Ern Baxter and the British Restoration Movement

Ern Baxter exercised a lengthy ministry in Pentecostal and Charismatic circles from the early 1930s to the 1990s. His main geographical sphere of ministry, and the place where he had the greatest impact, was in North America, but this article focusses mostly on a relatively small but nonetheless significant part of his life and ministry, his involvement with British Restoration churches from the early 1970s through to 1977. The British Restoration movement, with the Dales Bible Week as its flagship event, had a widespread impact on British churches.

Baxter was born in Saskatoon, Canada on 22 June 1914, and was taken by his parents to a Holiness Church as a child, and then from about the age of 14 to a Pentecostal Church. Formative events in his life were his conversion at age 17, his starting to travel as a musician with the evangelist MV Brown from May 1932, and then his baptism in the Spirit and call to the ministry in July 1932 whilst attending the Trossachs Conference in Canada. This conference, unusually at that time, majored on the experience of the Spirit and Bible teaching, twin emphases that Baxter sought to adhere to throughout his life. Baxter was in full time Christian ministry from the age of 18 until his death over 60 years’ later.

The prevailing eschatological viewpoint within American Pentecostalism and Fundamentalism in the 1930s was the dispensational premillennialist position, which Baxter held some years. However, he was challenged on this relatively early in his ministry by an older friend, William Booth-Clibborn, and came to accept the amillennial view for a number of years. Later on, although he did not care to be labelled a postmillennialist, he came to proclaim an imminent, glorious, triumphal future for the church on earth.  A victorious eschatology became a core part of his message in his mature years.

During a long and successful pastorate at the Evangelistic Tabernacle in Vancouver, some of the most dramatic and influential events of his ministry occurred during the years 1949-1956, when for large parts of the year he served as campaign manager and Bible teacher for the itinerant healing evangelist William Branham. Baxter had first heard Branham in Winnipeg in 1947, and had then been with some members of his church to attend meetings when Branham visited Calgary, Alberta. Baxter went on to lead meetings in Vancouver when Braham came there in late 1948, after which Branham invited Baxter to travel with him in future campaigns. Branham’s sensational healing meetings were high profile events and he, together with Oral Roberts, were the leading figures in the post war Healing Revival, which did much to prepare the ground for the Pentecostal message to spread into the mainline denominations, flowering in due course in the Charismatic movement.

Branham was a controversial figure, and whilst Baxter had a deep personal affection for him, he ultimately felt that he had no option other than to leave the Branham ministry. Whilst Baxter was a wholehearted believer in the supernatural, a number of aspects of the Healing Revival distressed him, such as false doctrine in the case of Branham, and financial greed, immorality, lack of accountability of leaders, and exaggerated claims in the supernatural realm on the part of some other ministries. Baxter later observed:

I remember in the beginning of the healing movement, simply to report a healing would produce great jubilation and praise from congregations. However, the cynicism became so deep that the people’s confidence was diminished. Even to this day, people are affected. People began to circulate healing testimonies which, when they were checked out by reputable journalists and reporters, even those who were friendly to the movement, were found to be false. The percentage of healings that stood up after investigation was embarrassingly low. As a result, disillusionment set in, and the healing movement as it was known in the beginning declined in momentum until today you can’t say it really amounts to anything as a movement. (Interview in New Wine, December 1978.)

In a later publication Baxter commented:

The healing movement quieted down, and I left the Branham ministry in disillu­sionment, questioning everything to do with the supernatural. Undoubtedly, I had seen the supernatural, and it was real; but I had at the same time seen uncorrected sin, corruption, and unsound doctrine. It seemed like a modern replay of Corinthianism, which like other errors perennially plagues the church. The existence together of spiritual gifts and sin can cause great disillusionment for the naive in Christ. I had seen numerous supernatural manifestations, not the maudlin push-em-down-if-they-don’t-fall-under-the-Spirit ones, but real manifestations that I was convinced were absolutely authentic. However, I had also seen gross irregularities in the midst of these impressive charismatic events. (The Chief Shepherd and His Sheep, 1987.)

I returned to Vancouver and began teaching and preaching again at my church, with a reduced emphasis in the area of supernatural manifestations. Then in 1958 Baxter suffered a heart attack and a nervous breakdown which left him prostrate for several months. From the records available, this was probably the lowest point in his ministerial life, and it left a deep impression on him. About this time he ended his twenty year pastorate of the Evangelistic Tabernacle in Vancouver, although he remained in Vancouver, in due course starting the Open Bible Chapel, which grew to several hundred members. 

