Pass the sickbag....

I confess that, until I read September's Monthly Record of the Free Church of Scotland, I was blissfully unaware of the antics of Canadian evangelist, Todd Bentley.  This is a delightful chap who's leading a `revival' (sic and, in this case sick) in Florida.  Apparently, his ministry involves kicking old ladies in the face and men with metastatic stage 4 colon cancer in the stomach.  You can check the latter out here, but you shouldn't do so straight after breakfast.  The writer in the Monthly Record summed it up nicely:

`We do not deny the miraculous.  God worked miracles in the Bible.  He can do so today. We do deny that God tells evangelists to kick people in the face.  We do not care about what Mr Bentley wears.  We do care about what he says and does in the name of Jesus.  And we dare not set up the Free Church as a faultless church that all true Christian should join.  Far from it.  Our problems and sins run deep.  But whatever weirdnesses we may have, we can at least be thankful that we do not advocate hitting people for Jesus.  May God have mercy on us all.' 

A quick google search revealed a couple of interesting facts: those discerning people at the UK's Christianity magazine seem surprisingly positive about Mr. Bentley, perhaps more positive than about those simply awful people who hold to penal substitution. Ho-hum.  If there's one thing more shocking than seeing Bentley beating the living daylights out of people on youtube for Jesus, it's the gullibility of those who can't see straight through this kind of psychotic evil.  Ohh, and the other thing -- Mr.  Bentley has just stepped down from his ministry for a period because he has been caught in adultery.   Now there's lovely for you, as they say in the Welsh valleys.