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Tonight I’m doing something I thought I’d never do. I’m planning to drive to the TBN studios and sit in the audience. My pastor will be there, with John Gray and Keith Craft and some other people I haven’t seen before.

I know I’ve said a lot of critical things about people I’ve seen on TBN, and I can’t say I was always wrong. I’ve seen greed and self-righteousness and egotism and all sorts of other things on TBN. I’ve seen people who are almost certainly heretics. But when I quit going to church about twenty years ago, I allowed my unreasonable standards deprive me of a lot of good things. I expected perfection, and I didn’t get it, so I settled for nothing at all. That didn’t work out too good.

I think the charismatics are on the right track. Their excesses are embarrassing, and their pastor-driven organizational scheme lends itself to abuse. But they get better all the time, and nobody else seems to be as close to the truth.

It’s like I’ve said before. The old churches are human-centered bureaucracies–barely churches–and the new ones aren’t anchored in wisdom and maturity. You have to make a choice. If God seems to be getting more done in the sillier churches, that’s where I plan to be. The Bible says he uses foolish things to confound the wise. The way things have gone over the last hundred years or so, it’s hard to argue with that.