The Revival Hub is a Charismatic Christian ministry located in Holiday City, Ohio, 20 minutes from my home. According to the church’s Facebook page, they are in the midst of a protracted revival meeting. Souls are being saved and their peculiar God is working miracles in their midst. One such miracle is a woman’s pacemaker being dissolved and disappearing from her chest. Now that’s quite a miracle, right? Of course, no evidence is provided for this claim. No medical reports, no scans, just the claim of miracle-working apostles, Pete & Alice Garza, and their mark.
You can watch other fantastical “miracles” here.
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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I was raised in this kind of craziness. We had a pastor who pledged church funds for a bunch of people to go see Kathryn Kuhlman back in about 1974, I think. Portland, Oregon. Apparently there were several congregants in need of healing. None of them returned healed, though.
When I read one of these bullshit stories I am always reminded of the pastor’s favorite bullshit story. He liked to tell about the faith one woman had that her god would heal a big goiter on her neck. Every week she stood during morning worship and thanked god for her healing… but the goiter just sat there. Goitering.
She praised her god every week until one miraculous Sunday, as she stood during the service to once again thank her god, the goiter just shrunk away and disappeared in front of everyone.
I guess she shamed him into fixing the issue?
I thought it sounded like bullshit THEN… before I was an atheist. Now, I think there were a lot of deluded people in our little burg.
Most of them are still there.
Dissolved a pacemaker my ass.
My daughter was telling me about this one friend she knew who had been miraculously healed of MS. One thing I know about MS is that, in many cases, it tends toward flares/ exacerbations and times when it is quiet and you can live fairly normally.
Yep. MS seems to a disease that faith healers can easily “cure.” At least in the short term. Sadly, for most people with MS, the disease eventually makes a reappearance.
I see the apostles “healed” people from fibromyalgia too — another disease that can ebb and flow with many sufferers. I find it sickening that they prey on hurting, vulnerable people.
There are two main types of MS: Primary progressive (which starts and then gradually worsens), and relapsing-remitting (which comes and goes). There’s also secondary progressive, when the relapsing type stops going into remission and just worsens.
A reprieve from RRMS is no miracle – it’s the way the disease normally behaves.
I wonder if these faith healer types are in it just for the money? How can people deal in such lies and deceptions—–or is the delusion some sort of placebo effect? Now, I am not denying that God could really heal a person if he wanted to do it, but I very much doubt that God works for or with these charismatic and pentecostal shysters.
I think some Charismatic preachers really believe that God uses them to miraculously heal people. Others are in it for the money. The claims of healings made on Garza’s ministry website are literally beyond belief. If true, Garza and his wife are the most renowned healers in human history. Sadly, I believe these “apostles” are modern day Elmer Gantry’s.
All they need to do is provide evidence for their claims. Before, after, and now scans will suffice. This will never happen. If the woman has a scan done, it will show a pacemaker (if it was implanted to start with). And when it does, the Garza’s will claim that the woman’s lack of faith caused God to undo her healing.
The placebo effect, as we know, is a powerful “cure.” Faith healers know this, convincing countless people that they have been divinely healed.
If they are so awesome, why aren’t they at one of our county hospitals or medical clinics? Why, I imagine God would be praised if all the people in the hospitals were cured. I wonder why they won’t do that? Leads me to think they do know they can’t do much, and hope for tiny “miracles” and overhype even that.
If they show up in a hundred or so COVID wards and heal everyone in there, I will give thanks, praise, and shout Hallelujah!
Still waiting for that amputated limb to reappear. Guess this is a bridge too far for an omnipotent being
So these videos of healings should be all over Instagram and TikTok, right?