Flirting with Faith

I never fully subscribed to Word-Faith, but there was a time when the Prosperity movement and I flirted. I'll share here an excerpt from the story of my journey through the charismatic movement. This section is rather unimaginatively titled "The Prosperity Preachers":

I was genuinely surprised by the message of the prosperity preachers when I heard for the first time that God wanted us to be rich. Europe’s first ever Christian TV channel had recently started broadcasting, and I was ripe for its teachings. A lady from church kindly kept my mother and I up-to-date with videotaped recordings of the daily programmes. The exciting preaching I was hearing was like nothing I had been exposed to before: Kenneth Copeland and Fred Price would encourage believers to "name it and claim it" with infectious enthusiasm; John Avanzini would open up the teachings of Jesus and provide keys to getting rich; Rodney Howard-Browne’s powerful anointing would cause an entire theatre-full of believers to erupt into hysterical laughter, while causing others to freeze like statues in the middle of giving their testimonies. I soon learned to sincere amazement that God wanted us to be wealthy and that sickness came directly from the Devil himself. The new preachers I listened to would talk straight to Satan saying things like, "Get your hands off my property in the name of Jesus!" Whenever financial trouble reared its head, they would simply "stand on the Word", confessing boldly that Jesus died to make them rich, and claiming by faith the results there and then. If signs of sickness appeared, they would proclaim aloud on the spot, "By his stripes I am healed. Hallelujah!" and Satan would be obliged to get out of the way, and God to step in. Christianity was one long line of victories, all available by quoting the promises of Scripture back to God, to oneself or even to Satan. I liked it.

I remember hearing John Avanzini speak one time. He began by saying something like, "Now this is one of Jesus’ greatest parables on the subject of money and how to become wealthy" (put almost as crudely as that). He then took his viewers through the parable of the sower (Mark 3:4-8), explaining that Jesus was teaching his followers that if they sowed their money in fertile soil, they would reap a hundredfold in kind. He also added that one of Satan’s greatest schemes had been to keep the church ignorant of the important meaning of this parable for centuries. I was bowled over, although not because Avanzini had twisted and contorted the text to suit his own ends, but because Satan had apparently been able for so long to blind the minds of believers to Jesus’ greatest parable on the subject of how to get money!

Unfortunately, I did not have the wisdom to check things for myself and see if what he was saying was true. It was quite some time later that I was combing through the gospels trying to find the parable to which John had referred, and was puzzled to discover that nothing he said even remotely matched anything I found on the lips of Jesus. Eventually I concluded the reference could only be Mark 4, and I was finally awakened to the fact that Avanzini had in fact grossly misled his viewers. No one approaching the parable for the first time could possibly have construed its meaning in the blatantly deceptive way he had. Mark even tells us in the following passage (4:13-20) that Jesus was talking about the word of God, a far cry from what I had been led to believe. Avanzini had of course conveniently forgotten to mention this part of the text. How many other Christians, I wondered, had taken John and his fellow charismatic preachers at their word and not had the wherewithal to compare it with the words of Jesus for themselves?