The Word-of-Faith belief system is so common now that it has become part of mainstream Christianity. As a new Christian, I was once caught up in this belief system, but want to explain why I now repudiate it. I do not take any pleasure in writing this, but it may help others from getting too deep into this belief system.

I will not give a full discussion of the Word-of-Faith belief system here. (Also called Word Faith, name-it-and-claim-it, the "uncompromised" gospel, and many other names.) I assume the reader knows the basics, or will be motivated to find out. The basic system of faith can be found at the many web sites which either support the belief, or expose it. The few books written to expose the truth about Word-of-Faith beliefs are dated now, having been published in the early 90s, and do not reflect current developments. (John MacArthur's Charismatic Chaos was a good one. Transcripts of some of the sermons that made up the material in this book are also to be found online.) Unfortunately, I do not know of an up-to-date resource. Many web sites, in a scattershot way, reflect the current state of the Word-of-Faith movement.

No systematic theology of the Word-of-Faith beliefs exists (or probably can ever be made). Instead, it is a loose collection of ideas concerning faith healing, prosperity, etc. Each idea has proponents, and different clusters rise and fall in emphasis over time. All of these are based on the idea that what you say with your mouth creates the reality you experience. This idea is demonstrably non-Christian, and was influenced generally by Hinduism and directly by one of the first Hindu yogis to come to America.

Basic research into the history of Word-of-Faith will show the concepts that lie behind it are not Christian, and come instead from the mind-over-matter splinter groups that formed in the late 19th century (such as Christian Science, Unity, etc; as well as Positive Thinking in the 20th century). In fact, some of the teachings of Paramahansa Yogananda are almost identical (he came to Boston in the early 20th century and absorbed many of the same ideas into his Hinduism). I found all this out later: I did not know much about Word-of-Faith as a new believer. I did not know it wasn't Christian.

I got caught up in Word-of-Faith beliefs as a new Christian (in the mid-1990s) because, really, that's all I saw. I was a new Christian and eager to learn more. Television and radio had a lot of these Word-of-Faith preachers. They wrote the Christian books I found. And the books were in the Christian section of the bookstore alongside all the other Christian books. My decision was to be a Christian, rather than some other religion, because I believed that Christianity offered a better explanation for life than any other religion I had studied. What I wasn't prepared for (yet) was to make a distinction among the different flavors of Christianity. I saw "Christian" as an indivisible entity, when it was really an umbrella covering a lot of different beliefs, some of which are contradictory and incompatible.

In the beginning, with my first exposure to Word-of-Faith, I was impressed by the power of God: A powerful God who rescues the lost and unwanted from their sins, and heals them, and turns them into productive, real, whole people. That's an attractive message, especially in today's self-help culture where everyone is expected to better themselves through self-effort, and those who can't are responsible for their own failures. Our modern world has adopted Hindu philosophy wholesale, after all. If you're not any good, you're responsible for your own shortcomings, because if you had just tried harder and done more, you would have been successful. That message was pounded with a hammer into my generation. Secular self-help (Carnegie, Robbins, etc), religious self-help (Peale and Schuler, whom I would later find not to be Christian at all), and all that. So the idea that God would help the helpless was an attraction. I did not see this in other aspects of Christianity, which seemed awfully mundane and not of much practical use. I wanted change and newness, and how much practical, hands-on change can a preacher get out of the stories of David, Joseph, and Jonah? (When I first started listening to Christian radio, it seemed as if every non-Word-of-Faith preacher was slogging through one of these three stories: often more than one preacher would be on the same story at the same time, and they seemed to rotate among the three.) Instead of drawing strained conclusions from irrelevant Old Testament stories (as I thought at the time!), the Word-of-Faith preachers had hands-on information about how to change my life immediately. That was a powerful attraction. When I first got involved with Word-of-Faith, it was before the prosperity aspect had become the central focus. The prosperity gospel was around, but the prime, overriding emphasis wasn't wholly on money and success at that time. Word-of-Faith had more to offer in the subjects of healing and deliverance and wholeness.

Word-of-Faith theology is spiritual junk food. I was so hungry for God that, like someone starving in the desert, when given any sort of food at all, I ate like a wolf. That's a significant problem in today's world: spiritual nourishment is nonexistent, and people are so hungry for it that they can't really be discerning because they have to take what's available. I did not realize that this was junk food, because I had never eaten the real food. In the years to come, I would experience better answers to my questions from authors like Phillip Yancey, Charles Spurgeon, C.S. Lewis, R.C. Sproul, etc. who would answer the questions I had about life in greater detail and sophistication. But I wasn't mature enough to know the good fruit from the bad fruit.

