What's the dope on TB Joshua?

Great Debates
21

Being the most liberal member of my Assembly of God (tho of course a wacky Righty compared to the SDMB L), I sympathise with your situation, Mangetout.
If I’d seen the Pensacola phenomena really getting out of hand at my church, I’d have had to speak out, leave or both. Fortunately, it levelled out.

Now, we are talking about the United Methodist Church, aren’t we? That’s a pretty moderate denomination. Any chance of approaching the bishop?

Another way to approach things- when asking the pastor-candidate about the miracles he’s experienced… “Wow, that’s great. Do you have the physicians reports, because if would could document how God is working…”

22

We’ll have to see how it goes; I have my family to consider and whatever happens, I can’t ignore that this is the church in the village adjacent to the one in which I live; if I leave, I still won’t be very far away and so, leaving under a cloud might not be the preferred option. If there’s any likelihood that I’ll be heard, I’ll speak up, but I’m not particularly prepared to pointlessly dash myself and my family upon the rocks of someone else’s certainty.

23

This thread has strayed a bit from the original question, which was about TB Joshua and more about my personal predicament; if a mod wants to move it to MPSIMS (or the pit, maybe) I won’t mind at all.

24

I hope nobody minds me resurrecting this thread (which really is MPSIMS now), but we had a special meeting tonight with a Q&A session with Craig Marsh.

Over the last couple of weeks, there has been a fair bit of pressure from the front, most of it very subtle, to coerce the congregation to vote him in; until a couple of days ago, I was reasonably certain that a 75% majority couldn’t have been achieved (asking around casually, it turned out that more people than I previously thought were harboring reservations just like mine), but just recently, it seems like a lot of people have been ‘got to’ - a number of them had softened considerably.

The meeting was incredibly tense and for the most part, consisted of people asking ‘what do you intend to do when you’re elected?’ and him answering in vague, rambling platitudes, or relating anecdotes from his past (including one that I seemed to be the only person shocked by - the time when he managed to land a (secular) job that he was way underqualified for by deceiving the interview panel). I had prepared to ask about his connection with TB Joshua and his appraisal of that man’s so-called ministry and I was incredibly nervous about doing so.

As it turned out, a friend (and ally) of mine ‘took the bullet’ for me; he had already attracted a wide range of scowls from various people after asking for details about one of Craig’s previous churches, which, according to the details on his job application, ‘no longer exists’ - the man answered ‘you don’t need to know about that’ and became very hostile and agitated. On being questioned about TB Joshua, he rather predictably said that a)he had actually been there, which is different to reading what other people have to say about him, on the internet b)TB Joshua’s ministry is appropriate in the context of Africa and (rather astonishingly) c)(words to the effect)“I have attained a level of spiritual discernment whereby I can tell that TB Joshua’s work is ‘of God’”.

You’d think that people would have been disturbed by the whole thing, but actually, for most folks, it seemed to just wash over them and they went away happy and contented.

I despair; we are, as a congregation, sliding down the disposal chute, but exclaiming “Wheeeeeee!”.

25

This testimony cracks me up:

Call me a cynic and all, but even after the eye rolling and so on, I’ve gotta say, not very impressive.

But wow, imagine. “…my experiences of people vomiting increased over the years…”

:eek:

26

…and now I love people vomiting near me! Thank you TB Joshua!

27

OK… at the meeting tonight (the last time the supposedly prospective new guy will speak before the election in three weeks’ time or so), he says he had an aout-of-body experience when he was operated on for his stomach cancer. Too good to be true, really - he really worked the crowd tonight - the election is pretty much a done deal. I will leave and go elsewhere, I think.

28

Craif Marsh’s web page here

TB Joshua

Big page of links here

Deception in the church False prophets & teachers

The bottom line seems to be that despite his genteel demeanor he is a charismatic through and through, and that can be OK or very bad depending on what you want in a pastor.

29

WHOA THERE! :smiley:

I’m a Charismatic. Pat Robertson’s a Charismatic. Even Benny Hinn, God help us, is a Charismatic. This guy goes beyond Charismatic- and I strongly doubt that’s a good thing with this guy.

30

Sorry. Sloppy use of the term on my part.

31

For what it’s worth, that is very much their loss and elsewhere’s gain. Hope the transition goes well!

32

Sorry to resurrect this thread again, but I thought I’d come back and update it with the conclusion; The church council meeting last night did not elect Craig to the leadership position; he would have required a 75% majority but barely got 50%.

It has been an interesting, eventful and somewhat stressfull couple of weeks leading up to this meeting and passions were running quite high; a few interesting things:
A number of the most vociferous people in support of his election have been employing tactics of manipulation and deception; some of this was exposed in the meeting last night (for example the chairperson of the steering committee - who had interviewed applicants and chose the final runner - stood up, made an impassioned plea about how God had told him this was right and that the committee were unanimous in their recommendation. He was shortly followed by one of the ordinary committee members, who, trembling with nerves, stood and said that he had never been in support of the motion and that the claim of unanimity was a false one).

There was also a last-minute attempt to rewrite the agenda; instead of the simple conclusive vote on acceptance of the candidate (requiring the 75% majority), there was a motion to change the item to some kind mandate to allow the existing lay leaders to pursue the matter to its conclusion - investment of this authority would only have required a simple majority. This was overturned by the district chairman (I think that’s the right title), who came in specially to preside over the meeting.

There were a whole bunch of other things, most of them too subtly nuanced to describe properly here, but it was notable that all of the argument in favour of electing the guy was based on emotion or other completely subjective stuff, whereas very much of the argument against was based on observation and hard fact - such as a transcript of where the candidate had (in the previous meeting where he introduced himself to the church) boasted that he lied in a secular job interview and landed a job for which he was way underqualified by sheer persuasion.
In fact there was a lot of that - it’s interesting how little of the actual substance of anything the man ever said was taken in; people remembered his jokes, his gimmicks and catch phrases, but had no recollection whatever of most of the disturbing, outlandish or unsupportable claims he had made (which had fortunately been recorded to tape, so they weren’t just fictions in the imaginations of the doubters).