In the early 1960s Baxter became involved with the infant Charismatic movement, commenting in his book The Chief Shepherd and the Sheep:

… one day I picked up a magazine and read about an Episcopalian priest named Dennis Bennett who had started speaking in tongues. Even some of his curates were doing so. My first thought was ‘here we go again.’ Later, I learned that he had been sent off to a city in the northwest [Seattle] to minister at a small church where, I was sure, he was meant to be forgotten. I discovered, though, that I myself could not forget about him, because his small church happened to be just two blocks from a Bible college at which I regularly taught. We soon met.

Baxter had involvement with radical Charismatic leaders in England during the early 1970s, holding meetings at the Bonnington Hotel, London. In 1974 Baxter ministered at the Capel Bible Week in Surrey, where Bryn Jones, the Bradford-based main leader of the British Restoration movement in the mid-1970s, was one of the other platform speakers. Jones organized the Lakes Bible Week in 1975, and invited Baxter as the main speaker. The attendance at this Bible Week was 500, and Baxter preached memorably on the subject of ‘The King and His Army’, drawing an analogy between Saul and David as types, in Saul’s case of unspiritual churches from which God’s Spirit had departed, and in David’s case of those that were experiencing the Spirit. He proclaimed God’s desire to see his people arise to exercise kingly authority in the earth, manifesting the glory of God to the nations, in contrast to a dead ecclesiastical system devoid of the Holy Spirit.

Just one year prior to speaking at the Lakes Bible Week in 1975, Baxter had entered into covenant relationship with a group of other leaders (Charles Simpson, Don Basham, Bob Mumford, and Derek Prince) at the Montreat, North Carolina, Shepherds Conference in 1974. Collectively these five leaders (including Baxter) were often referred to as the ‘Fort Lauderdale Five’, and were the leaders of the Shepherding Movement, which taught the need for every believer to have a personal shepherd, and the importance of relationships, accountability and discipleship. At the 1975 Lakes Bible Week Baxter recounted the intense emotion he’d felt when joining this group:

… it’s only a year ago in Montreat, where one morning a group of brothers said, ‘We’re going to meet in a room, Brother Ern, we’d be glad if you’d come.’ After much weeping, at last I went up, and I stood there, and turned around, and I said, ‘If I did what I feel to do’, I said, ‘I’d throw myself prostrate on the floor, and I’d say, “Brothers, cover me.” ’ I didn’t have to throw myself prostrate on the floor. A few hours later we met in a little room, and I entered into a relationship, and something happened in the spirit world, and something happened in my spirit, and suddenly I found that I was plugged into men of God, and after forty years it was like I’d come home. It was like I was forty years on the way home, and it’s been the most beautiful year of my life. I’m no longer alone. (Lakes 1975 transcript, p.56f.)

Baxter regarded this development as a great step forward, and believed that if covenant relationship and shepherding principles were widely adopted, it could prevent many of the excesses and problems which he saw as current threats to the Charismatic movement, that had previously derailed the Healing Revival and the Latter Rain Movement. He saw covenant relationships as a remedy for the loneliness that he had felt in the ministry, and the isolation and lack of accountability that had ended in disaster for many of his peers: 

If you know what it’s like to have been forty years alone… You say, ‘You weren’t alone.’ I was alone! I know what I was, don’t tell me, I was alone. I could go to a conference and meet a bunch of ministers, I could go and have a milkshake with the Baptist minister, but I was alone. I made my decisions up in that big office under the tower alone, and I made bad decisions, and I finished up a physical wreck, and in 1958 I had a heart attack, I had a nervous breakdown at the same time, because I was alone. (Lakes 1975 transcript, p.74.)

