Run, it's an Evangelist!

Our Sunday school class is studying the book, Gospel Medicine, by Barbara Brown Taylor. In the first chapter she talks about evangelism becoming a very distasteful thing these days. Brown talks about watching Oral Roberts in the 1950's doing his ridiculous faith healing routine and her reaction was to pray she'd never meet an evangelist in person and to swear that she'd run for her life if she ever did. Even as a preacher years later, she was offended when someone called her an evangelical. Even as a preacher she equated evangelism with radical insanity.

The following is an entertaining and disturbing video of some of the sort of faith healing I think Brown was talking about. I don't know who this preacher is, but the only video of Oral Roberts I could find was so old and grainy that it was impossible to even see what was happening.




Let me set one thing straight right now. This is not evangelism. This is spectacle. Evangelism is simply the act of telling people about how good Christianity is. Sharing your experience with God's and Christ's true spiritual healing.