Month: April 2024

The Prosperity Gospel

~ Vincent ~ Leave a comment

In worship, I’ve been preaching through John 6. In overview, Jesus makes bread for hungry people, the people get excited, the people chase Jesus down for more miracle bread, Jesus says he’s the bread of life and all they really need, and finally people get disappointed and leave. Here’s a crowd of people that legitimately witness a miracle, but instead of bowing down before Jesus, they want to put him to work. They don’t really want the bread of life; they want a life of bread.

Naturally, I started thinking about people that have that sense of religiosity today. There are plenty of popular speakers who claim that God wants to lead you to a life of bread. The prosperity gospel preachers are the most obvious example. I didn’t want to misrepresent them when talking about them, so I started digging through some of the their writings to get a sense for the kinds of things they say and believe. Let me tell you, it was a wild ride. Not only was it broadly ickier than I expected (you’ll see), but there were a lot of little dots I got the chance to connect.

Prosperity gospel preachers are overwhelmingly nondenominational. They’re also well represented by people of every race. Neither of these first two items surprised me. I can’t imagine most of these pastors being open to denominational oversight, and no race is immune from the temptation of money. What did catch me off guard was the religious background that most of these preachers had. There’s a surprisingly strong tie between prosperity gospel preaching and the Charismatic/Pentecostal tradition. Not every prosperity gospel preacher has a Pentecostal background, but the modern American prosperity gospel did get its start there (Oral Roberts tends to be the usual starting place for religious historians), and it still has really, really strong ties to it today. As a non-Pentecostal/Charismatic looking at their tradition from the outside, the connection seems pretty logical when I think about it. Charismatics often put a really high premium on miracles in a Christian’s life today. It’s not wild to assume that you can get to, “God wants to give me money if I have enough faith,” pretty quickly from there if you go off the rails. Pentecostalism also lacks the clear denominational structures that can prevent obvious false teachings from reaching the pulpit, and it tends to have a really low emphasis on (and even active skepticism about) education. I didn’t expect the connection between those two entities, but it makes good sense.

History aside, I was shocked at how shameless prosperity gospel preachers can be. Legitimately, wholeheartedly, shameless. Here are some quotes that just broke my heart:

  • “Sow a seed on your MasterCard, your Visa or your American Express, and then when you do, expect God to open the windows of heaven and pour you out a blessing.” -Oral Roberts (“Success in Life” broadcast on the Trinity Broadcasting Network September 21, 1990)
  • “The best thing you can do for the poor is not become one of them.” -Rev. Ike (“The Gospel According to Rev. Ike,” Ebony Magazine, Dec. 1976)
  • “Don’t wait for the pie in the sky by-and-by when you die. Get yours now with ice cream and a cherry on top!” -Rev. Ike (“The Gospel According to Rev. Ike,” Ebony Magazine, Dec. 1976)
  • “If you’ve got one-dollar faith and you ask for a ten-thousand dollar item, it ain’t going to work.  It won’t work!  Jesus said, ‘according to your [faith,]’ not according to God’s will for you, in His own good time, if it’s according to His will, if He can work it into his busy schedule.  He said, ‘According to your faith, be it unto you.’  Now, I may want a Rolls Royce, and don’t have but bicycle faith.  Guess what I’m going to get?  A bicycle.” -Rev. Frederick Price (Fredrick K. C. Price. “Praise The Lord” broadcast on TBN. 21 Sept. 1990)
  • “God works by faith. You must believe first, and then you’ll receive” -Joel Osteen (Your Best Life Now, p. 33)
  • “You will often receive preferential treatment simply because your Father is the King of kings, and His glory and honor spill over onto you” -Joel Osteen (Your Best Life Now, p.40)
  • “Remember, only what you give can God multiply back. If you give nothing, and even if God were to multiply it, it would still be nothing!” -Oral Roberts (The Miracle of Seed-Faith, p.27)

And my personal favorite, when Oral Roberts told all of his followers that he was going to die unless they sent him eight million dollars. There are a million newspaper articles about it, but that wasn’t enough for me. I wanted something more incriminating. I wanted to read about the incident in his own words. I didn’t have to look far. He literally wrote about it in his own autobiography:

  • “The Lord spoke to me near the end of 1986 and said, ‘I told you to raise $8 million to carry on My medical work. You have from January 1 to March 31 to get it done. If you don’t then your work is finished, and I am going to call you home.'” -Oral Roberts (Expect a Miracle: My Life and Ministry, p.289)

Yikes.