Over the years, I began to figure the Word-of-Faith movement out. But it took a while. The irony with my experience was that I was seeking more information from a sincere desire to know more. I was investigating everything, and began to read critiques of the movement as well as information from the movement's participants and teachers. Eventually my eyes were opened to the wholesale deception the movement practiced.

I came to the Christian world with a naive attitude that, in retrospect, wasn't a good idea. I thought Christian teachers were trustworthy. I thought publishing houses would vet their books for doctrinal correctness. And so on: I didn't know Christian publishing was all about making money first and anything else second. Of all the naivet? I had, looming largest was the idea that Christians would not intentionally lie. I read a book like Good Morning, Holy Spirit and took it at face value, assuming it was trustworthy. Why would Benny Hinn write a book of lies? Why would he say he used to stutter when he did not? Why would he say he knew Bible Hebrew when he did not? Why would he say his father was the mayor of Joppa when he was not? How could he ever hope to gain from this sort of distortion, when the facts could easily be checked and he would be exposed? Why not just skip over these details? And, why would Kenneth Hagin plagiarize E. W. Kenyon? And why keep selling the books as-is, years after the plagiarism was discovered? I took many years to study and try to understand Word-of-Faith as it was presented to me, and having been unsuccessful at that, began to question it. The more I learned, the less that made sense unless these people were not Christians.

I have come to some conclusions about the Word-of-Faith belief system.

As much as everyone would like to believe otherwise, words don't create reality. This is a belief that comes from the late 19th century, a time when humanism exalted the creative possibilities of mankind. As a belief, thoughts and words creating reality borrows both from humanism, Hinduism, and several other beliefs. It isn't Christian. And it doesn't work: I can say I want muscles all day, every day, but I am not going to get them unless I do a hundred pushups. Even then, I won't look like the professional body builders on those TV infomercials for exercise equipment (because that's their job, and anyone with a real job would never be able to devote as much time as they do). I can talk about how hungry I am and how much I want a hamburger, but I am not going to eat one unless I fix it, or go to the restaurant and order one. I can say I am rich. I can say I am healthy. I can say I am blessed. But all I am doing is nothing. The only way something is going to happen is through taking actions to achieve outcomes. (This is what separates pie-in-the-sky self-help like Napoleon Hill from results-oriented self-help like Tony Robbins.)

Faith healing is bogus. I don't say that lightly. Unlike John MacArthur and some of them, I am not a cessationist. I do not believe that God won't heal anymore. I just don't believe that God heals in the formulaic, man-centered way the Word-of-Faith system says he does. I have heard the "Healing School" tapes. I have read the books. And it's all bogus.

Faith healing must be bogus, because if it wasn't bogus, there would be people who were healed. I have looked, and looked, and looked, at sources both sympathetic and antagonistic and everything in-between, both secular and religious, and have never turned up one verifiable case of a faith healing. If God healed the way faith healers said he does, there would be a lot of cases confirmed by doctors. We'd have many cases with clear before and after records showing a medical condition and its subsequent removal. There are always a few, unsubstantiated claims of healing, but they never have any proof to back them up. If faith healing operated as advertised, though, there would be so many people healed that doctors couldn't verify all of the healings because there wouldn't be enough time to examine everyone who was healed. (Note that I personally have a medical condition which I've seen others say they were healed from. I have tried following up on these reports, and have gotten nowhere. If they were healed, evidence and testimony of these healings are a better kept secret than the Pentagon and the NSA have ever kept.)

Healing is said to be a sign and a wonder to accompany the preaching of the gospel. Who would want to follow that God? Healings are bogus and unsubstantiated. Faith healers themselves have health problems (almost all the major figures in the faith healing movement now have, or had if they are deceased, some sort of major health problem; these problems are well documented). People who follow the instructions and believe for healing don't get it. Healing services end and a stream of dejected people in wheelchairs come out empty-handed. What kind of God raises people's expectations and then can't deliver? And, most damningly for faith healers, why are God's powerful healings that they capture on film so cheesy? Limbs don't grow back. Disfigurements aren't repaired. The only thing the God of faith healers can heal seems to be psychosomatic illnesses, or people with nothing obviously wrong with them. This is a blasphemous imitation of God's creative power which lacks any true ability to do anything.

