Bible Answer Man Broadcast ExcerptsTranscripts of Excerpts from the Bible Answer Man Radio Broadcast
September 8, 2008, 40:08-40:58 [ audio excerpt / complete broadcast ]:
Hank Hanegraaff: Chris, I have gone out on a limb standing with the Local Church movement because I do believe this is an authentic expression of New Testament Christianity. I do believe that you are genuine brothers in the Lord, as are your wives and many other people that I’ve met within the Local Church movement. I’ve gone out on this limb because I believe that it is more important for us to not merely say that the Local Church movement is not a cultic movement, either from a sociological or a theological perspective, but that this movement, which was ultimately forged in the cauldron of persecution, has something to offer to Western Christianity.
September 8, 2008, 8:00-9:47 [ audio excerpt / complete broadcast ]:
Hank Hanegraaff: In my experience of the Local Church movement, particularly in the Pacific Rim nations, I have discovered that there are distinctives that may have a very valuable contribution to the church in the West. One of the things that you do, for example, is pray-read. And a lot of people think or at least have said that the pray-reading that goes on in the Local Church movement is a means of working devotees into an altered state of consciousness so that they lose touch with reality and end up believing things that are outlandish and perhaps even just mundane. They are no longer thinking critically, they’ve lost their critical thinking faculties, and they’re now in an experiential type of religion in which anything goes. I have been to your meetings in London, in Korea, in China, in the United States, and I have found that nothing could be farther from the truth. The fact of the matter is pray-reading for you is not at all meant to work people into altered states of consciousness. Far to the contrary, it is designed to do what?
Chris Wilde: Well, it is designed, ultimately, to help all of us to genuinely come in contact with the living Lord, the living Spirit of Christ, as revealed in His Word, and not to enter into some sort of state where we have an experience that is in any way divorced from the truth in His Word. I mean, to us it’s very important that we have an experiential relationship with Christ, but it’s equally important that that relationship and that experience be biblically hinged at all times.
September 3, 2010, 32:25-32:55[ audio excerpt ]:
Hank Hanegraaff: And that is one of the distinctives of the move of the Holy Spirit that you’re involved in—it’s not for the pastor alone to study the Word of God. It is not alone for the pastor to prophesy in the sense of encouragement, edification, exhortation, and equipping; but it is for every believer to be involved in the proclamation of the Word in praise and in worship. In every sense we worship God through prayer, praise, and the proclamation of the Word, and that is for every believer.
January 6, 2010, 12:30-15:33[ audio excerpt / complete broadcast ]:
Hank Hanegraaff: Something related to that, Elliot, that you and I have experienced in the research work that we did throughout the world is the very fact that the Local Churches involve their membership in worship, in oneness and in witness; in worship through prayer, praise, and the proclamation of the Word. So you don’t have a clergy-laity distinction in the same sense that many other denominations do. When someone comes to church, they have prepared themselves by feeding on the Word of God, immersing themselves in biblical passages so that when they go to church, they can prophesy. Not prophesy in the sense of foretelling the future but in the 1 Corinthians 14 sense of edification and strengthening other believers. So they immerse themselves in the Word so that the Holy Spirit can speak through them in the edification of other believers.
Elliot Miller: And boy, you just hit something on the head. I mean, I remember back in the 70s and in the 80s when people in my movement, the countercult movement, were researching the Local Church—we often would describe one of their practices called prayer-reading as a way of altering the consciousness to put you in a trance-like state so that the cult leaders could manipulate you and hypnotize you and abuse you and take advantage of you. And it was demonic, that you were opening up to the demonic realm. I mean, if I heard that once, I heard it a thousand times. Well if you’re actually being in these meetings and experiencing pray-reading, I was blown away by it because it is not an al…
I consider myself something of an expert on altered states of consciousness, I’ve been researching them for decades, I’ve written extensively on the subject, I’m writing a book on it right now, and this is nothing like pagan meditation or mysticism. This is immersing yourself in the Word of God in a way I’ve never seen people do before, it’s a unique approach to it. They developed their own devotional practice and it is full of content and the Sunday morning services—they open it up to—they’ve all studied, they’ve all prayed, they’ve all been in the Word, they have a particular topic they’re going to deal with on Sunday morning and they each have a few minutes, whoever is led of the Spirit exactly like Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 14, they will get up, they will preach, they will proclaim, prophesy in the sense of exhorting by the Spirit of God believers on that subject.
And it seems orchestrated by the Holy Spirit because each new person adds something meaningful to what the person before said and you really get into that passage of Scripture in a way that just exposi…—not that expositional teaching isn’t extremely valuable and shouldn’t continue full force—but just in addition to that, this particular method of approaching the Word of God is by no means Eastern meditation. It is biblical meditation which means to chew on the cud [Lev. 11:3; Deut. 14:7]. It means to really turn something over and go at it from every direction and get every little bit of nutrition out of that piece of food.
All audio clips are © Christian Research Institute and used by permission.
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