Letters from Norman…
by Norman Grubb

Dec. 4, 1981
Albuquerque, New Mexico

My dear Larry,

Yours is a precious letter which has just reached me, full of love and thankfulness for our wonderful years of co-serving the Lord and with Pauline now rejoicing at reaching her heart’s desire in being with Jesus. Also your news is so good of your Singapore visit, and your own ministry there, and the living zeal of the young Chinese.

But I will take this opportunity also of expressing my sorrow, which I can to you because you
have a heart of such understanding and loving appreciation, that Weccers [missionaries with the
Worldwide Evangelization Crusade] on the whole bypass and even condemn in print that total
fearless absorption in God Only and God All in all which some of us are being led to reaffirm in
the terms which we speak of as Union Life Reality—i.e. Total Reality.

This stretching to the limit in all the variety of the Spirit’s way of expressing Himself was the
very essence of C.T.’s abandonment which took its final form in his DCD booklet [“Don’t Care a
Damn for anything but Jesus”] outcry and took him to his human grave an outcast by the evangelical
church. And the same with our magnificent Rees Howells, who was stretched to the limit
by the Holy Spirit in his final declaration of faith that the war had ended and the world liberated
for the gospel, which equally destroyed him in the eyes of the believers, so that he died with their
thumbs turned down on him as a false prophet. Yet those two men had just that quality of
"beyond the limit" which has always destroyed the prophets and apostles of their days, only to
have their monuments built after they had gone, as Jesus said; and today we know WEC would
not be what it now is, but for the final "cutting edge" of CT’s DCD which laid the foundation of our
new WEC, freed from Committee control and tonings down of our "extreme" pillars; and his testimony
has been the outstanding book of our generation on the abandoned life for Christ, and quoted
by the whole church. And as for Rees Howells, I personally should never have known how to
walk that way of forward-moving faith if I had not first learned the secret from him; and today
his life-witness [Rees Howells Intercessor] is spread all over the USA, and there was one order
alone last year for 50,000 copies; and he is considered the modern prophet of intercession, so
that Doris Ruscoe, at my urgings and the Spirit’s confirmation to her, is now producing this further
book REES HOWELLS EXPLAINS INTERCESSION.

And in my day I sought to follow by being the only Missionary Society which refused Board
control and maintained leadership in the hands of the spirit by the fellowship, and refused the
title of "President" to which CT appointed Pauline and me, and deliberately took the title of "secretary"
as not implying human authority; and continued our all-out stand of the way of faith alone
for finances, adding to it the principle of homebasers not taking mission funds, to release all possible
for the fields, (and indeed I got into much disfavour by writing the article of "The Decline of
faith in faith missions"!), and was regarded in my day as much of a maverick by my fellow missionary secretaries, and was never asked to address them.

But to me the basis and kernel of all our or any Spirit-operation is that each individual knows
and experiences the "replaced" life, in which, as Paul said, it is not I, but HE replacing me as the
one living my 1ife; and in that inwardly-known relationship, the paradox is that I get myself back
(totally under His hidden inner management (Col.3.3, 4, etc.)), so that I know myself and act as a
totally, liberated son of God and commissioned apostle, and act and operate as a freed self, just as
Jesus, as the perfect Man, was the total "I Am" in His free self, yet within was not He, but the
Father, and in that relationship could then say, "He that hath seen Me hath seen The Father.."
And so we are as He, as John said in 1 John 4:17. This was the main drive of all my years of leadership
in WEC, and in the training of new recruits, and has been the heart of the message of all
the books the Spirit (I hope) led me to write.

And since my days as International Secretary ended, I have given myself to spreading this,
to me, "Total Reality" to all who will hear me, especially here in the USA. This "total message" of
us as liberated selves in Holy Spirit living and action has had two effects. The first, that very
many, and increasingly so, have been and are being "fixed" by the Spirit into this same inner
knowing of who we really are in Christ and He in us—though that is few enough when the whole
redeemed church needs to hear who they all truly are, and be delivered from their painful struggling
walk of defeated Romans 7, and into the "large place" of the continued walk in the Spirit,
(and not in the f lesh) of Romans 8—the indwelling Christ having completely replaced indwelling
sin, if they only knew it; and on then into the outpoured abandoned life of living sacrifice and
Spirit outflow from us, in taking the gospel to the world, and leading the redeemed into possessing
their full possessions, as in Romans 9:15.

