While I’m still waiting for a remix to Todd’s smash hit “Marinating… Pickling In God’s Presence” (see my archives)
TheLedger.com reports the following:
“Todd Bentley Launches a Web Site
Contributed by Cary McMullen – Posted: June 23, 2009 11:35:23 AM
Pentecostal faith-healer and revivalist Todd Bentley, who has been in seclusion for about 11 months now after leaving 1) his wife and 2) the Lakeland Outpouring revival last year, has started a new Web site. Bentley was ousted from his Canadian-based Fresh Fire Ministries last year after announcing a separation from his wife and amid allegations he was indulging in heavy drinking. Bentley subsequently divorced and remarried and has been undergoing “rehabilitation” in California and North Carolina. The Fresh Fire organization changed its name, allowing Bentley to claim it, so his new Web site is titled “Fresh Fire — Missions, Evangelism and Revival.” There is an evangelistic video from Bentley and a letter posted on the site, which includes this: “I pray unbelief is not in your heart as a result of hurt and disappointment wrought by unfolding events and decisions I’ve made, that even before God completes His work in me and heals, restores, and re-establishes my life and the life of this ministry; that He restores your hope, faith, and confidence, that He heals hurts, disappointment, and discouragement.” It would seem that it won’t be long before Bentley returns to public ministry, conducting revivals. Look for his critics and his supporters to continue their ongoing war about his legitimacy.”
Todd Bentley writes in his autobiography, Journey Into the Miraculous:
“…the Lord had actually shown me an open vision of Shonnah. It was my first open-eyed vision. I was in my living room and my fireplace opened up, kind of like a TV screen, and I saw us embracing in a wheat field that was ready for harvest. We were both weeping and I was wearing a tux and she was wearing a wedding dress. As the vision unfolded, her friend Roswetta (who was now my friend) was talking with me in the living room about Shonnah. I described the open vision to her as it happened. The presence of the Lord fell and we both wept. Roswetta said, ‘I can’t see it but I can feel goose bumps.’ During this vision, I also received an anointing of creativity, poetry and writing. In fact, I even received a three-page prophetic poem that I read at our wedding. I still write prophetic poems for my wife to this day.”
Did Todd Bentley commit adultery with the babysitter? Did he leave his wife for the nanny? Did he destroy his family for the intern!?!?!?!
Is he now married to Jessa Hasbrook… or should I say Jessa Bentley?
Did Rick Joyner perform their wedding? Was Shonnah and the kids invited to the ceremony?
Unfortunately, Todd didn’t keep certain things on his mind! He lost sight of his priorities. He forgot what is most important. Unfortunately, Rick Joyner doesn’t care too much about those BIBLICAL priorities either. True restoration would have included Shonnah… not Jessa.
Like a dog that returns to its vomit Is a fool who repeats his folly. prov.26:11
It has happened to them according to the true proverb, “A DOG RETURNS TO ITS OWN VOMIT,” and, “A sow, after washing, returns to wallowing in the mire.” 2Peter 2:22
Here is an excert from the Western Standard Blog…
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Mr. Bentley enters his rehab
At last, new trophy wife in tow, Todd Bentley, the Canadian evangelist who has been having many problems over the past year (to put it lightly) has entered rehabilitation. Over seven months after the collapse of his internationally famous revival in the U.S., he has at last gotten around to going to North Carolina to come under the mentoring of charismatic leader Rick Joyner. Mr. Joyner is to help him return to ministry. Yet, already, in the annoucements and videos that are coming out with Mr. Bentley, there’s more backspin than at a convention of billiards players evident, which is not a good omen for those hoping that Mr. Bentley can return to his work with integrity and a good character.
As videos began to be released a couple of days ago, there was a flurry of commentary and a bit of news coverage. Blogger Miriam Franklin has already weighed in with several pointed critical posts on Mr. Joyner and Mr. Bentley. I’d defintely agree with her on one point she has made, namely that people are concentrating too much on Mr. Bentley’s divorce and quickie remarriage to Jessa, whose affair with the evangelist seems to be the proxinate cause of the “Lakeland revival”. Not so. The affair was a symptom not a cause. That is to say, Mr. Bentley had a character problem that exhibited itself in lying from the pulpit about, for example, raising people from the dead. There were some aberrant, heretical things being said and done at Lakeland. And he was canoodling with a younger, prettier intern while his wife was either watching the kids or taking the pulpit herself to promote what her husband was doing. Marrying Jessa will likely not fix what leads to these sorts of actions.
