God’s Will is Prosperity, insists Gloria Copeland. “Give $10 and receive $1,000; give $1,000 and receive $100,000. . . . In short, Mark 10:30 is a very good deal.” “Scripture clearly establishes how intensely God desires to display His goodness and His love toward man by pouring out His prosperity and abundance… If you’re a believer, you have a covenant right to prosperity. And not just prosperity but True Prosperity. Now, with Gloria’s detailed study, you can “… discover for yourself that God’s Will is Prosperity.”  And if following Gloria’s advice doesn’t make you sufficiently wealthy, Amazon recommends, you also read her husband, Kenneth Copeland’s books, The Laws of Prosperity, and Prosperity, the Choice is Yours.

If the Copeland lifestyle is anything to go by, they are blessed indeed. A recent survey claims Copeland is the richest pastor in the world.[i] Their net worth is estimated at $760 million though he already claims to be a billionaire. Their 1,500-acre ministry campus near Fort Worth includes a church, a private airstrip, a hangar for the ministry’s $17 million jet aircraft, and a $6 million lakefront mansion. Maybe there is something in the prosperity gospel. Gloria quotes from Mark 10 where we meet a very religious and very prosperous young man who wants to follow Jesus. Lets read the story and see what it has to say about the prosperity gospel. Continue reading →

The first event I ever came to at Christ Church, 18 years ago, was an Alpha taster evening. I sat next to a lady and we got talking. Then she asked me “What do you do for a living?” I replied “Guess”. Without batting an eyelid she said, “Well, you are either an estate agent, a vicar or an undertaker.” I replied, “How did you guess?”, She replied “Because I am married to one”. She was in fact a local vicar’s wife.

J. John the evangelist has a better answer. “It’s difficult to know what to say. Because if I say to you that I’m a Reverend, which I am, that conjures up certain images in people’s minds as to what I might be. I like to be a bit creative in telling people what I do. I sat next to this lady on an airplane at Heathrow airport and I said, ‘Hello’, and she said, ‘Hello’. Then I said to her, ‘Where are you going?’ and she said, ‘I’m going to Singapore’. And she said to me, ‘Where are you going?’ and I said, ‘I’m going to Australia’.  I said, ‘What do you do?’ and she told me; then she said to me, ‘What do you do?’ and I said, ‘Well….’ ‘… I work for a global enterprise.’ She said, ‘Do you?’ I said, ‘Yes I do.’ I said, ‘We’ve got outlets in nearly every country of the world.’ She said, ‘Have you?’ I said, ‘Yes we have.’ I said, ‘We’ve got hospitals and hospices and homeless shelters,’ I said, ‘We do marriage work, we’ve got orphanages, we’ve got feeding programmes, educational programmes.’ I said, ‘We do all sorts of justice and reconciliation things’. I said, ‘Basically, we look after people from birth to death, and we deal in the area of behavioural alteration.’ She went, ‘Wow!’ And it was so loud, her ‘Wow!’, loads of people turned round and looked at us. She said, ‘What’s it called?’ I said, ‘It’s called the church … have you not heard of it?’ And that’s it, really, isn’t it – if we are a follower of Jesus then we are part of a global enterprise. But not only is it global, it’s intergalactic, because it includes everyone that’s gone before us.’[i]

The Real Jesus I Never Knew from Stephen Sizer on Vimeo.

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