Word of "Faith"

I’ve made no secret about my one time involvement with Word of Faith (WOF) teaching. It’s a confession that one visitor to this blog has tried to use against me. On more than one occasion (here and elsewhere) he has tried to use it to discredit who I am and what I now believe.

Accompanying that attempt has been an assumption about the extent of my involvement and the effect it continues to have on my life. From the tone and the content of insinuations made I can see he assumes my attraction to WOF was inspired by greed.

While my involvement with WOF has never been hidden, I don’t recall writing about my reasons for getting involved with that teaching. I now want to address those reasons.

For several years I had been involved with a Pentecostal denomination that continually presented a Christian reality that I was not experiencing. No matter how often they insisted that healing and miracles were valid today – they were demonstrating nothing of that professed reality. There was a huge gap between professed belief and actual experience. It was a gap that didn’t seem to exist in scripture. What was the problem?

My introduction to WOF came at a midweek home fellowship meeting. Members of the group had been listening to tapes from one of Kenneth Copeland’s conferences and they were sharing some of the things that had excited them. I offered significant resistance to the things they were saying but eventually their enthusiasm got through to me.

Was I won over by the promise of a prosperous life? Or was it the claim that Christians could and should live in total health?

It was neither. The thing that broke down the wall of my resistance was a realisation of what faith meant. At that stage I didn’t know about the WOF teachings of faith being a force that anyone could utilise. I knew nothing about the emphasis on positive confession (confess and possess or the less reverent blab it and grab it). All I knew was that I gained an understanding of faith for the first time. It became much more than an “airy-fairy” mystical word that seemed to have no practical use.
At best my previous understanding of faith involved a lot of uncertainty and had more in common with “wishing” than with a firm trust in my redeemer.
For the first time faith became something more certain and firm, something concrete.

Having faith in God meant to trust Him no matter what.
It meant taking Him at His word and having confidence in what He had said. Primarily, in practical terms, that meant accepting His word as being the truth even when our circumstances or experience offered contradictory evidence. If God had promised something in scripture, and if all conditions of that promise were met, then we should have the total confidence of receiving what was promised, because God is not a liar.

The biblical faith I discovered was not a vague uncertain trust in God. It involved an absolute confidence in Him and His character. His word became the standard by which God and His purposes could be known. Through scripture His desires and plans for mankind were revealed. By knowing His will and in particular through knowing what He had provided for His children, we could have the foundation upon which our faith could firmly stand.

That is the area of WOF that attracted me. It was not the promise of health and wealth – it was the promise of living as a genuinely effective Christian witness, actually LIVING and demonstrating the Christian life described in the New Testament instead of tolerating the hypocrisy of professing one thing and living another. It gave a tangible reality to faith and it was no longer merely a theological concept.

THAT is what drew me to WOF. Its teachers were the first to give me a real understanding of what faith is and at the time they were the only ones who seemed to be teaching that truth.

However, their message came with a lot of excess baggage that was not so helpful. While their doctrines were always (supposedly) based on ‘the word” – like all false doctrines they were based on PARTS of the word. I became very adept at quoting scripture to promote the teaching I was receiving. But my quotes were learned mainly via Copeland recordings and not through turning to scripture for myself. I was therefore never aware of the correct context of those quotes. I was only familiar with the interpretations placed upon those verses by the Copelands and associated ministries.

While the understanding of faith that I’d initially gained was still valuable (that is trusting God’s word to be the truth): all validity was dependant on it REALLY being GOD’S word and not a false assumption that I mistook for God’s word. Believing in an assumption or a wrong interpretation of scripture is NOT an expression of faith in God. That is where my departure from WOF began. There were too many inconsistencies between what I was being taught and what I was reading in scripture for myself. Too much of scripture was being ignored or misapplied.
At first I pushed aside my concerns. After all no one is perfect and I couldn’t expect the teachers to get everything right – and they were the ones who had given me an insight into the nature of faith when my church and its leaders seemed to be as much in the dark as I had been.

Instead of being attracted to WOF by their teaching on prosperity, it was the increasing emphasis on earthly wealth that gave me most cause for concern. While I was struggling financially I could see these men and women living highly extravagant lifestyles, financed by the donations they solicited. It seemed that the way for me to get out of financial difficulties was by sending them money (?) – and their lifestyles showed how it all worked (and could allegedly work for me) with God clearly blessing them and their ministry with wealth. None of this (their extravagance) seemed compatible with anything that Jesus said about wealth. Those parts of scripture were among those conveniently ignored.

A major area of their teaching on faith that I could not reconcile with anything in scripture was the idea that faith is a force that works when it principles are put into practice. Even unbelievers were tapping into this force of faith and were reaping its benefits without realising what they were doing. This teaching made faith into something impersonal with a power of its own. It was not a matter of having faith in someone (God), it was important to have faith in your faith. This is where “positive confession” came into play. Continued positive confession was the means of reinforcing and expressing faith to obtain a desired outcome. Negative confession was equally effective, but the outcome was nothing to be desired.
I was never comfortable with this aspect of WOF teaching and when I read “The Seduction of Christianity’ by Hunt and McMahon the reason for my discomfort was made clear. The authors showed there was a relationship between these beliefs and practices with occultism and eastern mysticism. It was around that time that I broke away from WOF teaching.

WOF teaching is riddled with false doctrine and false practices (and I think that has increased in the 20+ years since I abandoned it). But like the majority of heresies there is enough truth to disguise the lies. In the case of WOF I gained a much stronger understanding of what faith is (and is not). Faith revolves around relationship; knowing God, His ways and His desires well enough to trust Him totally. Faith requires an understanding of His will and is focused on His will. It is not focused on our desire or our assumptions and it definitely is not a “force” to be operated.

Looking back now I can say that my understanding of faith began with my involvement with WOF teachers – but it developed and matured DESPITE their teaching and not because of it.