Charis

When one points out the errors of the visions of Rick Joyner, they are considered the enemy and are considered on Satan’s side. This is where we just about lost our daughter. The former youth pastor ended up leaving our old church and took much of the youth with him. He had written his own book about his own visions of talking with the dead and my daughter was editor of that book. It is a long story but a sad one where we fought hard to save the young people who had become followers of the youth pastor and his visions. We were successful with our daughter and she is safe but we lost most of our youth. As a result of our working with the elders of our church, (we had educated them concerning all the deviation from scripture that the dead people in our youth pastors visions were teaching) our church banned the youth pastor’s book from the church and that particular pastor ended up leaving the church because he refused to come under discipline because of the unscriptural nature of his book and he pretty much took the youth group with him. They went where they could all experience the supernatural without having to test these experiences by the word of God.

The necromancy does sound odd and manifestly unbiblical. However, I have personally seen nothing of that in what I have read of Joyner’s. And frankly, having read a few pages of “The Final Quest” online, Joyner’s imagery strikes me as NO different than that in CS Lewis Chronicles of Narnia (I could post a quote where Lewis paints a word picture of sanctification as the Lion Aslan taking the dragon skin off from Edmund, but I won’t take the space on your blog for that- I really like that quote though 🙂 ) NOR is Joyner’s imagery much different than that in the book by Hannah Hurnard Hind’s Feet on High Places nor John Bunyan’s book Pilgrim’s Progress (didn’t he write that when he was in prison as a heretic?). If you took the writings of John Bunyan or CS Lewis and put the microscope on them and did exegesis on them as if they were scripture, SURE you could find all kinds of things that you could label “heresy”! I just don’t think they are intended to be authoritative like scripture! It doesn’t mean that we can’t glean some truth from them.

As for the church split, isn’t that the story of Christendom? It happened between Paul and Barnabas in Acts 15:39-40 “And the contention was so sharp between them, that they departed asunder one from the other” The church I attend NOW split off from a Wesleyan church because of an outpouring of the Holy Spirit with supernatural manifestations which was quenched by the then leadership of that Wesleyan church. My present church is under the covering of Elim Fellowship which accepts the supernatural. (The church split happened in the 80’s- long before we joined; but we joined out of a Wesleyan Church where I felt my spirit being quenched)