First Contact – Part 20 – TV Evangelists

When I was growing up, I watched a lot of evangelists on TV. Originally it was because one or both of my parents watched them and I was a captive since we only had one TV in the house. Of course we only had five channels to watch, so it wasn’t as if I had a lot of other choices. However, as I got into my middle to late teen years, I found that there were actually some TV evangelists that I enjoyed watching.

Some of the TV preachers I have watched, such as Joel Osteen, Ernest Angley, and Garner Ted Armstrong, I have already mentioned in earlier posts. Others I have watched at one point or another include Billy Graham, Oral Roberts, Jack Van Impe, Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, Kenneth Copeland, John Ankerberg, Creflo Dollar, Jesse Duplantis, Jerry Falwell, John Hagee, Benny Hinn, Gene Scott, Rex Humbard, T.D. Jakes, David Jeremiah, D. James Kennedy, Pat Robertson, Ben Kinchlow, Hal Lindsey, James Robison, Adrian Rogers, Robert Schuller, Charles Stanley, and Robert Tilton. Some of these evangelists grated on my nerves while others were quite enjoyable to listen to. As you might expect, I tended to like the more calm preachers that attempted to approach the Bible in a logical way rather than exuding emotion. I didn’t mind them being passionate, but the “Glory be to God!” happy feet ones turned me off. I also liked listening to the ones that concentrated on Biblical prophecy.

While I was still living at home with my parents, I listened mostly to people like Ernest Angley, Garner Ted Armstrong, Oral Roberts, Jim Bakker, Kenneth Copeland, and Jack Van Impe. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I actually went to see Ernest Angley in person.

My mother was a big fan of Oral Roberts and used to receive lots of literature from his ministry. After Mom’s death I found a few photos of the Roberts family that she had received and stored away. I always thought of Roberts as a decent preacher, but was skeptical of the healings he performed. He pretty much lost any confidence I had in him when in 1987 he famously announced that God had told him He would call him home if he didn’t raise $8 million by a certain date.

While on vacation with my parents one year, we visited my dad’s brother in Oklahoma and actually got to go to Oral Roberts University (ORU), home of the famous Prayer Tower, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I remember the day we were heading over to ORU. It was sweltering hot and we didn’t have air conditioning in our car. So we relied on the old method of cooling, which was to roll the windows down. But hot humid air is not conducive to cooling. Thus, all three of us were a bit irritable. Dad pulled into a gas station to refuel and get us something to drink. While Mom and I were waiting in the car, she opened her door slightly to let more air in while the car was stationary. Once Dad finished, he got back in the car and pulled out to turn left on a four lane road. Mom had forgotten she had her door ajar, so as Dad turned left the door swung open to the right and Mom’s purse, which had been sitting in the floor bed, tumbled onto the pavement in the middle of the road.  Mom said, “There went my purse.” But still being irritable from the heat she said, “Just leave it. Just go on and leave it.” Dad, even though frustrated, soldiered onward with his belief in “No Purse Left Behind”. He pulled off the side of the road, waited for traffic to clear, quickly ran to the middle of the road, retrieved the purse, and ran back to the car. Fortunately, the purse required no medical attention as no other cars had crushed it. Anyway, after this incident we were tempted to just leave town without visiting ORU, but we didn’t. Once we got to ORU and began walking around the campus, we all calmed down.

Back in the late 1980’s, while on vacation, my wife and I visited Heritage USA in Fort Mill, South Carolina. You may remember this as being the theme park started by Jim Bakker and his wife Tammy Faye. Our visit there was after the infamous Jim Bakker sex scandal and cover-up. With the Bakker ministry on the fritz, Heritage USA had greatly deteriorated; a sad sight to see. Jim and Tammy Faye were some of my mother’s favorites. She ordered literature from them as well as albums by Tammy Faye, who had become quite successful as a Christian singer despite all that makeup. I inherited those Tammy Faye albums, but have since either sold them in a yard sale or donated them to charity. Needless to say, I wasn’t a big fan.

