John MacArthur writes…

“Former NASDAQ chairman Bernie Madoff ran a ponzi-scheme swindle for nearly 20 years, and he bilked an estimated $18 billion from Wall-Street investors. When the scam finally came to light it unleashed a shockwave of outrage around the world. It was the largest and most far-reaching investment fraud ever.

But the evil of Madoff’s embezzlement pales by comparison to an even more diabolical fraud being carried out in the name of Christ under the bright lights of television cameras on religious networks worldwide every single day. Faith healers and prosperity preachers promise miracles in return for money, conning their viewers out of more than a billion dollars annually. They have operated this racket on television for more than five decades. Worst of all, they do it with the tacit acceptance of most of the Christian community.

Someone needs to say this plainly: The faith healers and health-and-wealth preachers who dominate religious television are shameless frauds. Their message is not the true gospel of Jesus Christ. There is nothing spiritual or miraculous about their on-stage chicanery. It is all a devious ruse designed to take advantage of desperate people. They are not godly ministers but greedy impostors who corrupt the Word of God for money’s sake. They are not real pastors who shepherd the flock of God but hirelings whose only design is to fleece the sheep. Their love of money is glaringly obvious in what they say as well as how they live. They claim to possess great spiritual power, but in reality they are rank materialists and enemies of everything holy.

There is no reason anyone should be deceived by this age-old con, and there is certainly no justification for treating the hucksters as if they were authentic ministers of the gospel. Religious charlatans who make merchandise of false promises have been around since the apostolic era. They pretend to be messengers of Christ, but they are interlopers and impostors. The apostles condemned them with the harshest possible language. Paul called them “men of corrupt minds and destitute of the truth, who suppose that godliness is a means of gain” (1 Timothy 6:5). Peter called them false prophets with “heart[s] trained in greed” (2 Peter 2:14). He warned that “in their greed they will exploit you with false words” (v. 3). He exposed them as scoundrels and dismissed them as “stains and blemishes” on the church (v. 13). 

Those biblical descriptions certainly fit the greed-driven cult of prosperity preachers and faith healers who unfortunately, thanks to television, have become the best-known face of Christianity worldwide. The scam they operate ought to be a bigger scandal than any Wall Street ponzi scheme or big-time securities fraud. After all, those who are most susceptible to the faith-healers’ swindle are not well-to-do investors but some of society’s most vulnerable people—including multitudes who are already destitute, disconsolate, disabled, elderly, sick, suffering, or dying. The faith-healer gets lavishly rich while the victims become poorer and more desperate.

But the worst part of the scandal is that it’s not really a scandal at all in the eyes of most evangelical Christians. Those who should be most earnest in defense of the truth have taken a shockingly tolerant attitude toward the prosperity preachers’ blatant misrepresentation of the gospel and their wanton exploitation of needy people. “But we don’t want to judge,” they say. Thus Christians fail to exercise righteous judgment (John 7:24). They refuse to be discerning at all.

How many manifestos and written declarations of solidarity have evangelicals issued condemning abortion, euthanasia, same-sex marriage, and other social evils? It’s fine, and fairly easy, to oppose wickedness and injustice in secular society, but where is the corresponding moral outrage against these religious mountebanks who openly, brashly pervert the gospel for profit 24 hours a day, seven days a week on international television?

Advocates of abortion and euthanasia don’t usually try to pass their message off as biblical. The people who say we need to redefine marriage haven’t portrayed themselves as an arm of the church. But the prosperity preachers deceive people in Jesus’ name, claiming to speak for God—while stealing both the souls and the sustenance of hurting people. That is a far greater abomination than any of the social evils Christians typically protest. After all, what the prosperity preachers do is not only a sin against poor, sick, and vulnerable people; it also blasphemes God, corrupts the gospel, and profanes the reputation of Christ before a watching world. It not only tears at the fabric of our society; it also befouls the purity of the visible church and abates the influence of the true gospel. It is surely among the grossest of all the evils currently rampant in our culture.

