Author: Dave Faulkner

I'm a British Methodist minister, married with two adult children. I blog from a moderate evangelical-missional-charismatic perspective. My interests include digital photography (currently using a Nikon Z8), contemporary music, and watching football (Tottenham Hotspur) and cricket. For my photography, please visit www.flickr.com/photos/davefaulkner

Healing, Verification And Resurrection

I saw some more Todd Bentley on God TV last night. (Please don’t yawn if this is boring you, but this is a big issue for me, given impending meetings in Chelmsford. In any case, my wife and children will be back from a half-term holiday tomorrow, and I shall have less chance to watch and blog then.)

Anyway – the point is this. He announced during the meeting (which would have been Wednesday night’s) that he is taking on staff to look into verification of the claims to healing that thousands have made in connection with the ‘Florida Outpouring’. He was clear that he would not claim that every healing was true, and I thought that was a step forward. He said they would pass on medically verified claims to healing to the news networks. It was Bene Diction in a comment on my first post two weeks ago who wrote this:

In April The Province (a BC newspaper) asked for documentation of healings…

“When The Province asked to speak to someone who had been healed
through Bentley in either B.C. or Florida, Fresh Fire was unable to
find someone at short notice, citing difficulties with outdated contact
information locally, and record-keeping problems in Florida.”

So let’s hope this is a move in the right direction, if that doesn’t sound too patronising. It would certainly be better than the past antics of scallywags like Benny Hinn, who was filmed for a British TV documentary on healing evangelists around eight years ago. It took the TV company three months of badgering before his ministry was willing to put them in touch with anyone. They ended up interviewing a family where it turned out that healing had not taken place, and that ‘Pastor Benny’ had told them they needed to give more. I think, if memory serves me right, they gave another $1000 and the healing still didn’t happen.

Bentley did get very excited last night about resurrections from the dead – and frankly, who wouldn’t, if they had happened? (I’m not saying they hadn’t, I’m just retaining my natural caution here.) In one case, someone had been dead eight minutes before coming back to life. I have no problem with such a story, except that I believe such stories also exist outside of claims to miraculous answers to prayer. I’m open to correction, especially from medics, if I’m wrong about that.

Another story came in by phone from Kenya. At first, it was mistakenly claimed to have medical verification from a doctor. It turned out that a doctor had prayed over the phone, and a hundred kilometres away, someone had been raised from the dead. That one awaits verification, I would have thought – much as I hope it is true.

Certainly, Bentley said a lot about resurrection last night. I felt that in his teaching, he let his excitement get the better of him. Emphasising that Jesus is the resurrection and the life, and that if we have Jesus we therefore have life, he got within a whisker of saying that dying without being raised back to life was an act of unfaith. Am I being unfair? Did I mishear or misunderstand? It was the impression I gained, though. And if I’m right, then the tone of the teaching was that everything was ‘kingdom now’, resurrection now, a little bit like the Corinthian Christians whom Paul had to correct for believing that the resurrection had already taken place.

To that I would reiterate what I learned from the likes of John Wimber in the mid-80s, that the kingdom of God is a mixture of the ‘now’ and the ‘not yet’. I hope and pray that we get as much of it in the ‘now’ as God wills, however much that is. But clearly a large part of it is delayed, not least the resurrection of the body, conquering the last enemy death. (This is in contrast to resurrection-resuscitations, like Lazarus and the son of the widow at Nain, who came back to life, only to die again later.)

In that respect, I found something my college principal said when I was training for the ministry. Talking about John Wesley‘s controversial doctrine of Christian perfection, he said that at heart, Wesley had ‘an optimism of grace’. Bentley has a huge optimism of grace, and it may be that people like him are sent to the church and the world to encourage us to be less pessimistic in our belief in God. Yet however optimistic we are about the grace of God, we still need a theology for when the blessings of God’s kingdom are mysteriously deferred.

