Messages spoken at the 1988 Iowa CFO
Iowa CFO 1988:
12 messages.
The 1988 Iowa CFO met at Riverview Park, Cedar Falls, in July 1988. The speakers were Earl Tyson and Ordelphia Nelson Proctor, and they spoke on the subjects of Christian Living, Faith, Family, Forgiveness, Guidance, Healing, Inner Healing, Jesus, Love, Praise & Thanksgiving, Prayer and Spiritual Growth. Choose a message below to listen.
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Ordelphia Nelson Proctor describes to the 1988 Iowa CFO anointing her classroom with oil and claiming brain-injured children by name, and the sign one of those boys printed and hung in the hallway.
Telling the 1988 Iowa CFO how God built her household, Ordelphia Nelson Proctor moves from a mother-in-law who took over her living room to the abused and unwanted girls she later fostered.
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Ordelphia Nelson Proctor tells how a teachers’ prayer group walked the corridors of a New York high school claiming it for God. She tells too how she arrived in the Virgin Islands to find herself billed on placards as the evangelist from the mainland, in this talk to the Iowa CFO in 1988.
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Earl Tyson argues that the only call every Christian receives is servanthood, and that seeing a human need is itself the call to act. Speaking at the 1988 Iowa CFO before a foot-washing service, he points to the unwanted children of Brazil and to his own leap out of the pastorate without salary or security.
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Earl Tyson dwells on the humanity of Jesus, a man with no home, no donkey and no burial plot of his own, and asks why believers work so hard not to see it. Given at the Iowa CFO in 1988, it moves from a borrowed tomb to a Depression-era boyhood in which he never knew he was poor.
Closing her series, Ordelphia Nelson Proctor sets “the garment of praise” against “the spirit of heaviness” and asks the 1988 Iowa CFO to put it on deliberately rather than wait to feel like it. She gets there by way of eight thousand crossings of the same toll bridge and a former colleague found in a dark Harlem stairway.
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Ordelphia Nelson Proctor carries her testimony on into marriage, fostering and a lawsuit she prayed over table by table in an empty courtroom at recess. Fifteen girls nobody wanted, taken into a three-story house, are what she leaves with the Iowa CFO in 1988.
Being chosen by God is what heals the wound of having been rejected by people, and Earl Tyson works it through a forty-watt bulb in a socket built for two hundred. Forty-three cents between father and son for bread and eggs, and a granddaughter telling a rejected cousin that he was her kind of man, are what he leaves with the Iowa CFO in 1988.
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Earl Tyson reads Romans 8 as grace overriding the law of sin and death rather than repealing it, the way lift overrides gravity without abolishing it. A contact lens turns up while he prays with a suicidal woman. A father refuses to ride in the car with a son he calls a pagan. It reaches the Iowa CFO in 1988.
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Opening her week at the Iowa CFO in 1988, Ordelphia Nelson Proctor works the football image of a wide receiver into a picture of prayer: it takes hold of what God is already throwing. Hurricanes named only for women until men’s names were added, and a mother-in-law who brought her bridge club to the honeymoon hotel, carry the testimony.
A maternity ministry turns out to have been given his own old family telephone number. A woman in Topeka is offended that he has left Sarah out of a prayer. Earl Tyson tells both at the 1988 Iowa CFO, where he argues that trusting God day by day is harder than building an institution to fall back on, and describes leaving the pastorate with no such backstop.
Faith has to be fleshed out rather than professed, Earl Tyson tells the Iowa CFO in 1988, taking John the Baptist as the necessary groundwork for receiving Jesus. He backs it with two segregated water coolers in eastern North Carolina that he drank from deliberately as a boy, and with his own father’s road out of the Klan into a color-blind pulpit.
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