In the weeks to come, we’re going to be looking at the preposterous claims and false teachings of some of religious television’s best-known figures. We’ll analyze why a disproportionate number of celebrity faith-healers and prosperity preachers have succumbed to serious immorality. And we’ll see what Scripture says about how Bible-believing Christians ought to respond. I hope this series will challenge you to take a more active stand against the phony miracles and false teachings that are being peddled in the name of Christ.”

From http://www.shepherdsfellowship.org/pulpit/posts.aspx?ID=4459&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+PulpitMagazine+%28Pulpit+Magazine%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

The Battle Creek Enquirer reports…

“Ed Dobson, wearing a suit too large for his thin frame, paced across the stage as he preached Sunday at Second Missionary Baptist Church.

He pumped his legs and spoke in short, punctuated phrases, firing up the congregation like a piston in an engine.

The crowd called out in response because they knew this little, white man had a big story to tell.

The 46-year-old Grand Rapids pastor devoted a year of his life to living like Jesus.

That meant that during 2008, he kept a kosher diet, attended synagogue and observed Jewish holidays. He did not trim his beard, which grew past his shirt’s third button.

It also meant picking up hitchhikers and taking them wherever they needed to go. The normally teetotaling Dobson did not refuse a drink when preaching in bars, just as Jesus reached out to sinners and drank wine on certain occasions.

And in a move that defied the conservative politicians with whom he had been associated, he told Good Morning America in January that he voted for Barack Obama because that’s the president he thinks Jesus would have chosen.

Claps of approval erupted from the pews at his omission.

For a man who was once an executive in the Moral Majority, a conservative Christian political lobbying group, he is fond of admitting that really living like Jesus will, “mess you up.”

Dobson joked that the first thing he ate New Year’s Day was a shrimp wrapped in bacon — the kosher thing didn’t work out — but he continues to sport a shortened version of his black-and-gray-streaked beard.

He said his journey was not a gimmick to write a new book — though his book, “The Year of Living like Jesus,” was published earlier this year. It wasn’t about becoming a more spiritual person either.

It was simply three things: to live more like Jesus, to think more like Jesus and to obey Jesus’ teachings.

“I’ve always tried to follow Jesus and this was the next step,” he said.

Dobson preached Sunday on the story of Jesus walking on water. He described a storm that ripped across the Sea of Galilee, where Jesus’ disciples were trying to row to shore.

Peter, one of Jesus’ disciples known for his impulsivity, saw his master walking on the water and asked to join him. Jesus called, and Peter stepped out of the boat to walk with him.

Dobson bobbed faster across the stage in his peculiarly undulating way, as if he were there on the water with Jesus and Peter.

The Grand Rapids pastor has been distinguished in his career as an author, minister and community leader, yet he felt constrained in his ability to know Jesus better, like the disciples who tried in vain to paddle against the waves.

So Dobson did what Peter did. He stepped out of the boat.

“For the first time in my life, I was able to follow his teaching outside the confines,” he said.

His wife did not follow him, but supported his decision. His kids thought his journey was at times “funny, weird, convicting and challenging,” he said.

Every day he listened to the Gospels on his iPod, which he said begs the question, “Would Jesus use an iPod?”

Dobson said he listened because he didn’t want to fall into skimming the first four books of the New Testament. Each time he listened, he grew deeper in his understanding.

It moved him to pick up hitchhikers and hand out money, no matter how far a person needed to travel or how many times they asked for help.

In one instance, Dobson said he was driving in the “hood” in Grand Rapids on a snowy February day. The sidewalks had not been cleared, and a 6-foot-7-or-possibly-8-inch tall man, weighing probably 350 pounds, was walking in the street.

Dobson, whose frail hands show the effects of a muscular deterioration due to Lou Gehrig’s disease, pulled the car over and asked, “Hey dude, you need a ride?”

The man silently slipped into his vehicle, and after a few moments said, “You’re a little, white dude and I’m a great, big, African American man. Why in the world did you pick me up?”

Dobson wanted to say because he was trying to be more like Jesus, but instead said, “Dude, it’s cold. It’s winter and it looks like you need a ride.”

Besides, Dobson thought, if he killed me he’d be doing me a favor. Lou Gehrig’s disease, scientifically known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, is a slow deterioration of muscles and nerves leading ultimately to death.

