Buckeye State Blog - Inside a service at Rod Parsley's World Harvest Church - Comments

Rod Parsley and others

Anonymous — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 20:11:49 -0700

I was not there so I will restrict my comments to those of you who do not fully grasp true Christianity. While coming to a saving knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ is both intellectual and emotional, it is by no means something that we do apart from the call of God in our life. Becoming a true Christian is a very humbling experience because for the first time in your life you understand that you are not as good as you think you are. As a matter of fact in God's view you are deserving of eternal Hell. However that is why He sent His only Son to die and come out of that grave 3 days later. It is your pride and willful sin that will send you to hell. The simple fact is that with all of Rod Parsley and Joel Olstene's different approache's to the truth or lack there of of the simple Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ it is only this that counts "For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of GOD unto salvation to everone that believes." Anything more or less is a one way ticket to everlasting pain and torment. Something Joel Olstene thinks you can't talk about because it might upset people. At least Parsley tells that like it is if nothing else from what little I have seen and heard from him, other than that I can not comment on the man or his ministry.

Rod Parsley

Anonymous — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 08:53:12 -0700

I think it so sad some of the comments about the "show" as it was described.....it is quite obvious that nothing is known of a pentecostal type preaching.....as for the healing, it was God that did the healing, read Acts in the bible........and if you are a bible reader and studier you would know that he does preach the Word of God........nothin about it is a "show"....the Holy Spirit moves through the music and song...to "work up" the people into a praise.....which again if you read your bible will see that is what our Lord requires of us...............I pray that all will come to the knowledge and understanding of Christ our Saviour and develope a personnal relationship with Him.....God Bless

Parsley's charisma

jenforclark — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 05:58:53 -0700

always reminds me of Greg Stillson in Stephen King's The Dead Zone.

Just seeking to understand

Renee in Ohio — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 05:52:23 -0700

This man wields a lot of power, and he's one of the people who, at least initially was a very public booster of Ken Blackwell. He probably still is, but not as overtly. Adam guessed that Parsley and Russell Johnson have backed off from their very public support either because of the IRS complaint against them, or because Blackwell has seen some polling indicating that appearances with these religious leaders do not benefit him politically. (May even hurt his chances.) Those are just guesses, but both seem plausible.

I think Ken Blackwell is a scary dude, and I sure don't want him to be our governor. (It's not like we can afford to move if he is elected.) I am also pretty dismayed at the success these folks had statewide in passing Issue 1, the so called "same sex-marriage ban" that was much more far reaching than just banning already illegal same-sex marriages. Rod Parsley was also a big supporter of that, and he considers the passage of the bill quite a feather in his cap, along with the re-election of George Bush in 2004.

From the responses I've gotten elsewhere, people seem to think I am somehow impressed with Parsley's healing abilities. I'm not. I find the whole package rather disturbing. But at the same time, I see the benefit in trying to understand how he can hold such sway over so many people.

They don't have Bibles there, because if they did

jenforclark — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 05:43:59 -0700

people would see that Parsely doesn't preach the Bible. I recommend listening to the song, "Brother Love's travelling salvation show" by Neil Diamond.

If

J-Dog — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 05:34:52 -0700

If I want to be entertained, I'll rent a movie. If I want to go to church, I will go to one that treats my relationship with God reverently. They treat God like a cheap hooker at a Ratt concert. What gives them the right and authority to think that they can manipulate God?

There is a fine line between religion and magic. If you care much about this, I suggest that you read Branislov Malinowski's work, "Magic, Science and Religion".

Inside a service at Rod Parsley's World Harvest Church

Renee in Ohio — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 21:54:34 -0700

Last Thursday I attended an event of the ACLU of Ohio, featuring speakers from Equality Ohio. I wrote just a bit about it here, but haven't had a chance to write up much of it until now. I was particulary interested to hear Adam Leddy of Equality Ohio describe the experience of attending a service at Rod Parsley's World Harvest Church. He recomended, as you'll see at the end of his remarks below, that we go and experience it for ourselves. But I don't imagine that I'm going to do that. Neither are most of you, I imagine. So I thought you might appreciate whatever insights Adam's description can offer.

