"The Big Preacher Guy" Phenomenon

No sooner had VNP been hailing a mellowing of evangelical attitudes than an article in an evangelical magazine pops up introducing its readers to the latest American Christian mega patriarch whose reputation is starting to make inroads into the UK. He was being compared with that Charismatic personality of the eighties and nineties John Wimber.

Wimber and his ‘Vineyard’ cluster of churches were associated with the so called ‘Third Wave of the Spirit’ - a ‘move’ of the Spirit that was supposed to unify charismatic and non-charismatic, a wave whose actual existence is, in fact, debatable. But there was this to be said for it: in Wimber’s mind this move was to be a complimentary union of the best from Charismatic and orthodox evangelical cultures – Wimber was the kind of personality who recognized that his own Christian culture needed other Christains. Moreover, Wimber wisely distanced himself from the bizarre and predatory Toronto Blessing of the nineties. His wife is quoted in the article warning against the kind of faith that sees the world through vehement and positive acclamations bordering on denial. Although Wimber and his Vineyard churches never really succeeded in breaking the mold of a Gnostic version of Charismatic Christianity, Wimber’s ‘Signs and Wonders’ healing ministry was tempered by attitudes of reconciliation, complimentarity, reciprocity, and frankness.

Unfortunately this latest big name import from America looks to be far less reciprocal and compliant. His take on the Gospel is that it majors on ‘kingdom’ – that is, for him the gospel is about membership and not message – the Christian cults would agree. He is a product of the Toronto Blessing, and readily employs those familiar cognitive resorts used to explain away the suffering and evil of our world: healings fail because those praying for it lack faith, or those receiving it are too accommodating towards the problem of pain. And if spiritual spin fails simply select out the conceptually less amenable facts of reality and forget them: “Celebrate what God is doing not what he hasn’t done”, and least of all don’t accept that God ever ‘wanted’ a world of suffering and evil. This is the time honoured gnostic disconnection from reality.

That the article writer presumably felt it appropriate to publish the warning from Wimber’s wife is ominous. If reality is difficult to come to terms with one ‘solution’ is to simply train yourself to ‘see’ a new reality using a mixture of denial, attitude, selective perspective and spiritual spin. With the spiritual excesses of the nineties receding into history we now have a clutch of gullible Christians who either never saw those excesses or have forgotten them. The time may be right for another religious quack.