Kenneth Copeland was another TV preacher that I listened to frequently. He occasionally put on his “Glory be to God!” happy feet, but not enough to drive me away. Copeland was one of those speakers that could almost convince you to give him your coat and then turn around and sell it back to you. He always spoke with such confidence and certitude that it was hard to question if he really knew what he was talking about. I’m the type of person that will still have doubts even when I have studied an issue and am 100% certain that I am right. I guess I just really took to heart the admonition of Han Solo to Luke Skywalker in the original Star Wars movie. When Luke successfully blew up an attacking ship, Han said, “Great, kid. Don’t get cocky.” Throughout history you can see people with great certitude being shamed by new knowledge contrary to their beliefs. So, I always season my certitude with a pinch of doubt. In other words, I try not to get cocky.

Of all the prophecy interpreting TV evangelists, Jack Van Impe, along with his wife Rexella, was one of my favorites. He too had an air of confidence about him. He usually attempted to connect Biblical prophecy to current events. It was amazing to me how much Bible prophecy was coming true during my lifetime. Well, it was until I learned that many of the same prophecies had been fulfilled many times before. In other words, people are always finding current events that seem to match Bible prophecy. Ultimately, I came to believe that the preterist view of prophecy made the most sense. I discuss this in more detail in my “God Is” book.

One day I was watching Robert Tilton on TV, and he was offering to send viewers some miracle water. I decided to take him up on his offer just to see what it was all about. Upon receiving it, I discovered it was a small quantity of water sealed in square plastic pouch about one inch on a side. Just a few days afterwards I won $1000 in a local radio contest. I was stunned! A few days after that I learned that a friend of mine was sick and running a high fever. I went to his house and laid the water pouch on his forehead. Instantly the fever disappeared and he was back at work the next day. After 35 years, that pouch of water still stays with me everywhere I go. Just kidding. I threw the pouch away soon after receiving it. The plastic is probably still in a landfill somewhere slowly deteriorating. I once heard a funny story about Tilton. A former preacher from the church where my wife is a member was at our house for dinner one evening. He told us that when he was in seminary one of the students showed him and others a video of TV footage of Tilton. Tilton made intense expressions when he talked, and the video had farting noises added right when he was making those expressions. I did not realize that this video was a national sensation until I read about it on Wikipedia. Then I found the video on YouTube. It’s definitely worth watching; it’s hilarious.

Back in the early 1980’s, believe it or not, my wife and I got into selling life insurance. A.L. Williams was a former high school football coach that became disenchanted with life insurance after his mother died. After looking into the market, he eventually began selling term life insurance. You see, apparently whole life insurance, which was part insurance and part investment, had been a pretty good deal until the inflationary period of the 1970’s. Interest rates in most investments soared, but not for whole life insurance. Williams recognized this and started promoting the idea of “buy term, invest the difference”. This idea and a lot of hard work turned Williams into a multi-millionaire. He started a multi-level company that Kathy and I became a part of. I was shocked when one day I was listening to Jerry Falwell on TV and he mentioned A.L. Williams. He told the story about how Williams was visiting the campus of Liberty University. While touring the campus, they ran into the sports director for the school. Falwell introduced them. Williams, having been a football coach, asked the director what he needed for the school’s athletic program. The answer was a football field. So there on the spot Williams agreed to donate millions of dollars towards the building of a stadium. It’s still there and is called Williams Stadium.

I have watched Pat Robertson on his 700 Club show a fair amount. Robertson is quite a controversial person because of some of his radical political stances. Sometimes it appears that he even embarrasses his co-hosts. I always enjoyed listening to the stories the show presented of how a person was listening to the 700 Club and was healed of an illness. The stories seemed so legitimate, but I was always skeptical of their veracity. One interesting connection I have with Robertson is that he mentioned a friend of mine, Drew Jamieson, in his 1993 book “The Turning Tide”. More recently one of my wife’s former students married Robertson’s granddaughter. Small world, huh?

Although I have seen David Jeremiah on TV, I have mostly heard him on the radio. In fact, at one time my wife and I had our radio alarm set to play a local Christian station each weekday morning. David Jeremiah’s show was just coming on when the alarm went off. So, I heard a lot of his sermons, although a number of them were during an early morning sleep fog. Jeremiah is another one of those preachers that seem very confident in their message. However, it seemed to me that he often embellished the Biblical text with made up information. I was surprised when I was talking to the preacher at my wife’s church and discovered that he didn’t care for Jeremiah very much because of those embellishments.