You read quotes like this and can’t help but feel angry. When the anger subsides, you worry about the people that they’re taking advantage of. Sure, some of them might be able to afford a donation here and there to support a charismatic speaker, but what about the people who are desperate? What about the woman who has cancer, trying to juggle her medical bills, sending “Rolls Royce faith” checks in the hope that thing will turn around? What about the poor man with brain damage who sends in any little bit of cash that he can in the hopes that God will miraculously restore him? I believe in miracles and tithing as much as the next pastor, but I’ve known people in these circumstances, and I’ve seen the damage that prosperity gospel preachers can cause. Here is a pack of wolves on the prowl for desperate, down-on-their-luck people. Not everyone has the gift of discernment, and they’re counting on that. It reminded me of another certain historical preacher that assured people that God would give them blessings if they forked over some cash:

You should know that all who confess and in penance put alms into the coffer according to the counsel of the confessor, will obtain complete remission of all their sins…. Why are you then standing there? Run for the salvation of your souls! Be as careful and concerned for the salvation of your souls as you are for your temporal goods, which you seek both day and night…

Don’t you hear the voices of your wailing dead parents and others who say, ‘Have mercy upon me, have mercy upon me, because we are in severe punishment and pain. From this you could redeem us with a small alms and yet you do not want to do so.’ Open your ears as the father says to the son and the mother to the daughter, ‘We have created you, fed you, cared for you, and left you our temporal goods. Why then are you so cruel and harsh that you do not want to save us, though it only takes a little?

-Johann Tetzel , Sermon on Indulgences

Where’s a Martin Luther when you need him?

Insights from Old Sermons

~ Vincent ~ Leave a comment

Deciding to post the entirety of a sermon series (The Gospel in a Postmodern World) was a task that took a lot more work than I expected. When I set out to do it, I thought, “All the work is already done! Since I’m moving to a new church, this will be an easy way to post stuff while I get accommodated to my new job.” WRONG! It took me AGES to get all of these sermons edited, transcribed, and posted. There was a lot of unexpected work that went into it, but I’m glad I did it. It was great to go back and look at some old sermons to let them sink in. Not only was it great to look at the material again (which I learned a lot from the second time through), but it was uniquely helpful to wrestle with them for such an extended period of time. Here were some insights I gained throughout the process that I thought were worth sharing.

1. Sermons are a lot of work.

Seriously, pastors are basically up there writing a book chapter by chapter each week. We might have different styles; some of us are writing a verse-by-verse commentary while others are working on a devotional and still others are doing totally different things, but regardless of which style someone uses, it’s a ton of work. We should remember that! As a pastor, I can verify that I feel guilty when I spend too much time on a sermon. Writing good sermons feels like the baseline for the job. The more you do on top of that, the successful you feel.

These seven sermons alone (35,000 words) measured up to a little under half the length of an average novel (75,000ish words) and was on-target for the length of a self-help book (30,000-60,000) or a shorter non-fiction book (40,000-70,000 words). That’s a lot of words! And this only represents seven sermons! Now, I preach for about 30 minutes each Sunday, which puts my sermon length above the average mainline protestant pastor (25 minutes) and below the average evangelical preacher (39 minutes), so my results are a little different than some others might be. Regardless of length or style, sermons are a ton of work, and it’s worth remembering that.

2. Sermons are their own medium

I know I just finished saying how sermons are like books, but they’re also not like books at all. Editing these suckers down to get them posted took a surprising amount of effort. A couple of them were already written, so I just had to do some light editing before I posted them, but the ones that weren’t written were put together using a transcription of the worship service from YouTube, and those ones were brutal to edit. Spoken words tend to be pretty informal. “Hey, how’s it goin’? You feeling tired today?” That sort of thing. There are also a lot of rules you can break while you’re speaking that are much harder to break when you’re writing. For example, writing in incomplete sentences are a no-no. They’re hard to read and look sloppy. On the other hand, when you’re speaking, you can throw around incomplete sentences all you want. If you’re taking a spoken piece and trying to transcribe it, you can try to really mash those incomplete sentences together with enough semicolons and colons, but it’s going to really hinder its readability. The spoken word just isn’t the same as the written word, and it takes some energy and creativity to translate one to the other.

3. Old Sermons Deserve More Attention

Sermons are one of the most disposable forms of media that I can think of. Books get read time and time again. Plays get performed over the course of a few weekends before the actors call it quits. Lectures from teachers and professors get used annually as long as they continue teaching the class. Even YouTube videos get watched multiple times if they’re good! But most sermons get exactly one day in the sun before they vanish forever. Sure, they’re often recorded somewhere, but very rarely does anyone go back and watch old sermons. Which is a shame! I found some really good stuff in here! And I’m sure there is a lot of really good stuff in all the old sermons out there that goes unnoticed just because their day in the sun has ended.

By no means am I saying that every sermon deserves to be played on repeat, but I am saying that I took a preaching class where I never read, listened to, or watched a single sermon that wasn’t given by myself or a classmate. I have a Master of Divinity degree and my coursework rarely had me looking at old sermons (with the singular exception of the required class on John Wesley to fulfill Methodist ordination requirements). By no means am I blaming any professors or the program I participated in. They had so much to teach already. I don’t blame them for not adding one more thing to the pile. There are a million things that deserve our attention in a given lifetime. We grab what we can and the rest slips by. I’m just saying that I hope to pay more attention to old sermons. There’s more there than most of us recognize.