At the start of the evening, he promised “many, many, many, many miracles,” and now, just before 10 p.m. and after almost three hours of preaching, hymns and prayer, Benny Hinn is beginning to deliver.
“A second ago, someone was healed of cancer,” he announces to the crowd in the darkened arena. “A bone condition is being healed. Hallelujah! If you stand up, you’ll find the pain is completely gone. . . .”
It’s the opening night of Hinn’s two-day June crusade in the Chicago area, and 9,000 souls have gathered at the Rosemont Horizon. Hundreds have come to be healed, and everyone, it’s safe to say, has come to see the diminutive, 40-year-old preacher in person and to watch him work wonders.
Most, if not all, know Hinn from TV.
Although he may not have the national name recognition of some televangelists, Benny Hinn, whose home is Orlando, is a prominent figure in religious broadcasting and publishing.
His half-hour program, “This Is Your Day,” condensed from his monthly crusades, is broadcast on Chicago’s WCFC-Ch. 38 at midnight weekdays, and the one-hour Sunday service from his nondenominational Orlando Christian Center is televised by the Trinity Broadcasting Network.
His brother and spokesman, Christopher, says Hinn’s two programs are shown on more than 100 channels and cable systems.
Hinn is also the author of three books that are best sellers at religious bookstores. His first, “Good Morning, Holy Spirit,” is said to have sold more than 1 million copies. Christianity Today magazine says the book “is one of the best-selling Christian books of all time.” Last year, Christopher says, his brother reaped $500,000 in royalties from his writings and tapes.
What the people who are present in Rosemont may not know is that only days before, Hinn publicly renounced the core of the beliefs he has held for the last decade, which, in its way, may be as miraculous as anything that will happen here.
Earlier in the evening, he alluded to this theological U-turn, speaking vaguely of “the changes taking place inside of me very rapidly” and his intentions to “focus on Jesus” because of a recent revelation from God. It’s likely he was also influenced by attacks from conservative Christian groups, which monitor the messages of independent ministries like Hinn’s and have accused him of unorthodox teachings and questionable healings.
For those at the Rosemont Horizon, the most obvious difference in Hinn is his hair. His soaring, heavily sprayed heap of a comb-over-the baked Alaska of evangelical scalpdom-has been reduced to a shorter, more conventional style.
Otherwise, things are much the same.
“A tumor is disappearing from somebody’s body,” Hinn is declaring. “I rebuke that tumor. Thank you, Lord. . . . There’s a heart condition out there to my right. You are healed. Praise God. Get down here quickly.”
Soon scores stream forward from their seats to the brightly lit platform to proclaim that they have been cured of their afflictions.
An aide’s voice booms over the public address system: “Asthma. Bursitis. Shoulder problem. Diabetes. Cerebral palsy. Arthritis.”
Introduced by the diseases and disabilities from which they now profess to be free, people converge on Hinn from both sides of the platform, one at a time and in pairs, to testify to their experience and receive Hinn’s personal and potent blessing.
Going with the flow
Like a loving hit man for the Lord, he touches them on the forehead with his hand, and they fall backward as if poleaxed, “slain in the Holy Spirit,” suddenly unconscious or seemingly so, collapsing into the arms of catchers who ease them to the floor, where some lie for several minutes, supine and motionless, as new arrivals step around them.
After a while, Hinn sheds the jacket of his white, double-breasted suit and continues in shirtsleeves, explaining, “We cannot stop when the flow is so strong.” He means the power of the Holy Spirit that is flowing through him.
Filled with fervor, he now and then taps the catchers as well, and they and the folks they are catching topple backward together.
A critic has described Hinn’s crusades as “the closest thing to professional wrestling we have in Christian circles.”
Yet for Hinn and his followers, the climactic tumult at the Horizon on this Thursday in June is nothing to get excited about.
As charismatic Christians, they accept the validity of such spiritual gifts as healing, prophecy and speaking in tongues (or glossolalia, an unintelligible prayer language). Ecstatic behavior and miracles of healing are commonplace, familiar, part of the scene.
Indeed, the concept of divine healing is rooted in Christianity through the miracles of Jesus.
“Attend mainline Protestant or Roman Catholic services, and you’ll hear prayers for healing,” says Quentin Schultze, professor of communication at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich.
“The emphasis for healing comes from Hebrews 13:8: `Jesus the same yesterday, today and forever,’ ” says Edith Blumhofer, project director of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals at Wheaton College. “That’s the basic rationale. It’s simple logic: Jesus is here. He will do it. He will do it now.”
Thus, people come expecting to receive or see a miracle. “They want to be reaffirmed in their belief that God is present right here and now,” she says. “It’s not the mystery of the eucharist. It’s real and tangible: `I saw it happen.’ You become your own best illustration of what you believe. It brings the theoretical down into your experience.”
Self-taught Bible scholar
The Christian watchdog organizations critical of Hinn have problems with practice, not theory; they complain that the healings he claims cannot be substantiated.
They also note that he seems to avoid the hardest cases. If he were all he purports to be, they ask, if he is truly a conduit for God’s power, why doesn’t he heal the most severely disabled? Why can’t he cure every cancer, rebuke every tumor?
The questions, of course, address a fundamental conundrum of Christianity and other religions. If God is omnipotent, loving and merciful, why is there so much misery? Why are the just and the innocent not spared their suffering?
Likewise, the scrutiny and censure of Hinn and his doctrines by the Christian groups address larger issues about what Blumhofer calls “personality-driven ministries” in which “immediacy is important and tradition irrelevant.”
