Warning Sign #7: Playing Politics

July 21, 2010 at 12:17 pm | Posted in When Good Preachers Go Bad | 3 Comments
Tags: Bapticostals, charismania, charsmatic theology, prosperity Gospel, prosperity preaching, Ron Phillips, TBN, Word Faith, Word of Faith

Let’s just pretend for a moment that you are the pastor/preacher at a fairly conservative Baptist church. One day, though, you decide you have had enough. Things are getting too boring around here, just trying to obey God’s Word. You have seen something better: the wild, exciting worship that takes place on TBN. You have seen the material wealth and fame of the “Word Faith” preachers, and the size of their congregations, and especially the showy display of their gaudy buildings. Something clicks in your brain, (which you will later claim was a “rhema word from the Holy Ghost”) and you realize that you are never going to be as rich, exciting, or renowned as those TV preachers unless you play down the “Baptist” aspects of your ministry and play up the so-called “Charismatic” or “Pentecostal” features which are part of the background of most of the famous prosperity preachers.

These would be your two main problems:

1. Traditional Baptist theology does not focus primarily on the so-called “sign gifts” of tongues, prophecy, and supernatural healings, but these are the bread-and-butter of Charismatic and Pentecostal fundraising.

2. To attract Pentecostals and most Charismatics to see your show, you are going to have to convince them that, although you have been a Baptist, and have preached that salvation is of the Lord, and that once God makes you a new creation in Christ Jesus you are eternally secure, you also somehow believe that you can lose “your” salvation.

How in the world are you going to convince your congregation that you are “going Pentecostal” without looking like a traitor to your former beliefs?

Here’s how: you are going to have to be “political.” Start telling people that you are “too Baptist to be Pentecostal and too Pentecostal to be Baptist,” and that some Baptists were mean to you one time, and didn’t want you to act too freaky in church. This hurt your feelings, but now you realize that they were just being too “by the Book,” and you were trying to “get free in the Holy Spirit!” Of course, you will have to use a lot of smoke and mirrors and a lot of doublespeak.

You will also have to be prepared to look extremely foolish at times: Case in point – in order to avoid the phrase, “once saved always saved” (which most Pentecostals absolutely hate), try referring to “The Gospel According To Jesus,” by John MacArthur. A good politician can use the “Lordship Salvation” teaching of this book to disarm most Pentecostals. Tell them that if you are not “crowning Jesus Lord,” every moment of every day, then you are not “saved.” This should appease them. They will interpret this to mean that you think folks can lose their salvation by sinning. Beware however: a more astute Pentecostal may do a little research and find out that MacArthur also wrote a book called “Charismatic Chaos,” and is perhaps the staunchest “cessationist” around today. [Uh-oh, now you will have to explain how you think MacArthur is right on one point, but is teaching a "lie from the pit of hell" (cessationism) on another point.]

That could be tricky, but it’s all in a week’s work for a Good Preacher Going Bad. Just keep them emotionally charged up with lights, smoke, discordant “worship” music, sowing seeds of faith (a.k.a. giving money), and claimed “healings” (which are supernatural even though they might take a while to “manifest” [wink, wink.]) As a prosperity-preacher-in-the-making, you will be very close at this point to “seeing a move of God” as the “fire falls” and the “latter rain” breaks out “in this place.”