Quote:
Originally Posted by Evang.Benincasa
What do the Sowderites believe concerning Light Doctrine?
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I don't know. I think because they have a Bride vs Friends of the Bridegroom type belief system, they see some kind of distinction between the super spiritual saints and the "others". I am not so sure they would say those others are part of other denominations though, they seem to go by the idea they and they alone are God's people, and any people of God in other denominations will eventually make their way to the Gospel Assembly group. Otherwise they view the denomonational world as part of the "daughters of the Great Whore, Babylon". I may be wrong, though, I wasn't around them long enough to get into all the details, we just visited them occasionally because our neighbors were members.
I do know they are twoness. They always had a big potluck supper after church. Their meetings are open to anyone present to stand up and speak, or sing, or pray, or whatever. But anyone who speaks or "teaches" or "preaches" can and likely will be questioned in the meeting by the other men as to what was spoken or taught. Their meetings have no format except they gather at an appointed time and sit and wait in prayer for the Spirit to move. Somebody will usually start a song or start praying a bit more loudly and then the meeting takes off. The meetings we attended years ago were very old school Pentecostal. In fact my older son testifies he got the holy Ghost during one of those meetings. THAT meeting start off with a song but then immediately turned into a 2 hour Pentecostal "altar service" (although they don't have altar rails).
The women sat on one side of the meeting house and the men on the other, although this was not strictly enforced because families would often sit together. But single men and single women, not with their family, were expected to keep on opposite sides of the aisle.
They were some of the nicest people we met, and made some of the best potluck Sunday dinners we ever ate at a church. They were
strict holiness, and quite honestly I suspected there were some deeper issues bubbling under the surface.
Which a simple google search will reveal is in fact the case.
Amanah posted they emerged in the 70s. That is not correct as far as I know. William Sowders started a following in the early 1900s, sometime around the Big Split that occurred in the assembly of gods, when he attempted to solve the "New Issue" between Oneness and trinitarian Pentecostals by saying it's not One, or Three, but TWO. I believe they baptise in Jesus' name for the remission of sins, but they are basically twoness.