Rich Preachers Low on Supernatural Horsepower

I’ve been thinking about Kenneth Copeland, the toxic preacher who joined a bizarre effort to undo the Protestant Reformation a few years back.

Copeland is an unpleasant guy. I’ll say that at the start. His ministry consists mostly of teaching, and I’ve seen a lot of it. He sneers at his followers, sometimes imitating them in silly voices. He speaks in anger. The Bible says God is love, so Copeland’s hostile demeanor is not a good thing to see in a Christian.

Christianity isn’t about being nice, but a Spirit-filled Christian who is mature will generally be nice anyway because God fills his children with love and patience. God is generally a nice person, and we are supposed to be like him. God has killed a lot of people, and the flames of hell are his anger, but you can’t judge his prevailing personality by the unpleasant things justice requires him to do. If Jesus appeared and taught in a human body, and he was not coming to exact justice, people would be overwhelmed by the love that radiates from him. No danger of that with Copeland.

Copeland’s broadcasts helped me to find God. Copeland is not wrong about everything; that isn’t possible. Back in the early Eighties, I used to watch him, and he taught, correctly, that God helps people. He taught that God heals us and helps us. I got my first miracle healing by applying something Copeland taught. Unfortunately, that gave me the idea that his teachings were generally sound, which is not correct. I was under the spell of the prosperity preachers for a number of years. It seemed that I had a choice: I could listen to preachers from churches which rejected the Holy Spirit, or I could attach myself to preachers who accepted all the fruit and gifts of the Spirit yet who taught evil, ineffective promises about money.

Churches that reject the Holy Spirit are awful. Their teachings aren’t even close to right. People who belong to such churches rarely get help from God. They don’t prophesy. They don’t cast demons out. Their services are worse than jury duty. Unbearable.

The prosperity churches were much livelier, but they pushed the miraculous and the holy aside and talked about money all the time. They assured people that giving them money would motivate God to make them rich. They still do it. They even charge for prophecies. A thousand-dollar prophecy is touted as much better than a hundred-dollar prophecy.

I knew I was supposed to be praying in tongues for long periods every day, but I didn’t do it, so I was easily fooled. When you pray in tongues a lot, God guides you and tells you things. I shut off the flow of information, so I listened to some very sick people, many of whom are probably in hell or headed there.

This shows the danger of charismatic churches that push the money gospel and don’t teach people to pray in tongues daily. People become convinced the money gospel is correct, and once they think they’ve got the real thing, they stop looking for the truth. Because they don’t pray in tongues, they don’t hear God telling them the prosperity pastors are wrong.

It’s bad to lack knowledge of God and know it, but it’s worse to be full of false knowledge you’re sure is correct. If you know you lack knowledge, you’ll look for it. If you think you already have it, you’ll keep digging yourself deeper into the hole of heresy. When people tell you the truth, you’ll drive them off. Or martyr them.

If Copeland does anything for people, I have not heard about it, but he certainly takes. My sister used to give money to Copeland’s ministry. When her life fell apart, she stopped giving. Then they started calling, asking if she was all right. No preacher ever offered to give money back or to give out of his own pockets.

The thing that struck me about Copeland today is that he does so little for people. I’m sure he has some charity operations, but I’ve seen him work many times, and I’ve only seen him lay hands on one person. He told her she was healed of a back problem, but she continued to walk like a person with cerebral palsy. I’ve never seen him cast out a demon or give a true prophesy. I’ve seen him make wrong prophesies, however. I remember him telling a crowd the world was about to hear about people being raised from the dead in Mexico. That never happened.

If all you do is stand far away from people and lecture them, why should anyone take you seriously as a minister?

The Bible clearly says we are supposed to help people one on one. We are supposed to heal the sick, prophesy, raise the dead, work various miracles, and cast demons out. We’re supposed to raise up disciples who do the same things. This does not happen in the money ministries. Not generally. If you watch a money preacher, you’ll see that he stands on the stage and tells other people what they should do. Benny Hinn has been known to bring people up for healing, but does he then have them heal others? I’ve never seen it.

I’ve been watching interesting preachers for the last year or so. They go to malls, accost strangers, and heal them on the spot. Some of them have the people they healed heal others. They try to create disciples. They cast out demons. They use the word of knowledge to tell people things about themselves. They don’t accept money; in fact, they are more likely to give it away. Many of the people they claim to heal really are healed. Some come back with medical reports.

The people who love preachers like Copeland and Joyce Meyer and T.D. Jakes worship them. They think they’re special apostles the rest of us can never match. You can’t tell such people they’re being flim-flammed. They get angry. They’ll say your advice is an attack of the devil. This shows how dangerous these preachers are. They delude people who have good intentions and stunt their growth. They turn them into attack dogs for Satan.