In his book, “Televangelism and the American Culture,” Calvin College’s Schultze concludes that “televangelism is more American than Christian,” driven by dominant precepts of society’s secular creed-entrepreneurship, individualism, self-reliance, faith in technology.
“Evangelists easily fall into experientially-based theology,” Schultze says. “They try to validate their beliefs by revealing what happened in their own lives.”
Further, there is usually “no overarching authority from a group, whether this is a denomination or congregation.”
In fact Hinn, who declined to be interviewed, has never attended a theological seminary or been affiliated with a denomination.
“Benny studied the Bible himself,” says Christopher, a year younger than his brother.
Considering his background, Hinn’s rise has been remarkable. He was born in Israel. “We grew up in the Greek Orthodox faith,” Christopher says. “My dad is of Greek and Egyptian heritage. Mom has Armenian heritage.”
When Benny was 11, Christopher says, Jesus Christ appeared to him. “Benny knew then that he would be a minister.”
At 14, Benny moved to Canada with his family, and in 1973, when he was 20, according to Christianity Today, “he had a profound religious experience” at a service conducted by faith healer Kathryn Kuhlman.
He would begin preaching, would marry the daughter of an Assembly of God minister in 1978 and five years later found the Orlando Christian Center, where 7,000 worship each Sunday. In 1989, he traveled to Pompano Beach, Fla., for the first monthly crusade.
`Health and wealth’
Also in the ’80s, Benny Hinn has said, he fell under the sway of the Faith or Word-Faith movement, whose proponents include televangelists Robert Tilton, Kenneth Copeland and John Avanzini.
The movement and its principals were condemned in “Christianity in Crisis,” published this year by Harvest House and written by Hank Hanegraaff, president of the Christian Research Institute of Irvine, Calif.
The institute, Hanegraaff says, “is the largest evangelical countercult organization in the country. We conduct primary research on cults and aberrant Christian theology or heretical teachings.”
Two years ago, pressure from the institute led to an interview with Hinn in Christianity Today in which he repudiated many of his previous theological assertions.
The Faith movement’s basic dogma, says Schultze, is essentially a “health-and-wealth gospel,” which holds that God doesn’t want the faithful to be sick, disabled or poor, and that if you have sufficient faith, you will be prosperous and well. When you die, it won’t be from disease; you’ll simply wear out. Giving money to the health-and-wealth ministries as a demonstration of faith will reap great dividends.
“He doesn’t stand for that anymore,” Christopher said on the phone from Orlando after Hinn’s crusade in Rosemont.
His brother, he said, disavowed the health-and-wealth tenets in a May 30 sermon to his home congregation. The reason he didn’t mention this at the Chicago-area crusade was he was waiting for it to be televised, which occurred after Rosemont.
In the sermon, Hinn warns that some old friends will be disappointed by his new views. “But I am going to say it. It’s time we quit preaching what this Bible never taught. . . . I am re-examining my entire theology. . . . I’m reading this Bible as though I’ve never read it before. God has taken me by the neck, and He’s shaking me.”
On illness and faith:
“I actually said that had my daddy known what I know, he would not have died of cancer. I’m having to take that back and say I was wrong. I was wrong. I don’t understand these things. . . . I’m not God. You become so convinced you’re right that God has to shake it out of you. . . .
“I think I will become more effective because now I can understand some people’s pain a little bit better. I think it’s cruel to tell people (they are sick because they) lack faith. How cruel! How cruel!
“I tell you honestly, I think I’m going to quit preaching healing and start preaching Jesus. And let him do it. . . . I’m going to re-aim the message.” (Christopher says his brother does not intend to end his healing ministry but rather to emphasize it less.)
`The final shocker’
On wealth:
“And here it is, the final shocker . . . I think the teaching on prosperity has gone too far to the extreme. I don’t deny God wants to bless us. . . . But ladies and gentlemen, I’m hearing more worldly ideas about prosperity than I’m hearing Godly ideas. . . .
“Money, money, money, money, money. . . . (Evangelists on TV) think (only) about money. . . . We have forgotten there are thousands of (poor) kids and (poor) people out there (and yet) preachers. . . . live in big homes and drive big cars.”
Christopher says the Benny Hinn ministry grossed $15 million last year and that Hinn drew a salary of $116,000. He says his brother’s $500,000 in royalties allowed him to give $100,000 this year to his ministry.
Hinn, he says, has traded his Mercedes Benz for a Lincoln but still lives in his $685,000 home, chiefly because of its security. “There are death threats against Benny all the time,” he says.
The Hinn ministry, he says, has also inaugurated stricter verification procedures to review healings.
While Christopher says Hanegraaff is taking a wait-and-see attitude with regard to Hinn’s pledge to change directions, one critic is applauding.
Hinn’s sermon of May 30 “took a lot of guts,” says Ole Anthony, president of the Trinity Foundation of Dallas, another Christian watchdog group.
Anthony worked with ABC’s “PrimeTime Live” in an investigation of Robert Tilton, going undercover to find evidence of fraud. He also helped the syndicated TV show “Inside Edition” look into Hinn’s ministry.
“We found the same things wrong with Hinn as with Tilton-trashed prayer requests that never reached either man and phony testimonials,” Anthony said.
The contrast in their responses prompted him to write “A Tale of Two Evangelists” for the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain.
Tilton, he writes, reacted with “a paranoia that is paralyzing” his ministry, while Hinn, through “his openness and willingness to correct mistakes . . . can become a model of accountability for this $2.5 billion-a-year American industry.”
He makes it sound like an exercise in self-healing.
