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Early in this journey I attended a Christian Businessman’s Association Meeting with an evangelist speaking to about 80 people. These successful, educated attendees swallowed it hook line and sinker. They spoke in tongues and were drunk with the Spirit. Except, there was no Holy Spirit present.

To tired&retired (henceforth, shortening this to T&R), I believe you are quite incorrect in this statement, and have done the Christian Business Men's Connection (click here) a grave injustice, and should apologize and visibly retract what you have written about CBMC on this forum.

I have been closely associated with CBMC since 1990, am familiar with the administration, have gone to and led many weekly breakfast Bible studies as well as organizing and attending many outreach dinners with business leaders that were invited to speak of their beliefs and results.

In all of this, I have heard not one smidgen of charismatic or Pentecostal manifestations; only featuring the influence of the Biblical Christ and His Written Word on the personal and business conduct of the participants. Nor have I ever heard of such events elsewhere or anytime in the past of this organization, which was founded in 1931 in Chicago, IL, and has spread globally to the redounding and glory of the God of Heaven.

I'm calling you out on this, but in a FRiendly way. You are wrong and have a spiritual debt to CBMC.

Conversely, it may be that betimes of your (hazy?) past experiences, you may have been invited to a local weekly meeting of, or more likely one of the recruiting dinners of, the Full Gospel Business Men's Fellowship International (FGBMFI) (click here) which abides unreliably in your memory.

In my past, I also have had a brush with this organization, have gone to a few local meetings in the 1970s, and received their magazine.

This operation was founded in 1952 in California, under the lifelong leadership of Demos Shakarian, which also has expanded globally. Its distinctive feature was the unabashed commitment to the "full gospel" (falsely proclaimed as fulfilling the gospel experience) exhibition of "signs" by publicly encouraging any and all of the Pentecostal/charismatic manifestations in its events.

Your observations of their conduct may be correct, but your opinions of it might not be, so you owe them an apology for attributing to them that their goals were more subject regarding intent to deceive, rather than objective, which would be to allude to the active Presence of Christ's Spirit among them through the "signs": speaking in tongues; a word of wisdom; healing; abnormal physical strength; revealing of secrets of the heart, etc.

Let's see if you can admit and revise what you have written in Post #23.

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As a footnote, let me also say that i was a very active member of another of the para-church non-Catholic organizations--the Gideons International--for ten years, an group that sought to recruit openly professing Christian church-member men across a broad evangelical Protestant local or denominational assemblies for the purpose of financing and distributing Bibles; and that included those admitting of charismatic conduct.

However, none of the Pentecostal extra-biblical charismatic manifestations, ones that were not favored by the more traditional faiths, were displayed. I never saw a demonstration of that kind of speech or action in any of the activities of the Gideons.

Thank you for your information and correction. I’m pretty sure it was the Full Gospel Businessmen’s Fellowship that my dad was involved with. That name sounds real familiar (I was off to college and then in another state for work after that).

From their website:

“We believe in the baptism in the Holy Spirit, accompanied by the initial physical sign of speaking with other tongues as the Spirit of God gives utterance (Acts 2:4) from the new birth, and in the nine gifts of the Spirit, listed in 1 Corinthians 12, as now available to believers.”

So speaking in tongues is huge for them. From this short statement it isn’t clear if the gifts of tongues is for just a short time to confirm baptism in the Spirit or if it is a long-term gift.

My mom said dad grew up Pentecostal with the old tent revival meetings. My grandmother was very sickly, and my mom thinks she went in hopes of being healed. And then when my dad got Leukemia, he perhaps looked for healing at Pentecostal meetings.

I recall him telling me the scripture about how by Jesus’s stripes (scars) we ARE healed. I don’t recall him talking about it in-depth, just in relationship to his Leukemia. So I’m not sure he understood, or at least didn’t tell me in a way that I understood it to mean are spiritual brokenness IS healed.

Although his Leukemia DID go into remission and he had many happy years with my mom, until he died after a brief illness. And he died in 1988. I still have (somewhere) his underlined and notated book that he gave me. “88 Reasons Why the Rapture will Happen in 1988.”)

Regardless of what one’s beliefs are on Jesus’s return - we all will meet him and need to be ready.

I truly believe that my old man was ready. I can see him at the Pearly Gates. “Well, at least I was right about the 1988 part!”

(I couldn’t find anything about the FGBF and the 1988 rapture, or my dad’s name associated with them But that was all pre-internet).