It’s very sad, because if the celebrity-preacher model were correct, it would mean the rest of us had very little hope of being healed or hearing from God except in the presence of a few oily TV stars. It would mean TV preachers were like angels. It would mean they were better than we are.

An angel is an extremely powerful being without human failings, and when they appear to people, they don’t try to teach them to be like angels. They do their amazing feats, and then they leave. That’s not how human beings are supposed to do things. We’re supposed to help others become like God.

If you have to get to a certain human being in order to be healed or helped, you are an undeveloped Christian. You should be able to get God’s help when you’re alone, and you should certainly be able to get it at your local church. You shouldn’t have to hang a calendar and circle the date on which Kathryn Kuhlman will be in your town.

Think of all the famous preachers who don’t do what disciples do. How many times has the pope healed someone or cast out a demon? How many times has John MacArthur done these things? Does Rick Warren ever prophesy? Do any of these men have proteges who do these things? Jesus certainly did, and so did his disciples. How can you represent Jesus if you can’t do anything he did?

Imagine a paramedic who couldn’t put a bandage on you. Imagine him standing there, saying, “If Dr. Chakrabarty was here, he could stop your bleeding! Dr. Chakrabarty is amazing! He can do anything! Give me an offering, and Dr. Chakrabarty will make you rich!” This is Kenneth Copeland, in a nutshell, except that he might also make fun of you.

Even the Old Testament prophets worked miracles. Are we supposed to believe the New Testament is a step backward?

It’s particularly telling when a charismatic preacher like Copeland or Jakes can’t do anything. These are the people who teach that miracles are for today, yet they appear to be powerless. ll they can do is talk, but obscure individuals all over the world are doing what Jesus did, every day.

Jesus said this: “And these signs shall follow them that believe; In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues; They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.” If the TV stars are so special, why aren’t these things happening? If they know more than the obscure people who are doing these things, how can they be doing less?

It’s a very interesting question.

Copeland and another prosperity preacher named James Robison joined an Episcopal priest named Tony Palmer in an effort to convince charismatics they were really Catholics. It was highly disturbing. The Catholic church teaches some very dangerous things. The Protestant Reformation happened for very good reasons, and those reasons still exist. The church had become the most powerful terrorist organization on earth, burning and torturing people on a colossal scale as matters of ordinary business. It teaches the worship of Mary, who was just a woman and who did not die a virgin. It teaches the worship of saints, which is necromancy. It teaches infant baptism, which does not work. The list of corruptions is very long, as Martin Luther proved. It’s not okay to join the Catholic Church. The problems are too great. Copeland should know that, but he wouldn’t know the truth if he saw it. He is blinded by pride and money.

Palmer, a genuinely disturbing individual who was killed in a motorcycle accident at the height of his efforts, was really a Catholic. He was married to a Catholic, and he believed their doctrine. He wanted to convert, but the pope convinced him not to because he served as a bridge between Protestants and Catholics. Palmer stood in front of a room full of charismatics and said, “You’re all Catholic.” That was not pleasant to hear. I felt like a runaway slave who just got caught by the patrollers. I’ve never been a Catholic, but I’m very glad I never had to be.

Jesus prayed his people would be united, and the ecumenicals–the people who want to drop the Catholic net on all of us–cite this as justification. The thing is, Jesus wanted us to be unified under the Holy Spirit, not a pope. The Spirit-led are already unified, which means the followers of Jesus are unified. The people who listen to the traditions of men are AWOL. To join the Catholics would be to join lost sheep instead of rounding them up.

Jesus was a divider. No one likes to talk about that. He said he was a divider. He predicted that Christians would be driven out of synagogues and persecuted by their families. It’s true. Right now, there are Jews who have been disinherited, spat on, beaten, and put in mental wards because their families and rabbis were against Jesus. You can go online and see them talk about what happened to them. Muslims kill converts. People who hear Jesus’ voice are driven out of churches, and the things they say can’t be reconciled with dead-church doctrine.

Division is not the optimal state, but it’s necessary at the moment because hundreds of millions of self-described Christians reject very important truths.

The unification movement is just a way to take the salt out of the church. If they can put us under authorities that discourage obedience to the Spirit of Holiness, while convincing us we’re still good Christians, they can pretty much kill the body of Christ on earth.

Unification was one of the big problems in Rome. The problem Christians had wasn’t so much that they worshiped Jesus; it was that they taught that worshiping other Gods was sin. Instead of accepting unification with pantheists, which would have destroyed the church and nullified the crucifixion, they chose to die in separation, and they were right, just like many of the people the pope’s servants burned over the centuries.

I wish I had never listened to Copeland or any of the Mammon preachers, and I wish I had prayed in tongues more when I was young. I hope the things I write will help others avoid these pitfalls.