For years, I wanted to believe there was some truth to faith healing, and some desperate people were truly healed by God, even through a flawed ministry. But I can't believe that any good whatsoever has come from the faith healing movement. It is based on raising expectations and getting people into a heightened state of emotion (where they are susceptible to commands like giving money), and then dashing hopes once the adrenaline has worn off. While there may be no documented evidence of true healings, there is a mountain of evidence of frauds and manipulation. I have seen countless stories over the years of what goes on in a healing service, such as the props brought in (wheelchairs, etc) to make healings seem to be happening. I'll believe in the God of Joni Erikson Tada, not the God of bogus faith healings.

Obviously, the Word-of-Faith preachers know faith healing is bogus, too. That's why the prosperity gospel took the place of faith healing as the main message. Healing doesn't withstand scrutiny, because there's no evidence. Remember in statistics, a correlation doesn't imply causation: The perfect message would be one that seemed to work because of something totally unrelated to it. Maybe faith healers knew that most quack medicines and remedies are given credit for "working" after some period of time, when the results are actually from the body's natural ability to heal.

I do not know a loving way to say this, other than the prosperity gospel is a scam. I wish I could come up with a way to be more loving in how I express this, but I don't think there is a way. It's a cold, calculated scam designed to take people's money. What prosperity preachers teach is the "law" of "sowing and reaping", which was an invention of the early prosperity preachers after World War II and has absolutely no precedent before them (that anyone has ever located). People who want money "sow", that is give money away, with the "seed", which is the money they have now. (This preys on low-income people who probably don't have as much financial education, and have little money, but want to improve their lives.) The money is, of course, given to the prosperity preachers (ministries with "fertile soil") who claim to be taking "the gospel" to the world (although the only gospel they ever preach is giving them money). Then, the sower waits to "reap", that is waits for God to return more money than was given away. The justification for this is found in the Bible only through the most bald-faced distortion of scriptures. (It is no accident that the prosperity gospel is founded on the King James text, since the last thing any prosperity preacher wants is someone to actually understand what they read in the Bible.)

Faith healing is bogus, and after a brief encounter with it, most people will walk away disillusioned. The prosperity gospel replaced faith healing as the main message of the Word-of-Faith movement, and from their perspective, it is brilliant because it piggybacks on the fact that most Americans will prosper anyway. After all, anyone who is committed enough to tithe to a ministry and actively study the Bible is most likely also going to be motivated to do other things to improve themselves in life: get more education, work harder, be a better employee, and stand out. Because people are prone to attribute cause and effect where there is no relationship between two things, the prosperity gospel gets around faith healing's most significant drawback, the demonstrable lack of evidence or success.

I have never been a materialistic person and wasn't interested in the success of the world, so that aspect of Christianity never made much of an impact on me, and I largely ignored it. Sheer greed took over the Word-of-Faith movement, and it became about money and nothing else. Money. Money. Money. Money. Money. All about money, all the time. Every religious program on TV is selling a product, every preacher is demanding money. Every message preached somehow concludes with a demand for money. People don't matter. Souls don't matter. The gospel doesn't matter. Only selling and demanding donations matters. This is when I hit the burnout point on Word-of-Faith. I was sick when I found out that most of the major preachers on television use the same service, essentially psychological experts in talking people out of their money, that writes their fundraising material for them. The Word-of-Faith world has become a constant, demanding fundraising machine, and that's not Christian in any way. (They don't even follow their own theology: they never give anyone anything. They don't sow seeds, they spend all their time demanding donations and taking other people's money. And the money is going to no good purpose, other than to buy television time so they can get more money.)

What was the final straw? I found a recording about the Word-of-Faith movement which had clips of various Word-of-Faith teachers saying things that went so far against the bounds of Christianity that I could no longer have anything to do with this belief. While we can't discount all medicine because of a few quack doctors, this case is different: These men are the main developers and promoters of Word-of-Faith theology, not some sort of fringe quacks exploiting it. They hold such aberrant doctrines that they can't be considered Christian. Specifically, the final straw was that more than one wanted to kill people who disagreed with them. Regardless of the theology or agenda of whoever made the tape, there is simply no argument when the preachers' own words, in their own voices, are exposed. They do not have Christian charity for others. They don't care about the gospel, correctly teaching the Christian doctrines, or any person's soul. They just want my money. Souls are not important. Eternity is not important. Only money.

Although I once believed in the Word-of-Faith movement, I now repudiate these beliefs. I wanted to believe, and tried to believe, and thought I did believe, but in the end I saw that the whole Word-of-Faith movement is a false Christianity that took me away from the truth.

I encourage everyone considering or involved in the Word-of-Faith movement to check it out as completely as possible.