Finally, I thought I’d end this with a link to something Ben Myers wrote on the Faith And Theology blog yesterday. Talking movingly about his elderly father’s struggles with ill health, he quoted Karl Barth on the subject of illness and healing. Barth is writing about the medical profession, but as I read his words, I was struck with just how much charismatics and Pentecostals with healing ministries would want to say something very similar. The quotes below are from Church Dogmatics III/4, s55:

“Sickness, like death itself, is unnatural and disorderly. It is an
element in the rebellion of chaos against God’s creation. It is an act
and declaration of the devil and demons. To be sure, it is no less
bound to God and dependent on Him than the creature which He created.
Indeed, it is impotent in a double way. For like sin and death, it is
neither good nor is it willed and created by God at all, but is real,
effective, powerful and menacing only in its nullity, as part of that
which God has negated, as part of His kingdom on the left hand.…

“The
realm of death which afflicts man in the form of sickness … is opposed
to His good will as Creator and has existence and power only under His
mighty No. To capitulate before it, to allow it to take its course, can
never be obedience but only disobedience towards God. In harmony with
the will of God, what humans ought to will in face of this whole realm
on the left hand, and therefore in face of sickness, can only be final
resistance.… Those who take up this struggle obediently are already
healthy in the fact that they do so, and theirs is no empty desire when
they will to maintain or regain their health” (pp. 366-69).

Furthermore:
“When one person is ill, the whole of society is really ill in all its
members. In the battle against sickness the final human word cannot be
isolation but only fellowship” (p. 363).

The full post is here.

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Oh No, Not Another Todd Bentley Post?

Er, yes. Just to say that late last night I received an email from an acquaintance whose wife has recently spent three weeks at Lakeland. He has offered a chat about some of the things that have unnerved me. That may not be for some time yet, unless we do it by email. I hope to reflect on that in due course (without betraying any confidences that might be shared).

In the meantime, I am hoping to attend the ‘impartation meeting’ at Meadgate Church tomorrow night, to witness things first hand. I’ll let you know how I get on.

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Ban Cluster Bombs

Ban Cluster Bombs:

A meeting is happening in Dublin about this terrible problem. When these fall but don’t explode, small children look at them and think they are attractive. They play with them. Innocent children are killed by them. And the British Government is one of the administrations dragging its feet in the negotiating. Please sign this petition.

(Thanks to Mike Bossingham for the email.)

UPDATE: Richard Hall and PamBG have joined in, too. How about you?

UPDATE #2, Wednesday morning: Good news! It looks like our Government has been persuaded, according to today’s Guardian.

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Todd Bentley: Violent Healing?

Now I am worried: the excellent Brian Jones has a disturbing YouTube clip of our friend Todd Bentley giving one example after another about how the Holy Spirit led him to perform violent acts upon people in order that they might be healed. He kicks an old lady in the nose with his biker boot; he chokes a man; he drop-kicks a pastor. Watch it yourself if you don't believe me. And watch audience members laughing as if it's a comedy routine.

For me, this goes beyond the weird and unusual methods in Scripture. It's way beyond Jesus using spittle in healing a blind person. It's even beyond God commanding Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, because in some of these instances, Bentley brazenly admits that he engages in the particular violent acts. In Abraham's case, it was a test and God restrained him at the end.

Not only that, I have known the odd pastor who would have taken this as justification for their own aggressive behaviour in church. I think I have alluded before to having been one of a group of charismatic church leaders who put pressure on another pastor to resign over his behaviour. In that man's case, it was the unholy triad of money, sex and power. The power came out in violence. Some of it was towards his wife and was witnessed by members of the church youth group. I wouldn't want that guy hearing Bentley.

As I said in a comment on yesterday's Bentley post, I've been trying to believe the best about people and hence I have tried to post in a measured and cautious manner. But I watched this video with an increasingly churning stomach and such a sense of revulsion. It's only two minutes long, but that was more than enough. Yes, God in his grace and mercy may be blessing and healing people in this 'revival', but I just can't square Bentley's unashamed methods here with the Jesus I read about in the Gospels.

