"The fact is that a lot of these charges against Benny Hinn could be leveled against a lot of different people. Right now Benny is kind of the one everyone is shooting at. It's hard to deal with I mean look at how Martin Luther messed up towards the end of his life and Amie Semple McPherson had a huge scandal in her day. Remember Jimmy Swaggart and of course his ministry bounced back. There are many things we can criticize, and you talk about the lack of accountability. Someone once said that sometimes the greatest strength is also the greatest weakness. One of the strengths of the Charismatic church has been our entrepreneurship. The fact that someone can start a ministry and people can follow and it can become huge. In denominations, that usually doesn't happen because they have too many restrictions and rules and all this. However, when you have a successful ministry that you built yourself and a lot of people follow you, you can become a law unto yourself because there are not elders although there is some kind of board for legal reasons but that doesn't always keep people on the straight and narrow." - Steven Strang
A favorite game of today's politics is whataboutisms. If you want to have a discussion about the strange Semple-McPherson kidnapping debacle or Martin Luther or Jimmy Swaggart, that is fine but not when we are in the middle of discussing Benny Hinn. It only serves to minimize and distract from what we are trying to wrestle with. Do not fall for the distraction. By the way, the board does not work at all because the pastor can manipulate the board selection process. When Mark Driscoll did not like some objections from his board at Mars Hill, he simply got rid of them and filled it with sycophants. It is quite telling that years later, even the sycophants were about to discipline him when he ran away in the middle of the night. The reason why people like Ravi Zacharias and Mike Bickle could have gotten away with decades of abuse is because boards do not work because they are subservient to the cult of personality pastors set up in the Purpose Driven Church model. Strang now finally gets around to promoting Hinn:
"My opinion on Benny is he genuinely loves Jesus, he says this himself. He has also done somethings that he felt was necessary to repent of and I am wanting the body of Christ to understand how we should do this and maybe we can pivot a little bit and talk about how other ministries, you know there are ministries that use these fund-raising tactics and why do they do it? It works! I've attended churches where they take the offing at the front of the church and if they don't get enough they take another offering. Now, some of that is kinda cultural but also they found if they take several offerings they get the money they need. Part of it is people respond to this kind of pressure. People don't respond to that as much as they used to. Even some of the TV networks don't do fundraising the way they used to." - Steven Strang
He says it himself? Well, that ought to settle it. Oh wait, Ravi said he loved Jesus. Bickle said he loved Jesus. Ted Haggard said he loved Jesus while having sex with a male prostitute and doing crystal meth. Brian Houston said it while driving blackout drunk. Carl Lentz said it while sleeping with his nanny in his wife's bed. What is absolutely amazing here is that Strang thinks it is ok to bully the sheep and shake them down because it works? If you do not get enough giving to match your vision, then your vision is not from God - period. There is a biblical word for pastors who demand second offerings because the first take was too low - hirelings. And for the love of everything holy stop pretending Benny Hinn has ever repented! Dr. Brown just got done saying he never repented! It is not "cultural" to accept being robbed. Brown responds:
"Number one there are proper ways for us to have accountability in our ministries, if we want to. In other words, we don't have to be lone rangers. We can have a solid board that really watches, or you ask for outside oversight, from other respected leaders and if something is amiss someone could come to them with a concern. Look, anyone with any Internet platform today is going to have someone attacking them, saying all kinds of crazy things. Like I say, I spot things or people send them to me and you just have to laugh when you read them. I have accountability in my life, first and foremost with my wife who calls me out on the carpet for anything that falls short of the standard. Beyond that we need to have people to say, hey that was not right or hey the way that offering was taken was not right we need to fix that." - Dr. Michael Brown
I will grant Brown the benefit of the doubt and assume he was tongue in cheek about his wife being his accountability, but it really does highlight the problem with Brown's argument. The people church leaders use for faux accountability is essentially the same thing as your wife. It is someone who is entirely subjective to the leader. Someone you can just laugh away any serious criticism of. Mike Bickle's board was trying to save him right up until the point that his victims turned out to be children. Then only Strang was left defending him. Respected leaders? IHOP refuses to even allow an independent investigation. Please. Now, Dr. Brown recalls the mess that happened when he chose to go on Benny Hinn's television show for a week.
"Let's use Benny Hinn as an example. I had heard all sorts of crazy things throughout the years. Then a grad from our ministry school got to know him and traveled with him and he said, Dr. Brown I think you guys should get to know him. He is really a rock-solid believer who loves the Lord, loves holiness and discipleship. Then I was invited to be on his TV show, and I thought, let me start with a clean slate. By the way, I wish I didn't do it. It was probably the biggest mistake I have made in terms of a public ministry decision because of the amount of flack that came my way and other things came out of it. But I thought let me start with a clean slate here. We hung out before the show, and it was wonderful. Fellowshipping around the word and Jesus. It was beautiful. He had a childlike kind of faith and excitement. Then we did four days of interviews on messianic prophecies and things like that. They were great shows in terms of content. Really good word-based content." - Dr. Michael Brown
I want to make sure we do not gloss over this. Dr. Brown had heard all sorts of crazy things about Hinn and his doctrine but apparently was willing to wipe all of that away at the word of a graduate of his bogus ministry school. Wow again. This highlights however the standard Brown employs for evaluating all potential false teachers. If he knows them, he excuses them based on that knowledge. He does not learn when blindsided by Ravi Zacharias. He does not learn when blindsided by Mike Bickle. Because some random graduate toured with Hinn on his private jet and listened to Benny assure him how much he loves Jesus, Brown adopts the notion that he must be a rock-solid believer and lover of holiness, of all things. The speculation back then was Brown did the appearances simply to sell his books to Hinn's massive audience of followers. Never mind the decades worth of false prophecies, teachings and fleecings - their brief time backstage was wonderful. Aww, ugh. Childlike faith and excitement? Was it because he knew he could leverage Dr. Brown's credibility to fleece even more money? We would soon find out.
