I'm dissapointed that this thread has simply become an extension of another. The article is really not about this, but about what people expect God to do for them, and how others take advantage of this expectation.
daniel-p
JoinedPosts by daniel-p
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Mammon from heaven: The prosperity gospel in recession
by daniel-p inbrother philip is one of the great young men of this ministry, the bishop explained, still shuffling the business cards.
im asking you to do something right now.
he asked the congregation.
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9
Mammon from heaven: The prosperity gospel in recession
by daniel-p inbrother philip is one of the great young men of this ministry, the bishop explained, still shuffling the business cards.
im asking you to do something right now.
he asked the congregation.
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daniel-p
[Did you actually read the article, leaving? If you did, you are one fast reader!]
Keep seeking first the Kingdom, and all of these other things will be added to you.
This is one of the most ridiculous statement in the Bible, and very convenient for pure capitalists, because if you have wealth, God must be blessing you! Hail the holy dollar!
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9
Mammon from heaven: The prosperity gospel in recession
by daniel-p inbrother philip is one of the great young men of this ministry, the bishop explained, still shuffling the business cards.
im asking you to do something right now.
he asked the congregation.
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daniel-p
Mammon from heaven: The prosperity gospel in recession
By Benjamin Anastas in Harper's Magazine, March 2010
The Prophet’s House in Duluth, Georgia, sits on a shelf high above the sprawl of Peachtree Industrial Boulevard, in a building that used to house a Meineke Car Care Center. success lives here, reads a message on one of the twin water towers flanking nearby Highway 85. gwinnett is great , reads the other, a sentiment more often reserved for God. The church, with its newly minted signage, bare reception area, and unfinished sanctuary, feels like a breakout of the Holy Ghost in progress. The PA system is too powerful for the room, the praise and worship band—at least when I heard them on Palm Sunday last year—was out of depth and out of tune, and the camcorder streaming this “Special Prophetic Miracle Encounter” with Bishop Thomas Weeks III live on the Web was operated by a boy who couldn’t have been older than ten. Dressed in a jacket, tie, and loafers, an open laptop on his knees, the boy grew less and less engaged with his ministry task as the nearly three-hour service wore on. By eight o’clock, his nose was deep in a schoolbook while the service simulcast itself. Another boy around the same age stood on a chair in the back to keep a floodlight trained on the Prophet as he labored to work up his modest, mostly African-American flock.
It was Weeks’s third service that Sunday, not counting his daily 5:00 a.m. prayer meeting. Still on probation for assaulting his ex-wife, the Prophetess Juanita Bynum, in a hotel parking lot near Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport in 2007, and recently evicted from his Global Destiny Ministries compound, also in Duluth, for failure to pay $400,000 in back rent and fees, Weeks had been on a mission to rehabilitate himself, in part by being the hardest working Man of God in Atlanta. 1 1. After promoting his search for a new wife in a reality-TV-style series for the Internet called Who Will Be the Next Mrs. Weeks?, last October Weeks wed Christina Glenn, an evangelist based in North carolina. Suggested “love token” for their nuptials: $100.
“If I told you that you had a two-thousand-dollar—” Weeks stopped and corrected himself—“a two-thousand-year historical vestment inside of your life, do you think you would miss that?”
There were a few murmurs from the seats, but his appeal for the most part fell flat. Weeks has never been considered a particularly gifted preacher by the standards of the black Pentecostal church, despite a brush with Christian celebrity that began with his televised “Wedding of the Century” to Bynum in 2003, which was carried on the Trinity Broadcasting Network and later sold on DVD. After their storybook wedding in the grand ballroom of the now-defunct Regent Wall Street Hotel (thirty groomsmen, thirty bridesmaids, 15,000 orchids flown in from Thailand), the prophetic couple moved their ministry from Washington, D.C., to Atlanta, where they founded Global Destiny and leased a $2.5-million, six-bedroom house on a golf course.
Weeks’s shortcomings at the pulpit were very much on display that night: he shouts into the microphones at odd moments, whispers too softly when he tries to take the mood down, and often lapses into a pretentious diction that makes his resemblance to the character of Carlton from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (down to his trademark three-piece suit and bow tie) almost tragic.
“If I told you that there was a trust set up for you two thousand years ago that had endless supply,” Weeks said, “would you act like you were broke?”
“No!” a few people answered.
“I can hear you!” someone yelled.
“Bless the Lord,” someone else called back.
