Fighting Demons, Raising the Dead, Taking Over the World

[The Night Owl]

Article from ReligiousDispatches.org...

Fighting Demons, Raising the Dead, Taking Over the World
By Bruce Wilson
April 1, 2009

Is this still Christianity? Bruce Wilson offers a primer on what has been called “Third Wave Christianity,” a global movement now almost 300 million-strong whose adherents believe they can abolish evil from the world by hunting witches, chasing demons from city limits, and getting Sarah Palin elected.

What is happening to Christianity?

In 1996 a team from Ted Haggard’s New Life Church flew to Mali and began furtively anointing entire towns with cooking oil.

The strangeness of it gripped Dutch missionary René Holvast, who later wrote: “It was confusing and produced a growing uneasiness. It did not seem to fit our current evangelical theological and anthropological textbooks.”

The team from Haggard’s church was a forerunner in a missionary wave that has washed over the world since the early 1990s, bringing what Holvast calls a ‘new paradigm.’

...

http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/religiousright/1273/fighting_demons%2C_raising_the_dead%2C_taking_over_the_world

[Wildewolfe]

1. It's what happens

When you take one dose of Christrianity and add in a couple teaspoonfuls of ceremonial magick a lick of schlock and a bunch of snakeoil. It makes them feel involved, connected and powerful.

None of which are true of course. It's revivalism and it's horsecrap.

[NeedleCast]

2. Sounds like the Deliverance Ministry Whack-A-Loons

http://www.sw-mins.org/Deliverance_ministries.htm

Fun reading in a "well that's insane" sort of way.

[zeemike]

3. They seem to find new ways to do exactly the opposite

Of what Jesus taught.