“Excuse me,” he says, and tells me his name. “Would you mind if I prayed for healing?”
He’s looking, pointedly, at my right knee, which is at the moment bound in a thick and very noticeable black brace. “Sure,” I say, because there’s not really another answer in this kind of situation.
Still smiling, he kneels in front of me and lays his hands on my knee, fingers on the gap in my brace where my kneecap is visible. He begins to softly intone a prayer: Lord, please bring healing to her knee. Complete and total healing, Father.
When he finishes, he stands up. “Thanks,” he says. “I’m practicing. Do you … do you want to test it out?”
I’m racking my brain for an excuse not to when the girl next to me, a Bethel student who is coincidentally wearing a brace on her wrist, offers her arm up to him. “You can do me too,” she says, and the kid lights up.
“Thanks,” he says, sheepishly, and kneels again in front of her, fingers gently encircling her wrist.
The room erupts in applause: Kris Vallotton is walking onto the stage. He’s a little portly, with salt-and-pepper hair, a graying beard, and an infectious energy. His preaching style toggles between genuinely funny jokes and sincere stories. “Welcome to Prophecy Week,” he says, and the students roar.
..........................
In Redding, BSSM’s students — some call them “Bethelbots” — are everywhere. For school assignments, students hang out in parking lots and grocery store aisles, asking strangers who use wheelchairs or crutches if they can pray for them to heal.
In a photograph from 2012 posted on Reddit, Kris Vallotton and Bethel Church’s spiritual leader, Bill Johnson, stand in front of a group of neatly dressed young people who are kneeling before them, arms outstretched and palms raised. In Johnson and Vallotton’s hands are swords, their long, gleaming metal blades resting on the students’ shoulders. It’s graduation at Bethel, and its students are being knighted.
BSSM is built on the idea that we are all “naturally supernatural”: We all have the potential to heal the sick and to hear God’s vision for the future. It’s ours because it’s Jesus’s, says Farrelly: Jesus does the work, and humans act as conduits. The school’s job is to foster the supernatural gifts of signs and wonders — to teach people to hear God’s voice and turn it into prophecy.
If they're for real why do they need to TOUCH people physically? creepy.
Stefan looks back at his time at BSSM and sees an array of “psychological mind games” — healing via placebo, prophecy through confirmation bias. He’s done some reading lately, he says, on how magicians convince crowds that they are seeing magic and not magic tricks; how believing that you are going to recover from an illness or that your injured limb has been healed can, sometimes, be enough to accomplish healing.
hmmm:
There’s the one of Bethelites doing something called “grave sucking,” or praying, prostrate, on the grave of a famous Christian. There are the frenzied “fire tunnels” where giddy church members form aisles and lay their hands on people in the middle, shaking, staggering, and screaming as they are filled with the Holy Spirit. And then there are videos of Bethel’s “glory clouds,” where gold glitter begins to drift from the church sanctuary ceiling seemingly out of nowhere mid-sermon, which have been viewed more than a million times on YouTube.
a big boo-boo:
A group that included Bethel students were drinking at the top of a cliff on the banks of the broad Sacramento River. When one man fell to the bottom of the 200-foot cliff, news reports say, the students didn’t call the police. Instead, they tried to climb down so that they could faith-heal him. They never found him, and for six hours, he lay bleeding and unconscious in the dark at the foot of the cliff. He survived, but was paralyzed. (The students were found to be not at fault in a suit.)
another big boo-boo:
Bethel’s annual Medical Healing Conference, which took place in May. The conference was initially set to be cohosted by the Shasta Regional Medical Center — the hospital where Orian died. Zibull was “shocked” and outraged when she heard about the conference, she says. Online, she began to plan a protest with the other members of the Citizens Concerned About Bethel Church Facebook group.
That protest never panned out, but Zibull still has her sign. It reads: “You can’t raise the dead.”
and
and
https://china-underground.com/2012/03/23/11-rare-videos-of-chinese-with-supernatural-powers/
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