A New, and Quite Shocking Testimony....

MY AMAZING EXPERIENCE OF THE “TORONTO BLESSING” ENTERING A BRITISH PENTECOSTAL CHURCH

By Maria Martin

“...They screamed and threw themselves on the floor . Once they had some sort of ’play’ where they asked people to pretend they were the devil and come behind other people to give them suggestions. One young woman was clearly bullied into playing the devil in the meeting and was very upset ...”

I received Jesus as my Saviour when I was about eight years old. I was brought up in the Baptist Church and became a Christian there, giving my heart to Jesus at this very young age. I had great teenager years, going to Bible camps and enjoying friendship with other Christians, and when I was 21 I started working with a Mission leading Bible groups in schools and colleges. I met my husband when I was 25, we had two children and moved to the UK. Some years after, we moved house again, to a village in Britain and started looking for a church there.

One Sunday morning I went alone to a Pentecostal church nearby. It was a lively sort of place, with wonderful worship and many young people, so we thought we would give it a try, since we had two teenagers. I was a bit worried about the fact that it was a Pentecostal church, but I thought that wouldn’t be that different from what I was used to. We were received with a lot of love, invited everywhere, to Bible groups, meetings in homes, parties, and suddenly life seemed full of friends again. We had some happy months and we seemed to know everybody there. We invited people for lunch and got to know some of the members very well.

I did have some concerns, though. There was not much doctrine taught to the young, their meetings seem to be more to play games than anything else. Slowly I could see that not everything was rosy, some members disliked others and there was envy, mistrust, etc.

There were two pastors there, and some other people who could serve as pastors as well. Under the pastors there were about twelve leaders and their wives, and under them, the members. There was a hierarchy with the top Pastor not accountable to anyone. I should have seen the warning signs.

About that time the ‘Toronto Revival’ started and our church went along pretty soon.
Our pastor now started ‘receiving’ prophecies very often. This went like this: One would get to church and the pastor would be pacing the corridor instead of sitting behind the pulpit. A bad sign! His eyes were like pebbles in those occasions, like if he was in a trance. No sermon, no Bible on those Sundays. The pastor would walk the church and grab some poor person, call he or she to the front and proceed to ‘give this person a prophecy’, sometimes a very humiliating and downgrading prophecy. Everybody tried to become invisible to the pastor! I do recall a young man who was terribly humiliated in front of the whole church, also a lovely woman who was told some dreadful things about herself. Thank God I was never a victim of those ‘prophecies!’

One of those ‘prophecies’ concerned a couple who, according to the pastor, was having a relationship before being married. He never said their names, but looked up to the gallery where they were sitting. There was no other young couple there. The girl felt the eyes of the whole congregation on her and run away crying, never to return. The young man denied everything and also left. This had a devastating effect on some young people, including my daughter. On another occasion , during a wedding ceremony, the pastor told everybody present that that marriage wouldn’t work! My heart went out to the poor mother of the bride and both families there all dressed up for the wedding. In this occasion, the pastor was right: The marriage finished in about three months. But I didn’t believe that he had the right to voice his opinion during the ceremony.

Talking about marriage, divorces and separations started being a common fact in the church. It seemed that every couple had problems one way or another. The son of the pastor, recently married, left his wife, a lovely girl whom he used to verbally abuse in the church steps Sunday morning, while people were going in. Because of this very short lived marriage, the girl’s whole family left the church and went through a terrible time, trying to avoid church members in public locations and even had a confrontation inside a supermarket, of all places! This girl became a recluse for many years and suffered greatly, but there was no word of comfort from any of the two pastors for this family. People who left the church might as well be dead. Nobody ever talked about them again in any manner, after the first communication that they had left and why. The explanation was always something that made them the wrong part, backsliders, sinners. Soon after, a wife of one of top leaders also left him. The couples were constantly called to "have a talk" with the pastors. They also called members to talk about everything else, for example, if someone dared visit another church. We were told not to visit another church. The pastor told us that if anyone wanted to visit another church, this person may as well stay there and not come back. We also used to ask permission to be absent on any given Sunday if we had to travel, etc.

A feeling of elitism was very apparent. We were the very best. Only our church had a good worship team. Only this church had a ‘move from God.' We were just in the middle of the action. We had arrived!

