Onward, Forward, Toward…

C. Peter Wagner announces Lakeland, the sequel in his latest e-mail (my comments in bold)

An Update on Lakeland from Peter
August 25, 2008
I was in the San Francisco airport on my way to Singapore and Indonesia when the news of Todd Bentley’s separation from his wife became public on August 12. When I arrived back home last week, I found that Doris had received and replied to around 1,700 emails and the stack of correspondence on my desk was unbelievable. It took me the rest of the week to …

I came across this interesting article by a man named Chris Elrod entitled Did I Sit On The Sidelines While The Playing Field Burned? where Pastor Elrod takes a sobering look at the Lakeland Revival and regrets not doing more to warn the community about Todd bentley.
What makes this story unique is that Elrod is the pastor of the Compass Point Church in Lakeland. If anyone saw the stuff that went on in Lakeland from April until the first of August, this pastor (along with Charisma forums poster “Hesed” who …

In light of the recent debacle now known as Lakeland, I was wondering and thinking about where the church will go next in terms of a ‘movement. In my thoughts, this came to mind:

Will we swing from the excessive charismatic/prophetic back to the excessive over-repentance / hyper-holiness mentality?

I believe that if we are not careful enough, we can get ourselves in grave danger of heading in this direction of an ‘over-repenting’ and ‘hyper-holiness’ type of Gospel where the legalisms widely known within fundamentalist and ole-time pentecostalism can take form. To …

According to John Arnott, there was also in addition to the emotional adultery, a problem with “excessive drinking” where Arnott states:

Todd has chosen to do something that is wrong according to Scripture, and his timing to announce it was equally inappropriate. Everyone is asking, “What happened?” “Why didn’t anyone see this coming?” We are making the answers to those questions a matter of prayer, and are as shocked and saddened by what has just happened as you are. Furthermore, it has now come out that there has been some …

J. Lee Grady asked this question on 7-9-08?
Can We Avoid a Charismatic Civil War?
It should have been asked before 6-23-08 when Bentley got ‘commissioned’. The Christian Civil War was planned out since the early 1990’s but began that fateful evening when the first shot was fired by the ‘Revival Alliance’ consisting of members from C. Peter Wagner’s New Apostolic Reformation, the Toronto Blessing People, the ‘revivalists’ of the Elijah List, and the descendants of the Kansas City Prophet movement.

I was comparing and contrasting the revivals of old versus the new revivals (Toronto, Brownsville, Smithton, and Lakeland) and I noticed some interesting differences.