Furtick Speaks it into Existence. Wake Up People.

There are a lot of big shot "rock star" pastors these days. A lot of them. There is Joel Osteen, Kenneth Copeland, Creflo Dollar, and Joyce Meyer. Those are four big names and are very easily identified by the majority of orthodox Christian believers as false teachers. Their teachings are pretty obviously false directly on the face of it.

A newer guy on the block who is moving his way up to rock star status in the preaching world is Steven Furtick. You've probably heard of him. He pastors Elevation Church in North Carolina which has well in excess of 10,000 members.

Pr. Steven Furtick

It's not popular now days to criticize anyone for anything. It's viewed as unloving, and truth be told, I'm generally not too concerned with that on the blog. The three of us here tend to stick to Confessional Lutheran stuff. That said, I have a lot of friends outside of Confessional Lutheranism in both the real world and in cyberspace. Furtick is popular - and he is not as obviously heretical as the others.

A recent article has come out regarding Furtick building a 1.7 million dollar home. While I do believe that he may indeed be fleecing the flock and using it for his personal gain here, I am not going to criticize Furtick for having money. Nor am I going to be harsh for Pr. Furtick having a huge church with a ton of members. Heck, I'm happy for the man in that regard. That's not the point of this post.

Rather, I would like to point out some of the things Furtick believes that have come straight from his mouth. He is a Southern Baptist by name, but he really isn't by practice. I will argue here that Pr. Furtick is heading very quickly down the same Word-of-Faith heresy road as the aforementioned Osteen, Dollar, and Meyer. He's certainly not all-in on Word-of-Faith, but he's already accepted one of the major tenets.

Pr. Furtick released a short video that spoke about his rituals that he uses before he preaches. In it, much of Furtick's theology is revealed. And, as you may not expect, it is chock full of Word-of-Faith nonsense. It's not by any stretch of the imagination classical Southern Baptist theology of the Calvinist or Arminian stripe.

Here is the video. Just watch it. The discerning ear will have horns going off continually and red flags flying.

Furtick - Activating Your Faith

However, I would like to specifically address some of the things Pr. Furtick says in the video.

At the 1:19 mark, he begins to describe his "ritual" which he is "superstitious" about. No, I'm not going to pick on those words. That's just how he describes it.

The first thing that should throw up some red flags is that he uses speaking the Word out loud to "activate" different parts of his body. He claims it is very important to speak these words out loud in order to create an atmosphere of God's Word around him. Through this process, Pr. Furtick says that he becomes bold and established, and from God's Word coming from his mouth, his faith is activated.

To keep it short and allow the video and Pr. Furtick's words to speak for themselves, let's just leave it at this: The claims Pr. Furtick is making, that speaking the Word vocally activates faith, builds up an atmosphere around you, and so on, are nothing short of "speak it into existence" theology. This has more in common with metaphysical mind science cults than it does with Christianity. And this is a core doctrine of the anti-Christian Word-of-Faith cult.

This is NOT Christian teaching. This stuff is dangerous. Pr. Steven Furtick is essentially a quasi Word-of-Faith teacher dressed up in Southern Baptist clothes.

This is a soft form of ex nihilo (out of nothing) creation. What's next? Now that our words are little packets of power that speak things into existence, should we now try to speak material things into existence and claim that the Word says we can do that? Wait a second, I think I've heard that before. The problem is, only one guy can create things out of nothing and it's not Pr. Furtick.

His name is YHWH. Ever heard of Him???