Revival Drawing Criticism
By TRAVIS REED
Associated Press Writer
Published: July 10, 2008
source
LAKELAND - Todd Bentley believes God acts through him to cure cancer, heal the deaf and raise the dead.
So do hundreds of thousands of people who have visited his raucous revival meeting, now in its third month and broadcast nightly from a huge tent in the middle of Florida.
The 32-year-old Canadian, tattooed to the fingers and neck, puts a palm to the forehead of the sick, desperate and faithful. Bentley yells "Bam!" they collapse and he proclaims them cured. Attendees dance in the aisles, shout to Heaven, laugh, shake violently and cry.
Such revivals aren't new, but Bentley's stage show has become a phenomenon in the religious world - for both its pull and the criticism it has attracted - in just a few months.
He claims to have medical proof of mass healings, but has not produced widely convincing evidence.
His tactics, sometimes violent, have made skeptics even of Pentecostals who believe in concepts that aren't accepted by all branches of Christianity such as speaking in tongues, miraculous healing and spontaneous twitching from the Holy Spirit.
"Some of the language used during the Lakeland Revival has created an almost sideshow atmosphere," wrote J. Lee Grady, editor of the Pentecostal magazine Charisma, in an online column. "People are invited to 'Come and get some.' Miracles are supposedly 'popping like popcorn.' ... Such brash statements cheapen what the Holy Spirit is doing."
When Bentley performs healings, often wearing jeans and a T-shirt, aides bring the sick up both sides of an elaborate stage. The preacher's assistants tell the audience each person's condition and how far they came to be cured: from Europe, the West Coast, up to the Northeast and beyond.
Like a psychic, he will proclaim someone in the crowd has a particular kind of tumor, growth or affliction.
"Someone's getting a new spinal cord tonight!" Bentley yelled in one service.
Bentley gives the credit to God, but Christian critics say he rarely opens a Bible or sermonizes about Jesus Christ. They worry he is too little about conversion, too heavy on his own hype and too focused on self-proclaimed miracles.
The revival sprung from Bentley's April visit to a Lakeland church for a speaking engagement. He has traveled the world as head of Fresh Fire Ministries, based in Abbotsford, British Columbia, but never received a fraction of this exposure.
Thanks to Internet streaming and live broadcasts on the satellite channel GodTV, Bentley's revival has outgrown four venues in Lakeland and drawn more than 400,000 in-person from around the country and world, promoters say.
GodTV estimated its viewership has more than doubled since it began televising the event each night, and Web hits have risen from 25,000 to 200,000 weekly. Bentley's own page is now getting 8 million hits a month, he said.
But the ease of Internet communication cuts both ways for Bentley. Critics circulate a YouTube video from Lakeland of him kneeing a supposed terminal stomach cancer patient in the abdomen, saying God told him to. In another clip, Bentley explains how he kicked an elderly lady in the face, choked a man, banged a crippled woman's legs on a platform, "leg-dropped" a pastor and hit a man so hard it dislodged a tooth.
The criticism has grown so acute that Bentley addressed it directly on stage earlier this month. He said he has used those extreme methods only about 20 times in 10 years of preaching, and those cases were taken out of context. Each person was healed, not hurt, Bentley insisted.
Expecting critics, Bentley's ministry distributed a list of 15 people it said were cured, and vetted by his ministry, with all but three of their stories "medically verified."
Yet two phone numbers given out by the ministry were wrong, six people did not return telephone messages and only two of the remainder, when reached by The Associated Press, said they had medical records as proof of their miracle cure. However, one woman would not make her physician available to confirm the findings, and the other's doctor did not return calls despite the patient's authorization.
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