Kurt & Mary Simms first trained with The Elijah Challenge in 2008. They now minister with power both on mission trips and locally in the Houston area. Kurt and Mary also own Simms Electric Services in Crosby, Texas, and have two daughters, Valerie and Victoria. They attend Houston’s Second Baptist.
“On Sunday, February 9, 2014 Mary, Victoria, and I were guests at Maranatha International Church, a Nigerian church in Houston. The senior pastor’s name is Felisi Sorgwe who is a Theology Professor at Houston Baptist University. We attended his church back in October 2013 with our daughter Victoria after he had invited her to come while she was a student in his Old Testament class. At that time we shared with him about our mission trips to Africa, and he was very interested. The following week he invited me to preach sometime after our return from Kenya mission trip in November 2013.
It was a wonderful service with very genuine and heartfelt prayers and worship. Then I shared our short “Kingdom of God” video from our Kenya trip. After the video I shared the basic principles found in scripture taught by Jesus for healing the sick and casting out demons to accompany the preaching of the gospel. At the end of the teaching I prayed to God and asked him to confirm the teaching that I had just shared—proving that Jesus is the Christ and that by believing in him we can have life in his name.
There were several healings that took place. The first two were a man with neck pain and a woman with neck and back pain; they were both healed instantly. A sister with a green sweater & yellow blouse said that a preacher up in Dallas had caused her to lose faith in healing, but now her faith had been restored. She wants to learn so she can be equipped to do what Jesus commanded.
The miraculous healings consisted of a total of 3 necks, 1 hip, 1 foot, 1 knee, 3 backs, and a girl that wanted to keep it private. One woman who declared she had faith like the centurion (Luke 7), and wanted her son with behavior problems and her mom with a stroke to healed at a distance. We praise the God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ for doing these mighty things through us at this little Baptist Church in Houston.”
Back & hip healed
Hip healed
Above & below: back healed
Ministering healing to knee
Knee healed
Back healed
Back healed
Neck & back healed
Pastor Felisi Sorgwe & Kurt Simms
“How do we as leaders explain such things?”
How might leaders explain such things happening in a Southern Baptist Church in Houston where the Senior Pastor is a Professor of Theology at Houston Baptist University?
The church where these things are “alleged” to have taken place is a Nigerian church where mostly Africans worship the Lord. Now we would certainly allow for God to do such things on the mission field in places like Africa, but not in the States where we already have the Scriptures. Unfortunately, the church where this happened is not in Africa, but in the Bible Belt city of Houston.
So how about saying that God will do such things for African-American believers, but not in white churches? But that explanation might not hold water either because we all know that God is not a “reverse” racist, and as good conservatives we don’t think that He believes in affirmative action either. “He is not a respecter of persons.” So perhaps these miracles appeared to happen in that church because African-Americans can naturally get quite emotional when worshiping God. So the “miracles” did not really happen…it was just all psychological and made up in their minds in the excitement of worshiping God. But…such a position would be really politically incorrect in America today, and invite criticism from some people, especially from our African-American brethren. Such a position would not be loving.
So what other possibilities are there which might be more acceptable to the people?
If we say that it is only by Beelzebul, the prince of demons, that these miracles took place in that Baptist church, the Senior Pastor who is a Professor of Theology at our local Baptist University might take strong exception—to put it mildly.
So let’s say, then, that the miracles reported in that church were of simply human origin. After all, in this dispensation God has ceased doing miracles through believers, and the power and authority given to the early disciples have disappeared. Besides, we don’t see any miracles to speak of recorded in early Church history after the Acts of the Apostles. But then our people whom we have firmly grounded in the authority and inerrancy of Scripture—and not of recorded history—might get confused or might even dare to take issue with us. Sadly, we leaders who have formal training know that since scriptural support for our position is at best scant, we have to rely on what we learn from the history of the early Church following the record found in Acts. Certainly that history must have been inspired and in accordance with God’s perfect will as well!
None of us pastors or leaders who have been to Seminary believe in such miracles. (But our people who’ve never been to Seminary and who know nothing about cessationism, there is a curse on some of them!)
But on the other hand, if we say that the miracles are from God, then our people will ask us, “why don’t you believe that He still does miracles in this way?” (They might also ask us, “Why do you say ‘it’s only description and not prescription for believers today’ when you refer to such miracles in the New Testament?”)
So…when the people ask us leaders about the origin of the miracles, let’s just answer them, “We don’t know.”