Andree Seu
Andrée Seu is a Senior Writer for WORLD and author of Won't Let You Go Unless You Bless Me and Normal Kingdom Business. A graduate of Westminster Seminary, she has four children and was widowed in 1999. She offers daily thoughts at worldontheweb.com.

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The Christmas fool

The man and woman who launched the bell ringers defied their fears | by Andrée Seu

A school of ministry in Redding, Calif., is a little off the usual model. Rather than kick you out if you mess up while trying some new way to expel the darkness, Bethel School of Supernatural Ministries insists you experiment, for the glory of God. "I don't know of any other way to learn but to fail," says the founder, Bill Johnson.

He didn't invent this, of course. William Booth did. The founder of the Salvation Army had his students do a few of the run-of-the-mill things—like circuit preaching; open-air assemblies; two-by-two evangelism teams; personal invitations to daily revival meetings; circus tents when the churches wouldn't have them; weekday assemblies in the back room of a pigeon shop; targeted prayer lists with the names of notorious townspeople; mentors for new converts; house calls; food and clothing to the poor; and joyful processions down the middles of streets (police kicked them off the sidewalks) to the chapel, in the derelict slums of London's East End.

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