“If you don’t know what a trust is,” Weeks continued, “a trust is an amount of money set aside for an eternal or a working purpose reset to set itself between fifty-five and one hundred and ten years.” The energy in the sanctuary faded. “That is a legal document that says it cannot be touched unless the trustee of the trust authorizes it to go any other place.” Someone clapped and the murmurs rose again. “Which means it calculates, it reproduces after its own kind. It pools the factors of its resources from worldwide areas. I don’t even have time to go into it. . . . God says I put a trust together called inheritance. And I put it in every believer.”
When the moment came to share his Global Entrepreneurial Anointing, Weeks carried a vessel filled with oil to the podium and picked up a business-card holder. One of the keyboard players in the worship band set a romantic mood. “I’m going to anoint you tonight,” Weeks said softly, “that the eyes of your understanding will be enlightened.” He started shuffling through a stack of blank business cards. “Do you not know that there is going to be wealth around this room like never before?”
“Glory!” a woman called out.
“Amen!” someone else answered.
“Brother Philip,” the Bishop said, “stand up.” Brother Philip did as Weeks asked. “Brother Philip is one of the great young men of this ministry,” the Bishop explained, still shuffling the business cards. “Some of you that need your carpet cleaned? You know, the children act up, other things were messed up? I trust this man. And today, Philip, I want to be able to say to you that your business is going to take off like never before.” The room erupted in applause for Philip’s good fortune, drowning out the soundtrack for a moment. “You clean the floor of the Prophet’s House. And you serve the prophetic spirit of this house. May the Lord give you for every foot that trampled in and out, may he return it back to you with open doors in your life.”
Over the backing of his keyboard player, Weeks revealed the nature of the miracle to be manifested. “There is an unusual anointing blessed upon my life in 2009,” Weeks murmured. “Somebody say ‘unusual.’”
“Unusual!”
“God has spoken to me and said there is a Global Entrepreneurial Anointing in this house. I didn’t say local—I said global. Somebody say ‘amen.’”
“Amen!”
The Bishop directed us to form a line in the aisle and come to the front to receive his blessing. He took a drop of oil from the vessel and anointed one of the blank cards. When the first person reached the podium, he handed him a card and blessed him. Weeks said that we could activate the anointing by touching the spot of oil on the card, and that when we had returned to our seats, he wanted us to do two things. First, on the front of the card, he told us to write down our dream job or the enterprise we hoped to get involved in by the end of this calendar year. On the other side, the Bishop instructed us to write down how much money we wanted to make in each of the next ten years.
I joined the line and waited to take a card from Weeks’s hand. The organ and percussion began to play along with the keyboard; it felt like the entire room was on hold with a credit-card company. When my turn came, the Bishop barely looked up from his vessel and his stack of business cards. I took my card from him, holding it by the oil spot to activate the anointing, and started walking away toward the aisle.
“Tap that man right there,” the Bishop said behind me. A woman stepped in the aisle and touched my wrist. I turned around.
“Do you have any family that’s in missionary work right now?” Weeks asked me from the podium.
“No, I don’t, sir,” I said.
The Bishop was temporarily thrown. “You don’t have any? Do you have any family that’s overseas?”
At this point it felt easier to lie. “Uh, yes I do,” I told him.
“Is there any family,” the Bishop asked, “that’s overseas that used to deal with the continent of Africa?”
My cheeks began to burn. The worship band kept playing its soundtrack for the Miracle Encounter. “No, sir,” I said.
The Bishop was unfazed. “There’s something that’s about to happen for a family member,” he pronounced, “that’s getting ready to do some work international. It may not be in Africa, but it’s going to be around African positions or corporate matters and intensities. But the Lord says there’s something that’s been done with missions or has been a call or a cause around your family. I don’t know what cause your family has picked up, but it’s a major cause and it’s going to reach continents and continue to flourish.” Then he finished: “And the Word of the Lord to you that you have great connections to them and you continue to have the passion to make sure it doesn’t stop. For whatever reason, the Lord stopped this service to let you know that.”