My blogging friend Bene Diction makes an excellent point in a post that notes that many prominent charismatic groups and churches are slumping in the amount of people that are logging on to their sites. This relates to several things that I have been seeing on The Elijah List, an e-list that caters to charismatics, to the effect that people with alleged prophetic insight are commenting that God will bring Christians through the current economic woes, or bless them in amazing ways financially. There are reports of layoffs at ministries, and the tone of requests for donations has been stepped up. All this backs up Bene Diction’s suspicion that there may be a lot of pressure to get Bentley out on the road prematurely so, as the “star” of the ”Lakeland revival”, he can start to draw the crowds again.
Mr. Joyner’s first letter, announcing that Bentley and new wife had arrived, also noted that Mr. Bentley has a new ministry, Fresh Fire USA, which is organized under Mr. Joyner’s own ministry for now. Those wanting to help Mr. Bentley were offered Fresh Fire USA’s address. So, I had to smile when religion editor Frank Lockwood of the Arkansas Democrat, on his religious news blog, titled his note on Mr. Bentley’s restoration process: “Sorry about the adultery. Please send $$$” .
Charisma, the magazine of record for charismatic Christians in the U.S., is covering this too. Their own story has an intestesting note. At the tail end of Bentley’s time in Florida, a team of charismatic leaders and ministers lead by C. Peter Wagner held a special commissioning service for Bentley which was broadcast worldwide via Internet, in which the “Revival Alliance” members predicted that Bentley would go from success to success. They welcomed Bentley as a member of their group and even gave him a special ring, but Charisma’s story quotes Revival Alliance member John Arnott (known for pastoring the “Toronto Blessing” in the 1990s) as saying that Bentley is no longer considered a “member in good standing” of their group. Mr. Wagner and Mr. Arnott revealed some of Bentley’s misdeeds in the aftermath of his leaving the revival, so Mr. Bentley has evidently decided to form alliances with those who are more sympathtic to him, such as Mr. Joyner.
Mr. Joyner features in another Charisma item as well. Charisma editor J. Lee Grady, in his latest column, is disgusted with the rush to bring Bentley back too quickly, calling it a ”travesty”. Mr. Grady is righteously indignant, but what I find telling is Mr. Joyner’s response. He writes, in part:
Lee, I love some of the things you write, but I also feel that some are straight from the mouth of the accuser.
HERE IS AN EXCERPT FROM A CHRISTIANITY TODAY ARTICLE ON ALL THE CALVINISTIC CONFLICT WITHIN THE CONFERENCE…
Tiptoeing through TULIP
Layoff allegations reveal Calvinism tensions at Baptist seminary.
Jim Jones | posted 3/10/2009 12:01PM
Commotion arose in February over reports that Calvinists teaching at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS) in Fort Worth, Texas, might be in danger of losing their jobs.
Pastor Wade Burleson of Enid, Oklahoma, raised the alarm in a February blog post alleging that SWBTS president Paige Patterson had met with professors and implied that the seminary, which is facing economic problems, might first target Calvinist professors if it had to resort to layoffs.
Seminary officials declined to comment, saying the Calvinism flap was a “non-story” based on false information. Greg Welty, an SWBTS professor for six years and a five-point Calvinist, said Calvinist professors had received no such warning, and urged Burleson to “repent of your lies and slanders.”
Burleson did not repent. He told Christianity Today that he received the information from professors who had been in the meetings. Burleson believes his report caused the seminary to temporarily retreat from the alleged plan.
The article goes on to say…
Shortly after Burleson’s blog post, Patterson was interviewed by Oklahoma pastor Wes Kenney, who asked about “rumors” of possible Calvinist firings.
“We’re hopeful that we don’t have to cut any professors,” Patterson said in the taped interview, posted on Kenney’s sbc Today website. The president said he would not hide behind a screen of economic problems if he thought a professor needed to be removed because of certain Calvinist beliefs. “I will say,” Patterson continued, “that Southwestern will not build a school in the future around anybody who could not look anybody in the world in the eyes and say, ‘Christ died for your sins.’ “
Patterson’s words, Burleson said, are a rejection of limited atonement, a tenet of five-point Calvinism that holds that God’s plan of atonement is effective only for those chosen by God for salvation before the world began. http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/april/3.13.html
Following is the notorious post that started everything… publicly at least.
Dr. Paige Patterson met with professors in the theology school at SWBTS and implied the seminary would be letting go the Calvinist professors from the seminary, claiming that the lack of funds and the need to reduce faculty as the rationale for the impending releases. Odd, however, was the seemingly chosen method of reduction. It was not years of service, nor even the performance of the professors, but rather, administration sought to ascertain just who on the faculty were avowed “tulip” men, and those are the ones being let go. Some of the professors present at the meeting included men who specifically informed administration of their beliefs at the time of their hiring, and they were told at the time their beliefs were not a problem.