I lived in the fifties and the sixties, when the great ministries lived up there in their eyrie heights, in their ivory towers of unilateral glory, and Satan popped them off one by one. When the healing movement started in the early fifties, I wrote an article that made me persona non grata with peers, for twenty years, right up to the present time, and the title of the article was, ‘The curse of carnal comparisons.’ And I took the thing because I saw it, I saw healers saying, ‘I’ve got the biggest tent, I get the biggest crowds, I’ve got the biggest magazine.’ Yes, and they fell with the biggest flop. Look, don’t laugh – this is no time for humour. I knew some of those men. It’s no joy to me that a man who blessed thousands died an alcoholic. It’s no blessing to me that a man who blessed thousands died in a needless automobile accident, having gone into delusion. I loved that man! It’s no joy to me to know of men today that are living out of touch with God, who once thrilled the hearts of great audiences.

I’d go from that service up into my office, and there wasn’t a lonelier man in the city than I was. And in 1958 I suffered a heart attack and a nervous breakdown at the same time, and I came crashing to the ground. And for six months I lay wanting to die. In the mornings they’d want to put the blinds up, open the shutters, and I’d say, ‘Leave them closed.’ (Dales 1976 transcript, p.67.)

Baxter’s most visible contribution to the British Restoration movement was his headlining preaching at a significant number of Bible Weeks in the mid-1970s, where he gave inspirational messages that enthused the young movement with a radical vision of a restored New Testament church whose achievements would vastly exceed those of the early church, with mass conversions, committed discipleship, and the transformation of human society brought under the rule of God. A substantial part of Baxter’s year was devoted to Britain. For example, in 1977 over a three-month period he held meetings in 24 towns and cities in England, and was the main speaker at four Bible Weeks – three in England and one in Edinburgh, Scotland. But the involvement extended beyond preaching, as British leaders visited the Fort Lauderdale Five in America, and as Baxter and his fellow leaders sought to assist or direct, according to one’s perspective, the leadership situation in the British movement. 

Within the British Restoration movement, there was already a strong emphasis on going back to the New Testament – to restore what was lost: hence the name ‘Restoration’. This included the Ephesians 4 ministries including apostles and prophets, and New Testament ecclesiology (geographical rather than denominational churches, etc.) In this they were at the radical end of the charismatic spectrum, going far beyond the ambitions of denominational charismatics. In looking back to restore the days of the New Testament they were influenced in part by the teaching of Watchman Nee and also by the Brethren, but they aimed to restore more than Nee or the Brethren would have thought possible. What Baxter added to the mix was the forward looking vision that all of this work of Restoration had a clear and glorious goal, one that was certain of fulfilment in the purposes of God, and likely to come to pass in the very near future.

The Lakes and the Dales Bible Weeks were the most important Weeks that Baxter addressed. Recurring emphases in Baxter’s ministry at the Lakes and Dales Bible Weeks from 1975-1977 were:

·       That God had brought personal blessing to many in the Charismatic movement, but now wanted to use that to bring about widespread revival and societal change. (‘God is saying to us: “I intend to solve the world’s problems by incarnating my royal self in the corporate body of my Son, and causing the kingdoms of this world to feel the impact of the corporate Christ, as it blazes forth in the authority of King David.”’ Lakes 1975 transcript, p.6.)

·       It was Baxter’s conviction that this generation would be the one to realise the eschatological vision of seeing the earth filled with the glory of the Lord, that this would be the generation ‘to go in and possess the land’, but he wasn’t absolutely categoric on this. (E.g. ‘It seems that we have come to that hour in human history when God is going to show forth his glory in the manifestation of kingdom power and authority.’ Lakes 1975 transcript, p.49; ‘We’re going to take over the world!’ Dales 1976 transcript, p.52; ‘Can you imagine when the bulk of the human population in the earth is going to far outnumber the unbelievers?!’ Dales 1976 transcript, p.79.)

·       That God’s rule is theocratic, through delegated men of his appointment, as opposed to democratic.

·       The vital role of personal shepherding, and of every believer being under divinely appointed, delegated authority

·       A corollary of this was that believers who found themselves in church connections that weren’t flowing with the Spirit, and lacked personal shepherding, should leave those connections and join themselves to a body of believers where these things were adhered to. Baxter preferred not to tell people explicitly that they should leave churches lacking the Spirit and shepherding, as he preferred for people to hear this for themselves from God, but this was the clear implication of his teaching.

·       Criticism of ‘easy-believism’ contrasted with the ‘Peter Package’ – that the normative entrance into the kingdom of God embraces repentance, water baptism and receiving the baptism of the Spirit with the gift of tongues.