Another TV evangelist worth mentioning is Peter Popoff. I never watched him on TV. In fact, I had never heard of him until I read James Randi’s book “Flim Flam”. James Randi is a magician (stage name of The Amazing Randi) who has spent a large portion of his life exposing frauds who claim they have some sort of supernatural or mystical powers. In fact, Randi has for many years offered a large sum of money to anyone who can demonstrate special powers without him being able to spot the trickery being used. So far no one has collected. Back in 1986, Randi set out to expose Peter Popoff. It seemed that Popoff had the ability to walk through an audience and tell people information about themselves including what ailments they had. Randi suspected that Popoff’s wife and the ushers were gathering information before a show and feeding it to Popoff via a transmitter. Randi was able to find the frequency they used and recorded what Popoff’s wife was saying to her husband. He later combined that recording with the video of the show so that anyone could see how he was using his wife’s information when speaking to audience members. Randi then appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and showed the merged video and audio.  Sixteen months later Popoff declared bankruptcy. Don’t you just love stories like that? But it seems that no matter how many of these shysters get exposed there are people willing to fall for yet another one. In many cases the ones who have been exposed make a comeback. Simply unbelievable.

One TV evangelist that I used to really enjoy was John Ankerberg. He was usually quite controversial, exposing what he considered to be fraudulent Christian teachers and groups. After I married Kathy I discovered that my father-in-law didn’t like Ankerberg at all. Why? Because Ankerberg was vehemently anti-Mason. I saw one of his shows where he exposed the supposed pagan rituals the Masons engaged in. But you see, my father-in-law was a Mason. And later one of his sons, my brother-in-law, became a Mason, and even became the Master of his local lodge. I was at the ceremony where he was inducted. So, here was yet once again an example of two people having a radically different view of what is Christian and what is not. Disconcerting to say the least.

I guess the most famous and most revered of the TV evangelists is Billy Graham. Who hasn’t seen one of his crusades on TV with George Beverly Shea singing “How Great Thou Art”, Cliff Barrows belting out tunes, Billy preaching the Gospel, and “Just As I Am” being sung as thousands of people made their way to the stage from far away seats? Graham is one of those rare people who were able to reach icon status in his field of endeavor. And he’s one of those clean honest guys that break the stereotypical mold of the greedy crooked evangelist that preys on the gullible.

Real Encounters With the Paranormal?

Given that Halloween is upon us, and this is the time for spooky unnatural events to occur, I thought I would share with you a few related personal stories.

I grew up hearing many bizarre stories from my mother concerning her youth. She used to tell me stories about seeing lights bouncing around in the sky and a fireball passing close overhead, so close that her father threw his hat at it. She was not afraid of these things since she had never heard anyone talking about UFOs and flying saucers from other planets, and she saw them often enough to where she just accepted them as normal.

The most intriguing and unbelievable story she told me was of the time she got up in the middle of the night to use the restroom (done outdoors in those days). When she stepped onto the front porch she noticed a multi-floored building across the road with the windows all lit up. This may not sound all that strange except for the fact that my mother lived in the country where there was no electricity, and only trees were across the road.

My mother also told me that she would occasionally hear a disembodied voice telling her something was going to happen, and it would always happen. It was like she had a personal invisible prophet speaking to her from time to time. The first time this happened she was fairly young. She heard the voice say that the barn was on fire. Then, just a minute or so later, a brother came running to the house saying that the barn was on fire. When I was in elementary school, my best friend’s mother came to our house. As my mother was talking to her, the voice told her that my friend’s mother and father were going to get a divorce. A couple of years later this came to pass.

