This one took a little bit to unravel. The above linked article was posted today at Charisma News with today's date and the author being indicated was Jamie Buckingham. Google only turned up a Jamie Buckingham that passed away in 1992, so I was confused. Adding to the confusion is the opening line said, "The morning after a recent ministry scandal broke", and had a hyperlink to an article about the recent Robert Morris scandal. So, the clear intention of Charisma was to deceive its readers into thinking this was an article written today, in reaction to the Robert Morris scandal. Except it wasn't. It was written by that former bible teacher who passed away 32 years ago. It was written in 1988 in reaction to the Jimmy Swaggart scandal, not the Robert Morris debacle. It certainly appears that Charisma wanted the patina of relevance to today, to try and get Christians to not trust the secular media by using the ghost of Jamie Buckingham but pretending he was referencing recent scandals. Let us reason once more beloved and see what Charisma might be up to with this deception.
"The morning after a recent ministry scandal broke, I woke to the internal words, "Beware of the tumblebugs." It's been a long time since I thought of tumblebugs. Lying in bed, I remembered kneeling as a child in our barnyard watching those tiny beetles at work. A tumblebug finds a pile of manure. With its front claws it pulls out a small amount, mixes it liberally with its spit, works it into a ball, then rolls it across the barnyard, pushing the bundle with its nose. As I look out over the kingdom, I realize God has given His church a gigantic dose of laxative. The secular media"the tumblebugs of society"smelling the results of God's purgative, have rushed out from under their rocks. They're not looking for the hand of God, much less His face. They're not even interested in the type of purgative the Holy Spirit administers to cleanse and purify His church. All they are nosing for is expelled waste. Once found"and God's people never have excelled at digging latrines"they roll it into a neat little TV spot, serving it up on the 6 o'clock news." - Jamie Buckingham
So again, the "recent" ministry scandal was Jimmy Swaggart but for some reason, Charisma could not just be honest and say they saw parallels from what Buckingham wrote to today. Instead, they chopped his original article up and removed any references to Swaggart. Now, I do not know Buckingham but his entire premise is just as bad as if Charisma wrote it themselves. Are we expecting the world, and the media from the world, to be seeking the hand of God or His face? That is an absurdity. I am not going to get into his disgusting metaphor here but suffice to say it is not an evangelism strategy to paint the lost as seeking our excrement. It is the type of arrogance the pervaded the church in the era in which Buckingham ministered and has only grown worse during the Purpose Driven years. Because Buckingham passed away in 1992, he never got to see that his notion that God gave the church a laxative to cleanse and purify by exposing Swaggart was equally incorrect. Swaggart's era gave way to the abuses of Holy Laughter, the Kundalini spirit at Brownsville, the Purpose Driven Church heresy and eventually the NAR.
"No one is a stronger proponent of freedom of the press than I. But it is truth that sets us free, not twisted, slanted, one-sided, incomplete facts. Such stories land us in more bondage than any journalistic censorship imposed by government regulations. A free press in the hands of irresponsible journalists is as dangerous as a vindictive man who shouts "Fire!" in a public theater. The journalists whose primary intent is to catch people in wrongdoing (or who edit film to create the impression of such) are instruments of their father, the devil." - Jamie Buckingham
The confusing messages indicate that Buckingham would have fit right in with today's apostate church. So, you are the strongest proponent for a free press but liken them to tumblebugs clawing through manure? How terribly Christian. It seems the same complaints that the NAR pretends is wrong with the media today were the same three decades ago. The problem is that both are wrong and distorted. Was there a redeemable side to the Jimmy Swaggart scandal I am unaware of? How about the Robert Morris scandal? Was there slanted, one-sided coverage or was it just the inconvenient truth that both Morris and Swaggart had swindled over 100 million dollars each from the church while being complete hypocrites. Swaggart loved preaching holiness and paying for prostitutes. Morris loved abusive tithing teachings after he had sexually abused a 12-year-old for four years while a married up and coming pastor. The church has seen 40 million people leave in the past 25 years and these are the reasons why. Correctly reporting the scum that both Swaggart and Morris represented in their own times, IS responsible journalism. With apologies to the dead, it seems Buckingham is making a very tortured argument that the problem with Swaggart, and now Charisma is trying to make about Morris, is that they got caught. The responsibility for journalists is to the truth and it so sad that it is not the same for Christian leaders. No one is editing film. Morris molested a little girl for four years and then lied about it as he built his 100-million-dollar empire by bleeding Christians of all their money to line his pockets. That is not shouting fire. It is shouting the truth. It is staggering that someone like Buckingham, who wrote 45 books, can look at the Swaggart scandal and conclude not that he was an instrument of the devil, which he was, but rather those that reported the truth about it were. The same goes for Charisma today and Morris. How can you look at what Robert Morris or Mike Bickle did and somehow conclude that the devil was using those the reported it instead of the perpetrators? It is disgusting.
"Why does the press continually ask questions of prominent pastors that attempt to set them up to look like buffoons? Remember what the news reporting media did to former Secretary of Interior James Watt? Once the newspapers discovered he believed in the return of Christ, they warped his words to sound like Watt felt it was OK to destroy our natural resources since the world would be burned up when Jesus returned"the exact opposite of what he believed." - Jamie Buckingham
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