·       An increase in the supernatural is to be expected in the coming revival, to include the provision of necessities for God’s people, such as manna from heaven (‘I believe that before this age ends, when economic, political and religious Babylon has collapsed, that we will enter into a dimension in God, where we will probably also go out and collect our manna. Now maybe not literally, but God will supernaturally provide.’ Dales 1976 transcript, p.38.), the miraculous and instant transportation of believers to where they need to go (‘I wouldn’t be a bit surprised but what we start to have some of the Philip Transportation Company restored.’ Dales 1976 transcript, p.82; ‘Any minute now I'm expecting that the Philip Transportation and Airline Company to start to operate again.’ Dales 1977 transcript, p.82), healing (‘It is my firm conviction that one of the great things that is up ahead for us is a massive visitation of God’s healing upon our bodies.’ Dales 1976 transcript, p.34), and angelic manifestations (‘I believe in angels. I’ll tell you something, if we are living in the time I think we’re living in, we’re going to start to see them more and more. …I think we’re going to start to see angels as a fairly commonplace thing.’ Dales 1977 transcript, p.5.)

·       An intense belief in the reality of demonic powers, to be remedied by practices such as exorcism, and spiritual warfare against evil principalities and powers.

Listening to those series again, and reading the transcripts, and comparing the contents to a number of other series that Baxter preached over the years, it is apparent that there is a high degree of overlap, and certain key elements are repeated again and again. Baxter himself was aware of this. He relates an occasion in Britain when a man approached him and gave him a copy of a tape of his, recorded in 1950. Baxter went home and listened to it, and commented, ‘Do you know what I heard? I heard the seeds of everything that I am teaching today in that message from way back in 1950.’ (The King, the Kingdom, and the Holy Spirit,published posthumously in 1995.)

What also comes across is Baxter’s excitement and enthusiasm for what he saw happening under his own ministry, and for what he discerned developing worldwide with the Shepherding Movement, and his particular relish for the British dimension. Partly this was natural, Baxter enjoying connecting with his British roots (Scottish father and Irish or half-Irish mother), and partly it was enjoyment at the response to his ministry, and to the intensity of the worship experienced there – rather like his time at the Kansas City Shepherds Conference in 1975, when he preached his celebrated sermon, ‘Thy Kingdom Come’, which has many similarities of theme to what he preached at the Lakes and Dales Bible Weeks, and in particular his sermon on ‘God’s Ultimate Man’ at the Dales in 1977.

The series that Baxter preached at the Lakes in 1975 and the Dales in 1976 were loosely of a consecutive expository nature, interpreting Old Testament passages as having typical significance for the church today. The 1977 series at the Dales was more thematic.

In 1975 the transition of kingship from Saul to David was traced, with examination of every detail for contemporary significance. God rejected Saul because of his disobedience, and it was evident for many a year that the Spirit was now with David, that he was God’s coming man, and that he was the one who would lead God’s people to Zion, establishing a glorious reign, and who would dislodge the Jebusites from Jerusalem (Zion). 

In 1976 the analogy was drawn between the children of Israel being delivered from Egypt, passing through the Red Sea (baptism), and following the cloud (being led by the Spirit, being taken through the wilderness, a time of testing and preparation), and into the Promised Land (the glorious future for the church of God).

In 1977 the teaching was on the majesty, sovereignty and authority of God; on the purpose of God in the creation of man, that he might rule gloriously over creation; on man’s fall; on Christ’s glorious victory; and God’s plan to manifest his rule and to fulfil his original creation purpose through the church taking authority, and governing the earth in a righteous reign in which the great majority of the earth’s inhabitants would gladly enrol in God’s kingdom.  The second half of the ministry during this week explained how this was to be achieved: the necessity of right foundations (repentance, baptism, the filling of the Spirit); right relationships (covering, submission to authority, shepherding); and taking collective action in spiritual warfare to bind the strong man (Satan’s deputy over Great Britain), and to release God’s power to transform the nation.

These were heady years for Baxter, but along with the highs there were also difficulties and challenges. Following the Montreat conference in 1974 when Baxter entered into relationship with Basham, Simpson, Prince and Mumford, at the Lakes Bible Week in August 1975 Baxter could look back and say that it had been the most beautiful year of his life. However, he ended his preaching at the Lakes on Thursday 7th August, a day early, as he had to travel back to America in order to attend meetings of ministers in Minneapolis on the weekend of Saturday 9th and Sunday 10th August. These proved to be tense, difficult and confrontational meetings of leading charismatic figures to discuss the Shepherding Movement, which was causing serious alarm to many, including the charismatic leaders Pat Robertson, Dennis Bennett and Harald Bredesden.

