Revival Review: Bad Acting Bites Believers

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Lately something has become apparent to me.  Namely this:  radical Charismatics will believe almost anything if it contains a modicum of amusement and at least a passing reference to Jesus.  I don’t know what else to conclude when the unabashed showmanship which is being daily displayed in Lakeland Florida passes for a Christian revival.  Is this sort of formulaic hucksterism what Christianity is all about?  If it is, then man oh man I wish I had taken the blue pill.  Don’t get me wrong-I’m not afraid or intimidated by the goings on down South. I would just hate to think that I’d banked my life on a religion which checks its brain at the door in favor of an experience much less enthralling than Bonnaroo (and with a lot crappier music).  I know I haven’t but even the concept is worth a shudder.  By now I’ve watched a good bit of the Lakeland ‘process’ and am beginning to feel as if I’d seen a continuous loop of a bad SNL revival parody  (SNL would have been funnier though and at least the odd knowledge that ‘this is trying to pass as authentic’ doesn’t trouble me in a bad SNL parody).  Really though, it’s not even very good comedy, I mean, the whole ‘Bam’ old-lady-hits-the-floor thing is only funny the first couple of times, and then…wellllll.  You get my point.

With that said, I am not sure that people are being healed at the Lakeland revival.  Yeah I’ve read the testimonies, seen the x-rays, watched the people fall down on stage, and heard all about William Branham’s healing angel.  I am sure that there are many people who are so enamored with the idea of supernatural healing that they think that they must believe that they have been healed or somehow their faith is impure.  I am sure that many people believe that if they say that they have been healed then they will be, eventually.  I am sure that many people have so strongly tied their Christianity to sight and not faith. 

By that same token, I am painfully aware that this post touches a deep nerve in the radical Charismatic body. It offends one of their most deeply felt desires, that is for one day, in some meeting, prayer group, worship service, conference, that they will get the ultimate Holy Ghost ‘fix’. This is why so many are spiritual junkies (and I was one of them) on a tireless hunt for that definitive experience which will finally tell them that they have arrived as truly ’spiritual’.  Even so, I must emphatically state that ascended spiritual masters are not Christians. Christians live within an effective and certain hope of a future reality. The ‘Not yet’ aspect of glorification (when we will see Jesus and have the power of glorified bodies) is not within our grasp already. Radical Charismatics miss this tension entirely. They suffer from an over-realized eschatology which drives them in continual attempts to lasso the future and bring it into the present.

The various negative responses that I’ve encountered in my last post, ‘Todd Bentley in His Element’, confirm the existence of this radical Charismatic sore spot.  In exposing Bentley’s beliefs I attack the validity of the current great hope for many radical Charismatics.  Seriously, the fact that Paul Cain and Bob Jones endorse Bentley should be reason enough to take pause.    But that is only secondary to the real issue which is this:  The miracles aren’t the main thing. The belief which is promulgated alongside them is.  Miracles fade faith is staid.  Radical Charismatics are brainwashed into believing that surreptitious show business is what God is ‘really doing now’ through self-appointed super apostles, as opposed to meeting men and women (his children) through the suffering, mundane drudgery, minute joys, and fading mortality of this life.  Baby-steps of faith.  I would like to believe that hour by hour, day by day, we become more like Christ as we move into the purposeful future of our glorification-the time of which He has planned.  That’s simply not fantastic enough-radical Charismatics need some canned excitement.   The normal Christian life is too much about faith and perseverance and repentance, not enough about power and miracles and speaking things into existence.  This dichotomy between conviction and impression spawns a false hope driving its victims to project their desire at the earliest presenting opportunity.  Desire for the spectacular becomes so strong that when it is manufactured in live mockumentary via the Lakeland reality show, ahem, “healing revival”, that the first whiff of the miraculous is enough to cause a frenzy.  The frenzy becomes a melee, and the melee becomes a phenomenon.  Now it is simply too big to discredit. 

The Lakeland healing revival will be a footnote in the trainwreck which has become modern and post-modern radical Charismaticism.  Lakeland will end up like Toronto, desperately trying to recapture the ‘move’ of an earlier time.  People will drift away, carried by the high for a time, only to detox hard if they can’t find another fix quickly enough.  Others will come forward and admit to lying about healings, gold teeth, and pins melting out of their legs just like they did at the Airport Vineyard.  Finally, some will be driven out of radical Charismatic practice by the Holy Spirit when the bottom falls out of the experiential entrepreneurship they’ve subjected themselves to.  These will find solace in the beauty of the normal, human existence which the gospel allows for.  Dying daily is not sexy, but it is real.  I’ll take the real thank you.

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Filed under Heresy, charismatic, prophetic

Tags: healing revival, Ignited church, Lakeland, Lakeland revival, revival in Florida, Todd Bentley