It doesn't seem right not to be there and experience it in order to give it a fair hearing. And that's what I did, and it's just phenomenal. A beautiful facility. It's perfectly lit for television--it's first class, basically. The people are extremely friendly, and very welcoming, very accomodating to me. I wasn't particularly social there, but everybody was just great people.

It's a show unlike anything that anything you've seen--it's certainly unlike any church service I've ever been to before. It seems to me that the objective of it is to work people into a sort of frenzy. And throughout the evening it's meant to climax. There's a climax here, but that's not the big one, there's a higher climax and a higher climax. You're exhausted when you leave even if you're not an active participant. Literally, I was tired when I went home. It's skillful and it's *so* high energy and so intense, and the energy of it is so contagious, you just feel it.

The first thing that I noticed is that I didn't see a bible anywhere. Some people had brought their own, and maybe there were some but I wasn't looking in the right place. But I'm so conditioned to looking at the back of the pew and there they are. The book itself didn't strike me as a huge part of the service, in the traditional sense, in that nobody was reading it, nobody was looking at it, there didn't seem to be direct citations to it. It was more just on a level of the senses, on a level of God's power and God's glory, but not necessarily God's commandments, I suppose--God's tenets, or anything of that nature.

There were a number of, I don't know what you'd call them. I don't want to be crass, but "opening acts" to sort of work the crowd up. The singers were phenomenal, working the crowd into a frenzy, and you wait and wiat. I don't know how long, but maybe an hour and 15, hour and a half before Rod Parsley hit the stage. When he does so, he very gradually takes over the program from the pastors and preachers who are up there opening the show. Very gradually, and at that point, I don't know how the audience keeps going, but they do. There is just a real connection there between Rod Parsley and his congregants--it's palpable. You can feel it.

Within five minutes--and this is what struck me probably more than anything else when I was there--within five minutes of his taking the stage and beginning to speak, he performed a faith healing. A gentleman came up with pain in the lower back, and Parsley laid hands and cured it. And he said that in curing the back pain of this one particular person, he had cured the lower back pain of everyone else in the room. And what struck me about that was, when you think about that, again, it's not for me to mock what anyone believes. But when you think about a man within five minutes can perform a faith healing on every person in the room, and he's established such credibility, and inspired such passion and such belief, and such faith in people, that that's sort of accepted without question. Without any sort of deeper analysis. It was part of the show. To me, it was just astounding, just incredible. But it was par for the course. That was the first 5-10 minutes of the program, and it goes on from there.

...he was pacing back and forth across the stage, and carrying on a conversation with God at the time, and God was giving him directions for what to say to the congregants, and what he could and could not say. He got to the point where he was choked up, and couldn't look at the audience. He did have a bible. He was holding his bible and hiding his face, saying "I can't look at you, I can't look at you!" He was pacing the stage, pacing the stage, and saying "I can't look at you, I can't look at you!" It was just incredible theater, just amazing.

So we've gone from this faith healing, to a direct conversation with God, in full witness of however many thousand people were there at the time. And when you think about that, and I could tell you more and more about it, and I do recommend that you go--not to be confrontational or to cause trouble, but just to see it, just to know it. Or at least watch it on television over the weekend. I would encourage that very strongly. But what strikes me so much is that, when people who follow you and believe in you believe that you *are* speaking to God, and that you do have what would be to me, miraculous capacity to cure somebody, through faith. When you have convinced people of that, and when you have thousands of people who do believe in you so deeply, really, what *can't* you convince people to do? If it comes down to saying, "Can you volunteer to help our voter registration effort?" Are you willing to do this or that for this cause that we're working for?" I can't imagine anyone saying no to that.