Later in September 1975 Baxter preached one of his most famous sermons, ‘Thy Kingdom Come’, at the Kansas City Shepherds Conference, as mentioned earlier. Some present thought that it was the greatest sermon they’d ever heard, and the worship was intense and memorable. Baxter described what had happened:

I don’t know if any of you heard about the last meeting in the Shepherds’ Conference in Kansas City? Any of you hear of that, or hear the tape? Almost five thousand shepherds in Kansas City. I was to speak that night, and a prophetic word came, ‘Take off your shoes for the ground on whereon you stand is holy.’ I never saw a sight like it in my life, to see five thousand men with their shoes off, lying prostrate all over that great auditorium. And the presence of God came in, and those men began to worship God, and it mounted and mounted and mounted until it became a roar! Like the sound of many waters! Then they stood and again it came, and my young Timothy who lives with Ruth and me – he is a healthy young man, no superstition about him, he loves God – but he said he stood there with his hands up, and he said to me, ‘Ern,’ he said, ‘something brushed by me.’ I said, ‘I believe that.’ I said, ‘I was standing on the platform, and I didn’t dare turn around. I knew that there was standing behind me an angel.’ The place was full of angels! The place was full of the high praises of God! I travel all over America. A Baptist minister in Florida came to me, and he said, ‘I have worn out the tape of that meeting and your sermon. I have literally worn it out!’ All over America I find ministers, denominational ministers, to whom have been given a tape of that meeting. When I got up to speak I declare to you I was off the ground! For forty-five minutes my pulpit was up there – my feet never touched the platform! It was something like I had never had before. (Dales 1976 transcript, p.85f.)

At the Dales Bible Week in 1976 though, he reported to his audience that he had come closer to discouragement that summer than he had for many years, as he despaired of the egotism he’d encountered in men he’d shared platforms with. (Dales 1976 transcript, p.6.) This may be a reference to the stiff opposition that the Fort Lauderdale Five had encountered to their shepherding doctrines. Trouble followed in England too. Baxter had a much less happy time at the South and West Bible Week held near Bath, shortly after the Dales Week. His wife Ruth fell ill and had to be admitted to hospital, and Baxter was ill at ease in the meetings. He felt that there was a spiritual force that was opposing him. There were at the time cracks in the relationships between various of the British leaders, which very soon resulted in the split between R1 and R2 (Andrew Walker’s terms for the two sections of British Restorationism), with Bryn Jones, Arthur Wallis, David Mansell and Hugh Thompson adhering to R1, and Peter Lyne, Graham Perrins, John Noble and Gerald Coates part of the much looser R2 grouping. (Walker, Restoring the Kingdom, p.95f, and Jonathan Wallis, Arthur Wallis: Radical Christian, pp.229-232.) Then at the Dales in 1977 he reported that since December the previous year, when he’d started to move into the realm of spiritual warfare, ‘I would say that Ruth and I went through more brazen, straight open, uncamouflaged satanic attacks into our marriage than we have ever had before.’ (Dales 1977 transcript, p.84.)

However, at the Dales Week in 1977 Baxter had a tremendous time. The highlight of the week in terms of enjoyment was the Tuesday evening, when he preached on Jesus as God’s Ultimate Man. There are a number of parallels between this meeting and the Kansas City meeting in September 1975. The first parallel is the intensity of the worship, where Baxter at the start of his sermon compared the two meetings: ‘But as the worship built up, it came to that that you came to. Now personally I’ve believed for some time that we’re about to break into another dimension of worship. And it started to rise just like that, and it was just like one tone, as we heard it tonight. But it swelled and swelled, and got greater and greater, until men were standing with their hands in the air.’

