3. Andrew Evans

Andrew Evans, founder of the Family First Party (FFP) and since 2002 a Member of the South Australian Legislative Council, looks and talks like anyone’s grandpa. It’s hard to believe that this friendly old gaffer is a senior player in Australia’s Religious Right - but you’d better believe it.

Evans was born in India to missionary parents about 70 years ago. When he was 11, the family moved back to Australia and after a period of time, Andrew ‘came to an absolutely undeniable conclusion that the Bible was true’ and decided to become a pastor. You can read all about his career in his maiden speech to Parliament, delivered on 9 May 2002 - but suffice it to say that he rose to become the National Superintendent of the Assemblies of God (AOG) in Australia and held that position from 1977 until 1997. He was then appointed World Secretary of the AOG and also became a member of the World Executive of the Pentecostal movement, which has a total following of around half a billion people.

There are lots of questions I have about Evans, among them why for some years he referred to himself as ‘Dr’ Evans, followed by a period in which he called himself both ‘Mr’ and ‘Dr’ Evans - and finally settled on ‘Mr’. His brief parliamentary biography lists his only ‘qualification’ as an OAM and it would be interesting to know the status of the institution that awarded him the doctorate about which he now seems so modest. (There are a few other ‘doctors’ involved in the Pentecostal movement to whom we could direct the same question.) But what I really want to do here is to give you some idea of what goes on inside Andrew Evans’ head.

Let’s have a look at two papers written by ‘Dr Andrew Evans’ in the early 1990s, while he was still the senior pastor of the Paradise, SA AOG church. The first of these is called Church Growth through Prayer - where the author tells us of the struggle to increase the size of his church’s congregation:

Another thought occurred to me. We would have a healing crusade using a world-renowned minister with a healing ministry … [O]ur brochures contained testimonies of people jumping out of wheelchairs and blind eyes opening. A banner outside the front of our church declared, ‘Come and see blind eyes opened, the lame walk, the deaf hear, the dumb speak.’

As you can see from this brief excerpt, and as you might expect of an international AOG leader, Evans believes in magic. He would obviously phrase this idea differently - ‘I trust the Holy Spirit to work miracles as promised in the Bible’ etc. - but the effect is the same. What we have here is a very suggestible personality, but one with powerful administrative skills.

The healing crusade failed, but a more austere program of ‘fasting and prayer’ did the trick - ‘More than half the congregation began to cry and weep’ etc. - and a few years later Evans found himself running a megachurch. Other parts of his story confirm the deeply mystical nature of his personal outlook:

When I was a Bible school student, God spoke to me through prophecy and said, ‘One day you are going to preach to multitudes.’

Evans also seems to accept the magical idea of ‘words of knowledge’, one of the supposed ‘gifts of the Holy Spirit’, usually viewed by Pentecostals as:

… a form of Christianised extra-sensory perception in which details about the situation of another are revealed to the thoughts of believers, often in … prayer meetings or healing revival meetings. (M. Moriarty [1992] The New Charismatics, 357 n.19)

In another paper, entitled A Fresh Wave Dr Evans gives AOG members the benefit of his views on the ‘fresh wave of the Holy Spirit’ which swept through charismatic churches beginning in the 1980s and accelerating from the early 1990s. In Evans’ words,

…[W]hat is happening is a move of God … What has marked this new wave has been the unusual manifestations [among Pentecostal and similar groups] such as falling, shaking, ‘drunkenness’ in the Spirit, weeping and laughter.

In his paper, Evans was especially concerned to promote the work of South African evangelist Rodney Howard-Browne, sometimes referred to by less enthusiastic Pentecostals as a ’stage hypnotist’. Evans told of people listening to Howard-Browne’s preaching and immediately falling off their seats, crying, laughing etc.:

On another occasion, he ministered to 4,000 students in the Oral Roberts University, where the majority of them were slain in the Spirit. Many went outside and then, after prayer, literally hundreds were laying on the grass prostrate under the power of God.

(The term ’slain in the Spirit’ does not refer to physical death, but rather the phenomenon of falling over backwards when a faith-healer gives you a shove. Some unfortunate people are missed by the ‘catchers’ standing behind them and do themselves a mischief, but it’s hard to tell whether they should blame God, the Devil, the faith-healer, or stupidity.)

Anyway, Evans invited Howard-Browne to preach in Adelaide and was very impressed, claiming that ‘[p]astors from all over Australia were touched with the fire of God.’ Evans then gave his readers some ‘helpful advice’ about dealing with these manifestations of the Spirit:

When people fall over …, [e]ncourage them to stay down and continue to receive from God. It is not unusual for people to stay down for several hours … Have capable people available to catch those falling over. This removes the fear of falling and also avoids unnecessary collisions … There is no need to cause people to fall to the floor by forcing them. The Holy Spirit is perfectly able to overwhelm people without your effort.

Evans later advises pastors to ‘[d]eal with any carnal behaviour [occurring at these sessions] and do not allow it to hijack what God is doing.’ The mind fairly boggles!

Philip Powell, a former National General Secretary of the AOG and strong critic of the ‘new charismatics’, argues that Evans’ ideas about the spiritual gift of ‘prophecy’ (unbelief.org 16 July 2005) are radically defective:

Andrew Evans told me that he accepted a 60 per cent accuracy standard [by alleged prophets], meaning that a person may be wrong 40 per cent of the time and still be a true prophet. (Philip L. Powell et al. [2002] Gathering the Faithful Remnant, 28)

If correctly reported, this is indeed a very strange thing for Evans to say, as prophecies of this kind are supposed to emanate directly from God. So is God correct only 60 per cent of the time? And which 60 per cent?

Elsewhere, Powell has referred to Evans as ‘a pragmatic pastor’ - and in my view this is a very accurate description. During the past few months, the Family First Party has tried its utmost to downplay the social conservative aspects of its platform and to emphasise its role as a ‘defender of the family’. The problem is that harsh and oppressive policies on abortion, bioethics, censorship, the teaching of evolution, gay rights, sex education, women’s rights and a host of other issues lie at the party’s core - see ‘Sample Quotes’. At a fundamental level, the FFP only exists in order to implement these policies, but its leaders are pragmatic enough to shroud them in ‘pro-family’ rhetoric.

And the worst of it is that this AOG-dominated party consists largely of people with mindsets very like that of Andrew Evans. Their mental environment is dominated by spiritual warfare between angels and demons and by direct messages from God himself, and their physical existences are punctuated by ecstatic religious experiences such as prophecy, faith-healing, ‘words of knowledge’, speaking in tongues, laughing (or barking or howling) uncontrollably and rolling around on the floor. And I say nothing here of their preaching of the ‘prosperity gospel’.

Evans and other FFP leaders deny that they are ‘linked’ with the Religious Right and in a sense they’re right. They aren’t ‘linked’ to it. They are now a fully-fledged and near-indispensable component of this modern political phenomenon.

Filed in: Pentecostalism, Politics