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NOTES TO EDITORS:
The British media-dubbed ‘Toronto Blessing’ was
a collection of the bizarre happenings – falling down, speaking
in tongues, uncontrolled jerking and laughter, jumping up and
down and making wild animal noises like roaring and barking –
which began with the Toronto Airport Vineyard church in January
1994. The Blessing spread rapidly to the UK so by the end of
1994 it is estimated that between 2000 and 4000 congregations
had embraced it.
The Evangelical Alliance UK was founded in 1846 and today
represents over one million Christians in 30 denominations. The
Evangelical Alliance was a founding member of the World Evangelical
Fellowship, which now has 120 member Alliances, together representing
200 million evangelicals worldwide.
An evangelical is someone who believes that Jesus is both
God and man; that the Bible is the ultimate authority in all
that it addresses; and that the traditional beliefs of the Church
such as the physical resurrection of Jesus are true. An evangelical
owns a commitment to Christ as their personal saviour and a desire
to live out that faith in the community.
http://www.eauk.org/contentmanager/Content/press/EA_011106b_toronto.cfm
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Toronto Blessing ‘Was Threefold Crisis for Modern Day
Evangelicalism’, says Evangelical Alliance Theologian in
New Book online only
6 November 2001
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In a major new book published today by the Evangelical Alliance,
its Theological Adviser, Dr David Hilborn, argues that the Toronto
phenomenon of the mid 1990s represented a crisis for UK evangelicalism
- the consequences of which are still being felt today.
Toronto in Perspective, is a volume of essays in which Hilborn,
as editor, draws together contributions from six prominent evangelical
scholars and writers - Margaret Poloma, Stephen Sizer, Martin
Davie, Mark Cartledge, David Pawson and Patrick Dixon. The essays
offer various perspectives on one of the biggest and most controversial
events in recent Christian history. The book has been written
to give Christians and others a better understanding of what
the Toronto experience meant for evangelicals when it emerged,
and what its significance is now.
In his article Hilborn identifies three key areas of crisis
in relation to the Toronto movement: those of definition, discernment
and unity.
Definition was considered important, so evangelicals spent
much time and expended much ink trying to decide whether Toronto
was revival, renewal or awakening. But Hilborn writes that an
overemphasis by both supporters and opponents on the dramatic
manifestations of the Spirit – which so excited the news
media – obscured the need for more sober analysis of the
impact of the Blessing on people’s lives and churches.
The lack of such analysis contributed to the second crisis
of discernment. Many at the time suggested that the Blessing
should be judged by its fruits. These however were not entirely
self-evident, and different camps interpreted data in different
ways – often to suit their own position. So sceptics condemned
the lack of scriptural and doctrinal substance of Toronto-style
meetings and pointed to a dearth of repentance and low number
of new converts. The pro-Toronto lobby on the other hand presented
accounts of cross-centred preaching, radically enhanced discipleship
and influxes of new Christians. So often however the evidence
offered was merely anecdotal – not least in the case of
the ‘animal noises’ debate, which again captured the
imagination of the press.
Beyond all this, Hilborn points to key facts such as the drastic
drop in regular church attendance during the 1990s from 10% to
7.5% of the English population. If, he says, the main test of
a movement’s godliness and fruitfulness is its durability
then, by this test, ‘Toronto would have appeared to have
withered on the vine, though certainly not the Vineyard’.
But the most serious crisis (‘unity’) was seen in
the impact of the Toronto movement on relationships within the
Church. Hilborn argues that the Blessing drew out tensions which
had existed under the surface of Evangelical Christianity for
some time, and that it aggravated long standing mutual suspicions
between conservative and charismatic evangelicals in particular.
While accepting that the Evangelical Alliance might have responded
more swiftly and extensively to the Toronto Blessing when it
emerged, Hilborn nonetheless states that from an early stage
"the role and work of the Alliance became crucial".
It was, he writes, "probably the only organisation which
could seriously hope to work through and beyond these polarities,
and therefore reiterate a unity which could be neither cheap
nor monolithic, but which could be grounded in genuine biblical
collegiality."
Hilborn says that the Alliance’s Euston Statement, which
was issued in December 1994, remains one of the few documents
published on the Blessing which can claim a genuinely ‘conciliar’
and ‘ecumenical’ evangelical authority.
This co-operative approach has now been embodied in the Alliance’s
theological commission, ACUTE, which was formed as a constructive
response to the debate on the Blessing and has gone on to produce
major reports on the equally controversial questions of homosexuality
and hell.
General Director of the Evangelical Alliance Joel Edwards
concluded: "There are important lessons here, many of which
have only become apparent with hindsight. All in all I am glad
to be able to commend this book within and beyond the Alliance’s
constituency. It deserves to become a standard text on an extraordinary
period of recent church history – one with which I was closely
involved at the time, but which I now understand much better
having read what follows in these pages."
Ends
Media enquiries: Lorna Madden
Evangelical Alliance
07740 655 377
eaukpress@hotmail.com |