I have just started a book called To Spread the Power: Church Growth in the Wesleyan Spirit and I’m the section on apostolic confidence.
Reverend McCabe was sent by the Methodists in 1881 to plant churches all over the Northwest and they came to a point where they were starting a CHURCH A DAY and in some months two a day! He wrote about his mission in a paper and this is one great story:
An article in McCabe’s morning newspaper featured a speech delivered in Chicago by Robert G. Ingersol, the famous agnostic philosopher, to a convention of the Freethinkers Association of America. Ingersol’s speech declared that “the churches are dying out all over the earth; they are stuck with death” (see Luccock, 1964, pp. 66-67). When the train stopped at the next town, McCabe sent a telegram to Ingersol, still at the convention:
Dear Robert:
“All hail the power of Jesus’ name—we are building one Methodist Church for every day in the year, and propose to make it two a day.”
That is apostolic confidence my friends!
I know the first question many of you have reading this is, “How? How did they plant a church a day?” Or, “what did these churches look like?”
I will loop back and write another post on the principles I find about these churches, but for now I want us to be inspired by “apostolic confidence”. I haven’t heard this term before and I love this guy’s drive to plant churches and to show the church is alive and well and advancing.
I am currently at an offsite work meeting and don’t have a ton of time to think on this, so I am wondering if you can help me in the comments? Lets do this as a community…
1) What does it mean to be “apostolically confident”?
2) If an agnostic freethinker was bashing the church today, what would you say to them in “apostolic confidence?”
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