Bill Johnson, Bethel Church, and the NAR: A Balanced Observation and Study

Bill Johnson is a major Christian leader in our time and operates with a powerful gift of healing. Thousands of people have gotten healed through his ministry, and this has been on a world-wide level. Through his leadership, Bethel Church of Redding, California, has become a true "mega church." However, it all comes with a 'boatload of bad doctrine.' People make the mistake of believing that his power of healing must be the stamp of God's approval, meaning that his teachings must be legitimate. Nothing could be further from the truth. God's giftings are based entirely upon the grace of God and have nothing to do with one's ethics, morality, or even doctrine - all within limitations, of course. Yes, the gifts of God and one's teachings are independent from each other. Bill Johnson is a good man, full of the passion of Christ to preach the gospel world-wide, but he has NO formal training in theology and has been making many mistakes in his handling of, and interpretation of, Scripture. However, it is this author's opinion that he is not a deceiver nor demonic, as many bloggers on the Internet claim, but that he is honest and sincere, yet plagued with false doctrine and even a few heresies. Thus, this book offers a "balanced" view of the man and the church, meaning that not all is bad, nor is all good. In fact, the good is better than best of most other churches, while, at the same time, the bad is worse that the worst of most other churches. This is the real paradox of the man and the church, but this complicated dilemma has been deciphered by the author. This book is written from the perspective of the author having been in a satellite church of Bethel's for over ten years and seeing both the positive and negative effects it has had on the church. Please note that there are three versions of this book: (1) The digital version, also called an E-Book. Its length is about 400 pages (in MS Word format). (2) This single-volume, paperback version. It is about 480 pages long, using the Kindle default font size of 8. This is small print; the average size of most books is about size 9. This version is handy because the entire work is contained in this one volume. However, some readers would probably prefer the normal-sized print. But a change to this font size would increase the size of the book by 110 pages, thus making it almost 600 pages long, which is too large. Hence, there is the need for the following version: (3) The two-volume, paperback version. Volume I is about 333 pages long using normal-sized print, or font size 9. Volume II is about 282 pages long. Financial disclosure: This book costs $14.00, which is about the lowest cost allowed by Amazon. The printing for one copy is $6.65. The author's share is $1.75 per copy. This is a print-on-demand book. In other words, a copy of the book is printed at the time it is ordered.