Back at my seat, an African-American woman in the row in front of me caught my eye. She was small and thin, with straightened hair a few weeks past the style’s expiration. She carried her Bible in a nylon case with a handle, zipper, and a pocket for storing pens. I watched as she used one of the pens to fill out her ten-year projection. I couldn’t make out what her dream profession was, but it must have been something special. By year ten of her financial plan, she would be making $650,000,000.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and Mammon.” Jesus slept in animal stalls and lived off the charity of women. He left the world with no possessions, and he cared especially for the least among us and the “poor in spirit.” His only act of violence in the Gospels occurs when he overturns the tables of the moneychangers and drives them out of Herod’s temple in Jerusalem. “My house shall be called a house of prayer,” He said. “But you have made it a den of thieves.”
In America—and, increasingly, around the world—an alternative gospel has emerged, one in which Jesus was a small businessman and entrepreneur, his disciples were men of relative wealth, and when the Son of Man traveled, he didn’t go coach. This theology is known as the “prosperity gospel,” and among its most common tenets is the belief that God wants His children to enjoy health, happiness, and wealth now and not as an eternal reward in Heaven.
The gospel of wealth in American religious life dates to the late 1800s, when the Robber Barons sought to reconcile their industrial fortunes with a Bible that warned against the pursuit of wealth. One of the most prominent exemplars of this new creed was Russell H. Conwell, a Baptist minister from Massachusetts and author of the best-selling inspirational tract “Acres of Diamonds”—originally a speech that he delivered in churches, social clubs, and meeting halls across the country. Conwell had a vision of the Gospel in which to “honestly attain unto riches” was nothing less than a godly duty for any Christian American. “Money printed your Bible,” Conwell wrote, “money builds your churches, money sends your missionaries, and money pays your preachers.”
During the economic boom that followed World War II, the prosperity gospel was embraced by the prophets of the Holy Spirit, particularly two giants of the Pentecostal tradition: Kenneth E. Hagin, father of the Word of Faith movement 2 2. The evangelist E. W. Kenyon (1867-1948) developed the Word of Faith theological principle known as “positive confession,” which holds that whatever promises you find in Scripture and “confess” to God, you can have. and founder of the RHEMA Bible Training Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma; and Oral Roberts, the pioneering media evangelist and founder of Oral Roberts University. The white Pentecostals of the Dust Bowl era had been among America’s poorest people. After the war, though, they gained a foothold on the American dream: houses, cars, leisure time. The uncompromising Pentecostal faith—based in firsthand encounters with the “gifts of the spirit,” such as speaking in tongues, healing, and prophecy—adapted itself to this new influx of money and opportunity. In the popular telling, Oral Roberts claimed he felt the divine hand of guidance one day in the late 1940s when his Bible miraculously opened to a passage from 3 John: “Beloved, I pray that you may prosper in all things and be in health, just as your soul prospers.” Roberts used this scriptural insight to boil the joyful news of the Gospel down to a simple promise: Something good is going to happen to you.
Roberts’s most enduring theological principle, and his greatest innovation as an evangelist and religious entrepreneur, was the “seed-faith” gospel. Inspired by Napoleon Hill’s 1937 handbook, Think and Grow Rich, Roberts transformed the Parable of the Sower, which for Jesus was a metaphor for the abundance of faith, into a miracle investment opportunity for believers. If they planted a “seed” in “good ground,” they were guaranteed an exponential return: “some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.” Seed-faith theology sanctified the human desire for wealth by converting it into a tithe or an offering to Roberts’s ministry. Versions of the seed-faith gospel are still extant in many of the largest media ministries. Whether it’s Joel Osteen’s promise of a more “abundant” life or T. D. Jakes’s coaching his followers on how to “reposition” themselves to find success, the underlying message is clear: The more freely you give, the more generously you will receive.
In Atlanta, the prosperity gospel has found particularly fertile ground. There are more than fifty churches within the metropolitan Atlanta area with an average attendance of at least two thousand people, the highest concentration of megachurches per capita of any major city in America. The worshippers tend to be younger, more educated, and more affluent than those in the conventional churches. More importantly, Atlanta is a city in the thrall of outsized success: from corporate giants like Coca-Cola, CNN, and Home Depot, to self-made entrepreneurs like Tyler Perry, who in 2008 built a 200,000-square-foot studio complex there, examples of outsized success writ large are the local norm. Although its homegrown epic may still be Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (at least for the sentimental few), Tom Wolfe’s A Man in Full more accurately reflects Atlanta’s contemporary values. As Charlie Croker—the flailing, overreaching real estate developer at the center of the novel—puts it: “This is Atlanta—where your ‘honor’ is the things you possess.” In Atlanta, the rise of the prosperity gospel has meant that the things you possess can also be a measure of your godliness.
