is there no shame?

So, yesterday, I'm cruising the internet, doing a bit of this of that, when a link over at Charisma Mag caught my eye. It was for something called Dominion Camp Meeting.

Now, if you've been coming here for a while, you may have seen that I will occasion voice an opinion about Dominionisms (I think they stink). So, with that being a bit of a source of curiosity to me, I clicked on the link.

Dominion Camp Meeting is something put on by Rod Parsley. The site is incredibly uninformative, containing mostly rah-rah rhetoric that kinda like cotton candy--all fluff and little substance. Still, the so-called Prayer Form page was most informative, in it's own way.

Prayer Form

Please understand, I don't link to this page to in any way encourage anyone to go there and give this charlatan money.

In the upper right corner of the page, there is a video of Parsley speaking to us viewers. It's not even really much about the camp meeting itself, though it does get some mention.

In the video, he claims...

God sent me with a divine mandate to get you dreaming again.

This kind of rhetoric is very common nowadays. Dreams are the current big selling point, claims that God wants to help you fulfill your dreams are the main message coming from far too many churches. It is, to put it blunt, one of the most popular false gospels being proclaimed today.

But Parsley's just getting started.

Proof of desire is in the pursuit. This is the time to act, this is the time to move, this is the time when we understand that our faith, to operate in faith, required a response.

Oh, a response? Well, what might that be?

Let me encourage you to take a step of faith toward God, toward your dream, your dream, by sowing a seed that God has already placed in your hand. 

And the last part of that statement is accompanied in the video by footage of someone filling out a check. Yeah, now you know what's going on. Why?

Because the realization of every dream begins with a simply step of faith and obedience toward God. 

Really? I guess people who don't believe in God don't get their dreams fulfilled, because they can't take steps of faith toward God?

Your seed is the only influence you have over tomorrow. Your tomorrow different than today, a seed is the mechanism of the deliverance.

So, don't worry about studying or getting job training or anything like that, those have no influence over tomorrow. No, only giving a lot of money to someone like Parsley will change your tomorrow. And, yes, it will change your tomorrow. It'll make you a lot broker.

So, right now, as an act of your personal faith toward God, I want to challenge you to sow a seed with a purposeful expression of the number 14, that God's opening the door to your dreams again. Maybe that seed's $30.14, $50.14, or $114, whatever it is, make sure that 14 is in there, it'll build your faith. 

I am so tempted to fill out the online giving form on that page for $.14, just to see if that would fit within his "whatever it is". I have my doubts that it would be considered acceptable to him, though, and I doubt the teaching set that comes with a generous donation is worth that $.14 anyway.

Listening to Parsley is a study in inducing nausea, though he does have a most revealing story about something he claims former charlatan Oral Roberts said to him.

Let me put this bluntly--what Parsley is saying here is blasphemy of the worst sorts. Nothing of what he says is biblical at all. Giving him $30.14 will do nothing to build your faith, it will only build his bank account and shrink yours. This is a scam, a fraud, and it is a shame to the church that charlatans like Parsley are in any way tolerated by the church.

Last year, there was the Strange Fire Conference, which got a lot of charismatics riled up. But are they riled up over this blasphemous camp meeting? Why not? Why are people like Michael Brown not getting on their soap boxes over Rod Parsley's blasphemous rhetoric? I found out about this camp meeting from an ad at Charisma Mag, why are they allowing such rot to be advertised on their site?

Can a church that tolerates people like Parsley really be expected to stand firm when the world comes knocking, demanding that their pet sins be tolerated, too?

book review--Authentic Fire by Michael Brown

not the worst book i've read, but maybe the most disappointing

This book is a response to Strange Fire: The Danger of Offending the Holy Spirit with Counterfeit Worship by John MacArthur.There is some meat in this book. A lot of the goofiness that fills so many books from those on the charismatic side of things is absent here. Brown's defense of continuationism in chapter 6 is at least plausible, though I've seen some cessationist arguments that are equally so, too.

But there are simply times when Brown's arguments are far from convincing, and seem, at best, forced.

For example, when he goes on about what he refers to as the genetic fallacy, it reminded me how often I've heard or read of charismatic churches or organization go on about their spiritual genetics or spiritual DNA, holding up those in the past as examples to followed. For example, in Jesus Culture: Living a Life That Transforms the World, the author, while not completely denying their faults, holds up several very questionable people as example of those he considers to be revivalists.

If that is considered a legitimate practice, then MacArthur's referring to the at best questionable aspect to Azusa Street and those who lead it is no less legitimate.

To my mind, one of the most questionable things Brown does is an attempt to spin some stats about how popular the prosperity gospel has become across the world. "What the Strange Fire camp did not emphasize strongly enough (or, at times, at all) was that: 1) A majority of the population in some of the countries surveyed is extremely poor, which means that "material prosperity" for many of these believers simply meant, "Having enough food for my family so we won't starve," or, "Having a roof over my head that doesn't leak." Is it so heretical to believe that God will grant that to His children? 20 (Note that, according to some estimates, 70% of the world's population lives on less than $ 3 per day.)" (Kindle Locations 2195-2199).

I'm not sure how Brown concludes that because a majority of people are in extreme poverty, than that means they are not open to believing the prosperity gospel. Do not prosperity gospel preachers prey on the very poor as well as the more well-off? To show the truth behind the stat without Brown's attempt at spin, I'd like to recommend this book Where Are We Heading To? by Thuso Kewana, an African minister who has seen the damage done by the prosperity gospel. It's a short book, well worth reading. He mentions, for example, pastors who boast about how much their suits cost, or one who taught that those who do not tithe should be cast out from the church.

An article by Sam Storms favorably reprinted in this book sums up the main problem with the current charismatic movement, no matter if Brown's arguments concerning continuationism are valid or not. Storms tries to defend the idea the modern-day prophets do not have to live up to the plainly stated OT standard of being completely correct in the prophetic words they give, but can made mistakes, and he even tries to read between the lines of certain NT passages to find this idea of his, though it is not plainly taught in the NT. A good response to this kind of teaching is this book, The Fallible Prophets of New Calvinism: An Analysis, Critique, and Exhortation Concerning the Contemporary Doctrine of "Fallible Prophecy" by Michael Beasley, and I recommend it pretty highly.

If this book left me with one overriding impression, it's that, with the best will in the world, Brown is insuring that nothing in the charismatic churches is going to change. False prophets will continue to prophecy falsely, and charismatics will not do much about it because they are too afraid of "quenching the Spirit" (as if God was not the one who set up the standard of perfection in prophecy). The prosperity gospel will continue to spread, especially as it is currently morphing in the pursuit of one's dreams and living a fulfilled life, and there will be little or no accountability concerning it. The craziness will continue, and will continue to get worse and worse, and Brown will continue to get more worked up over those who try to expose and refute it than anyone actually spreading it.