Dobson said the experts gave him two to five years to live. That was more than nine years ago.

“When I get ticked that another muscle doesn’t work, I remember God wrapped himself in human flesh and it encourages me,” he said.

It encourages Debra Evans, too. She has been a member of Second Missionary Baptist Church since the beginning of the year, but a Christian most of her life.

When her baby boy was born seven years ago with what the doctors called abnormal brain development, she wasn’t sure she had the faith to help her son.

Doctors continued to monitor him for mental development. Scans of his brain indicated he should be disabled, but he ate and laughed like any other baby. Today, she said, he is in school and doing fine.

Though she said she didn’t know it then, now she understands — as Dobson also said — that all you can do it trust God to have mercy and know that he has it in abundance.

“You have to believe to receive,” she said. “Unless you’ve been there, you’ll never know.”

From http://www.battlecreekenquirer.com/article/20091207/NEWS01/912070311/Living-the-gospel

The Citizen reports…

“A superior court judge has ordered all of Pastor Robert Farah’s assets, including his three properties, frozen despite his personal pleas to release them.

Represented by attorney Chris Carter, Furgerson needed to show that Robert Farah substantially influenced Furgerson’s decision to invest through Financial Resources Mortgage, Inc. and that his finances were linked to that of his son.

Furgerson said he first became aware of Financial Resources Mortgage, Inc. when he received a postcard solicitation and, after some investigation, he made a $60,000 investment. He said after that he often received phone calls from Scott Farah but, when Scott Farah learned of his real estate sale, the frequency of the calls increased.

As Robert Farah continued to deny he had any active role in his son’s business, Carter provided document after document that he said proved just the opposite — including one that listed Robert Farah as one of the incorporators of Financial Resources Mortgage, Inc., in 1989 when the company was formed.

Robert Farah admitted to lending his son the money to start FRM but said he withdrew his interests once the company got going.

Robert Farah replied that the Center Harbor Christian Fellowship once owned the land while the church he ministers is the Center Harbor Christian Church.

He denied that either he or his son used the pulpit to solicit investors. “We are a poor church. Many of my parishioners are unemployed,” Robert Farah said.

“I say, let the truth prevail,” said Klenert. “

From http://www.citizen.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091205/GJNEWS02/712059957/-1/CITNEWS

NPR reports…

Play audio

“More than 20 states, including Florida, limit where convicted sex offenders can live — keeping them away from schools, parks and other places where children congregate.

In Miami, dozens of homeless sex offenders live under a bridge because there are few, if any, options nearby. But 90 miles away, there’s a community dedicated to housing sex offenders.

Where Electronic Monitors Fill The Pews

On a recent Sunday morning, a few dozen men and just a few women gather at a little country church near Pahokee, Fla. They sing, pray and stand up to testify about the importance of God in their lives.

About the only sign that there’s something unusual about this church comes when it’s time for communion. Many of the men making their way to the altar are wearing ankle bracelets and electronic monitors on their belts.

This is the church at Miracle Park, a community mostly made up of sex offenders. Dick Witherow is their pastor.

Standing at the altar, he challenges the congregation. “How many of you were looking for God when you got saved?” He laughs, “You didn’t choose God. He chose us.”

Witherow is a tall, spare man, 76 years old, a former private detective.

Shortly after he entered the ministry some 30 years ago, he began working in prisons, holding prayer services and doing addiction counseling.

Then, about a decade ago, he began focusing on sex offenders. After some horrific sex crimes involving children, Florida became one of the first states to pass laws restricting where sex offenders could live after they’re released from prison — effectively banning them from some communities.

Ministering To ‘Modern-Day Lepers’

Witherow began looking at places where he could open a residential program for sex offenders, which didn’t endear him to nearby communities. “I tell people I’m the most popular man in town,” he says. “And of course, I’m saying that facetiously.”

Witherow believes people can change. At Miracle Park, those on probation attend weekly court-ordered sex therapy sessions. He also offers anger-management classes and sessions on relationships, inner healing and life skills.