Talks about ’Revival’ were the order of the day. Everybody thought Revival was imminent. Prayer meetings were organized about this expected Revival and one of them was a prayer meeting led by sister Maureen. Now, sister Maureen was a 'one woman show’ and this prayer meeting consisted of her prayers, her talk, her experiences and her ’Toronto-type' shows. Together with another sister she was friendly with, they screamed and threw themselves upon the floor.
Once they had some sort of ’play’ where they asked people to pretend they were the devil and come up behind other people to give them suggestions. One young woman was clearly bullied into playing the devil in the meeting and was very upset. After some of those meetings, I didn’t want to be present anymore and organized a Bible study in my home, to which I didn’t invite sister Maureen. In the middle of it, she appeared at my door, provoking such a commotion for not having been invited that we had to stop everything and ended up divided into two groups fighting each other! Some Bible study!
Sister Maureen loved to find some fault with people and confessed in a self-congratulatory manner that she followed members of the church if she saw them enter a Video rental shop to see which videos they took out!
There was absolute obsession with the devil. During prayer meetings people would rebuke Satan from every chair and see devils working in everything. While I do believe that the enemy is always trying to make the Christians fall, the power of God is much greater.

The meetings on Sunday mornings and evenings were prolonged for hours by people streched on the carpet, moaning, not able to get up, or sometimes getting up very quickly and being told by the pastor to spend more time on the floor. Prayer meetings in the homes ended up becoming ’holy laugh’ sessions, where people would do just that, laugh and laugh even more. There were other prayer meetings where people actually prayed as well, but always somebody had to start prophesying and having ‘words’ for somebody else. Sometimes I was enjoying a genuine prayer meeting when things started degenerating to something more to the taste of the people there, in another words, to experiences of shaking, falling about, etc. Some visitors would add to the general euphoria by telling us that they had prophecies about our church and that we were the leaders, we were the very best, and we would lead the whole area. Unnecessary to say, perhaps, but they were all false prophecies: Years have now gone by and nothing remotely like the "prophesyings" ever happened.

The two pastors many times didn’t agree with each other and talked about the other to members. I was told personally by one of the pastors that what the other one said was, "in his head only." The church presented so many problems that one couldn’t be blamed for thinking that a revival of the form of Christianity which we were presenting would be an absolute disaster. Still, one could not go against anything because we were not supposed to dissent at all. This is a sure mark of a cult. The signs were all there, but I still didn’t see them.
People started ‘getting’ pictures during services, they all were self-congratulatory and they were interpreted as God telling us how wonderful this church was. How deep deceiving can go!

The pastor’s son brought a new girlfriend to the church while still married to another girl and nothing was done about it. He was allowed to be part of the worship group as if nothing had happened.
I was by now feeling very acutely that things were not quite right and tried to communicate my feelings about the lack of good teaching for the young, the ‘Revival’ that people expected to come in the middle of the confusion and some other questions about the way they were interpreting some Bible verses. It seemed to me that nobody was worried about those things, as long as everybody fell down on the carpet and had visions and ‘pictures.‘ Experience became the norm, the people considered "spiritual" were the ones who prayed the loudest and who had most strange things happening to them.
When the wife of yet another member left him, he came to our house to tell us that he believed she would come back because he had seen (please don’t laugh) three cars with the same letters in their plates and he considered that a sign! That was the kind of thing that was around. (That was really weird). By the way, she has never gone back to him.

Our pastor decided by this time that he had to go to Toronto to see things by himself and from then on he would be always going somewhere abroad taking a trusted elder with him. Who has paid for all those trips, I wonder?

A person from my family who also belonged to the church told me in confidence that he wanted to see the pastor to put right some sin (a sexual matter) that was heavy on his conscience. He had already confessed to God, but he still wanted to see the pastor about it. I was really worried and told him not to, but he went ahead and talked to the pastor expecting confidentiality. About three days later, he was called again to the church and when he opened the door of the pastor's office most of the elders were inside waiting for him. He was then humiliated beyond belief and told to leave his ministry in the church. Everything that belonged to this man’s ministry was bundled in black bags to be thrown away (like if he had some disease). His wife couldn’t face meeting people in the street anymore and their best friends cooled off with them because, in the end, everybody and their wives knew it all. We all suffered a lot, being of the same family. His wife was told by one of the pastors that would be okay to leave her husband (she had no intention of doing so and they are still married today). And he just went to talk about a sin that God had already forgiven! Well, God might have forgiven him, but he was not forgiven by the church. However, the pastor’s son (apparently) had no sin when he brought a girlfriend to the church and kicked his own wife away.

After that, we left. Some people wouldn’t look at us in the street anymore. Some others we avoided because we knew what they would say. The couple mentioned above suffered greatly for years. They have never got themselves involved with another church, though they love the Lord. Our family had to move home to avoid the fear and anguish of meeting church people in the street. Our children are still without a church and they remember well those terrible days.
My involvement with this church made me think a lot and read all I could about churches that become cultic and forget about the grace of God. Also it made me much more aware of how easy things can go wrong and how much we need to be firm in what the Bible really says, not depending on experience but in the Word. Because is by the FRUITS and not by EXPERIENCES that we are known to be disciples of Christ.
Maria Martin, 2006. All rights reserved.

UK APOLOGETICS

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