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Changing Your World with Dr. Creflo Dollar

(Resisting the cherry danish with God’s help) 7:00 a.m.

“Dr.” Creflo Dollar’s Changing Your World opens with a montage of happy families and individuals (much like the opening sequences for all the other shows so far, but with more African Americans). The theme song is decidedly gospel: “I’m a world changer, anointed with the power of the Holy Ghost, I’m a world changer.”

He’s preaching to a mostly African American congregation numbering in the thousands. Dollar is a handsome African American man in his forties. The gray suit he’s wearing is silk, and I’m betting it’s custom. The stage is all decked in royal blue with purple carpeting. A large gospel choir, resplendent in blue robes, sits behind him.

♦♦♦

“Wow,” Ann says when she sees the show title. “This guy is a doctor?”

“Only in the way that Benny Hinn, Joyce Meyer, Paula White, and Jesse Duplantis are doctors. They were all given honorary doctorates from Oral Roberts University.”

Dr. Dollar: “We’ve been talking about why God allows trials in our lives. Is it because he’s trying to be mean? Absolutely not. Is it because he himself is the destroyer? Absolutely not. But will God allow trials and temptations and tests and hard times to come in our lives? The answer is yes.”

Doc Dollar offers four reasons for this:

1. He loves us and wants us to be healed, to be whole, and to have abundant life. God allows trials in our lives because he knows where our rebellion against his word and our hard-headedness is going to take us.

2. He’s trying to get your attention. Which is the purpose of this sermon.

3. He wants every hindrance removed that keeps us from fully yielding ourselves to God.

4. He wants us to love him: “God will never allow a trial without giving us a way to escape it.”

[My own: That’s just how life is.]

If you have a temptation, test, or trial, the first thing you need to know is that you can resist it. You have the ability to resist. Say out loud, “I have” [the audience echoes “I have”] “the ability” [“the ability”] “to resist” [“to resist”] “temptations and trials” [“temptations and trials”]. You’re not going to go through something someone else hasn’t already gone through; it’s not going to be beyond human experience.

I tell Ann Brock, “That’s what got me through labor with both my kids. I thought to myself, ‘Being in labor may feel like it’s the craziest, most intense, unusual thing in the world, but actually it’s pretty darn common. Billions of women have gone through this, so you can too.’ “

Dollar:

“God is faithful to his word and to his compassionate nature, which means that God ain’t never gonna get so mad that he ignores his compassionate nature, so no matter what trial you are going through God is faithful to his word and his compassionate nature.”

This is a lovely sentiment, but it’s not in 1 Corinthians 10:13. The whole Amplified Bible thing is making me just a little crazy. The text he is using from 1 Corinthians does not talk about God’s compassionate nature. The writers of the Amplified Bible added that. That particular translation of the Bible was undertaken in the 1950s by the Lockman Foundation, which on its website says the following about the project:

The Amplified Bible is a translation that, by using synonyms and definitions, both explains and expands the meaning of words in the text by placing amplification in parentheses and brackets and after key words or phrases. This unique system of translation allows the reader to more completely grasp the meaning of the words as they were understood in the original languages. Through multiple expressions, fuller and more revealing appreciation is given to the divine message as the original text legitimately permits. The Amplified Bible is free of personal interpretation and is independent of denominational prejudice.

The doctrine of scripture that holds that God verbally inspired the writers of the texts and was present and active in the entire process of the Bible being created is not at all uncommon among TBN folks. This is fine, but when they preach not from the biblical text, but from the added bits in the Amplified Bible and then treat them as having as much authority as actual biblical texts, things get confusing for me. I wonder if they think the guys who added all that stuff in the 1950s were also guided by the Holy Spirit, as if the Holy Spirit just kind of took a long sabbatical until the 1950s and then came out of retirement just for that gig. I’m all for looking at different ways to translate Greek, but Dr. Jim Boyce, my revered New Testament professor at Luther Seminary, who has been teaching Greek since shortly after the original texts were written, reminded us that “all translation is interpretation.” There’s no way to get around that.