But the other effect has been that the radicalness of this all-out reality is too much for many.
We expect this, as it has always been so in the history of the church, who so often prefer the
umbrella of some law-control on their lives to what appears to be (until it becomes to you a glorious
fact by faith) the exhilarating but dangerous-looking free life in the Spirit, where "the wind
bloweth where it listeth," and those in it shout in the joy of the mountain-top and high road living.
And in seeking to share our joy and exhilaration, and calling on people to join us, maybe sometimes
some strange phrases may pop out, or even off-centre by the newly-experiencing. I can
therefore fully understand some reserve at some phrase (just as the DCD shocked so many!),
but, Larry, my beloved, I had thought that Weccers who do live abandoned lives for Jesus up to
their measure, would first catch the glory of what we are saying of this glorious, released, Christlived
life; and that it would mean so much to them that they can easily bypass this statement or
that. But alas for me, it has not been so. Somehow they haven’t caught the glory, but sniff heresy,
as if we actually say we are Christ—which of course is to us, not blasphemy, but a joke! If once
you have known who you are for ever, the vessel, branch, temple, slave, body-member, etc., and
never had a nature except the former nature of the spirit of error, cast out for ever in Calvary,and now possessed and owned and operated totally by the replaced Spirit of truth, and we
humans simply expressors and manifestors of the Spirit united to us, how could we ever imagine
or say we are HE?!! Yet some of my precious Weccers really think we say, and thus presumably
believe that! Yes, this is my sorrow, and how can I but feel that as a Crusade we have lapsed from
the radicalness (and thus unpopular) positions of CT, Rees Howells, JD Drysdale, in whatever different
terms they taught and lived their far-outness? Is WEC thus "far-out" today?

And I am sure that, though you write of approving the emphasis of us as “containers,” you
know we move right on from being "pots to persons." And in other words, not so much seeing ourselves
as containers separate from what we contain, but rather as, in our union with Him who we
contain, actual expressors of Him; He in our form, (like CT’s saying of Jesus Christ running about
in black bodies, and Jesus saying that we are the Light!) And somehow I seem to have mistakenly
conveyed to you that we remain passive containers, and have not moved on to Paul’s final Gal.
2:20 statement, "the life I now live, I live…" with very much the New Self in total action! Sorry I
did not convey that, but I surely meant it! And you see I joyfully have regarded you as one in
WEC who has fearlessly "gone farther," even to the discomfort of some in WEC, with your glorious
revival (Pentecostal) emphasis since your experience in the Congo revival—and how fully I have
backed and stood for you in your glorious all-out witness.

So, because of our love for each other, so expressed in your present letter, and our obvious
heartfelt union in the ways of the Spirit all our years, I have felt liberty to write my heart out to
you. I just have to go on, though not in always the conventional evangelical terms, but I trust
always true to Scriptural revelation. I deeply believe that there is a shortness in that early quality
of fearless DCD abandonment which brought WEC and CLC into being, and exemplified by such
men in our beginning history as CT, Rees Howells and JD Drysdale; and even dare to say that the
rejection of our union-life witness, despite its shortcomings, is indicative of that move away from
that caring not for man or devil or even "the church," and therefore the seriousness of our probably
not imparting to our national brethren this same Holy Spirit-abandoned, fire-filled, Christexpressing,
truly Pentecostal "way of God" in the New Testament and early church; and yet with
that my great thankfulness that WEC does go farther than others, and I am proud of my fellow
Weccers and would be with no other "Crusade," and equally my faith and stated word of faith that
the Spirit is bringing WEC back to its total, fearlessly confessed all-outness, even where it does go
beyond or differ from other God-led missionary groups.

So thank you for letting me share this with you. It may well be one of my last attempts to
write out my whole heart on these matters, so I may have the boldness to share with some others.
Ever loving you and thanking God for you.