And while I'm at the keyboard, let me raise one other question that's been bugging me. It seems minor, compared with what I've just written about, but some of the issues around the falling under the power of the Spirit still bug me, and I don't have any clear answers. My experience in the past of that phenomenon (both personal and witnessing others and hearing their stories) is that if the sense of the Holy Spirit is so powerful, it's difficult to get back on your feet quickly. However, people are getting back upright before very long in Bentley's meetings. I watched some again last night, and noticed how the stage is littered with bodies, but a few minutes later it isn't. Sometimes you see the people up and walking behind him in the camera shot. Peter Kirk also gave his account of just a brief amount of 'carpet time' at Dudley:

Of course it was bound to take a long time to anoint over a thousand
people. How they handled it was to line people up across the front of
the hall facing the stage, with space behind them. Trevor walked across
the line touching each forehead briefly with the cloth; I reckon he was
taking less than two seconds per person. At the touch most people fell
over, and were caught by “catchers” and lay on the floor- but only
briefly. For, as Trevor had warned would happen, after only about five
seconds each person was encouraged by the catcher to stand up
immediately and move away, so that a new line could be ready as soon as
Trevor finished the old one. It was a bit like serving communion at my
church, but faster.

Eventually, just before midnight, I got my place in a line. Despite
this conveyor belt approach, necessary simply because of the numbers,
this was a profound experience. The cloth touched my forehead with a
slight pressure but nothing like enough to push me over. But as it did
I felt the power of the Holy Spirit come on me and nudge me over. This
is not the first time this has happened to me, and sometimes I have
fallen over, although at other times for various reasons I have chosen
to stay on my feet. Last night I let myself fall over, and was caught
gently and laid on the floor. I felt God’s anointing on me, the
anointing which had arrived from Lakeland only that morning. I could
gladly have lain there and soaked in God’s presence. I wasn’t allowed
to, but getting up and going back to my seat didn’t take away the
anointing.

I'm simply puzzled. If anyone has thoughtful explanations, I'd be interested. Please post a comment.

But right now my biggest questions are about the video clip and the unashamed uses of violence in connection with blessing, and the attribution of it to the Holy Spirit. Your thoughts are most welcome.

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streetdiversions 2008

Well, I may have had my photo woes on Saturday, but yesterday afternoon I managed to get some more photos of the streetdiversions festival. I've uploaded them to Flickr here, so although I haven't recreated everything I lost on Saturday, there are still photos of the wonderful Coneheads, Andrée Kupp, Stacey and Tracey from OzStar Airlines and others.

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Todd Bentley Again

In the interests of fairness, I watched a broadcast of Todd Bentley from the 'Lakeland Healing Revival' on God TV last night. I know, I can't believe what I just typed: I watched God TV. Anyway, the alternatives included the Eurovision Song Contest and Britain's Got Talent! But watching the broadcast is the closest I'm likely to get to someone I wrote about. Here are my thoughts on what I viewed:

1. I have no doubt that the guy is sincere. He's loud and passionate, and just because my personality style is much quieter, I'm not going to diss him for that. I was less sure about Roy Fields, the worship leader's insistence on extravert styles of worship, rather than letting the expressions of worship come from the hearts. I don't suppose he either was being insincere, it was more about the mode of worship and church he knows. Traditional churches that insist on people not being bodily expressive are just as wrong, in my estimation.

2. I'm still nervous about the approaches to the testimonies of healing. All but one of them came without medical verification. The one that did was where a nutritionist accompanied the testifier. And in fairness, another woman was supported by a doctor. A third said she was going to ask for another X-ray, which at least meant she was serious about verification, but I would have been happier hearing her story after that test. Bentley also read out the thirteenth case of a resurrection from the dead, but admitted he was reading it out before the story had been verified.

In every other case, the people were coming onto the stage within a few days of symptoms having improved. I do hope and pray, and especially as someone who does believe that God heals in response to our prayers, that none of these people is disappointed. But when it is so quick, there is still the danger of a case of psychological remission. I am happy to give Bentley the benefit of the doubt that in his excitement, but I fear it is getting the better of him. What will happen if any of these people have relapses? There is a danger for the spiritual effect upon them, and for those who heard it. The name of God will be besmirched.

Likewise, I wondered about the practice of getting people to donate their walking sticks, zimmer frames and wheelchairs so quickly. The relapse question looms large. And what is Bentley's team doing with the collection? I don't suppose they are being held in case the original sufferer needs them back – that would be inconsistent with the tone struck. But are they being given to hospitals, for example, or are they being kept as trophies? I'm not accusing him of anything dishonest, I just felt like I wanted an explanation when I heard it. Perhaps one has been given on other evenings. Does anybody know?

