Alithis
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what is the general feeling about the Bethal church in redding ?
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Bethal church -opinions ?
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Alithis
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sorry bethel with an e
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I wouldn't touch anything from Bethel with a barge pole, and think Bill Johnson is a false teacher. I'll expand more on that when I'm on my laptop, my tablet doesn't lend itself to extended writing.
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OK, a few more thoughts on why I don't accept Bethel and would regard anything from Bethel with great suspicion.
Firstly, some personal experience. One couple I know went to the "Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry" and, when their church declined to fund it for them, they left the church completely, apparently unwilling to consider that maybe this wasn't God's calling on their life. The people who led the group that declined the funding included missionaries with many years of experience who were saying that the course they were talking about didn't seem well suited for what they said they believed their calling to be. Anyway, they found the funding and went to Bethel, at which point they went from "a bit fringe" to all-out weird. They started posting "testimonies" of people being healed almost daily, and the recurring theme was that the focus was always on "I found this man", "I spoke to him", "I laughed at his pain and it went away" and so on. It was more akin to a freak show where they did stranger and stranger things to see people healed. Another recurring theme was that they never mentioned whether the individual concerned accepted Jesus Christ as their savior.
Then when they returned they had a totally different vision to how they started. Their initial vision was a very specific ministry abroad (I'm not providing specific details so as not to inadvertently identify them) but when they returned their vision had changed completely, and involved little more than helping set up what was essentially a branch of Bethel near their home. So once again they were appealing for money, and by then the tone of their posts had shifted from "we'd really appreciate financial help if you could offer some" to "sow into our ministry and reap the rewards". They were also very clear that the wife would not be working because she was looking after their children, which was something of a slap in the face for all sorts of couples where the wife would dearly love to stop working but couldn't afford to. And the ever-more surreal stories of healings continued, with still no mention of giving glory to God or whether the person concerned was saved or not.
In other personal experience a church I attended for some months started using more and more Bethel material in their services, and things started getting more and more silly. They started misusing Scripture, and conventional praise and worship songs gradually got replaced with relentlessly repetitive music, often played on streamed videos. The last time I set foot in that church was when they played a video of what Bethel considers to be "worship", that troubled me so badly that after 10 minutes I walked out. That was the only time my wife has ever walked out of a church during the service in utter disgust. The only way I can describe the way I felt as I walked out was "contaminated". When I was asking the minister what had changed and why it concerned me he was somewhat responsive for a time but then announced that he wasn't willing to debate who was right or wrong. When I asked if he could show Biblical justification for what they were doing, or use Scripture to counter the Scriptural questions I was raising he shut down on me and refused to discuss it any further. This church had gotten involved in all sorts of things that sounded good but nobody could explain just what, if any, difference they made. They talked of breaking off curses all the time, even a prayer for healing of a cold was loaded with breaking off word curses and written curses. They truly appeared to believe in a silly "oh yes it is" / "oh no it isn't" world in which a curse could be broken off, reapplied, broken off, reapplied etc, and effectively all that would decide whether the curse was active or not was who spoke last. They believed that they could declare an alternative reality but couldn't pay their bills, they seemed to have a congregation who were permanently very needy. Certainly they showed few, if any, signs that God was blessing them and it was abundantly clear that their endless declarations and decrees were achieving nothing, yet they continued. Along the way they were adopting teachings from people who taught the exact opposite of what Scripture teaches.
That leads on to the teachings of the likes of Bill Johnson. I have a couple of his books - one that I bought before I knew anything about him and his church, and another that I bought in electronic form when it was massively discounted because I wanted to see if he was still teaching the same things. His teaching is very persuasive, it seems very much like a bait-and-switch where he leads the reader along a train of thought before concluding something that isn't actually a fair conclusion from the process he has been following. He makes some valid points (e.g. Christ is a title rather than a name - "Jesus Christ" effectively means "Jesus the Messiah") and then goes on to claim that we can have the same "Christ anointing". That section alone causes me great concern - when John wrote how to test the spirits (1Jn 4:1-3) he talked of spirits that confess that "Jesus Christ is come in the flesh". Since the demons acknowledged who Jesus was when he walked this earth as a flesh-and-blood human it clearly means something more than acknowledging that Jesus walked this earth as a man. If we look at Peter's revelation in Matt 16:16 it is clear - "you are the Christ, the Son of the living God" (emphasis mine). Teaching that we can have the same Christ anointing strays, as far as I can see, dangerously close to demoting Jesus to "you are a Christ, a son of the living God". Matching that to how John tells us to test the spirits is enough to make me seriously question whether Bill Johnson is promoting the spirit of Christ or the spirit of antichrist.