I can’t think about this anymore because I’m missing some preaching and despite all this stuff I actually kinda like this guy. He’s totally charming.

I’m impressed with the fact that his whole congregation has open Bibles in their laps and all seem to be busy taking notes. Lutherans don’t really bring Bibles to church. I’m not sure why that is. The lectionary texts are printed in most Lutheran church bulletins, and so if they want to follow along they only have to flip over the announcements, and there are the four texts, one each from the Hebrew Bible, the Psalms, the epistles, and the gospels. One problem this creates is that then no one opens up his or her own Bible. And in some churches when the lectors get up to do the readings, they don’t open up a huge lectern Bible; they just read off the bulletin insert. We seem less like a People of the Book and more like a People of the Bulletin Insert.

“If you are going through a trial or test,” Creflo insists, “God has already guaranteed and promised that you can win. So win! Amen!”

In my fundamentalist Church of Christ upbringing, however, we brought our Bibles to church, boy howdy. As a matter of fact, if you were a particularly righteous woman, you would carry your Bible in a quaintly quilted Bible cover with a lacy handle — like Laura Ingalls Wilder. I remember my father’s Bible being clothed in a zippered leather cover complete with an inlay of a sword on the front. When we’d be late for church and my dad couldn’t find his Bible, he’d yell, “Has anyone seen my sword?” I’m sure calling a Bible a sword comes from a verse, but I can’t remember which, but the whole sword thing is a bit too Knights Templar for my taste. My friend Seth, who always can outdo my crazy “growing up Christian” stories, claims that as a child her family would do “sword drills” where her dad would grasp a Bible by the spine and shout out a verse, like “Leviticus 15:16,” and then the kids would race to grab the Bible and look up the verse as quickly as possible. Full contact competitive Bible looking-up game, yep, a little crazy.

Seth’s coming at one o’clock in the morning for the Bible trivia game show slot. I don’t stand a chance.

Dollar:

There’s nothing you’re going to be facing that you’re not going to have the ability to win over. “Well, brother Dollar, I used to be a drug addict, and somebody came up to me with some cocaine.” You know what? God wouldn’t have allowed him to come up to you with some cocaine if you did not have the ability to resist him [congregation: Amen]. “Well, but you don’t understand now. I love me some women, and if a good-looking woman comes up.” Well, you know you can resist her. She can shake till her girdle pops loose and it won’t bother you a bit because you have the ability to resist. Somebody shout, “I have the ability to resist!” [I have the ability to resist!]

Me: “I have the ability to resist this cherry danish, but I am choosing not to.”

♦♦♦

Suddenly there is simply not enough coffee in the entire world for what I’m trying to do here. Twenty-two and a half hours to go.

Advertisement: Taffi Dollar’s book: 21 Days to Your Spiritual Makeover, $19.99.

“Creflo Dollar ministries is dedicated to changing the lives of others,” the announcer says. “To help us to continue to make a difference, consider making a financial gift and start changing the world one person at a time. It is people like you who make it possible to spread the word of God.”

♦♦♦

Ann gives her own response: “I think he seems sincere and contextual. He has a word he speaks to his audience, a word of comfort and how to get through trials and temptations. That is a theological difference for us — where God is present in an almost manipulative way. I call it parking space theology.”

Me: “Yeah, God involved or intrusive in a moment-to-moment way. The language is so different from what we are used to. But I think he speaks in ways that are meaningful to people, or he wouldn’t draw such crowds. We Lutherans have such theological pride.”

Ann laughs, “Yeah, that’s kinda true.”

I add, “It can make it really hard to hear theology that we think doesn’t stand up. It makes me wonder, what would Creflo Dollar think of my preaching? If I was preaching in my context and he was watching in his living room, what would he say?”

THE ROUNDUP

Old Testament passages cited: Nineteen.

New Testament passages cited: One.

Cost of products offered: $19.99 for Taffi Dollar’s book.

Running total after 2Vi hours: $423.99

God: Much like a manipulative boyfriend or girlfriend who tests you to see how much you really love him or her.

Thought for the half-hour: Send Creflo Dollar my preaching tape. Ask for comments.