Back story: the church I attend is in a period of transition that will probably lead to the election of a new pastor.
Back story 2: the leading candidate for the post has been proposed and, as Harrison Ford might say, “I have a bad feeling about this”. He has links with TB Joshua - who, I am given to understand, is a somewhat unconventional and controversial self-styled prophet/evangelist.
So what’s the straight dope on TB Joshua? There seems to be quite a lot of stuff out there about him, but I’m having trouble cutting through the bias on either side - maybe that’s inevitable.
Back story 3: (irrelevant, but included for interested parties) - It’s pretty much a ‘done deal’ - there will be a series of meetings culminating in an election - the outcome of which is fairly certain to confirm him as pastor. How do I know this? - probably topic for another thread, but the ‘programming’ has already begun - the other leaders are unanimous in approving the new guy and yesterday’s sermon was (as I expect all the others will be between now and the election) something along the lines of “The voice in my head is ‘God’ - you disagree? then the voice in your head is ‘Satan’; the very presence (and opposition) of which neatly confirms that the voice in my head is ‘God’”.
The Assembly of God of which I’m a member had a lot of people enamored with the Pensacola Revival. I had misgivings & still do, but I have to admit I never saw it get out of hand in my church. I can’t see any but the most rabid charismanics in my church wanting to touch this T.B. Joshua with a ten-foot pole.
I attend a Methodist Church in the south of the UK, with a congregation spanning pretty much the spectrum of belief right the way from meek moderates and hangers-on through liberals and all the way to (a few) extreme fundamentalists/literalists/what-have-you - every 18 months or so, a small (but varied) contingent from the fundie end of the scale will get caught up with some sparkly promise of miraculous power, such as ‘the Toronto Blessing’, the Pensacola thing, or individual personalities such as Benny Hinn, Jimmy Swaggart (before the scandal, but not long before) or TB Joshua; whatever particular hobby-horse it is at the time, it will be presented to the church as The Real Thing This Time; lives will be radically and permanently changed, a bit, for a week or two, then everything goes back to some more stable form of normality.
TB Joshua isn’t the actual personality in question this time, the proposed new pastor is a guy called Craig Marsh, who claims (among other things) that his entire digestive system miraculously regrew after extensive surgery for cancer and that a person for whom he prayed had their artificial hip implant miraculously change back into the original bone version.
I would very much like to do that, however, I suspect that would result in me being singled out as the heretic I very clearly am. I dunno; there’s no reason at all that a supernatural, notionally omnipotent deity couldn’t rebuild a digestive system from nothing, or transmute a plastic and metal hip joint into living tissue; I just really doubt that’s what has actually happened in this particular case; the stories always seem to end “… and the doctors were just amazed and couldn’t explain it, and admitted it must be a miracle.”, not “and the doctors were so amazed they rushed off to write to The Lancet”. In the case of a patient undergoing a hip replacement operation, normal medical practices would generate mountains of hard evidence, including before/after x-rays, then the hip suddenly turns back into a real one, and the doctors shrug it off as “Wow! That’s like, amazing… next please!”.
Um, I was raised in an “non-denominational” Christian Church (descendants of a schism from the Disciples of Christ[sup]TM[/sup]) that repudiated any non-local authority. Each such congregation is led by its own elders, the idea being to keep out corruption in larger denominational structures by not having larger denominational structures.
I guess I was lucky. In the churches I grew up in, it mostly worked okay, with responsible elders keeping the loons out of power. Of course, loons could just leave (or be, at least in their minds, pushed out) to find others of their kind. Those of us on the relatively sane side of a division were safe enough, but what happens to those who just think they’re going to church & get a bad pastor? In other parts of the “non-denominational” tradition, there have been some decidedly wacky charismatics, some notoriously silly legalists, &–oh, yeah–Jim Jones.
So I am curious to see how other Protestant sects deal with ensuing wackiness. :sigh: I guess it comes down to sane responsible people standing against the asinine. Hard work & conscience, no easy solutions, like everything else.
Then again, my definition of “sane” is pretty close to “Deist-in-all-but-name,” so what do I know about faith & passion? (Um, mostly that the really caught-up look like mad fools, actually.)
If it’s really just a small, hard core minority that’s pushing this, can’t you organize the rest of the members together against it? I mean, you can’t be the only person to feel this way.
It is probably a 50/50 split or nearly so at the moment; in order to be installed as pastor, he’s got to get a 75% majority vote, but he will get it; those in favour happen to include the entire group of leaders/stewards, and the circuit superintendent minister. I fully expect every sermon now to be about solidarity of belief, trusting visionaries, not giving in to doubt and criticism etc. I’ll just leave and go somewhere else probably. Shame - I’ve been there for more than fifteen years.
Or you could just stick it out. Does your half of the church hold any leadership positions at all? Any way to put pressure on the leadership? Maybe you could arrange a sermon about trusting common sense?
And that’s a less preferable option than asking your future minister to provide reasonable evidence to substantiate his utterly extraordinary claims? To acquiesce, by your own description, to the congregation “being fleeced”?
If Mangetout is expecting to leave, he might at least “take one for the team.”
But, there are lots of things to consider: lost of friendship, loss of fellowship, etc. If he just leaves, then he can maintain some of his relationships. If he rocks the boat, he may alienate people he is close to.
An apt summary of the dilemma; the problem is also that there exists already a prejudiced mindset; oversimplifying, it’s as if the existing leadership have asserted:
“X is God’s perfect plan, we must implement it and we must be on our guard against Satanic attack, which may come from without or within”
-Anyone questioning whether X really is God’s perfect plan, or even a good idea at all, immediately identifies themself as a person who has allowed their thoughts to succumb to Satanic attack; not only does this permit the quick and easy dismissal of their (unaddressed) query, but the mere fact that Satanic attack has now been identified adds apparent weight to the initial assertion that predicted it.
(Um, mostly that the really caught-up look like mad fools, actually.)