[Posted at Bene Diction Blogs On, Dec. 27, 2010]
In recent months, evangelist Patricia King has been working on developing a Christian influence in Hollywood. But unfortunately a bit of Hollywood hype crept into her ministry this morning.
I figure that I had better post on this quickly before this goes "Pfft!" as sometimes happens at King's XP Media site.
The heart of King's email this morning reads like this:
DEMONIZED ZOMBIE SET FREE BY JESUS - WATCH TESTIMONY NOW
Dear Friends,
A ministry associate of ours, Shawn Gabie of Kingdom Culture Ministries in Ottawa Canada (info@kingdomculture.ca), came back from a missions trip to Haiti recently. He shares on video an amazing interview with a fully delivered, ex-zombie to share with you. JESUS IS AWESOME!!! Some of it you might question and wonder if some of these things are really possible? Shawn does help walk you through much of it on the video....
I scurried to the site to see whether they were going to brazenly claim that the healed fellow was a zombie, and found Jesus Heals A Zombie Sigh...
The bulk of the video is Gabie interviewing a Haitian Christian who says he has been delivered from demonic spirits through prayer. This is something that some Charismatics believe and preach and try to find Biblical support for. So, if this fellow has been blessed through prayer, as he says, that would be a great thing.
Introducing the interview in the studio, Gabie says that the man's mother received a mysterious vision. "A cow spoke to his mother... while he was in the womb," Gabie says. "That was obviously demonic."
Fully warned, if we have discernment, that we are in "Here be dragons" territory, the video rolls and the man begins to share his story.
The gist of his story is that the Haitian lapsed into a catatonic state, and was healed of it. But the Haitian describes it as his "spirit was taken out of the body" by a voodoo practicioner.
Gabie: "And you became what people in Haiti call 'Zombies'?"
Haitian: "Yes."
How Gabie sums up the story is at least a bit dodgy. It's starts at 17:23 of the video.
"That's a crazy [story]" Gabie says. "The devil wants to take him out at an early age...At six years old, there's a thing place on him, a curse placed on him. The spirit leaves his body. He becomes a zombie, which is very common here in Haiti. I have issues with that, but its very common here in Haiti, if you talk to people in the small villages they will tell you..."
I have issues with that, you could say. I would like to give the Haitian the benefit of the doubt and assume that he was healed, by God, of whatever he was suffering from. But something that would be great is being turned into something tawdry by the way that it is being handled by his Western friends.
I suspect that it would be unBiblical to teach, or say, that the Haitian's spirit fully left his body.
Also, anyone who knows his horror movies recalls that "zombies" are *dead*. This man, whatever happened to him, did not die.
This is a shame. Although the Haitian man's tale seems a bit fantastic, if you can reduce it to saying that he was sick in ways that all can agree with and then healed, God can be praised by those who believe that He heals today.
But fantastic talk of zombies will lead the sceptical to rightly discount the man's story.
A bit of Hollywood style hype has wrecked this man's story. And if God has helped him somehow--in a way that Westerners can understand--that would be a big shame.
So shame on Gabie and his partner in medacity Patricia King.
[Update: My apologies to Gabie for misspelling his name in places. Now fixed . Mom wanted her computer back and I wrote this quickly.]