There were also many similarities in what Baxter taught in the two sermons. Thirdly, there were parallels in how he felt: at Kansas, he felt that his feet never touched the platform; at the Dales he declared: ‘it’s all I can do to stay in my skin tonight! My body’s a real embarrassment to me tonight, I want to get out and fly!... This is pretty intoxicating! I want you to know, you can’t see what I’m seeing tonight without reeling a little bit!’ (Dales 1977 transcript, p.43f.) Looking back the next night, he said, ‘Last night, I tell you, I was literally intoxicated’, and added further on the Thursday: ‘You will remember the night before last there was a tremendous anointing here and as I said last night, I was literally intoxicated. I said, I think to George yesterday, I think I knew a little bit of what John meant when he said he was in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day. When I came down out of it, it was like I came down a ladder out of something I’d been up into, and I realised that you couldn’t literally live there, it would burn you out, but as I was sitting here a tremendous anointing came on me.’ (Daels 1977 transcript, p.53, 61.)

For Baxter though, it was the Friday night session of spiritual warfare, where the people present joined together to take spiritual authority over Great Britain, that was the spiritual climax of the week, towards which all that preceded had been preparatory.

Baxter reported enthusiastically on his 1977 ministry in Britain in the December 1977 issue of New Wine. He noted the low ebb of religious life in Britain, a far more secular country than America, and the severe economic problems afflicting Britain at that time. He was deeply impressed by the leadership of the English Restoration churches: ‘In these men who came from all over England, I saw probably the finest, purest, most gifted, well-informed body of leadership that I’ve seen in corporeity anywhere in the world.’

Baxter enjoyed ministering in these circles: ‘I was very aware during this time of the special anointing God gave me.’ He commented glowingly on the worship at the Dales Bible Week: ‘…the praise was so intense that during the last night it reached an absolute roar. It started to do this about the third night and it picked up.’

What seemed to Baxter to plant God’s seal of approval on the proceedings of that week were angelic manifestations on the campgrounds:

About the second or third night after I’d finished speaking, I sat down for just a few minutes before leaving. I felt impressed to pray and as I did, something happened that has happened to me several times lately – especially over there. I started to pray out of my spirit but not out of my head. Most of my praying is a combination, but this just came right out. I prayed like this; ‘God, let something supernatural happen on this campground tonight that will be a demonstration of Your glory.’ I had no idea what I was asking for, but I knew it was God. I slipped over to one of the leaders and told him what I’d done. I said; ‘We’re not going to tell the audience because that sets up the power of suggestion. I just want you brothers to know that I’ve prayed this way.’ About 2:30am that morning, beautiful choir music was heard coming from the congregation hall which seats 10,000 people. The unique thing was – there was no one in the congregation hall at the time! Now it wasn’t one or two people who heard it. The whole camp heard it! And it wasn’t only the whole camp that heard it; the neighbourhood heard it! And they protested; ‘Now we don’t mind you people singing until midnight but 2:30 in the morning is a bit ridiculous.’ How could we say to these people, ‘We weren’t there’?

This continued. There was a nightly angelic concert. And then other supernatural events started to happen all through the grounds. We’re documenting all of this, but what I’m saying to you, I’m just saying out of memory because I don’t have all the details. There were 750 children in the children’s group with two very fine men over them – Hugh Thompson and Mike Stevens. Hugh Thompson is a man of great competence in God, and his little boy said to him after one of the meetings, ‘Daddy, wasn’t it wonderful seeing all those gold angels with flames flying across the room?’

…for the last two years I’ve been saying that if we are living in the time of the end, the Bible says God is going to send forth His angels to do a whole lot of things. And I’ve been saying we’re going to start to see angels. So this is a great confirmation of my own faith and in a very real sense, a great confirmation that we’re actually living in the time of the end. And if that’s the time we’re living in, a lot of exciting things are due to happen.

Baxter was confident of great results as they collectively engaged in spiritual warfare on the final night of the conference: ‘…we linked our arms – this great host linked arms - and I have never felt such a strong anointing as came out of that kind of plurality. I came against the Prince of Great Britain to break his power that we might spoil his goods. And the cry of triumph that went up after that was something that I’d not seen ever before.’

The early reports that reached Baxter in the aftermath of the conference were positive, of people waiting for these Spirit-filled men to return to their homes, wanting to know how to be converted, to receive the Holy Ghost, and to be delivered. 

Baxter said, ‘I’ve never come away from a nation still carrying it on my heart like I’ve come away from Scotland and England…. I believe I saw in Great Britain an intensity of relationship functioning on a level that made it possible for God to do what He did.’