But it seems Calvinism is a problem to the powers that be at SWBTS. At least one professor from the philosophy department, himself on the brink of release, was present. The professors faced a grilling as to their soteriological belief system. They were asked to declare how many points of Calvinism to which they ascribed, and an even more penetrating series of questions were posed to that unfortunate soul who had the temerity to say “four” or “five” points.
Historically, dismissals at SWBTS have taken the backdoor approach of “You have a year to find a job,” but the rough economic environment might speed that process up just a tad for these tulip men. Here’s hoping they can make it through the spring.
Of course, it is the perogative of the SWBTS President to release whomsoever he will, but the forced, imminent departure of Calvinists from SWBTS illustrates just how far we have come since ideologues, who can’t handle dissent, have taken charge of the Southern Baptist Convention.
The Following Is An Excerpt From An Article Found In Time Magazine About 10 Ideas Changing The World Right Now…. This One Is Number 3:
If you really want to follow the development of conservative Christianity, track its musical hits. In the early 1900s you might have heard “The Old Rugged Cross,” a celebration of the atonement. By the 1980s you could have shared the Jesus-is-my-buddy intimacy of “Shine, Jesus, Shine.” And today, more and more top songs feature a God who is very big, while we are…well, hark the David Crowder Band: “I am full of earth/ You are heaven’s worth/ I am stained with dirt/ Prone to depravity.”
Calvinism is back, and not just musically. John Calvin’s 16th century reply to medieval Catholicism’s buy-your-way-out-of-purgatory excesses is Evangelicalism’s latest success story, complete with an utterly sovereign and micromanaging deity, sinful and puny humanity, and the combination’s logical consequence, predestination: the belief that before time’s dawn, God decided whom he would save (or not), unaffected by any subsequent human action or decision.
Calvinism, cousin to the Reformation’s other pillar, Lutheranism, is a bit less dour than its critics claim: it offers a rock-steady deity who orchestrates absolutely everything, including illness (or home foreclosure!), by a logic we may not understand but don’t have to second-guess. Our satisfaction — and our purpose — is fulfilled simply by “glorifying” him. In the 1700s, Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards invested Calvinism with a rapturous near mysticism. Yet it was soon overtaken in the U.S. by movements like Methodism that were more impressed with human will. Calvinist-descended liberal bodies like the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) discovered other emphases, while Evangelicalism’s loss of appetite for rigid doctrine — and the triumph of that friendly, fuzzy Jesus — seemed to relegate hard-core Reformed preaching (Reformed operates as a loose synonym for Calvinist) to a few crotchety Southern churches.
No more. Neo-Calvinist ministers and authors don’t operate quite on a Rick Warren scale. But, notes Ted Olsen, a managing editor at Christianity Today, “everyone knows where the energy and the passion are in the Evangelical world” — with the pioneering new-Calvinist John Piper of Minneapolis, Seattle’s pugnacious Mark Driscoll and Albert Mohler, head of the Southern Seminary of the huge Southern Baptist Convention. The Calvinist-flavored ESV Study Bible sold out its first printing, and Reformed blogs like Between Two Worlds are among cyber-Christendom’s hottest links.
Like the Calvinists, more moderate Evangelicals are exploring cures for the movement’s doctrinal drift, but can’t offer the same blanket assurance. “A lot of young people grew up in a culture of brokenness, divorce, drugs or sexual temptation,” says Collin Hansen, author of Young, Restless, Reformed: A Journalist’s Journey with the New Calvinists. “They have plenty of friends: what they need is a God.” Mohler says, “The moment someone begins to define God’s [being or actions] biblically, that person is drawn to conclusions that are traditionally classified as Calvinist.” Of course, that presumption of inevitability has drawn accusations of arrogance and divisiveness since Calvin’s time. Indeed, some of today’s enthusiasts imply that non-Calvinists may actually not be Christians. Skirmishes among the Southern Baptists (who have a competing non-Calvinist camp) and online “flame wars” bode badly.
Calvin’s 500th birthday will be this July. It will be interesting to see whether Calvin’s latest legacy will be classic Protestant backbiting or whether, during these hard times, more Christians searching for security will submit their wills to the austerely demanding God of their country’s infancy. http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1884779_1884782_1884760,00.html
Here is another way people have decided to “pickle in “His” presence”…
Accodring to the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship website:
Soaking Prayer
Soaking is intimate time spent with Jesus. It’s you and I enjoying just being with Him. It’s about returning to our first love. There’s a deep need in every one of us to be close to God. Experiencing God is something to be sought after. While we base our theology on God’s Word, our experiences with God make it all come alive. The Bible is a book of experiences of men and women of God throughout history, whose lives were changed through divine encounter. Your life will be changed as you encounter Him.
How do you ‘soak’?
