Outside in my yard today, I was walking some cut shrubbery to the edge of the road for the city yard waste crew to pick up next week. I was thinking about an earlier post I had written in reference to the statement of :
Pentecostalism has showed us the past fifty years that the ‘ways and means’ did not matter as long as the ‘ends’ was successfully obtained.
I thought about this more and more and I came to the conclusion about how Pentecostalism is famous for using any form of “ways and means” in order to obtain and reach the “ends”. The logic was that if the ‘ways and means” got the “ends” we wanted, this must mean that it was God. Some famous examples include:
The use of women as preachers: No other denomination or move of God before Pentecostalism had the presence of women as preachers. In fact, the three most notorious women preachers of the Pentecostal era suffered divorce in their first marriage (two had affairs). The ‘ways and means’ of using women as pastors got the ‘ends’ of some tingles and shakes along with building some bigger churches. What did we see when the principles of 1 Tim. 2:11-12, 1
Cor. 11:3
Evangelical Extortion In March 1986, Oral Roberts claimed to have spoken directly to God, and was told that he would die if he was unable to raise $8 million by March 31, 1987 to produce and send out medical missionaries. He stated on April 1 that the 8 million dollars had been raised and his life had been spared (1.3 million was given by a dog track owner at the very end of the fundraiser). What has happened, Oral closed down the medical school and the City of Faith hospital. Oral sold the building to pay off debt. Oral has had a couple of heart attacks and appears to spend more time on Benny Hinn’s show than on his son’s own show. We saw the extortion of money by other ministries either to give to advoid curse or give to get mega rich appear in droves.
Holy Hexes We saw ministers use the ‘ways and means’ of a ‘holy hex’ to obtain the means of suppressing people who disagree with them. Benny Hinn is notorious for his ‘Holy Ghost Machine Gun’ statement where he asked God to kill those who disagreed with him equating it to disagreeing with God. We saw more and more ministers use this to shut people up in order for their sins not to be exposed. This has caused the church to be cowardly and refuse to take a stand against blatant unscriptural truths and heresies fearing that they will be poor, poverished, and dead.
Other offspring movements that brought forth a truth but produced more error The Charismatic movement brought back the concept of Grace and the Holy Spirit but produced the Shepherding and Vineyard movements. The Vineyard produced The Toronto Blessing and the Kansas City Prophets. The Toronto Blessing produced Brownsville, Smithton, and ‘the river’. The breakup of the Kansas City Prophets produced the International Houses of Prayer and the 24/7 ‘Harp and Bowl’ worship fallacies.
The ways and means to produce an ‘ends’ of our desire is alot like the ’strange fire’ Nadab and Abihu lit in Leviticus 10. However, we need to get back to the solid Biblically-based teachings of the Reformers and learn the Bible again and not man’s interpretation called ‘God said’. When the ways and means are rightly done in God’s desire, the ends will be blessed by God and will show forth in integrity, dilligence, and servantute, not numbers, money, and church corporations.
It never ceases to amaze me how often Christians generalize something to the point that it makes everyone look bad.
I attend a Vineyard church, and I’m surrounded by godly people who seek to do His will. One could easily argue that the more “traditional” churches only succeed at neatly fitting God into the little box they’ve built for Him, where anything different is automatically wrong. It goes both ways. Both types of churches have faults.
But don’t generalize and demonize all Charismatic churches in general. My time at a Charismatic church has produced much fruit in my life.