Witherow has authored a book about sex offenders called The Modern Day Leper. He says he could have worn the same label as the men at Miracle Park. He was 18 years old when he met his first wife. She was just 14, and before long she was pregnant. A judge allowed them to get married but told Witherow he could have been charged with statutory rape.

“If that would have happened in today’s society, I would have been charged with sexual battery on a minor, been given anywhere from 10 to 25 years in prison, plus extended probation time after that, and then been labeled a sex offender,” he says.

Witherow knows that there are those who argue that’s what should have happened.

‘The Cry Was So Loud … All Over Town’

Witherow once had a ranch for sex offenders in Okeechobee County. But zoning law changes forced that facility to close. His search for another spot brought him here, to a small community he renamed Miracle Park. It’s a collection of duplexes about 3 miles east of the town of Pahokee, in rural Palm Beach County.

It’s surrounded on every side by sugar cane fields. About 40 of those living there now are sex offenders.

“It’s open to everybody,” Witherow says. “However, the only ones that are really looking to be out here in the boondocks and pay $100 a week to live with somebody else, basically, are those who don’t have anyplace else to go, which are the sex offenders.”

Witherow didn’t have the $5.5 million the owner wanted for the property. So instead of buying it, he became the property manager. One of his first acts was to let families with children know that a community of sex offenders was moving in, and that they might want to move out.

Most of the families left. Several later sued, saying they were forced from their homes unfairly.

Henry Crawford, the vice mayor of Pahokee, says, “The cry was so loud, man, you could hear it all over town.”

On the western edge of Palm Beach County, Pahokee is a poor and mostly black community in one of the nation’s wealthiest counties.

Crawford says that because Miracle Park is located outside of the city limits, there wasn’t much local officials could do about it. He believes the sex offenders deserve a place to live. He just wishes it wasn’t here.

“If this was in other parts of Palm Beach, I don’t think this would occur,” he says. “But I think the good reverend knew that it wouldn’t be much pressure from rural Palm Beach County … not to do this. So the fight was easier here than it would be anywhere else.”

Not all the people who had been living in Miracle Park moved out. Stroll through the grounds and you’ll run into elderly residents who have lived there for years. Many are former sugar company workers or their relatives.

Barbara Haywood lives there with her daughter and 9-month-old grandson. When she first heard that sex offenders were moving in, she says, she was scared. But not anymore. In her Bahamian accent, she says, “I’m [not] scared any of them because everyone pass, they give me a respect, you know?”

‘God Has Forgiven Me Now’

Across the nation, communities are debating where sex offenders can live after they’re released from prison. That includes Miami-Dade County, where a colony of sex offenders live under a bridge on the causeway leading to Miami Beach.

Witherow believes shared living arrangements like Miracle Park offer a solution. He says he screens the sex offenders who want to live here. Repeated offenses, burglaries and violent crimes are all red flags. And he says that, as a general rule, he won’t accept pedophiles.

But these are still sex offenders, people who in many cases have done terrible things.

The operations manager at Miracle Park is Pat Powers, an efficient, compact man in his 60s. Twenty years ago, he was a racquetball coach who pleaded no contest to molesting 11 of his teen and pre-teen students.

“I was guilty as could be,” he says. “Even to this day, there are times where I just feel like, you know, I let people down. But God has forgiven me now, and so now my life is changing.”

Shared Space, Self-Policing?

Jill Levenson, an associate professor at Lynn University in Boca Raton, says it’s possible that clustering so many sex offenders in one place could increase the risk for nearby communities, like Pahokee. But, she says, research shows that there are also benefits to placing sex offenders in shared living situations like Miracle Park.

She says the sex offenders often begin to police themselves. “If somebody is doing something that’s risky,” she says, “the others will call him out on that or report that to authorities because, in their mind, if one person goes on and re-offends, that’s going to be problematic for everyone else that’s living there.”

It’s been nearly a year since Witherow opened his community of sex offenders at Miracle Park, and financially, things aren’t going well. He has used up $300,000 in savings and is running a deficit, in part because many of the sex offenders have been unable to find work and pay their rent.

Ever a man of faith, he says “God will provide.”