It’s about resting His presence, so a good idea is to put on a worship CD, and sit or lie down so you are at rest, and let the Holy Spirit come and minister to you. Pray simple prayers like “I open my heart to you Father, come and say what you want to speak to me, and refresh me with your Holy Spirit” Give all your concerns and cares to him, and let your Heavenly Father fill you with peace and joy. It’s not about striving in prayer, but instead resting. The longer you spend in His presence the more you will receive from Him, so take more than 15 minutes at a time. John and Carol Arnott regularly rest in God’s presence for hours at a time.
Soaking Prayer Centers
Here at Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship (TACF) we want to equip you. Our desire is to build strong lasting relationships with you. Through a Soaking Prayer Center you will experience greater outpouring of God’s love in your life, and will be equipped to help others.
At TACF we believe God is giving us a vision to see people soaking in the wonderful, life-changing presence of the Holy Spirit all over the world, in what we call on our TV show ‘Catch the Fire Soaking Prayer Centers’. We’re hearing amazing testimonies of people receiving healing from life’s hurts, more passion for God, even healed relationships after gathering together to spend time soaking. Now we believe that God would have us model this as part of our evening meetings at TACF.
Much better than anything Todd ever produced and possibly could start a new revival if they would just have a reunion tour in Florida. Now that I would travel for! Bam!
I found this still posted on the freshfire website. A sad reminder of what can happen so quickly to anyone. It is sad that the “writing on the wall” is there. It states that Todd was constrained by the Holy Spirit. I would have to question that in light of the recent seperation. Read the following from the description about the conference that to place back in May… its almost haunting.
Florida Outpouring Comes to Awake Deborah Women’s Conference!
Awake Deborah begins next week! What perfect timing—because the outpouring in Lakeland, Florida will continue simultaneously. Soon it will go into its second glorious month—the glory and revival in Lakeland is only increasing!
What’s more, Shonnah Bentley, who’s been in Florida for the last three weeks, will come to this first ever women’s conference to impart and bring the glory straight to you! She will be laying hands on everyone! Although Todd is constrained by the Holy Spirit to remain in Florida to impart every evening to the thousands there, you won’t want to miss out on receiving the impartation that Shonnah will bring with her!!… Awake Deborah is going to be a powerful time of impartation, personal ministry, healing and, with so many prophetic people, there will be lots of prophesying and supernatural stuff!… We are truly seeing the ‘restoration of all things’ and know that this women’s conference is a step in that direction. We are going after what we’ve seen in the spirit—women awakened into their destiny!! http://www.freshfire.ca/index.php?Id=&Act=show_event_details&event=264
Here is another interesting and sobering fact. Notice how every speaker at this conference claims to ”move powerfully in the prophetic” yet none of them could see the oncoming devestation that would be caused by the disfunctions within the Bentley home. Seems “Deborah” was still asleep even after this conference.
Stacey Campbell
Stacey Campbell has been moving powerfully in the prophetic gifting since 1987, when the Holy Spirit fell on her church bringing renewal. She is a radical prophetess, both accurate and cutting edge in style. Stacey has received radical visions & words for nations, churches, & the upcoming revival generation.
Patricia King
Patricia King is a passionate, prophetic personality who is the host of Extreme Prophetic Television. She has had over 25 years of background as a Christian minister in conference speaking, prophetic service, church leadership, and television & radio appearances.
Jerame Nelson
Jerame Nelson is the founder of Living at His Feet Ministries. Jerame is a prophetic revivalist with a passion to see the kingdom of God manifested in the earth today. It’s his belief that through Intimacy with God, and obedience to his voice, we will see the manifestation of God’s Glory. Jerame travels around the US and the Nations full time, teaching and preaching on Intimacy with God, as well as healing and the Prophetic.
Kira Mitchell
Kira Mitchell is the founder of Unquenchable Ministries. She operates in a strong prophetic anointing and moves in power evangelism which releases God’s glory and power. Kira interned under Evangelist, Todd Bentley, and is now an associate of Fresh Fire Ministries.
Shonnah Bentley
Shonnah Bentley is prophetic, and she moves in compassion to see the broken-hearted healed and restored as she travels and ministers around the world with her husband, Todd Bentley.
Divisive evangelist resigns from leadership position
Bentley had recently separated from his wife Shonnah, who has returned to Canada with their three children. The board said the Bentleys were going through the “necessary steps towards restoration and wholeness.”
The announcement about Todd Bentley, a 32-year-old Gibsons native, came Friday from the ministry’s board of directors.
An Abbotsford-based faith healer who has polarized North American evangelicals has agreed to step down as the head of Fresh Fire Ministries after it was discovered he had an “unhealthy relationship on an emotional level” with a female staff member.