My eyes have been opened to a number of things during this rather painful period That I really would have been more comfortable not knowing, but we’re now faced with perhaps an equally difficult time ahead; we must go forward from here knowing that opinion (or at least expression of votes) was almost equally divided. In the past, we have cherished the diversity of experience and opinion; even the tension between differing viewpoints has largely been positive, in that it provokes thought and discussion. I really hope we can still live with each other.

33

Congratulations on dodging a bullet. All this would be an interesting study in group psychology if it weren’t so painfully close to you.

I take it you are planning to stick it out. Do you think that you could get a spokesman who agrees with your statement “we have cherished the diversity of experience and opinion; even the tension between differing viewpoints has largely been positive, in that it provokes thought and discussion” to give a speech reminding people of the richness of their shared heritage?

Anyway, you have my prayers.

Tinker

34

Thanks; in fact my statement above, as well as being my own view that I have independently formed, just happens to be very similar to part of a statement made by one of my closest friends and allies through all this (and indeed has been much bolder and more outspoken than I have on this issue); he touched on many other things too, including rather a scathing (but ultimately entirely factual and backed up with recorded evidence) criticism of the candidate. I honestly believe that what happened last night is that the sheep (or enough of them, anyway) have rejected the wolf as their leader.

35

Congratulations to you and your congregation for persevering through some very tough times. I had a feeling, while reading your earlier descriptions of the situation, that there were far more people on your side than you realized. I’m glad they were not afraid to make their voice heard.

You are undoubtedly right that difficult times lie ahead. I’m guessing that the vote did not split arbitrarily, but down ethnic or class lines or according to some similar factor. Is your church in a transition stage, with members of one group joining the congregation relatively recently (within a generation) while the other group has multi-generation ties to the church? Whatever the source of the split, it will be difficult to heal, but many churches have gone through similar times. Hopefully your District Chairman will work hard with your church to find a pastor with experience and skill in dealing with churches in like situations.

Either way, the presence of church members like you and your elloquent ally, who value both diversity and thoughtful discussion, will go a long way in helping the church move forward.

36

Thanks for your encouragement; it’s hard to tell exactly where the division of votes fell because it was a secret ballot, but judging solely on the basis of statements made by numerous members before the ballot, I’d say there were actually a number of distinct camps:

-Those who felt a strong (but subjective) convicition that the candidate was the ‘right’ person for the job.
-Those who felt they should simply vote behind the leaders and steering committee
-Those who were not sure, but felt they should not reject the candidate in case he was the right guy.
-Those who felt a strong (but subjective) conviction that the candidate was the ‘wrong’ person for the job.
-Those who had examined the candidate, his background, experience and the statements he had made (both in the Q&A session and in sermons he had given on previous visits) and felt that the conclusion of this research clearly marked him as unsuitable.

My feeling at the moment is that not only was the result wrong, but most likely the process was flawed and perhaps even the motive was incorrect; our church has a somewhat unconventional leadership structure and this position (called ‘lay leader+lay worker’) is/was by no means a standard Methodist idea - it may even be that the concept was wrong; there was a certain amount of “We need a lay leader/Why, what will he do?/The lay leader will answer that when he gets here”. Maybe we don’t need another, better candidate, maybe we need something else altogether.

*Interestingly, the Methodist rule books says that the council must initially perform an open voting process in order to choose the secret ballot method and that the initial vote must be a two-thirds majority; I really strongly disagree with this principle; secret ballots are most often required because there is a minority that feels oppressed or fears backlash.

37

A possible (and quite reasonable) question arising from my post above would be “What? there were no people who had examined the candidate etc… and felt that the conclusion of this research clearly marked him as suitable?”
And the answer is, apparently, no; there were not; the last-minute attempt to change the substance of the agenda was in fact an appeal to give the leaders/steering committee time to examine his background and references - they’d already taken six months and not managed to get around to doing this! - because the process was subverted quite early on by a couple of strong personalities with strong ‘spiritual’ convictions.

The friend I mentioned above was originally invited to sit on the steering committee, but declined because the invitation email not only invited him to join, but also set out in detail the decision the committee would eventually reach (the final candidate was known to them already and I suspect was already ‘groomed’ for the position).

38

There are good reasons for both open and closed balots in a church.

I don’t know much about Methodist polity in the UK, but I do know that no system of polity has been yet devised that can prevent a determined majority, or even a determined minority, from undermining the process. It’s the role of the denominational leadership to ensure that that doesn’t happen. In this case, it sounded earlier as if the leadership was part of the faction pushing for this person, but ultimately, it seems the process, however muddled, worked–he wasn’t appointed. Surely that is the right result.

You can hardly say the result was bad because a lot of people voted for him, as long as they voted the way they feel. Not everybody makes decisions the same way, and subjective feelings aren’t a wrong way to make a decision, even if I have to agree with you that in this case, the decision those people wanted to make would have been a bad one.

39

Sorry, by ‘bad result’, I mean that the lengthy process of planning, interview, screening, selection etc selected an unsuitable candidate (and indeed argued for the creation of a position for him - a position and duties that might be based on flawed concepts). Yes, I believe the end result was right - he was rejected; I suppose what I’m saying is that I think it would be incredibly unwise to just ‘try again’ - another iteration of the same process.

IMO, ideally, people would make their decisions based on a broad range of factors, including their own subjective feelings (which, as you say, aren’t to be ignored), but without deliberately choosing to ignore the hard data inputs of their eyes and ears.