The Florida Outpouring Part 1

This past Sunday while in Florida on vacation I drove the hour and a half from my parents home in Lake Helen to Lakeland, FL to attend a service at the Florida Outpouring; aka the Lakeland Revival.

For those of you who don't know about this, the revival began in April with an evangelist/prophet named Todd Bentley. On the night I was there, the revival was in it's 67th day.

I wanted to attend the revival for a few reasons:
First, I have some serious concerns about Todd Bentley and some of the things he claims to have experienced as well as some things that he has stated publicly. I am not going to go into those things right now on this blog because it would not be productive to point out every issue I have with Todd Bentley. The only thing that I would like to point out is that I have no problem with Biblical manifestations of God's presence. Those are not the things I am calling into question..tongues, slain in the spirit, healing, etc.

Second, as a pastor I feel that I have an obligation and a duty under scripture to 'test the spirit' of any movement that could influence the people of my congregation. There have been some people from the congregation go down to attend the meetings, and some that have asked questions about it, so I decided to go and check it out while in FL on vacation. It would not be fair of me to take a decisive stand on it without going there and experiencing it.

Third, I realize that God is more than able to use someone with a less than perfect track record of ministry to still reach people and make his presence known to them. I wanted a first hand experience of being there. My top spiritual gift is discernment, so I wanted to go and discern it in person apart from the hype of the positives and negatives that I was hearing about. I wanted to be able to separate the experience from the person and make a fair judgment of each.

My experiences at Lakeland will be part 2. Then my conclusions will be part 3. Coming soon.