3. I still think – watching on a 28 inch TV screen rather than a small YouTube video that it looks like Bentley is giving the adults a gentle push when he prays for them in the name of his Big Bam Boom God. He never pushes the children (whose stories are, perhaps, the most touching). He blows gently on them. This does seem more appropriate and sensitive. But he doesn't seem to stop the prayer and laying on of hands until someone has fallen down and an assistant can arrive to cover them with a blanket.

4. I couldn't believe he was saying this, but Bentley really did ask those watching on TV or the Internet to lay their hands on the screen or monitor in order to receive the anointing, or the blessing they needed. It sounded like all the worst televangelist talk, of the 'Touch the television and feel my sincerity' variety. It seems to be linked into this idea of the 'transferable anointing', just as church leaders are travelling to Lakeland to receive the anointing and bring it home.

It all sounds a bit animist to me, but maybe I'm being unfair. What I do think is reasonable is that someone may have a particular experience of the Holy Spirit, and then they are so endued with divine power that when they pray for people, things happen that didn't before. I'm sure that God could 'transfer the anointing' via screens and monitors, but I wouldn't want to baptise that idea. I would see it as an act of grace. I suppose it would be like the stories in Acts about Paul's handkerchief, and those who wanted to have the shadow of Peter fall on them. One would have to be very careful to keep the focus on God and not an object that becomes the object of veneration. (The same is true, of course, regarding personalities.) I notice from Peter Kirk's account of his trip to Dudley that a handkerchief soaked in anointing oil is being used there as the ostensible means of 'transferring the anointing'.

5. Further to the regular invitations to 'come to Lakeland' is the need to theologise about the notion of the 'holy place'. It is something evangelicals have either denied, been wary about, or just not thought about. God is God. God is omnipresent. Yet God also chooses to manifest his presence in a particular place for his sovereign purposes. It is interesting that the notion of 'pilgrimage' is coming back in all sorts of Christian traditions. Some of that is purely spiritual: it is the sense that we have not arrived, for we are still on a journey. But a Lakeland or a Toronto becomes like a Protestant Lourdes, Walsingham or Santiago de Compostela. Again, the place must not be venerated, only the Lord of the place. Making pilgrimage to such a place needs to be from a sense that this is the place to which God has called me out of obedience, rather than an assumption that a visit is the current cure-all.

I have related before the story of visiting Glastonbury twenty years ago with my sister. We found the town, with its occult and new age shops, spiritually oppressive. We made a point of walking to the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey, where Christian prayer had been offered for centuries. There we felt 'clean'. I have heard, too, stories of Christians entering houses and feeling a sense of peace, only to discover afterwards that the previous residents were a Christian family. I would be reluctant to suggest that spiritual power somehow resided in the ground or the premises, but perhaps there is something in the sense of dedicating a place or objects as holy to the Lord. Presumably we wouldn't do that unless we believed that God took us at our words in making the dedication, and acted accordingly?

Overall, then, there is still the usual church mix of the good, the bad and the indifferent. However, with this phenomenon it is all magnified to a huge extent. May all of us, whatever our views of Bentley and Lakeland, echo the words of John the Baptist: 'He must increase, but I must decrease.'

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Blog Changes

I've made a few alterations to the blog today. I'd be interested in your feedback.

1. Most obviously, I've changed the design scheme in Typepad. I'd had the old one for three years, and thought it was time for a change. Typepad has a huge array of themes. I think it's an improvement, but some might think the main colour is a bit garish. Would a softer pastel be better?

2. Most importantly, I have removed comment moderation. Your comments will now appear instantly. It seems to me that Typepad catches the great majority of the spam, and I also have filters in place to prevent certain profanities appearing. I hope this means that when a post gets popular, the conversation can proceed faster than it currently does. In any case, all comments and trackbacks still get emailed to me, and so I can unpublish or delete anything dodgy. I still don't mind hearty disagreement, it's only the offensive stuff I'd remove. If removing moderation does let a lot of filth through, then even though I can nuke it, I'll reinstate moderation.

3. If any of you read the blog in syndicated form, you'll now find that instead of just reading the first forty words of a post to judge whether it's worth reading, that has now increased to one hundred. Again, I'd be interested in any reactions to this change.