But in the meantime, he is talking to corrections officials about a whole new group of sex offenders who need housing: senior citizens who have served their sentences and have Social Security but need just one more thing — a place on the outside where they will be allowed to live.”

From http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121089157&ps=cprs

Pakistan Christian TV reports…

“An Australian missionary was arrested on false charges of “forceful conversion” by the Andhra Pradesh State Police on November 24, 2009 at Utnur in Andhra Pradesh state, India.

The source said that Hindu radicals and Locals of the town have warned Pastor Premanandam and his daughter Joy Carol not to invite anymore foreign missionaries to the town.”

From http://pakistanchristian.tv/news/2009-11-28_Australian_Missionary_Arrested_in_Andhra_Pradesh_State_India.cfm

Margaret Court’s Perth Victory Life Centre notes…

“How to be Filled with the Holy Spirit….

…..Prayer: Jesus, I ask You to fill me with your Holy Spirit with the evidence of speaking in tongues. By faith I believe that I receive.

Now begin to speak out in the language that the Spirit gives you (not in English).”

From http://www.victorylifecentre.com.au/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=79&Itemid=97

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports…

“While accused killer Christopher Coleman has welcomed numerous jail visits from pastors and ministers, he has turned away a former co-worker from his old employer, the Joyce Meyer Ministries.

The relationship between Coleman and the worldwide television ministry, where he had been security manager, has played a significant role in the criminal case and in a wrongful death suit filed by his slain wife’s family.

Shepard declined to comment about it, referring all questions to Michael King, the ministry’s lawyer. King said the two were friends prior to the killings, and that Shepard tried to visit in a personal capacity.

Police have said that Coleman faked threats against himself and family that were made to appear as if they came from an enemy of the Jefferson County-based ministry.

“I just don’t think he did it,” Gaub said. “I don’t think he has it in his heart to do something like that.”

From http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/laworder/story/7B7D06BB3A04BBFB8625767F000983B0?OpenDocument

Nathan McLean blogs…

“Tuesday’s from 10:30-11:15am would be my favourite meeting of the entire week.   Its our staff meeting at Hillsong Church and is the time when we get to worship as a staff and also be challenge in leadership from, in my opinion, the greatest church leader on the planet Ps Brian Houston. Its not always Ps Brian speaking but it is always a really practical, challenging message on leadership and culture when he does speak.

This week he brought a message on ‘Empowering Upwards’ and I want to share some of it with you.  When it comes to the word empowering most of us, myself included, automatically think of the people in our world that we lead and empower to do all they can in life, we are empowering downwards.  Ps Brian however challenged us as leaders to empower those above us by making their leadership of us easy.

Now, when it comes to Children’s Ministry, I know that we would never be the ones to complain about not getting enough budget or blame others such as youth for getting more focus. HA!!! We are the worst at it so dont log off now but read on and be challenge…take on the attitude of my good mate (and boss) David Wakerley who always says “I am not here to build a great children’s ministry but rather to build a great church through the children’s ministry.” So here comes a few thoughts:

1. Put yourself in the shoes of your leader.

If you want to empower up then spend a moment thinking of what they want to see you achieve in the children’s ministry.  Dont work separate to your Senior Pastor but get in his shoes and see what you could do to make his life easier.

2. Picture the decisions that are being made above you

Sometimes we want our questions answered now but the reality is that often our leaders above us are dealing with bigger things then we could imagine so if we need to wait for them to tell us which artwork design they like best then so be it.  Avoid pulling your leaders head down to the decisions that you are making when they should be soaring and trying to see vision for the future. You can be the one that releases them to soar!

3. Refuse to blame.

Be the sort of Children’s Pastor who doesn’t blame anything on anyone but rather sees it as your responsibility to do whatever it takes to help your leader take the church forward.  If families need someone to inspire them to come to church, be that person.  If you need more leaders, dont wait for your pastor to announce it to the church, be the recruitement person.  If you need more fun in your children’s ministry, be that person.

I think I shall leave it at that for now but I want you to feel the challenge like I did to re,ease those above you and look out for them as they are the Godly leaders you have been given!!!”

From http://nathanmclean.com/2009/11/11/empowering-upwards/