Johnson appears to have an issue with Biblical study. He makes some fair points (e.g. "Knowledge puffs up but love edifies") but seems to completely overlook Paul's calling to Timothy to "Study to show thyself approved unto God ... rightly dividing the word of truth" (2Ti 2:15). Yes, it takes faith to "go off the map" and follow God into the unknown. Yes, the OT names such as Abraham and Moses did just that, but they didn't have the benefit of 66 books of Scripture to guide them. Johnson doesn't cover how we should follow the Biblical call to "test all things" if we've "gone off the map" to avoid getting lost.
His teachings on dominion are also seriously strange. He teaches that God gave dominion to Adam, who gave it to Satan when he ate the forbidden fruit. Then Jesus came to take it back, and when Jesus was tempted by the devil what the devil was offering him was a shortcut to regain dominion over the earth. But this teaching also raises many questions - when Jesus encountered demons why would they have obeyed him? If they were the devil's servants doing the devil's bidding on the devil's earth why didn't they just tell Jesus to go pound sand? The fact they didn't suggests they couldn't, which starts to poke holes in the dominion teaching. It also raises questions over why the Psalms say "the earth is the Lord's and everything in it" if the devil actually had dominion over it.
Then there's the matter of the so-called "glory cloud" reported at Bethel and in other places that are very pro-Bethel. This is apparently a cloud of God's presence, but when compared to Biblical times when people encountered God there's something of a mismatch. Isaiah cried out "Woe is me for I am undone" (Is 6:5). Ezekiel fell on his face (Eze 1:28). John fell as if dead (Rev 1:17). At Bethel they hoot and holler and whip out their phones to video it. Something doesn't seem right there.
I'm thinking about a more substantial article about Bethel and Bill Johnson in particular, although for now that will have to suffice.
Firstly, some personal experience. One couple I know went to the "Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry" and, when their church declined to fund it for them, they left the church completely, apparently unwilling to consider that maybe this wasn't God's calling on their life. The people who led the group that declined the funding included missionaries with many years of experience who were saying that the course they were talking about didn't seem well suited for what they said they believed their calling to be. Anyway, they found the funding and went to Bethel, at which point they went from "a bit fringe" to all-out weird. They started posting "testimonies" of people being healed almost daily, and the recurring theme was that the focus was always on "I found this man", "I spoke to him", "I laughed at his pain and it went away" and so on. It was more akin to a freak show where they did stranger and stranger things to see people healed. Another recurring theme was that they never mentioned whether the individual concerned accepted Jesus Christ as their savior.
Then when they returned they had a totally different vision to how they started. Their initial vision was a very specific ministry abroad (I'm not providing specific details so as not to inadvertently identify them) but when they returned their vision had changed completely, and involved little more than helping set up what was essentially a branch of Bethel near their home. So once again they were appealing for money, and by then the tone of their posts had shifted from "we'd really appreciate financial help if you could offer some" to "sow into our ministry and reap the rewards". They were also very clear that the wife would not be working because she was looking after their children, which was something of a slap in the face for all sorts of couples where the wife would dearly love to stop working but couldn't afford to. And the ever-more surreal stories of healings continued, with still no mention of giving glory to God or whether the person concerned was saved or not.