Baxter planned to return to Britain in 1978 to minister again at the Dales Bible Week and other Bible Weeks. This was announced in Restoration magazine. His Fort Lauderdale colleague Bob Mumford was to accompany him. But then in the March 1978 issue of Restoration appeared a brief notice, which said: For valid reasons Ern Baxter will not now be sharing at the Bible Weeks this year but will be meeting some leaders in this country. We are expecting Bob Mumford as planned.

What those ‘valid reasons’ were, I have been unable to establish. Bob Mumford did come and was the main speaker at Dales in 1978, but that was the last time that any of the Fort Lauderdale Five ministered at the Dales Bible Week. Baxter was still listed as a USA Associate Editor of Restoration until mid-1979, but this appears to have been a purely titular post. No contributions from Baxter ever appeared in the magazine. It appears that at some point during this period tensions developed between Baxter and Jones over issues of who should be covering who in some different situations, and as a result, contact between the two men ceased for a number of years.

Baxter continued to visit Britain, for example ministering at the Anglia Bible Week from 1981-1984, a lower key conference mainly organised by Stanley Jebb, and also supported by Barney Coombs. Happily, the relationship between Baxter and Jones was restored following the demise of the Shepherding Movement in 1986, and the death of Arthur Wallis in 1988. Baxter came over to England to deliver a memorial lecture for Arthur Wallis in 1991, also preaching at Bryn Jones’s church in Bradford, and giving teaching to leaders at Jones’s Nettle Hill complex.

During one of these teaching sessions Baxter looked back on the Bible Weeks of the mid 1970s, and reflected that whilst he still believed in the glorious vision of the triumphant end time church, they had perhaps misunderstood the time factor in God’s purposes, and been too apocalyptic:

The church’s journey has been a long one, and I think that requires us to perhaps re-evaluate the whole time concept. I received a letter the other day, a very touching letter, from someone who’d been in the seventies conferences, who said that they were so blessed, and they continue to be blessed, and while the anticipation in the seventies seemed to indicate some kind of an immediate fulfilment of the great things God was saying to us, that they are still encouraged to believe God for those things, and that probably it has been our misunderstanding of the time factor, and I’d like to suggest to you what the great Princetonian Warfield said, when he was talking about eschatology, and the age in which we live, he said, ‘We may well be living in the infancy of the age.’ 

I think that those of us who see the ultimacy of the Lordship of Christ in a time-space world have occasion to have all the patience we need, because he’s going to take all the time he needs to do it, and while I think in other days I hoped it would happen now, I think God has directed me personally to the passage concerning David. David wanted to build a house for God, and God said, ‘No, you’re not going to build me a house, I’m going to build you a house. The house you’re thinking of, your son will build’, and instead of David going off in a snip or a pout, or saying, ‘I’m going to take my toys and go home, I don’t want to play any more’, he took his vast personal financial resources and began to store up material for the temple that Solomon would build. The New Testament says that he served his generation and fell on a sleep. I think we need to embrace that kind of an idea, that we’ve maybe thought too apocalyptically in our own time situation. We might look at the fact that we are building quantitatively and qualitatively in our generation, and that we might well fall on a sleep, but we will make our contribution, and I think that’s important, that keeps you from carelessness, and it keeps you from a kind of irresponsible apocalypticism, that so many have got into, which made them cancel their insurance, and drop out of school and everything, and the bus didn’t come. (First message in a series on The Kingdom and the Holy Spirit, given at Nettle Hill, England, 1991.)

Baxter was here following a very long line of Christians who have had to adjust their eschatology in light of the non-materialisation of that which they had hoped for. The early Pentecostals had been convinced of the imminence of the Second Coming, which was foretold in numerous prophecies. As with their conviction that the gift of tongues would enable them to preach to the heathen without the need to learn their languages, they had to make adjustments as reality stubbornly refused to conform to expectation. Baxter had pondered the significance of the moves of the Spirit that he had experienced during his lifetime: his initial entering in to the Pentecostal experience in the early 1930s; the Healing Revival and the Latter Rain Movement of the post-war period; the Charismatic Movement of the 1960s; and the Shepherding Movement of the 1970s. He was convinced in the mid-1970s that this was the moment for the dramatic breakthrough, nothing less than the establishment of the kingdom of God on the earth, but when that hope failed to materialise, he revised his understanding of the timescale for God’s end-time purpose.

A Norman