The 7/12 Faith article on “Healer and heel?” brought up a question I’ve been pondering recently. If your church started preaching the devil, would you notice?
That someone as abusive as Todd Bentley could cause a religious revival makes me wonder. I mean, what kind of awful churches are these people coming from, anyway, that they consider this a “revival?”
One could argue that charismatics are more vulnerable to shenanigans like kicking people in the face to heal them than are less experiential Christians such as evangelicals. You could argue this if you assumed all religious abuse is physical rather than verbal or psychological. Having had experience with both the evangelical and charismatic church, I’d argue evangelicals tendency to ignore sublimate feelings to the “word of God” may actually make them more vulnerable.
If an evangelical starts to experience depression during sermons, as I did a while back, it’s not because the god being preached comprises the abusive traits of her parents. It’s because she isn’t open to the Holy Spirit. Or, worse, she committed some heinous (and, in all likelihood, luridly sexual) sin sometime in her ancient past that God has only just now gotten around to addressing.
Several years ago I heard a sermon in which the minister said Jesus broke the leg of a lamb that went astray and carried it around his neck. He called this an example of tough love. I call this an example of bull.
I once received a lesson from a farmer’s son on herding sheep that go astray. After a flock of sheep jumped the fence from a neighboring pasture, my boyfriend explained he needed to find the sheep that jumped first. After finding that sheep, he gently guided the sheep back over the fence. Sheep are followers by nature. The rest of the flock followed the leader back over the fence.
No shepherd in his right mind would destroy his livestock, the source of his living. To this day I’m not sure if this minister thought Jesus was a sadist or a damned fool.
That someone as abusive as Todd Bentley could cause a religious revival makes me wonder. I mean, what kind of awful churches are these people coming from, anyway, that they consider this a “revival?”
One could argue that charismatics are more vulnerable to shenanigans like kicking people in the face to heal them than are less experiential Christians such as evangelicals. You could argue this if you assumed all religious abuse is physical rather than verbal or psychological. Having had experience with both the evangelical and charismatic church, I’d argue evangelicals tendency to ignore sublimate feelings to the “word of God” may actually make them more vulnerable.
If an evangelical starts to experience depression during sermons, as I did a while back, it’s not because the god being preached comprises the abusive traits of her parents. It’s because she isn’t open to the Holy Spirit. Or, worse, she committed some heinous (and, in all likelihood, luridly sexual) sin sometime in her ancient past that God has only just now gotten around to addressing.
Several years ago I heard a sermon in which the minister said Jesus broke the leg of a lamb that went astray and carried it around his neck. He called this an example of tough love. I call this an example of bull.
I once received a lesson from a farmer’s son on herding sheep that go astray. After a flock of sheep jumped the fence from a neighboring pasture, my boyfriend explained he needed to find the sheep that jumped first. After finding that sheep, he gently guided the sheep back over the fence. Sheep are followers by nature. The rest of the flock followed the leader back over the fence.
No shepherd in his right mind would destroy his livestock, the source of his living. To this day I’m not sure if this minister thought Jesus was a sadist or a damned fool.
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