonder. ‘Some new thing’ had come into the world and those who found it were engaged for years in trying to understand and to explain what it meant.

He goes on to quote from Dr. Streeter’s book, The Primitive Church: 

It is permissible to hint that the first Christians achieved what they did because the spirit with which they were inspired was one favorable to experiment. Perhaps the line of advance for the church today is not to imitate the forms but to recapture the spirit of the primitive church.

A fitting introduction to what turns out to be a very insightful look at first century Christianity. Read this book and you will be challenged to confront the shallowness of your own walk with Christ, as well as the glaring differences that exist between the quality of church life shown in scripture and the kind most of us know today. In chapters 1-7 Loosley examines the startling fact that when the church was young, she had

no buildings,

no denominations,

no fixed organization,

no New Testament (!),

no vocabulary of its own,

no dogmatic system,

and no day of Sabbath rest (not in the Gentile world).

He then goes on in chapters 8-10 to to consider what the church did have when she was young, which was

an experience,

a store of teaching from Christ,

and a gospel.

These final chapters are short, but they are the cream of the crop. Read them for yourself. Then along with Mr. Loosley, let us “get back to first things.” 

At last! Here’s the book I’ve been waiting years for from Gene Edwards. Living Close to God (When you’re not good at it) is Gene at his best: Practical help on knowing the Lord Jesus Christ, deeply, intimately, personally.

Gene has never been much for convention of any sort, and certainly his writing style is no exception to that rule. The chapters of this book vary in length but are mostly short, and the abrupt ending is sure to disappoint the hungry reader who is eager for more. Nonetheless, what Gene offers in this brief volume is well worth the read. Living close to God’s content is largely autobiographical, which serves the purpose of the book well, I think. Any honest reader will relate to the author’s confessions of not being a “naturally spiritual person.” But they will also be given heart to go on pursuing a meaningful, living walk with Christ that is subject neither to personal failures nor the limitations that come with traditional forms of prayer and Bible study.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who is hungry to know the Lord in a real and living way. To read an excerpt from the first chapter click here.

Also, in case you care to know, I received a copy of this book free from WaterBrook Multnomah Publishing Group in exchange for this honest review as part of their Blogging for Books program. If you have a blog of your own and you love to read, head on over to their site and sign up for yourself!