Hello World!!!

As of this month, I have owned my modest townhome for seven years…In this time of economic confusion,  I don’t see this feat as a minor blessing – Particularly since just months after closing on my first home, I lost my job…About a year after that, I still hadn’t found a job in my field and my roommate moved out…It was a trying time for sure, but the Lord brought me through, and here I am seven years later…

This may sound like hocus pocus but about a year before I closed on my townhome, on the morning of my birthday, the Lord revealed to me that I would be a homeowner…I don’t know how this happens, but sometimes although I don’t hear audible words, I sense that the Lord is speaking to me…This was one of those times…I sensed this revelation as I read the book Dancing in the Arms of God by Connie Neal.  (By the way, it’s a great book if you want to know how to develop a personal relationship with God!) At this time of my life, I wasn’t very making very much money at all so I wondered how this would happen…(Not that I’m rolling in the dough now…but I am doing better – praise God!)

There is an African proverb that states, “When you pray, move your feet.” After praying about the matter and coming to the conclusion that I had heard from God, I got moving. I began researching how to buy a home and even took a one-day seminar about buying a home, I talked with a friend who works in budget counseling about the costs of maintaining a home, and I started saving up my down payment money.

A few months later, I interviewed a woman for an article I was writing about her son who had won several scholarships to college. While I was at her home, I told her that I thought her new home was beautiful and that I was planning to start looking for my own home. She told me that through God’s favor, she was able to buy her lovely home although she had never thought she could afford a home as nice as that one. Then, she added that she rarely told the story of how she got the home to anyone. However, she said, to those to which she choose to tell the story, each one was able to get a home in spite of difficult circumstances…Finally, she gave me the name and contact information for her mortgage lender…My father said that the only way that you know that someone has truly prophesied is if the prophesy comes true…I called that mortgage lender…and you know the rest of the story…

This is a nice example of how the Lord has worked in my life. But as people are losing their homes all over the country, I wonder, if they, too, felt the Lord had blessed them with their homes in spite of unfavorable circumstances…I also wonder in light of “The Prosperity Gospel,” have many of us thought we heard from God when it was really just wishful thinking? Read this article below. It appeared in Time magazine on Oct. 3.

Maybe We Should Blame God for the Subprime Mess

Has the so-called Prosperity gospel turned its followers into some of the most willing participants — and hence, victims — of the current financial crisis? That’s what a scholar of the fast-growing brand of Pentecostal Christianity believes. While researching a book on black televangelism, says Jonathan Walton, a religion professor at the University of California at Riverside, he realized that Prosperity’s central promise — that God will “make a way” for poor people to enjoy the better things in life — had developed an additional, dangerous expression during the subprime-lending boom. Walton says that this encouraged congregants who got dicey mortgages to believe “God caused the bank to ignore my credit score and blessed me with my first house.” The results, he says, “were disastrous, because they pretty much turned parishioners into prey for greedy brokers.”

Others think he may be right. Says Anthea Butler, an expert in Pentecostalism at the University of Rochester in New York: “The pastor’s not gonna say, ‘Go down to Wachovia and get a loan,’ but I have heard, ‘Even if you have a poor credit rating, God can still bless you — if you put some faith out there [that is, make a big donation to the church], you’ll get that house or that car or that apartment.’ ” Adds J. Lee Grady, editor of the magazine Charisma: “It definitely goes on, that a preacher might say, ‘If you give this offering, God will give you a house.’ And if they did get the house, people did think that it was an answer to prayer, when in fact it was really bad banking policy.” If so, the situation offers a look at how a native-born faith built partially on American economic optimism entered into a toxic symbiosis with a pathological market.

Although a type of Pentecostalism, Prosperity theology adds a distinctive layer of supernatural positive thinking. Adherents will reap rewards if they prove their faith to God by contributing heavily to their churches, remaining mentally and verbally upbeat and concentrating on divine promises of worldly bounty supposedly strewn throughout the Bible. Critics call it a thinly disguised pastor-enrichment scam. Other experts, like Walton, note that for all its faults, the theology can empower people who have been taught to see themselves as financially or even culturally useless to feel they are “worthy of having more and doing more and being more.” In some cases the philosophy has matured with its practitioners, encouraging good financial habits and entrepreneurship.

But Walton suggests that a decade’s worth of ever easier credit acted like a drug in Prosperity’s bloodstream. “The economic boom ’90s and financial overextensions of the new millennium contributed to the success of the Prosperity message,” he wrote recently on his personal blog as well as on the website Religion Dispatches. And not positively. “Narratives of how ‘God blessed me with my first house despite my credit’ were common. Sermons declaring ‘It’s your season to overflow’ supplanted messages of economic sobriety,” and “little attention was paid to … the dangers of using one’s home equity as an ATM to subsidize cars, clothes and vacations.”

With the bubble burst, Walton and Butler assume that Prosperity congregants have taken a disproportionate hit, and they are curious as to how their churches will respond. Butler thinks some of the flashier ministries will shrink along with their congregants’ fortunes. Says Walton: “You would think that the current economic conditions would undercut their theology.” But he predicts they will persevere, since God’s earthly largesse is just as attractive when one is behind the economic eight ball.

A recent publicly posted testimony by a congregant at the Brownsville Assembly of God, near Pensacola, Fla., seems to confirm his intuition. Brownsville is not even a classic Prosperity congregation — it relies more on the anointing of its pastors than on Scriptural promises of God. But the believer’s note to his minister illustrates how magical thinking can prevail even after the mortgage blade has dropped. “Last Sunday,” it read, “You said if anyone needed a miracle to come up. So I did. I was receiving foreclosure papers, so I asked you to anoint a picture of my home and you did and your wife joined with you in prayer as I cried. I went home feeling something good was going to happen. On Friday the 5th of September I got a phone call from my mortgage company and they came up with a new payment for the next 3 months of only $200. My mortgage is usually $1,020. Praise God for his Mercy & Grace.”

So this article,  I think, can lead to some interesting discussion at our churches…How do know that we have truly heard from God? Does God “bless our mess?” Does God call for us to throw reason out of the window when He has revealed something to us? For goodness sake, why do people always say they are “blessed and highly favored,” when life is really sucking for them – at least at the moment – I swear…Does getting blessed by God always follow a large donation to our church? I’m sure that you can think of your own questions. Let the commentary begin…

Any thoughts?