Creflo Dollar’s World Changers Church International is hidden behind a wall of cypress trees in a blighted section of metropolitan Atlanta. The grounds contain the 8,500-seat World Dome, a mini-mall converted into administrative offices, a small Christian academy, and warehouses and loading docks for Creflo Dollar Ministries. From the first moment you pull into the parking lot, waved into your spot by attendants in orange vests, to the last brisk “Have a blessed day!” delivered by the cashiers in the church bookstore, a volunteer or a security guard is always on hand to keep you moving.
Dollar is an Atlanta-area native who turned to the ministry after an injury cut his college football career short. Raised a Baptist and ordained a minister in college, Dollar worked as a teacher and educational therapist until 1986, when he founded World Changers in a school cafeteria. He was converted to Word of Faith teachings after attending conferences and listening to motivational tapes produced by Kenneth Copeland, the current leader of the movement and a polarizing figure for his ministry’s financial excesses (one of Copeland’s favorite catchphrases is “Money is for spending”). 3 3. Kenneth Copeland Ministries is headquartered in Newark, Texas in a compound with its own airstrip and that houses four ministry-owned airplanes, including a $20 million Cessna Citation X. Dollar refers to Copeland as his spiritual “Dad,” and often quotes him in his sermons.
World Changers grew dramatically in the 1990s, turning Dollar into a national figure. His “Changing Your World” TV broadcasts are currently seen in all fifty states and in more than 150 countries. Dollar oversees a multi-platform ministry empire with help from Taffi Dollar, his wife of twenty-three years, a co-pastor of World Changers, and C.E.O. of Arrow Records, their music label. He travels in his ministry’s jet to New York most weeks of the year for services at large venues such as the WaMu Theater at Madison Square Garden or the Manhattan Center. In 2006, World Changers took in $69 million in donations and sales revenue.
There are no images of Jesus at World Changers and no crosses. Instead, a globe with a Bible on it decorates the altar in the World Dome, along with the church motto, a line from Proverbs, glowing from within: in all thy getting, get understanding . Dollar has the controlled and slightly elevated bearing of a teacher—his broadcasts rarely veer from Scripture for long, and he often paces the stage holding an oversized Bible open in his hands. With his close-cropped hair, conservative (at least within the gaudy sartorial realm of televangelists) suits, and sometimes blunt speaking style, Dollar comes across like a football coach who also teaches social studies.
“I could turn General Motors around in five minutes,” Dollar boasted to a nearly full house the first Sunday I visited the Dome. “But they don’t wanna listen to me!”
He came down the carpeted steps from the podium to share his bailout homily with the front rows, tracked by at least two cameras projecting his image onto twin jumbotrons.
“How do you turn a failing car company around?” Dollar asked. “You take serial number 00001, the first car that comes out for that year, you find you some anointed people, and you say, ‘Here. I’m gonna sow this first car so I can have the blessing on the rest of them.’ If the first fruit is holy, then the lump gonna be holy.” Applause rippled in the cavernous space. “But see, they too scared to do that.”
Having followed Dollar’s broadcasts since 2006, when I first saw him preach in person at a Pentecostal convention, I was surprised by his volatility that Sunday morning. Something was roiling in him. The service had begun with a rousing bit about the Shirley Caesar gospel classic “Hold My Mule” that had some of the older women in the church running and shouting in the aisles.
“Your praise will steel the avenger!” Dollar had hollered. “Your praise will stop the Devil! Your praise will paralyze your enemy!” But as the morning’s service passed the thirty-minute mark, Dollar turned on the congregation. He asked them to pledge their belief in God’s word with a show of hands, then questioned their faith. “Your belief ain’t nothing but lip service,” Dollar said. “You gotta show more than your hands.”
Dollar’s sermon that morning was “How to Recession-Proof Your Life.” The message, like his plan to turn around GM, was steeped in “positive confession,” the primary vehicle of Word of Faith theology. “I believe,” the formula goes, “I receive.” It is also known as the gospel of “name it and claim it.” God sent Christ to suffer and die for our sins, this theology holds, so all that is required to tap into God’s “endless supply” is to ask for what we want—but in the right way. It’s all a matter of “positioning,” or living right according to the principles of the Bible.
“We love reminding God about His part,” Dollar said. “We get selective amnesia when it comes to our part.” Dollar seemed to be confronting a flock with the habits of a losing team. They had allowed themselves to drift out of position on the playing field of the economy, and he would drill them until they got it right.