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Language Of Zion

The other day I came across Ben
Myers’ post on Daniel Radosh’s book ‘Rapture
Ready! Adventures in the parallel universe of Christian pop culture’. The
very title (which seems, from an Amazon
search, to be based on quite a few books) came the same day that somebody
had sent me an email, where the sign-off was something I hadn’t previously seen
in my sheltered Methodist upbringing: ‘Stay rapturable!’ It doesn’t quite fit
with my eschatology, but I suppose it’s better than being rupturable.

Which made me think about the ‘language of Zion’ that we
employ. Any specialist field or discipline has its own language, or uses common
words with a different meaning (think ‘factor’ in Maths, for example). We have
just had Trinity Sunday, and few Christian doctrines have more technical words
than the Trinity. And I certainly don’t want to diminish the importance of ‘the
language of mystery’.

But we get a bit daft in the church. Do I need all those
letters that begin, ‘Greetings in the precious name of the Lord Jesus Christ’?
I know what they mean, and some of them are sincere. Why, a few are even from
friends. Yes, the name of Jesus is precious, but over-use and reduction to
catchphrase diminish that sense of value for me.

I know a fair few of the Protestant (and especially
evangelical) words and phrases. I’m less familiar with what my friends who
climb burning candles and inhale pungent incense use. Or is this just an
evangelical disease? Can anyone help on this question?

I’m not blameless myself. Often, I end an email with the
words, ‘Grace and peace’. No, it’s not that I fancy myself as the Apostle Paul,
but I do like his use of those words in greetings. They convey something
important to me. I end some letters with ‘Yours in Christ.’ Prepare your
charges of hypocrisy to lay against me!

So why do we do it? Perhaps we need a secret code. On this
understanding, it is Christian undercover spy language. It is our equivalent to
the ICHTHUS symbol in the catacombs, before we made the fish badge something to
market. PTL and WWJD are the combinations that crack the code and let us
inside.

But if it is that, it is quite worrying. Although things may
be going against Christians in western society, we have not reached the level
of persecution that many of our sisters and brothers have. So we hardly need
the equivalent of the secret handshake. It therefore becomes a marker of who is
‘in’ and who is ‘out’, and our society is sensitive to issues of inclusion and
exclusion. Of course, some fundamental degree of inclusion and exclusion is
inevitable by virtue of positive or negative responses to Jesus Christ, but a
form that implicitly suggests superiority, and thus contradicts grace.

On another level, perhaps it indicates the difficulty we
have in translating the Gospel into what the Book of Common Prayer in its day
called ‘a tongue understanded of the people’. Are we so caught up with church
stuff and so unused to enjoying the company of non-Christians that we have no
language for mission, apart from slogans? Does anyone remember the Christian
policeman characters on ‘The
Fast Show’? They had some of our religious clichés down to a tee.

In fact, what may seem to be a facetious subject is a missionary
question. It is indicative of our failure to heed the dictum of Helmut Thielicke that
the Gospel must always be forwarded to a new address. It is about the
assumption that people need not only to be converted to Christ but to our
culture. It thus denies incarnational mission.

Of course, maybe we shouldn’t get too po-faced about this.
Maybe the best account I’ve ever seen of this comes from the time when Ship Of Fools was a printed magazine in the
early 1980s. They published ‘The Ship Of Fools Dictionary Of Sanctified
Jargon’. It contained such gems as, ‘Suffer the little children’: see Sunday
School.

Why do you think Christians do this? And do you have any
amusing examples? Let’s have a bit of fun here.

I was going to end the post with that last paragraph, but as
well as having fun, we need (without getting po-faced, as I said) to think
about some solutions. Some are inherent in what I’ve written already. We need
to be careful about the ‘us’ and ‘them’ mentality, especially when it is
couched in terms of persecution. We need to be more comfortable around those
who do not share our faith: rather than being petrified of them, 1 John reminds
us, ‘Greater is he who is in you than he who is in the world.’ We seem to
function more with an Old Testament fear of ritual contamination than a New
Testament faith in which all those understandings have come to an end and
fulfilment in Christ.

But what do you think? As well as sharing some examples of
Christianese, what do you think we might do in order to kick the habit?

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