Messages spoken at the 1977 Annual CFO
Annual CFO 1977:
11 messages.
The 1977 Annual CFO met at Tulsa, Oklahoma, in May 1977. The speakers were Barbara Ann Chase, Dr. Kahn Uyeyama, Evelyn Carter Spencer, Herman Buck, Jack Prince, Jim Christian, John Sandford, Mary Virginia Parrish, Reginald (Reg) Goff, Roland Brown and Thelma Lee, and they spoke on the subjects of Camps Farthest Out History, Faith, Healing, Integrity, Joy, Kingdom Living, Love, Prayer, Spiritual Growth and The Holy Spirit. Choose a message below to listen.
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Reg Goff comes off a morning healing line at the 1977 Annual CFO, convinced that the deepest wound in most of those faces was the belief that they were nobody. He answers it with Jesus setting a child among the disciples, and with Starr Daily, beaten and left in a dungeon, meeting eyes that held all the love of all the mothers in the world. Two doors, love and prayer, stay open to everyone.
Thelma Lee argues to the 1977 Annual CFO that familiarity is what blinds us to miracles: the mockingbird by the shrub, a breath, a child at a circus. Ten days off a Bermuda crossing she recalls three of them wishing aloud at a ship’s window for something to appear, and a school of porpoises arriving within three minutes. CFO itself, she says, is a unity rather than a union, and no less a miracle.
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Kahn Uyeyama argues for preventive medicine of the spirit, acting on a prompting to pray before the accident rather than praying for healing after it. His three year old asked the family to pray for Susan at the moment her car went off an embankment in Oregon, and interrupted a healing workshop in front of fifty people holding a dying caterpillar. From the Annual CFO in 1977.
Opening the first night of the Annual CFO in 1977, Jim Christian borrows the Roots miniseries the country had watched that January to ask what CFO and each camper are actually rooted in: not heritage, not denomination, not even CFO, but Calvary. The danger, he says, is not that a movement becomes organized but that it becomes institutionalized, the walls rebuilt while the hearts stay unchanged.
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Roland Brown takes the new creation of Second Corinthians as a place you can stand in, or step out of, a dozen times a day, and calls repentance the ordinary work of shifting mental gears. He counts up how often Paul writes the phrase “in Christ” and argues to the 1977 Annual CFO that he meant it to be lived rather than merely believed.
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Before the Annual CFO in 1977, Barbara Ann Chase reads Isaiah’s barren woman told to lengthen her cords and strengthen her stakes, and applies it to a movement about to need more room. The structure is sound, she argues, but the branches coming up from those roots are not meant to look like the roots, and only the Spirit rather than an imported liturgy can fill what the structure holds.
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John Sandford reads the present moment as Malachi 3, a season of purifying fire, and names four things he believes God is doing at once: calling the church back to the Lordship of Jesus, restoring fathers to children, raising up intercessors, and drawing believers across denominational lines. None of it, he warns the 1977 Annual CFO, can be received by people too busy to sit still and listen.
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Herman Buck coins a word, the “nowness” of God, and runs his own life through it as a refrain: a factory job, a conversion in 1956, Bible study with a motorcycle gang, two baptisms in a motel whirlpool at the Grand Canyon. Now, he insists from Second Corinthians to the Annual CFO in 1977, is the accepted time.
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At the Annual CFO in 1977, Mary Virginia Parrish prays Paul’s Ephesian prayer over the camp, that the eyes of the heart be enlightened. She tells of hearing herself say aloud that there was enough untapped power in the room to cause a spiritual explosion, and recounts leaving a six year post as a commission director for plain availability to God, finding security exactly where she had none.
Jack Prince closed the sale of his business the day his daughter Becky was pulled from an overturned car with a fractured skull. Driving them to the airport, the chairman of the Georgia Mountain CFO told him not to believe what his eyes saw. Speaking to the Annual CFO in 1977, Prince traces the succession of CFO people who were simply there, at the gate, in the lobby and at the bedside, for the next three weeks.
Teaching from Ephesians, Evelyn Carter Spencer describes maturity as a personality integrated at every level, with mind, will and emotions believing the same thing at the same time. She tells of praying for God’s highest and best, and being handed a brand new Cadillac two hours later by a man she could not refuse, and of the three days it took her emotions to catch up with her obedience, in this talk to the Annual CFO in 1977.