“They fired me ’cause they didn’t like me,” Dollar complained in a minstrel voice, yanking on his belt as if he couldn’t keep his pants up, and shuffling onstage. “They fired me ’cause they didn’t like black people. They fired me because they prejudiced.” He shifted back into his own persona. “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” he scolded. “When you’re good at what you do, don’t nobody care what color you are, they don’t care where you came from, and they don’t care about your accent.”
The crowd clapped their approval of the message, but Dollar hardly paused to soak it in. He began to blink with rage.
“Chief executive officers are concerned about the bottom line,” he said. “When you do what you’re supposed to do to enhance that bottom line and to make them better, and you got answers, and you make it easy, they will pay you.”
It was a disquieting moment, but rather than circling back and softening his tone, Dollar continued his jeremiad: “People get tired of paying money to sorry, complaining, murmuring, don’t-ever-want-to-work people, so they go out and find somebody else who don’t mind doing the job you complained about.”
Dollar dialed down the wrath toward the end of the service, when church volunteers began distributing white collection envelopes. He descended from the stage and faced his congregation. “Aren’t you ready to enter the glory of God, to see the power of God manifested in your lives?” he asked. “I mean real results.” A pianist accompanied him in soft tones. “He’s ready to do that for you,” Dollar said. “I’m asking you to do something right now. If you believe what I preached, and you believe what you read in the Bible, then take your money and sow to the words that you just heard.”
It seemed as if all 8,500 hands held white envelopes aloft, many of them with credit-card numbers written on the outside. While the tithes and offerings were collected in white plastic buckets by the team of ushers, Dollar opened up the altar to anyone who wasn’t saved. “This is an opportunity of a lifetime,” he said earnestly. “In fact, this decision is going to determine what’s going to happen with your life.”
There is hardly any talking after church at World Changers, just a tide of people rolling out the doors toward the parking lot. Later, as I waited in the vestibule for the freshly burned DVDs of the service to be delivered for sale, I watched a swarm of ushers in black suits spray the bank of doors at the entrance with glass cleaner.
The prosperity gospel can be an unforgiving theology even in the best of times. In theory, the “covenant” entered into by believers in positive confession binds God to deliver and make manifest the exact substance, item by item, of the words spoken to Him in confession. But in practice there are no guarantees. If you are afraid of losing your job and you pray, “I am of God, and have overcome Satan. For greater is He that is in me than he that is in the world,” the pink slip still might come. If you’re behind on your mortgage and pray, “There is no lack, for my God supplies all my needs according to His riches in glory by Christ Jesus,” you may still lose your home.
The problem is not God. He is blameless; He is the Perfect Father. The problem is you. There must be an unexamined sin in your life that you haven’t dealt with. You need to love God with more faith and more urgency. You need to dig deeper, inflict more pain, when you tithe and sow a seed.
I spoke to Dr. John Avant, an author and Baptist minister, about the personal cost of such a high-wire faith. For eight years Avant was pastor of New Hope Baptist Church in Fayetteville, a suburb of Atlanta. During that time, Avant estimates that he helped minister to more than a hundred former members of prosperity churches in Atlanta, most of them African Americans. “We found a lot of deep disappointment bordering on despair,” Avant told me. “People had been taught that if they gave money, they would be rich. But when they had a need themselves, they were abandoned. When they came to us, they were at the end of their faith.”
Reverend Raphael G. Warnock of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King Jr. was co-pastor from 1960 until his death, sees another pitfall to the gospel of wealth. One of the most important values of the African-American church in particular, Warnock said, is the traditional emphasis on the “total liberation of the whole community,” not just that of individuals. “Part of the message of the Biblical prophets is systemic criticism,” he said. “They aren’t just speaking to individual concerns, individual sin, or individual aspirations.” Such messages are conspicuously absent in the prosperity gospel.
Complaints in Atlanta about the complicity between the church and the machinery of economic growth are longstanding. W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1903 essay “The Wings of Atalanta” is almost prophetic in its vision:
In the Black World, the Preacher and Teacher embodied once the ideals of this people,—the strife for another and a juster world . . . to-day the danger is that these ideals, with their simple beauty and weird inspiration, will suddenly sink to a question of cash and a lust for gold. Here stands this black young Atalanta, girding herself for the race that must be run; and if her eyes be still toward the hills and sky as in the days of old, then we may look for noble running; but what if some ruthless or wily or even thoughtless Hippomenes lay golden apples before her? What if the Negro people be wooed from a strife for righteousness, from a love of knowing, to regard dollars as the be-all and end-all of life?