In other personal experience a church I attended for some months started using more and more Bethel material in their services, and things started getting more and more silly. They started misusing Scripture, and conventional praise and worship songs gradually got replaced with relentlessly repetitive music, often played on streamed videos. The last time I set foot in that church was when they played a video of what Bethel considers to be "worship", that troubled me so badly that after 10 minutes I walked out. That was the only time my wife has ever walked out of a church during the service in utter disgust. The only way I can describe the way I felt as I walked out was "contaminated". When I was asking the minister what had changed and why it concerned me he was somewhat responsive for a time but then announced that he wasn't willing to debate who was right or wrong. When I asked if he could show Biblical justification for what they were doing, or use Scripture to counter the Scriptural questions I was raising he shut down on me and refused to discuss it any further. This church had gotten involved in all sorts of things that sounded good but nobody could explain just what, if any, difference they made. They talked of breaking off curses all the time, even a prayer for healing of a cold was loaded with breaking off word curses and written curses. They truly appeared to believe in a silly "oh yes it is" / "oh no it isn't" world in which a curse could be broken off, reapplied, broken off, reapplied etc, and effectively all that would decide whether the curse was active or not was who spoke last. They believed that they could declare an alternative reality but couldn't pay their bills, they seemed to have a congregation who were permanently very needy. Certainly they showed few, if any, signs that God was blessing them and it was abundantly clear that their endless declarations and decrees were achieving nothing, yet they continued. Along the way they were adopting teachings from people who taught the exact opposite of what Scripture teaches.
That leads on to the teachings of the likes of Bill Johnson. I have a couple of his books - one that I bought before I knew anything about him and his church, and another that I bought in electronic form when it was massively discounted because I wanted to see if he was still teaching the same things. His teaching is very persuasive, it seems very much like a bait-and-switch where he leads the reader along a train of thought before concluding something that isn't actually a fair conclusion from the process he has been following. He makes some valid points (e.g. Christ is a title rather than a name - "Jesus Christ" effectively means "Jesus the Messiah") and then goes on to claim that we can have the same "Christ anointing". That section alone causes me great concern - when John wrote how to test the spirits (1Jn 4:1-3) he talked of spirits that confess that "Jesus Christ is come in the flesh". Since the demons acknowledged who Jesus was when he walked this earth as a flesh-and-blood human it clearly means something more than acknowledging that Jesus walked this earth as a man. If we look at Peter's revelation in Matt 16:16 it is clear - "you are the Christ, the Son of the living God" (emphasis mine). Teaching that we can have the same Christ anointing strays, as far as I can see, dangerously close to demoting Jesus to "you are a Christ, a son of the living God". Matching that to how John tells us to test the spirits is enough to make me seriously question whether Bill Johnson is promoting the spirit of Christ or the spirit of antichrist.
Johnson appears to have an issue with Biblical study. He makes some fair points (e.g. "Knowledge puffs up but love edifies") but seems to completely overlook Paul's calling to Timothy to "Study to show thyself approved unto God ... rightly dividing the word of truth" (2Ti 2:15). Yes, it takes faith to "go off the map" and follow God into the unknown. Yes, the OT names such as Abraham and Moses did just that, but they didn't have the benefit of 66 books of Scripture to guide them. Johnson doesn't cover how we should follow the Biblical call to "test all things" if we've "gone off the map" to avoid getting lost.
His teachings on dominion are also seriously strange. He teaches that God gave dominion to Adam, who gave it to Satan when he ate the forbidden fruit. Then Jesus came to take it back, and when Jesus was tempted by the devil what the devil was offering him was a shortcut to regain dominion over the earth. But this teaching also raises many questions - when Jesus encountered demons why would they have obeyed him? If they were the devil's servants doing the devil's bidding on the devil's earth why didn't they just tell Jesus to go pound sand? The fact they didn't suggests they couldn't, which starts to poke holes in the dominion teaching. It also raises questions over why the Psalms say "the earth is the Lord's and everything in it" if the devil actually had dominion over it.
Then there's the matter of the so-called "glory cloud" reported at Bethel and in other places that are very pro-Bethel. This is apparently a cloud of God's presence, but when compared to Biblical times when people encountered God there's something of a mismatch. Isaiah cried out "Woe is me for I am undone" (Is 6:5). Ezekiel fell on his face (Eze 1:28). John fell as if dead (Rev 1:17). At Bethel they hoot and holler and whip out their phones to video it. Something doesn't seem right there.
I'm thinking about a more substantial article about Bethel and Bill Johnson in particular, although for now that will have to suffice.
Alithis
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- Jul 13, 2015
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- Married
i have little opinion on bethel as i have not been overly involved in it though it certainly does appear to be changing at a very fast rate from what it started out as .
