Come Try the Real Thing

When you get baptized with the Holy Spirit, sometimes you will feel his emotions as though they were your own. It happened to me at the National Holocaust Memorial in Washington. I walked in and felt a wave of grief, and I knew it didn’t come from me. This morning, during prayer, I got a taste of the way I should feel about prosperity churches, and it was not good. It was horrible, as though I were considering a chain of abattoirs where human beings were slaughtered for their meat.

I use Facebook. I used to think it was stupid, but they fiddled with it until it made more sense and became useful, and I began to like it. Sometimes people share things posted by prosperity preachers, and I have taken to blocking them. I don’t block the people who share, but I have blocked–if I recall correctly–Joyce Meyer, Benny Hinn, T.D. Jakes, and some others. I don’t know whether I’ve blocked Joel Osteen, but I will if I get a chance. You have to wait for someone to share something. You can’t go to a page and block it in advance, unless it’s a personal page.

My old church, Trinity in Miami Gardens, was a prosperity church. The church isn’t prosperous. They have debt they can’t pay. But they claim to teach prosperity, and it seems to be working for the pastor and his family.

This morning I thought about the way they invite Steve Munsey in and let him teach his garbage. The metaphor that came to mind was a family of wolves running a sheep farm, inviting a hyena to come in and eat the flesh of the sheep they have ripped open.

Munsey is a predator. That is my OPINION, as we lawyers like to say, not that he would sue a critic and thereby draw attention to himself. I am sure he doesn’t believe the crap he teaches. I think he knows it’s a pile of lies, and I think he made it up just to get money.

He claims that if you give a pile of money to a church or televangelist on Passover, Pentecost, or Yom Kippur, God will give you blessings listed in the Old Testament. Unfortunately, if you read the Bible for yourself, you will see that there is no connection between these blessings and Munsey’s offerings. If you wanted, you could tell people to give big offerings on Chanukkah, and then you could point to an unrelated blessing, like the one that says no weapon formed against you will prosper, and you could say the blessing comes from the offering. This is the kind of thing Munsey did. It doesn’t just happen. His lists of blessings didn’t make themselves. He had to sit down and write them out, and to me, that proves intent to deceive.

He says the Jews went to Jerusalem three times a year to give God “their best offering,” and that God sold them these blessings in return. Any Jew can tell you this is crazy. The Jews did not go to Jerusalem three times a year, and they didn’t give giant cash offerings on the specified holidays. There were times when Jewish MEN went to Jerusalem (not all Jews), and there were offerings, but they were not huge cash offerings, Gentiles were not involved, and there was no mention of special blessings given in exchange for money.

This is not really something you can argue about. It’s not a matter of interpretation. The things he teaches are demonstrably, objectively untrue. There is no possibility that they could be true.

I thought about this, and I thought about the other prosperity pimps. I thought about the things God really wants to do in his people. He wants to enter our hearts and minds, live in us, heal us of the internal damage that has been done to us, heal our bodies, give us fulfilling missions, and make us victorious in life. But if you go to a prosperity pimp, he will actually prevent God from doing those things for you!

Some megachurches have flocks made up of reasonably successful people. That is not the case with Trinity. A lot of people there are in government housing. Many have no jobs. They come from generations of poverty and idol worship. Things don’t go well for them. These are the last people on earth a man of God would want to hurt, yet the leaders of the church invite Munsey in for the specific purpose of squeezing money out of them.

That’s really something. We all forgive Robin Hood, because he stole from the rich and gave to the poor. But what can you say about wealthy people who steal from the poor AND claim to be helping them, IN God’s name?

The fact that other churches have wealthier congregations doesn’t excuse this behavior in those venues. Stealing and lying are wrong, no matter who the victim is. And the charlatans aren’t just stealing money. They are stealing peace. They are stealing faith by convincing people that God isn’t real and that all preachers are thieves. They are stealing cancer cures, deliverance from addictions, victory over terrible cycles of family dysfunction…every blessing you can name. They steal it all. Prosperous people have problems, just like everyone else. They need God just as much as the poor. So it’s not okay for Kenneth Copeland to rip off Texans who drive German cars.

Churches have become abortion mills. In the supernatural, they are littered with the bones of Christians who have been dismantled and gutted by people like Munsey, Paula White, and Benny Hinn.

It would be better to kill people physically than spiritually. It would be better to find a good Christian and cut his throat than to fill an unsaved person with so much disgust that he won’t come to the altar, or to destroy a Christian’s faith so he and his descendants live in sin and failure.

No one in the charismatic churches will speak up. We’re so brainwashed, all we can say is, “Judge not.” So when a crooked millionaire comes in and rapes a congregation over a thirty-year period, we smile and refuse to be “judgmental.” If one of these white trash jokers broke in your house and tried to take a $30 lamp, you would flip out, and you would tell everyone you know. But we have an insane notion that we can’t speak up when they are clearly robbing us of our future with Christ. That is truly amazing.

Sometimes sincere preachers slip up through weakness or ignorance. That’s understandable. But that’s not what’s happening in the money churches. Many of these people know exactly what they’re doing. The Bible commands us not to keep company with swindlers who call themselves Christians. Tell me how you can reconcile that with an ignorant unwillingness to point out sin.

At my church, the Holy Spirit talks all the time. He speaks through pastors and ministers. Sometimes he talks through people in the congregation. He doesn’t tell us we’re going to be millionaires. He brings comfort and hope of inner healing. He tells people he knows about the abuse they’ve suffered, and that he is going to undo the damage and bring them joy and recovery. He tells them they’re going to do great things for HIM, not for themselves. And these things come true.

People whose lives are full of pain and despair brighten up and come alive as they continue to attend. Shackles fall off of them. They start helping others. That’s what a church is supposed to do. We become God’s agents, and we help others join the workforce. In the process, we get blessed.

God is not behind the vultures and maggots. He is not on their side. He did not bring them to us. He did not build their giant, self-glorifying, tacky megamall churches. The outward appearance of success is not proof that God has done something. God is in the churches where love, not greed, is the primary motivation. They may be small. They may not have TBN shows. But they are producing strong Christians who will, in turn, build future generations of strong Christians.

There is no shame in calling people what they are. The apostles did it. Jesus did it. He whipped people on the temple grounds, because they used God to justify their greed. We are right–we are obligated–to shine a light on those who habitually, deliberately slice up and divide the sheep. To grin and ignore it is to trivialize the desires of God’s heart.

The Bible calls the liars “wolves” for a reason. Wolves do not take care of sheep. They kill and eat them for pleasure. It is not a flattering term, nor is it a term that reflects understanding and patience. People are literally dying for lack of a proper introduction to God, and they are also being bankrupted by idiotic offerings. Don’t hesitate to speak up, and if you know of a church where people are being healed, then speak up about that. Life is short. We shouldn’t let people die before a good word reaches them.

When the unbelieving look into our churches and see love, inner healing, outer healing, victory, and restoration, they will want what we have, and then we’ll be able to reach them. If a few crooks have to be put out, it’s a profitable trade. They can always sell cars for a living. The devil’s children are nothing if not resourceful.

Let’s quit making excuses for the wolves who feed on our bodies. It was never supposed to be like this. There is hope in God, and if you want to find it, you will have to step away from people who offer you fantasies and mirages.