It was 7:45 on Easter morning and Nuttin’ But Stringz, two brothers from New York City who combine hip-hop beats and violin, had already started their set inside the packed cathedral at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Lithonia, a suburb of gated mansions, horse barns, and rolling stone walls southeast of Atlanta. Along with nearby Stone Mountain and parts of Decatur, Lithonia is one of the wealthiest predominantly African-American communities in the country. Driving in the Easter-morning SUV traffic to the New Birth complex, with its massive cathedral building, corporate-style offices, playing fields, college-size health-and-fitness center, and acres of parking lot, I was reminded of John 14:2: “In my Father’s house are many mansions.”
Easter at New Birth is an event. For the past sixteen years, Bishop Eddie Long, the leader of the church, has hosted a resurrection blowout at the Georgia Dome (home to the NFL’s Atlanta Falcons) for as many as 40,000 people, with appearances by such celebrities as Jennifer Hudson, Patti LaBelle, and the rapper T.I. The week before the holiday, however, Long had announced that this year New Birth would hold Easter services at its home cathedral. Church revenues had dropped by 20 percent, and Long had decided that the $200,000 needed to produce the service in the Georgia Dome could be better spent elsewhere.
New Birth is sometimes derided as “Club New Birth” because of its informal worship style and the jewelry, sunglasses, and nightclub-ready fashions of its congregants. But for Easter a different mood prevailed: a giant wooden cross with a bloodstained shroud draped on it stood near the entrance.
Long is a bodybuilder, and he often wears muscle shirts under his custom vestments and three-quarter-length suit jackets. Like Creflo Dollar, Long believes that Jesus was rich, and he also preaches the hundredfold return—but the similarities end there. To Long, the “guilt trips” of the church are part of what’s kept Christians—specifically, African-American Christians—down. Dressing right, speaking right, and acting right are not the way to godliness and wealth; “taking authority” is, and that begins with accepting an exalted lineage that goes back to the cross.
“I’m speaking to you in a time of recession,” Bishop Long said at the opening of his sermon. He was wearing a bright white suit—it was almost blinding under the klieg lights—with a tight black shirt underneath. The stage was crowded with senior ministry staff and visiting dignitaries seated in regal chairs. Elder Vanessa Long, Long’s wife since 1990, sat in the front row. Behind them, an enormous choir dressed in multicolored shirts curled around the stage. “I’m speaking to you at a time,” Long went on, “when everybody is talking down. But the saints of God are talking up!”
Long’s message that morning was entitled “Vision in Hard Times.” I had been eager to hear how Long would weave the recession into his usual message of uplift, but he started with a defense of himself. “You know what the good thing about family is?” he asked the congregation. “In the world you gotta act like this, do like this. But when you come home, you supposed to be able to chill. When I go home I don’t go hollering to my wife, ‘God bless you, hallelujah, praise the Lord!’” Laughter spread through the cathedral. “I’m home! I’m running around butt naked, all that stuff. This is who I am! I work too hard to come home and try to pretend.”
If there was a point to Long’s joke, it was this: “What we need,” he said, “is a naked church. In the spirit.” Part of being “naked,” he said, was realizing that you were born for a reason. “You are not an accident!” Long insisted, his voice dropping into a growl. “You are not junk! When God released you, he released you with a divine purpose for your generation! And you shall accomplish what God ordained for you to do!”
The message was just reaching its crescendo when I noticed a man in a beige suit coming up the aisle in my direction. He was wearing the telltale earpiece of security. He stopped at my seat, glanced at the voice recorder in my lap, and said, “I need you to step out.”
I told him I was a journalist, and that I had permission from Long’s PR director to be there, which was true.
He leaned in closer and repeated, “I need you to step out.”
I stepped out. In the corridor, I explained myself again. Another member of the security team made a call on his cell phone. When the word came back that my story checked out they both apologized, but by the time I got back inside the service was practically over. That was fine, though. Elder Prude was expecting me.
Elder Wallace Prude’s office is above the cathedral, in a warren of staircases, hallways, and darkened cubicles. Prude is a trim, good-looking man, and he was dressed in a pin-striped suit so neatly pressed it might never have been worn before. He is the senior director of Pastoral Services at New Birth, a position that puts him in charge of the church’s extensive network of social services, which includes ministries that offer counseling, burial assistance (“home-goings”), medical care, employment placement, food vouchers, and outreach to the homeless. I decided to ask Prude how many people in the church were facing foreclosure.