Back in the late 1970’s, soon after my grandmother died, several of my relatives were at my grandfather’s house. An uncle was sitting in a chair directly opposite a wall where a whatnot hung. On a shelf of the whatnot was a small porcelain cup that had belonged to my grandmother. Suddenly my uncle saw the cup slide off the shelf and begin floating in the air toward him. Flabbergasted, all he could do was stare. When the cup got within a few feet of him, it quit moving towards him and the handle turned upward as if someone was holding it. Slowly it descended straight to the floor whereupon the cup appeared to have been released and then rolled over until the handle contacted the floor. He later described it to me as something straight from the TV show “Bewitched.” A second uncle, who was standing nearby but facing the opposite direction, caught a glimpse of the cup as it hit the floor. Thinking a young niece was responsible, he called out for her to stop throwing things. She was not even in the room at the time. A cousin was in the dining room at the time and reported that he also caught a glimpse, through a doorway, of the cup as it was moving though the air. When the second uncle asked the first how the cup got on the floor, the latter was speechless. After asking a few more times, he was finally able to answer that it had just floated over there. Several of the family members got together and tried to determine what had caused the cup to come off the shelf, cross the room, and settle on the floor. During the course of their investigation, they set the cup back on the shelf and pushed it off my hand. The cup sailed quickly through the air and hit the floor with such force as to break it into many pieces. A third uncle, when later told about this incident, said that he would give a hundred dollars to have seen that cup floating through the air. The uncle that saw the whole event responded that he would give a hundred dollars to not have seen it.

What do you think of these stories? Do you believe they happened just as I told them? You are probably expecting me to now tell you that I just made them up for this Halloween season. If so, then you would be wrong. I did not make these stories up. They were told to me by my relatives. And given that the relatives reporting these stories were trustworthy, I have to believe there is something to them. I just don’t know what. What was the point of the lights in the air and the building across the road my mother saw? I don’t know and neither did she. What was the point of the cup floating through the air? Some of my relatives believe that the cup was moved by my recently deceased grandmother, who owned the cup. I don’t know what to make of it. Given that, until the cup incident, my uncle was a diehard skeptic about supposed supernatural occurrences reported by others gives his story even more credence.

I have personally only had a couple of weird experiences that seemed paranormal in nature. Many years ago I went with a female coworker to a new restaurant in town for lunch. It was fixed up with a lot of decorations, TVs on the walls, and a side room with arcade games. While waiting for our food, I began watching an old B&W movie that had just started. The title of the movie was a woman’s name that I cannot remember, so let’s just say it was Amelia. Well, at the point that Amelia makes her first appearance in the movie, she is asked who she is. She responds, “Amelia.” Well, just at the time she said her name, an employee of the restaurant came over the intercom to call out the name of the customer whose order was ready to pick up. You guessed it, the name was Amelia. Kind of bizarre, don’t you think. Anyway, after my friend and I finished eating, we were just sitting there relaxing when I heard a deep male voice behind me say, “Better get back to work.” I quickly turned and looked all around, but there was no one anywhere near me. Just when I thought I might be hearing things, my coworker said, “Yeah, you’re right.” I asked her who she was talking to. She said, “Didn’t you just say we needed to get back to work?” I responded that I had not, but I had heard someone else saying it. To this day I still don’t know whose voice that was or where it came from. Upon telling my mother, she of course believed it was a supernatural warning that we really needed to get back to work.

On March 30, 1981, as I was driving home from work, I heard a report on the radio that President Ronald Reagan, Press Secretary James Brady, and others had been attacked and shot by a crazed gunman. The report went on to say that James Brady, as a result of a gunshot wound to his head, was dead. Being a man of faith at that time, I began praying that Brady would somehow not be dead. I knew this was a rather brazen prayer given that I was in fact praying for nothing less than a resurrection. Later I heard reports that Brady was in fact not dead. The earlier reports had been incorrect. Even so, the report of Brady still being alive gave me pause.

To be honest, I am skeptical of all supernatural or paranormal stories, even MINE. It seems that when such claims are put to the test scientifically, natural explanations are always forthcoming. One person who has been diligent about exposing people with supposed psychic, paranormal, or supernatural abilities is magician James Randi (aka The Amazing Randi, must see this video). For many years now he has had a challenge in which if a person can demonstrate his powers under controlled conditions he will receive a substantial cash prize. Everyone who has taken this challenge has failed. Randi documents many exposés in Flim-Flam!: Psychics, ESP, Unicorns, and Other Delusions as well as other books.

Even so, may you have a HAPPY and SPOOKY HALLOWEEN.