Eight months with my head out of the loop and I finally wake up to a double portion of shame, betrayal and intrigue.
First up, Todd Bentley – the guy with all the tattoos and tv interest – has left his wife. One minute he was being heralded as the edgy, awkward deliverer of the very latest brand of God-Soaked Things. The next, he’s been far too edgy and awkward and left people are left wondering whether it was all a fraud.
Not so much need for the wondering with Mike Guglielmucci. The guy wrote a song – ‘healer’ – and added to his creation by letting people know that he was suffering from terminal cancer. It turns out, however, he hasn’t and never did suffer from cancer – just a sixteen-year addiction to porn.
Of course many are responding with shock and disappointment, and words like betrayal and fraud are never far from the screen. God TV – the station that appeared to do all that it could to promote the meetings in Florida that Bentley hosted – now has little to say on the subject, let alone show. I heard that ‘healer’ has suffered a similar punishment, having been quickly yanked from YouTube as well as various forthcoming live albums; how – the logic goes – can people sing the song knowing such lies have been woven into it?
I don’t know what I think about Bentley. I mean, I know what I think – I wrote about those thoughts a while back – but the sad news that his life is so obviously in some kind of free-fall does not really change how I feel. If anything it makes the fault lines even clearer; yet again the Church has missed the point and got blinded by the lights, pumped up by the sugar rush of something that seems New and Exciting. We wanted Bentley to have caught hold of something truly dramatic, radical and utterly transformative – something that would change our world as we know it. And because we wanted it all so desperately I can only assume that he fell into the same trap of so many others, where delivering on expectation eventually became more important than pursuing personal integrity.
We wanted the glitz and the excitement, and in a way, I suppose that’s exactly what we got. And if there’s any shame in the story I think it belongs to us, who forced our heads into the trough and gorged on the assumption that transformation, drama and radical experience could be found simply by turning up to a meeting or flicking a tv remote. We want change? Well, it comes through us, not to us. We want something that could change the world? What more do we need than the ancient and eternal truths that bind our faith together?
When it comes to Guglielmucci and his lies, I feel sad. I feel sad that he treated cancer as a dressing-up box accompaniment, a tool for advancing his art. Life deserves more respect than that. It is clear that his own freefall has been going on for some time, and it saddens me that secrets and lies lasted well into their second decade. I feel sad that he felt the need to develop a good story to help promote the song. But none of it surprises me.
I suppose I feel more sad about the reactions of others. The way I see it, the background to the song is now utterly different, but the lyrics remain just as true as they have over the millennia. Surely now, at last, Guglielmucci can sing those words out loud without having to shield the deceit? Why, then, can’t we? Doesn’t he need us to sing for him more than ever? Doesn’t the song now have far more authenticity that we know the truth behind it? Isn’t it now finally about God alone, rather than a terribly human attempt to create something to impress the congregations?
So I don’t see why Hillsong has yanked footage of Guglielmucci speaking at one of their events with an oxygen tube strapped across his face like a misplaced smile. I don’t see why this song must be buried without trace. If the work of fallen songsmiths should disappear then where does that leave us with the Psalms? By extension, what do we do with Martin Luther King’s words? Do any of us make the grade?
What I do see is that yet again this fall exposes our own failings. Once more we missed the point and made the story about us rather than God. We got seduced by the hype and got lost in the crowd.
It will happen again, I suppose. These wanderings off course have a familiar feel to them. But we really ought to know better. And if we continue to pursue excitement and frills and easy-answers to complex questions, if we reduce our part in the faith to hopping on a plane or singing a sing with enough passion, then the world will rot on our watch as this bride of Christ flirts with the wedding guests.
Filed under: we can do better than this
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