“A lot,” he told me. “A good seven hundred people. Maybe eight. It could be more than that.”
To help them, the church had a longstanding ministry structure in place. It began with the Empowerment ministry, which processed forty to fifty applications for practical assistance every week, everything from credit counseling to help finding a job. Elder Prude estimated that at least ten applications per week were coming in from people who were facing foreclosure. Once the application was evaluated, the church called on its ministry resources and church members with expertise to help resolve the crisis. If the applicant had lost a job, they referred him or her to their ministry for employment assistance (“Kingdom Career Connections”) and tried to match the applicant with an opening in their jobs database. If a church member needed help negotiating with a lender to stay in his home, he was referred to the Stewardship ministry, and a real estate professional from the church could step in. If a member had any underlying medical or mental-health issues related to the crisis, he was referred to the Health Services ministry.
I asked Elder Prude if, in better times, they had helped church members who had wanted to buy a home, maybe for the first time; or, if the member had had credit trouble, to navigate a mortgage industry that had at times preyed on just that kind of borrower.
“Oh, yes,” Elder Prude said. “People perish because of lack of knowledge.”
Prude told me that New Birth also held regular Tuesday night “Empowerment meetings” on buying homes and keeping budgets, and that they had called on the same team of professionals for mentorship. “It all comes back to empowerment.”
This kind of ministerial service is often cited as a benefit of the gospel of wealth. It provides the newly prosperous (or those who’d like to be) with the practical skills to handle money, and the confidence that God will help them raise their credit scores. There is a different way of understanding it, of course—one in which the church aids and abets a finance industry that is leading the believers down a prim-rose path that ends in economic ruin.
It was a raw and rainy morning in Atlanta when I returned to the World Dome for the opening session of the 2009 Financial Empowerment Conference. All week, Dollar and a roster of special guests, including the evangelist Dr. Nasir Siddiki, a Muslim convert to Christianity who teaches “biblical wisdom principles for success,” would be sharing the secrets of how to tap into God’s “unlimited resources” and unleash “supernatural debt cancellation” along with a host of other financial miracles.
“Regardless of the media reports,” a line on the pamphlet for the conference read, “Believers are not subject to the recession.”
Dollar opened the morning session with a prayer. “Thank you so much, God, for this, another opportunity to minister to your precious sheep,” he said. “Let this week of meetings be so revolutionary that it revolutionizes our finances. While we’re here in these sessions, I declare angels will be released to cause supernatural happenings in our finances. Lord, we believe you. We trust you. And we expect mighty things.”
Dollar lectured for an hour and a half on the connection between obedience and receiving God’s riches. But the usual power was missing from his voice. Unlike on the Sunday I’d visited the Dome, when he’d held the audience rapt, I saw people staring into space and shifting in their seats. Dollar still knew how to work up the crowd with a well-placed line (“I feel like money tryin’ to find me,” he said. “I’m in here mindin’ my business and money tryin’ to find me right now!”), but for the most part, the spirit of the morning was markedly downbeat. Even his humor was. Toward the end of the session, Dollar had some trouble finding a passage in Genesis and he paused to flip through the pages of his Bible.
“If y’all don’t mind,” he said, “I really need to finish this. So I’ll take you about five minutes over. But don’t—” he got distracted and cut himself off. “Well, we’ll just finish this next year. There might not be no next year! I sure hope not, I hope Jesus comes next week. Next hour. I wouldn’t mind if He came in the next five minutes. ’Cause I’m ready to go. If Jesus came right now, I’m like, ‘Woo, I’m so glad you came!’”
The crowd laughed along with his gallows humor. “Now don’t nobody write letters, ‘Oh, Pastor sound suicidal.’ I had a meeting this morning, my briefing, and they say, ‘Well, some guy need to talk to you ’cause he’s been having suicidal thoughts.’ I said, ‘Everybody’s been havin’ suicidal thoughts.’ Just as long as you don’t digest it, you know? It ain’t a bad thing for us both trying to get to Heaven!” He reveled in the laughter. “But you need to hang on in here till Jesus takes you out properly,” he said. “Don’t go blowing your head off and endin’ up in Heaven needing to borrow heads. Hang on here and wait for the Rapture to come. You just can’t get impatient.”
