A New Kind of Gospel

On a late Sunday evening, I watched the telecast of yesterday's sunday service in a church located in a small town of my state. The service stretched to 4 hours. Let me give a brief description of what happened.

The opening hour was led by a middle aged pastor. He spoke of how he went to another city in India to witness a "Major Prophet" and how much he was impressed by what had happened there. He then told the church that the pastor who serves their church (a young, handsome man in his late 20's or early 30's) has the same degree of gifting. He spoke of how the prophet was able to read a text message on a young woman's phone without even reading it with his eyes. click here for the link which I had already seen through social media. Here is another link where he produces miracle money - several people appear on stage with money that God gave them in their purse, or under the chair or in their bank accounts via a text message. See for yourself.

Anyway, I had already learnt that there is a new name for such prophecy - it is called "forensic prophecy". I am not kidding. It is real. When a pastor is able to specifically talk to you about incidents in your life, or names associated with you, it is called forensic prophecy. It is founded in Africa and to the best of my knowledge has not reached USA. It has reached India though.

Returning to the Sunday service: After nearly 3 hours of service, something quite unusual happened - the guest pastor began to preach. He started reading out prophecies from God concerning the young pastor of the church. To summarize what he said: the pastor will hereby be called Prophet; that he will have foreigners serve him; that he will have private jets and world leaders come to see him for advice; and so on and on. He also said that gold dust and silver dust will start appearing at the church in the body of believers, and in their bibles. If they see gold dust, it means that God's glory is going to fall on them, and if they receive silver dust, it implies redemption.

Unfortunately, 24 hours after the service ended, and within a few hours of me seeing it online, that entire service has been deleted from youtube. The church website has almost all other sunday services except this one. I wonder why!

Alright, let me stop here. Like I said earlier, I am just describing what I saw. I must admit I am quite perplexed by all this. Sometimes I wonder why people read the same text so differently - I'm not talking about personal work of the Holy Spirit; but the remarkably different theologies. I know that some of these are beyond my understanding. But, clearly, gold and silver dust... Miracle money...

Let me close with a link to a fascinating cartoon drawn by Adam - a Christian illustrator. Click here.

Finally, something that touched me much. This morning, one of my friends shared me her blogpost via FB. Here's a link to the post.

But it is this statement of hers that struck me most:

?Finally, my own place in my journey leads me to plead for more openness. If you’ve read my previous blog posts, you know that I come from an evangelical background but for the last 10 or so years I’ve been uncertain of what I believe. I’ve tried to hold on to the Christian faith, I didn’t want to let go. But ironically, one of the things that’s made it hard to stay is the evangelical church itself. I have not been shunned or deeply wounded, but rather the evangelical church just isn’t built for people like me. It is not a place that embraces, encourages and curiously probes doubt but rather it is a continual mantra of belief and certainty: “I know”, “I believe”, “I affirm.”