Traveling Down Memory Lane--3rd Wave Charismatic Revisited

Today we are going to travel down memory lane. I started this blog in the summer of 2004 so it is almost 6 years old now. I started it because I was alarmed by the Third Wave Charismatic so-called "revival" (Toronto, Brownsville, etc.). I wrote about this movement as a Pentecostal, not an anti-Spirit or anti-gift Christian. But I could see and sense a very strong occultic spirit in this movement. I was reading an article today that reminded me this so-called revival did not revive America and Europe like it was suppose to. In fact, things have gotten worse. But then, that is what happens when you think the occult spirit is the Holy Spirit. After a while, when things began to fall apart, they began to call themselves a "Renewal." Well, the "renewal" hasn't seemed to work either. But the most astonishing thing I think I've seen is what I saw at the Harvest Rock Church homepage recently. Harvest Rock was one of the main Third Wave churches with its pastor having his own apostolic network of other churches. Now they are calling themselves the HR church and boy, did they ever do a revision (and that is putting it mildly) on their history. When they were a revival church the history told how the pastor had gone to Toronto and gotten the "Spirit" there and he would never give this up or stop preaching it. Now they've taken all of that out of their history and want us to believe they started as a church that wanted to help the poor. I never read anything about helping the poor before there. But since every other church is on the "Helping The Poor" bandwagon I guess they wanted on too....I don't know.

In the early days of this movement I saw the deception, dishonesty and frankly anger at those who opposed it. Many of you might remember the "prophecy" by the pastor of Brownsville AG against Hank Hanegraff who exposed this movement and especially their church in his book Counterfeit Revival. Bad things were going to happen to Hank. But Hank is still with us going strong while the pastor of Brownsville fell off a ladder. Also, he soon left Brownsville as did the head of their revival school after a very bad feud between the two. Other Third Wavers, including the two big "gold dust" people, have either died of or have cancer. I'm not trying to be trite here at all, or unfeeling, but when a Christian dibbles dabbles around with this kind of stuff, things might not turn out so well for them or their churches. Meanwhile Steve whats-his-name who moved to Kansas City or the vicinity therein, I guess is so desparate for people to partake of his "ongoing" revival he is putting full page ads in Charisma magazine. I cannot tell you how many letters I received a while back about former members of his church. Talk about a cult and abuse....wow!

So, since this movement is falling apart except for Peter Wagner's NAR (The New Apostolic Reformation), which is still trying to be "something improtant," I officially pronounce this movement fairly dead.

That is why you haven't heard from me about it in a long time. Now is time to concentrate on the emergent movement which IMO is one of the most dangerous one in 100 years (since the Liberal Protestants).