Paula White's Appointment Surfaces Frightful Memories

The Word of Faith movement promises a different Jesus from the One found in Scripture.

The prosperity gospel is a perversion of Christianity. When President Trump appointed Ms White to the new position of leading the White House faith office, my heart sank. Firstly, she is a woman, so Scripture has disqualified her from being a pastor, and secondly, the theology she represents has done so much damage in America, but more especially in Africa, where desperately poor people will cling to any formulaic promise of improving their circumstances. I’ve seen it firsthand. I have recovered from the Prosperity Gospel. It took a long time. Here is my story.

I first encountered “Christianity” in my early teen years. It was a perfect storm of events. I started attending Rhema, a Word of Faith circus freshly imported from Oklahoma to Johannesburg. At roughly the same time, my parents divorced, followed by my grown sisters leaving the nest. People I loved were suddenly absent, and they took my sense of stability with them.

The prosperity gospel seemed like just the safety net an adolescent crashing off a broken home high wire needed.

The Prosperity movement made promises to me that I believed God would deliver on. After all, He promised health, wealth, and unity. Or so I was taught relentlessly from the pulpit and in Sunday School. I was young and in good health. I didn’t covet riches. But there was something I wanted desperately. Something I prayed for constantly and claimed vociferously: I wanted my Dad to come home. Everyone at the church always seemed smiling and happy. This gospel made people euphoric and ecstatic - at least on the outside. They raised their hands, fell over when “anointed,” gave literal buckets of money, and took care of their tongues lest they “spoke words” that might block a material blessing.

The prosperity gospel has a way of luring one into the big tent. I do not doubt that cults operate similarly, using enticements and promises.

From my experience, it is a movement with a magnetic attraction for con artists and charlatans in leadership and laity. It’s incredible what people can get others to believe and do when they say they communicate directly with God and have received new messages that have to be shared. They manipulate and seek to control other people, claiming that God has given them direct messages for the other person. Combined with not understanding the Canon of Scripture is closed, adherents allow themselves to be exposed to dangerous influences and manipulations by others. Indeed, it is worse than Catholicism’s open canon because the Word-Faith denominations turn each person their own Pope.

The entire theology revolves around acquiring “faith.” It’s not Biblical faith; it’s believing that your faith is faithful enough to be faithful. If you lack faith, “claim” more of it by trying hard and speaking it into existence! If bad things affect you, your lack of faith has repelled God’s health, wealth, and prosperity blessings. He is your cosmic genie, begging to shower you with money if you only ask using the right formula.

The constant train of lies from healing and prosperity peddlers, promising heaven and earth and everything in between, only to find you are sitting with Job, in ashes, scraping off boils. How many loved ones have died because someone didn’t have enough faith? How many people have gone bankrupt in the process of believing that God was a cosmic slot machine? All that was needed was to drop endless seed offerings into the eager, grasping hands of lovers of self and money. How many grifters have sold prayer cloths to prey upon desperate mothers? How many bitter, angry, broken people are out there, never having feasted on the true Gospel but only having been promised a fast food diet of instant gratification? Who else but Esau comes to mind, selling his birthright for a pottage of stew?

The prosperity pimps are short-selling your birthright. Don’t buy what they are selling. After all, the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus. It doesn’t carry a price tag. Not even for a cent.

Yes, we are promised healing and prosperity, and God delivers on each of His promises. A wise pastor pointed this out to me recently: the prophecies of Isaiah 53 confirm that by Christ’s wounds, we are healed, and every promise will be fulfilled down to the smallest detail. God’s Word never returns void. This miracle is even more significant than the prosperity crowd claims. The dead and buried will be raised to life with imperishable bodies in God’s perfect timing and according to His wisdom. They do not need the soft and luxurious things of this world.

I quit being angry with the Lord. He graciously brought people into my life who helped me see the error of the false theology I was a victim of. He led me out of the despair and wilderness of my misdirected faith and into the promised land of the one true faith: the real Gospel. I have been buried with Christ in baptism and raised to new life in Him through His resurrection (See Romans 6).

However, I do still deal with suppressing my anger towards the faith healers and prosperity peddlers. Perhaps I would get over it more quickly if they would leave my family and friends alone. They prey on the most vulnerable among us, at our weakest moments, and teach people heresy in the name of Christ.

They dare to point to Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons and castigate them for their denial of Christ. But, the Name It & Claim It crowd are no better with their promises of temporal material riches and physical well-being, all wrapped together in fake healings and the trappings of the many storage barns they have built for themselves. This is contrary to the tribulation promised by Christ Himself in John 16:33 and re-iterated by St. Paul in Romans 5:3.

They hold up Christ as an example of how we should live – telling us that we should be good and generous and that we can bring things into being by the power of our words. They tell us that we can declare our family members healed or create our own riches. They want us to believe that the cattle on the thousand hills are ours for the taking and that God will open a window in heaven and pour down trinkets and goodies for momentary enjoyment here on earth.

The spiritual snake oil salesmen never get down into the trenches with us and help us in our hour of need, nor tell us that what we are going through is part of life and very much a part of our Christian walk. Instead, we are told that these troubled times are of our own making and that we are responsible for them because of a lack of faith.

That is not Christ, that is not Biblical, that is not the church, that is not salvation, and that is not Christianity. St Paul described the charlatans aptly here,

“For many, of whom I have often told you and now tell you even with tears, walk as enemies of the cross of Christ. Their end is destruction, their god is their belly, and they glory in their shame, with minds set on earthly things. But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself.” (Philippians 3:18-21 ESV)

I love this verse because it clearly contrasts what the health and prosperity crowd offers and what we really have to look forward to in Christ.

Our bodies fail us. Each day, we become more acutely aware of our human frailties, which are the consequence of sin. Things don’t turn out the way we hope and dream. But we place our hope in the Risen Savior who makes all things new. We wait on Him through the trauma and turmoil of life. We don’t hold to healing here and now. Yes, Christ does heal, and miracles occur daily. But, even if we receive healing now, what does this profit a man? Each of us will still die, and this will go on until the day our Lord returns. Indeed, to live is Christ, and to die is gain (see Philippians 1:20-23).

The only profit is the knowledge of Christ and what He has won for us on the cross and through His resurrection. The only way to understand that is to start with God’s Holy Law. We have to know that we are lawbreakers. We aren’t even able to comprehend how frightfully sinful every one of us is. Our sinful nature permeates every cell in our bodies. Salvation is not trying harder. Being a Christian does not mean insta-happiness. On the contrary, be warned: being a Christian will result in persecution, rejection, and possibly poverty. That is our natural state. We are in the world, but no longer of it. We are aliens in a strange land but bearers of an extraordinary alien righteousness that was gifted to us by the will of God, without our consent, let alone our decision.

Salvation is faith in the One who did it all perfectly for us. Christ was born sinless, lived a perfect life, and died a sacrificial, propitiatory death on our behalf so that we would be absolved of our sins. His resurrection sealed His righteousness to us so that we might be fully reconciled with the Holy God and be granted eternal life in Him.

Nothing else matters; everything else is chaff. And that chaff will be burned off in the last judgment.