Prayers Incorporated

[IanS]

At our family get-together on Christmas my sister-in-law told my wife something that has been bothering the both of us ever since. She told her that she is quitting her in-home daycare to help out some people at her church who are staring a new small business. Seems innocent enough, right?

However, when my wife asked how she will be helping, my sister-in-law told her that they hired her to pray for their business to be successful. They even went so far as to buy her a new laptop computer to help organize herself. My wife got the impression that she is also planning to go around and solicit herself as some kind of “spiritual hired gun” for people and businesses who want to be more profitable.

She goes to a protestant church and told my wife that this is very popular in England. I just want to know if any Protestants or English out there have ever heard of this practice. As far as I know, my sister-in-law only has a high school education and has received no professional training in Christian theology. I don’t know, maybe she has reached some kind of spiritual plateau I’m just not capable of achieving, and that would make her prayers more effective than freebie prayers.

For me as a Catholic, I guess I’m just glad to have the Saints intercede for me. So far they have done a great job, and I have yet to get a “prayer invoice” in the mail.

 

[BlestOne]

Let me get this right…She is being compensated to pray? Oh that is too much!!! So is her title Director of Spiritual Affairs? I so think this is linked with prosperity theology that is so popular at the moment. So what happens if the business is not sucessful? Does she get canned for not praying good enough or do they decide that business and church don’t always equal success? I think I will stick with the tried and true intercession of the saints too!

 

[awalt]

I heard Father Corapi say when you pray, pray for the big stuff for people (salvation, the Holy Spirit, etc.) – not that you can’t pray for little secular stuff, but it’s almost an insult to the “King of the Universe”, to ask for something small when He says “Ask and you shall receive.”

So – asking that some business is successful, in return for pay, and God knows all - what do you think He would think about that?

 

[IanS]

BlestOne:

Let me get this right…She is being compensated to pray? Oh that is too much!!! So is her title Director of Spiritual Affairs? I so think this is linked with prosperity theology that is so popular at the moment. So what happens if the business is not sucessful? Does she get canned for not praying good enough or do they decide that business and church don’t always equal success? I think I will stick with the tried and true intercession of the saints too!

Thanks for the (name removed by moderator)ut. My wife did a little research based on what you said and she thinks my sister-in-law has gotten sucked into the Joyce Meyer’s Prosperity Gospel. I believe Joyce makes millions and millions off it a year. Below is an article on it:

Joyce Meyer’s Prosperity Gospel
One of the most popular doctrines of Word-Faith theology is the so-called, “Prosperity Gospel” (aptly referred to by some as, “Blab-it, and Grab-it”).

The prosperity teaching works like this: a proponent will tell you that if you want God to bless you (with money, of course), you will first have to ‘sow a seed of faith’ (translation: send money to the prosperity teacher). God will then (have to, according to some of these cons) send you as much as a hundred-fold in return. Alternatively, or in addition, God will also owe you physical healing…

Of course this begs a question: If you can get money - up to a hundred-fold of what you give to someone else, why do prosperity teachers always ask for more money? If a prosperity teacher puts his money where his mouth is, he would be sending you money.

But there is a variation to the scam. The bottom line of Word-Faith theology is that if you want something, you have to speak or ‘proclaim’ it. According to Word-Faith teachers, Christians are not just God’s children, but have by accepting Jesus Christ become like Adam who, af all, was created in God’s likeness and was to have dominion over the earth.

In other words, according to this teaching, they have become ‘little gods,’ and just like God Himself they should now be able to speak things into existence. (Those who teach this also warn that speaking things into existence can be dangerous. In Word-Faith circles, saying that you have a headache is considered to be a ‘negative confession.’ In order to get what you want, you must make a ‘positive confession.’)

Again, if this trick really worked, those who teach it should never again have to ask for money…

In November, 2003, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch - Joyce Meyer’s hometown newspaper - published a special report on Joyce Meyer. The following is quoted from the report’s introduction:

Joyce Meyer says God has made her rich.

Everything she has came from Him: the $10 million corporate jet, her husband’s $107,000 silver-gray Mercedes sedan, her $2 million home and houses worth another $2 million for her four children – all blessings, she says, straight from the hand of God.

It’s been an amazing run, nothing short of a miracle, says Meyer, a one-time bookkeeper who heads one of the world’s largest television ministries. Her Life in the Word organization expects to take in $95 million this year.

Just look around, she told reporters last month from behind her desk on the third floor of the ministry’s corporate offices in Jefferson County.

Here I am, an ex-housewife from Fenton, with a 12th-grade education,'' she said. How could anybody look at this and see anything other than God?’’

In many ways, Joyce Meyer is an American Cinderella.

Describing herself as sexually abused when she was a girl and neglected and abandoned as a young wife, Meyer has remade herself into one of the nation’s best-known and best-paid TV preachers. She has taken her ``prosperity through faith’’ message to millions.

If you stay in your faith, you are going to get paid,'' Meyer told an audience in Detroit in September. I’m living now in my reward.’’

Meyer, 60 and a grandmother, runs the ministry with her husband, Dave, and the couple’s four children. All of the family, including the children’s spouses, draw paychecks from the ministry.

But the way Meyer spends her ministry’s money on herself and her family may violate federal law, legal and tax experts say. That law bars leaders of non-profits – religious groups and other charities – from privately benefiting from the tax-free money they raise.

Last month, Wall Watchers, a watchdog group that monitors the finances of large Christian groups, called on the Internal Revenue Service to investigate Meyer and six other TV preachers to find out whether their tax-exempt status should be revoked.