That evening, when Dollar returned to the stage for the night session, the house was close to three-quarters full and the bounce was back in his step. I was sitting toward the rear of the church this time—seats had been harder to come by—and I had to watch him on the giant screens to either side of the stage.
“There is no genuine comfort without possessons,” Dollar said, launching into his teaching for the night. “It’s clear that the more means a man has, the more comfortable he becomes on this earth.” He revealed a few facts about Jesus’ finances: “The place where they had the Last Supper? That was a ballroom. That room was for rent, that wasn’t for free. You think they gonna let Jesus have a room for free?” He dispensed a little practical advice: “If you ain’t got enough money to pay your rent, then you need to take that money that you got and you need to sow it in the anointing so that anointing can assist you in getting what you need.” Then, near the end of the night, he shared a story about how a word from God had helped him find his calling in the ministry.
“I remember this very specifically. I said, ‘I ain’t gonna be no preacher!’ ‘Why?’ ‘Preachers ain’t got no money! I don’t know no preacher that got money. Every preacher I know broke ’cause he come to my house to eat chicken.’” He let the laughter go on for a little while. “I’ll never forget what I heard. ‘If you will abide by my words and my will,’” he said, his voice now taking on more gravity, “‘everything you ever desired in life is located in the will of God for you.’” The crowd let out a murmur. “I discovered that place was the place of my empowerment. The place where He gives the power to get wealth is that place of your passion, the place of your calling, the place of your equipping, the place of your gifting. Once you get there and realize . . . ‘Goodness. This is what I’m supposed to do.’”
Later that night, as the session drew to a close and the offering envelopes were raised in the air yet again, I found myself awestruck at the thought of the haul Dollar had coming in that week. Two sessions a day for five days, hundreds of envelopes in the morning, thousands more at night, every $5 bill worn from use, every check deducted from a balance that could barely cover it, every credit-card charge for amounts that would trigger over-limit fees—all of it given with the expectation that it would release angels over the earth with bottomless pots of gold. It was, I thought, divinely inspired. It was money in the bank.
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127
DO you follow any of these quacks, charlatans, liars, mystics or self-promoters?
by Terry indon't try to lie about it.
you accept some of these people as an authority.
you listen to them.
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daniel-p
Harper's Magazine had an excellent article a couple months ago on the "prosperity gospel". I will try to find it.
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101
All I can say about thr finale of "Lost" is...
by changeling inwtf???!!!.
they are all fucking dead!.
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daniel-p
So for those of you who spent 6 years watching this show, was it worth it? I've only seen the first quarter of the first episode and it just didn't grab me.
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85
From Pioneer to Professor: My Story
by laverite ini wanted to say hello.
i knew i was gay.
i wanted to study and learn about everything i could.
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daniel-p
Welcome! A PhD by 25 is impressive. I am also a first generation former college student from a strict JW upbringing, but spent 6 years in the troof trying to find my place before I returned to school. However, I have one question: when/how was your loss of faith? You explained the guilt you had over your sexuality and your love of learning, but when did you actually lose your faith?
-dp
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11
Don't get me wrong, I like Jesus
by stillin infont of wisdom, anti-corruption, moral type of man who stood up for his beliefs.. in today's watchtower study, the illustration of the weeds sown among the wheat was expounded upon.
it occurred to me that one thing that jesus never mentioned, but that any farmer/gardener would have thought of right away, was that leaving the weeds among the wheat would have, at best, diminished the quality of the harvest.
that's what weeds do.
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24
Does anyone here work out?
by XPeterX ini do since 2007,bulking 6'220 19yo can hit 300 in a few years.
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daniel-p
p90x
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72
Who Would You Like To See As President Of The USA In The Next Election?
by minimus inwill it be obama or someone else?.
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daniel-p
Ron Paul? Viability is the key here, and Ron Paul is about as viable as Sarah Palin.
And about the Fairtax... in general, I think it's a good idea, but given the latest chunk of generous tax credits most people would find their effective tax rate go up (to the Fairtax's 23%) rather than go down, and I think that will kill it.
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72
Who Would You Like To See As President Of The USA In The Next Election?
by minimus inwill it be obama or someone else?.
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daniel-p
I am not so sure - Obama has not been polling very well lately.
Polls can change in a day, and there are two and a half more years till 2012 elections, so I'd say that's irrelevant.