Linkathon!

Dallas says:

When I heard that Jack Chick died the very first thing I thought of was an agnostic friend who was hounded by someone at work with Chick tracts daily while he (my friend) was undergoing cancer treatments. I guess the person thought they had found a weak spot to exploit… not surprisingly, it failed to work.

London says:

I think guys in jail like those tracts because they are good rolling papers.

Josh the Baptist says:

Hmm. Don’t know if you are serious but you may be right. Those guys are amazingly resourceful.

Dan from Georgia says:

Chick tracts helped me!

Helped me to know that demons laugh like “haw haw haw!!!”

John 20:29 says:

just read my first “Chick tract” – i like it – reminds me of my late mother-in-law… she didn’t care one whit about who she offended 🙂 definitely not “seeker friendly”… well, maybe… if you are really a seeker… dunno

Babylon's Dread says:

Yes, Pete could climb out on a limb or two. I didn’t go with him after about 2002 but I kept my connection to what he was doing. He hung out with too many weird zionists for me and had too many strange prophetic ideas as well. But I loved him and thank God for him.

Lura Humana says:

[long time intermittent lurker, first time commenter]

Wow. Peter Wagner. My best wishes to Doris and family. Back in the day, I took a church growth class from him at Fuller’s School of World Mission. First thing in the morning, I think. Don’t want to even pause to count up the decades from that time.* This was all very much before Act II of his life with descriptions of more wackadoodle-doo statements such as the Japan and Sun God Whatchamacallit described upthread by David, comment # 12.

The time I knew Peter Wagner was in the days of overhead projectors and rolls of acetate, where people would (if they were totally prepared) lay their transparencies upon the lit surface, or (far more common) write with erasable ink onto acetate film, and then roll the whole screen off the lit surface onto the roll of acetate with a squeak-sqeuak of the roller.

That teaching projection tech predates whiteboards. It totally predates computers and digital projection. Hell, it predates the verie first Macintosh computer itself.

Anyway, I recall sitting in a darkened room looking at a screen, while Prof. Wagner lectured. Maybe his class was where I was introduced to the idea of Bounded Sets and Centered Sets. If not there, at another course. The more I think of it, the more it seems Wagnerian, even tho current google searches attribute it to Hiebert, whom I also took classes from. Anyway, that was decades ago, and his coursework amounted to a kinda What Style of Church Governance Are You? — keenly interesting, but still pedestrian and hardly-revelatory. It was waaaaaay before he took that deeeeeep dive into realms of Spiritual Warfare Woo.

And now he is dead.

Condolences to Doris et al.

So I oh-so-casually knew Peter and Doris from the time when their lives were centered on the pedestrian matters of how churches grew.

Doris was a bright and chirpy figure in the administrative offices on the campus of Fuller. Now that these memories are surfacing, I think of another moment of interaction with Doris, but, dear readers, as a long-time-lurker-first-time-commenter, that interaction shall remain private. I assume she’s still among the living. But I don’t know. I left that world long long long long long ago.

And after a time of lurking, dear reader, I uncloaked to tell you these story snippets.

*1982, 1983. I am old, Father William. (and, at this time, an infidel) Selah. 1982: church growth course. 1983, that sensational Signs & Wonders course— MC510. Signs and Wonders and Church Growth. The Course number, MC510, got a fancy-dan graphic red font-on-black background treatment on the cover of a long ago issue of Christianity Today magazine. I audited the course, the first time it was offered. (Because it was “church growth,” Wagner’s name was listed as a faculty member, along with guest professor-what-have-you, John Wimber. Am wracking this old brain for faint memories of Pete Wagner’s presence in class. I think so… I think he was there for it. More on sidelines than out front—well, except for first class session, when he kicked the whole shebang off. So yeah, I was there for the whole Christianity-Today-coverage-worthy course—at least until I left the country on a short term mission.

WenatcheeTheHatchet says:

a not “too” surprising piece on Chick at The New Republic

https://newrepublic.com/article/138177/jack-t-chick-leni-riefenstahl-american-cartooning