Todd Bentley - losing the fire in the belly

3 09 2008

On this site on 13 May 2008 I talked about the great things that were taking place in Lakeland, Florida with Todd Bentley. Unfortunately and even upsettingly the Revival has now gone a bit sour with poor press coverage from the secular arena and also issues with Todd’s private life also making headlines.

The damming report on ABC News could be excused for some ‘clever’ editing but still rocked the momentum that the Revival had stirred up and the many that were/are being heeled. To add salt to the wound Todd has also split from his wife and many are now calling him a ‘false prophet’.

I disagree though.

I believe that Todd has stirred up real passion for Jesus and has possibly been swept up in the media circus that pursued. In any business environment the key to survival is to delegate and if Todd had stayed focused on what he was being called to do rather than trying to drum up a media frenzy and create international Revivals, he would still be in Lakeland today.

For me, I lost my fire in the belly for this Revival when Todd’s ‘brother and sisters’ at the Revival started delivering the event in Todd’s absence. Fair enough you might say, surely Todd is allowed a break every so often, by why did they try and mimick the physical actions of Todd. Todd was unique in the way that he would rid evil spirits from the sick; the rest just copied and thus could be classed as false prophets!

I pray that Todd can recover from this and prove that he is not another Marjoe Gortner.





Shortlist for Blog Award

1 09 2008

Great news - this site has made the initial shortlist for the Christian Blog Awards. It is now in the hands of the Lord as to whether we get any further.




Google Trends - 12 months on

24 07 2008

12 months ago I undertook a review of search traffic within Google to understand the search traffic of ‘religions’ within the UK. Click here to view original post.

Back then we highlighted the fact the although there are more references on Google for the term ‘bible’ compared to ‘Koran’, there was though more users searching for religious terms ‘Muslim’ and ‘Islam’.

Well 12 months on and it would appear that the number of references within Google UK for ‘bible’ has increased to 8.8M compared to a leveling for the term ‘Koran’. 12 months ago the ration was 6:1 in favour of the term ‘bible’, that figure now stands at 23:1. So is Christianity really under threat in the UK of distinction, or is just media hype?

What is also interesting is that if we spread the research to the four corners of this planet it would appear that searches for ‘Islam’ and ‘Muslim’ are on the decrease, is this the turning that we have all been awaiting.

Also I wonder why historically traffic for the terms ‘Islam’ seems to decrease around holiday times!





Finding your gifting

22 07 2008

Dilbert strip

Dilbert strip

“Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it. And in the church God has appointed first of all apostles, second prophets, third teachers, then workers of miracles, also those having gifts of healing, those able to help others, those with gifts of administration, and those speaking in different kinds of tongues.”  (1 Corinthians 12:27-28)(NIV)





Gun Crime

27 06 2008

I have always steered away from guns and gun crime purely for the reason that there are too many innocent lives affected but this activity. For every one person killed by a firearm, there is a network of family and friends who suffer most. This network is then expected to pick-up the pieces and resolve the void left by this crime.

I normally don’t advocate programs on television, but a trailer for one program really got me thinking and to the point that it is a great humbler to the rest of us outside of that world.

A few weeks ago I was fortunate enough to see a performance by Teen Challenge in which a reformed group of young chaps provided a really strong performance on growing in a drug and gun culture. It was hard hitting, emotional and most of all to common story that seems to growing. If you ever get a chance to see these guys in action then I would strongly recommend. Click here to view their website.

Gun Crim on Channel 4