"Third Wave" of Christianity is growing faster than the earth's population and faster than Islam

[Christa]

Religious Revolt: New Christian Sect Battles Demons, Raises the Dead, Campaigns for Sarah Palin

What is happening to Christianity?

In 1996 a team from Ted Haggard's New Life Church flew to Mali and began furtively anointing entire towns with cooking oil.

The strangeness of it gripped Dutch missionary René Holvast, who later wrote: "It was confusing and produced a growing uneasiness. It did not seem to fit our current evangelical theological and anthropological textbooks."

The team from Haggard's church was a forerunner in a missionary wave that has washed over the world since the early 1990s, bringing what Holvast calls a ‘new paradigm.'

René Holvast has theological training, but his perplexed reaction was similar to that of Alix Spiegel, a radio journalist who went to Ted Haggard's New Life Church in 1997 to do a story for This American Life. Spiegel encountered something so alluring, even overwhelming, that the secular, urban Jew was almost pulled in. (After several days at Ted Haggard's church, Spiegel called This American Life's Ira Glass who -- as if he were a deprogrammer weaning her from a cult -- had to convince Alix Spiegel that she really belonged back in her secular realm of origin, Chicago.)

From its early days, New Life Church's members worked to map out all the territorial demon spirits inhabiting Colorado Springs. At some point in the process, they fed the mapping information into a computer database. Methodically -- street by street, block by block -- they used prayer-warfare to expel the demons from their city. And they maintained a 24/7 prayer shield over Colorado Springs to prevent demon re-infestations. As with inner-city cockroaches, the price of demon-free living was constant vigilance.

Full article:

http://www.alternet.org/story/137728/religious_revolt%3A_new_christian_sect_battles_demons%2C_raises_the_dead%2C_campaigns_for_sarah_palin/

From one insanity to the next :eyes:

[Ian David]

1. Ted Haggard went to Africa to rub young boys with oil? Or am I reading that wrong? n/t

[Kolesar]

2. Are they sure it wasn't "palm oil"? ... eom

[rateyes]

6. Oh, no you didn't.

:rofl:

[Loki]

3. I call this religious revolting.

It's cultism plain and simple and their tax exempt status should be reported, investigated and revoked. I think the SPLC even has some of these so called churches on their Hate Watch list.

[hobbit709]

4. If missionaries were killed and eaten on sight

There'd be a lot less proselytizing going on.-T.P.

[HamdenRice]

15. What a lot of racist bullshit. You think Africans are cannibals ...

because that's what you learned in the Tarzan movies, right?

[patrice]

5. anything, Anything, A-N-Y-T-H-I-N-G to avoid the necessity of turning one's honest awareness toward

one's own mind and heart.

[rrneck]

10. Anything to turn a buck off it. nt

[juno jones]

7. Meet the 'third wave':

An oldie but a goodie for those who have not delved into this particular rabbit hole:


'Joel's Army and the Seven Mountains Plan for takeover'
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/10/7/165650/170

The diaries of troutfishing and dogemperor on Daily Kos contaiin a huge amount of primary sources and documentation, video, links to websites, etc. This shit is seriously scary and people didn't examine Sarah Palin's ties to this cult closely enough during the election.

[dgibby]

8. NOTHING is more dangerous than a religious zealot,

regardless of the religious persuasion. They scare the hell out of me, and I don't scare easily. To ignore or dismiss them is both foolish and dangerous.

[patrice]

13. Nor her ties to Secessionists who claimed to have put her in the Alaska governor's office and also

her obvious intent to harness the Special Needs and, hence, the Disabled voting communities, which are some of the most organized and gauranteed response rates out there.

[Silent3]

9. Maintained a "prayer shield", huh?

Is this Christianity, or Dungeons and Dragons? I'm tempted to ask what "level" demons were kept out, and what the demons would have to roll to "save vs. spell" to get through the shield.

[Silent3]

11. Growth rate statistics, without raw numbers...

...can be very misleading. If I were to start a new religion and I were, at first, the only member, in going from 0 to 1 the size of the membership in my religion would have increased at an infinite rate. Even if you want to discount that first case, as soon as I make a first convert I'll have DOUBLED (oooooh!) the size of my following. If I convert one hundred people in the first year of evangelizing my new religion, I'll far outstrip the growth rate of all established religions. Who else increases their membership at a rate of 10000% per year? The only competition for rapid growth (measured this way, proportionately, not in absolute numbers) would be other small-but-growing religions.

It's easier for a new movement with a new angle to grab a lot of low-lying fruit -- people who already believe in something very close, but who are a bit dissatisfied and looking for a change, people who are desperate and who will grab at anything the first kind stranger presents -- when that movement first starts up. than it will be for the movement to acquire converts later on. Only the passage of a fair amount of time can tell how much power a movement has to gain significant new mind share on a global scale, how much truly new territory the movement acquires rather than merely displacing a different brand of nearly the same thing, and how much the movement will remain, if it does grow large, true to its original form.

[EvolveOrConvolve]

12. It also doesn't hurt that

denominations like these encourage over-breeding.

[DeSwiss]

14. That "new paradigm"

...is also referred to as "making it up as you go."