I get these e-mails at least twice a week from J. Lee Grady at Charisma magazine and this one I received over the weekend is worthy to publish:

It’s Getting Really Weird Out There
Written by J. Lee Grady
Taken from the November 11, 2005 e-mail

It’s Getting Really Weird Out There
In many charismatic ministries today, basic Christian morality has been hijacked.

How would you feel if your pastor announced from the pulpit that he had uncovered a “new revelation” in the Bible? His discovery: That a church leader can have more than one wife.

Hopefully, you and everyone in the building would run, not walk, out of that church and never come back until the pastor had been replaced. But I am afraid too many of us gullible charismatics might stay in the pews—and eventually give the guy a standing ovation plus a $10,000 love offering.

That’s how strange it is getting out there. Something has gone terribly wrong in our movement. Everywhere I turn I find that leaders of so-called Spirit-filled churches are making bizarre choices that compromise basic Christian integrity. Some examples:

• At one charismatic megachurch, staff pastors successfully convinced all their wives and female staff members to get breast implants. (I wonder: Was this discussed at a staff meeting?)
• A church in California (known for its revival meetings and prophetic ministry) recently imploded after members learned that several men in the church had been having homosexual affairs with the pastor, who was married.
• A leader with an international following (who wears the label of “apostle”) recently informed his leaders that men of God who reach his level of anointing are allowed to have more than one sexual partner. Then his own son offered his wife to his father out of a sense of spiritual obligation.

We can all say together: “Eeeuuuwww!”

What has triggered this madness? The devil is working overtime, yet our discernment is at an all-time low. Satan’s tactics are more brazen than ever. We might as well let him walk into church on Sunday morning and give him the microphone.

We’ve been bewitched. What matters to us today are the carnal things. We want flash, bang and the wow factor. If a person can shout loud enough and get everyone to swoon at the altar, we don’t care how he or she lives at home. Morality is irrelevant.

In 2000 Charisma reported that charismatic preacher Clarence McClendon had divorced his wife of 16 years, Tammera McClendon, and married another woman after only seven days. The ceremony was performed by Bishop Earl Paulk, founder of the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit in Atlanta. Several prominent ministers attended the wedding, lending their endorsement to McClendon’s actions.

Tammera McClendon later informed Charisma that Clarence had told her while they were married that God had already shown him the woman who would replace her as his wife.

McClendon left his denomination, the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, after his divorce became public. He began a new church, Full Harvest International Church, which currently meets in Gardena, California. His preaching is aired on the Trinity Broadcasting Network, and he was a featured guest on TBN’s Praise the Lord program last week.

In fact, McClendon collected the offering during the network’s annual telethon. When I turned on the program and saw him raising money, I stared in disbelief.

How did we get in this pitiful condition? The very pulpits of America have become defiled because we are unwilling to confront sin. We are playing political games when the very health of the church is at stake.

Some Christians write letters to me saying: “The Bible says we shouldn’t judge. Sure these leaders have stumbled, but no one is perfect. We need to forgive.”

What Bible are these people reading? Mine says plainly that it is our responsibility to judge sin in the church. Of course we forgive, but forgiveness does not involve putting a preacher back on stage the next week if he just had a serious moral failure.

When the apostle Paul learned that a man was living in an immoral relationship with his father’s wife, he tore into the situation with a vengeance. He said: “Are you not to judge those inside [the church]? Expel the wicked person from among you.”

Those are not politically correct words, but they were spoken by a true apostle. If we want a restoration of genuine, apostolic Christianity in our generation, we need to dispense with the craziness and initiate some apostolic confrontation.

J. Lee Grady is editor of Charisma and an award-winning journalist. He writes a column for Charisma Online twice a week.

To Mr. Grady, I say a hearty AMEN!!! to what you wrote. Even though we have disagreed in the past on Charisma’s own forum concerning the concept of accepting advertisements from the same people constitutes endorsement, I do respect you and commend you on what you have written. I still have a big problem with many of the ads ran in the magazine and I hope and pray that when you write more e-mails or magazine articles like this one (you have before and you will in the future) that you will challenge outright sin, heresy, apostacy, and false teachings in the church whether those sinners, heretics, apostates, and false teachers had ever spend money to place ads for their mega conferences and books in Charisma Magazine or not.

I wished in the three items listed here that we would have known specifically who these individuals and churches are to where others could be warned to stay away from these individuals and churches.

The whole Pentecostal / Charismatic / Third Wave movement was weird and bizarre to start with. The problem was that (1): No one challenged it out of a fear of ‘judge not’ and ‘touch not mine anointed’ and (2): The more weird and bizarre it got, the more ‘of God’ we called it because it was equated to being further separated from the world. After seeing ‘most everything’ in the Pentecostal / Charismatic / Word of Faith / Third Wave camps and their value of the esoteric and experiences of personal revelation over the exegesis, evangelism, and the ecclesiastics of the Word and Spirit, I had to leave years ago where I eventually decided to attend a church that was reformed in belief of the Word plus believing in the proper exercising of the matters and gifts of the Holy Spirit.

It is still weird but getting weirder. From the examples in Grady’s e-mail, to the bizarre fundraising tactics shown weeks ago on TBN’s ‘raise-a-ton’ (the $66.12 a month for 12 months to receive the Psalms 66:12 anointing that was later on re-applied to Psalms 71:17, Judy Jacobs acting like she was riding on a horse prancing around the stage), this is only just the beginning because it’s going to get more bizarre and wierder before a huge breakdown will eventually happen.

I think I was correct when I posted some time ago that we are experiencing both a re-reformation of God’s true people while at the same time seeing a re-downgrade of Christianity in progress.