An Open Letter To Elim”s John Lancaster

Dear Mr Lancaster,

I write you from Australia where I just read a reprinted article from Elim”s DIRECTION magazine last November (2006) republished by permission in a local Christian publication circulated in Australia, New Zealand, and the UK.

In the article you challenge the agenda set by the world infiltrating the church under the banner of ‚   “contemporary culture”  etc. In your article you warn of the erroneous deceptions of post-modernism (the basis of “The Emergent Church”), ‚   the usurping of biblical counseling with pop psychology, and sound-biting as a substitute for biblical exposition.

You go on to further warn that compromise with these things displaces the biblical gospel founded on substitutionary atonement. Rather remarkably, as I did myself more than 13 years ago on a recording, you compare these trends to worshiping at a pagan altar counterfeiting the true one (the biblical Old Testament altar of course being a type of the Cross of Christ).

The point being, Mr Lancaster, that the way into the current avalanche of deception you bemoan was paved by the Toronto Experience, which you endorsed at the time as “The Present Move of God” . This laughing and drunken counterfeit revival endorsed and defended by yourself on the video we have watched repeatedly filmed at Bridge Street Elim in Leeds, UK and massively propagated in DIRECTION magazine that failed to bring the promised revival as its proponents at Elim , such as Ian Bilby and ‚   Elim’s leader on the Isle of Man, assured it would.

Among other results of what you sanctioned as a “move of God”  your Ian BiIby, leader of Elim in New Zealand, and his worship leader who cheered the Toronto deception for which you were an advocate and an apologist, were found to be in serial adultery the whole time, and your Elim leader on the Isle of Man was Incriminated as a paedophile and sent to prison for having sex with a child in the Elim church kiddies’ nursery. It produced public, shameful scandals but no revival.

It was this false revival that precipitated the very maelstrom of hype-artistry and heresy against which you now pose to issue a caveat. If people lacked the discernment and biblical knowledge to see through that combination of the carnal and the demonic, there is nothing they will not believe. In your hideous defence of this counterfeit you ignored the fact that God’s Word teaches that the true fruit of the Holy Spirit is “ekreitei” ” “ self control, not the lack of it. You falsely asserted that the excesses of your Toronto phenomena did not characterize it, yet it was the open lunacy of John Arnett, Randy Clark, and Rodney Howard Brown captured on video, imitated by Colin Dye, Wynne Lewis, and the Elim presbytery, and promoted in DIRECTION magazine that was the mainstream.

In your DIRECTION magazine a series of articles lauded by your General Superintendent ‚   actually extolled Christians getting on the floor and imitating animals and roaring like lions. In the Word of God when a mind of a beast was given to a human being like Nebuchednezzar, it was a divine judgment, not a blessing. This is what Elim promoted, and the facts remain that you were an apologist for deception, a defender of error, and a promoter of a stupid religious con-job that you misled God’s people into believing was a move of God.

Does it not trouble you, Mr. Lancaster, that the Epistle of James says that those who teach will be judged more strictly than the rest? That Peter says shepherds will give account for the sheep whom you fed to wolves? Have you lost your fear of God, Mr. Lancaster?

In your polemic against those Pentecostals who opposed your “present move of God” (which at that time included not only myself, but David Wilkerson, Elim’s own Jim McConnell, former Assemblies of God Australian General Secretary Philip Powell, Assemblies of God USA General Secretary Dr. George Wood, Dr. Opal Redding, and a host of Pentecostal academic theologians and scholars such as Professor Wave Nunnely, and Dr. Siam Bhayro presently at Cambridge), you compared them publicly to Bible teachers like Apollos who were not baptised in the Holy Spirit. To this I have only one question: Where is your revival? Are those whom you demeaned not vindicated and those whom you defended indicted?

You took exception to remarks ridiculing Elim’s Bible College. I would point you to the current article by a former Elim minister who resigned in disgust and left the post-graduate program at this institution after your leader John Glass took the students to Mowcop in Staffordshire to practice New Age visualization techniques. I would also point you to the Gowdy article by one of the pastors at Airport Vineyard Church Toronto who now in repentance admits it was all an orchestrated exercise of unbiblical idiocy of the lowest kind packed in what amounted to hyped up connivance. This is your “move of God”, John Lancaster.

Now however you represent yourself as a champion for orthodoxy after you were a champion for the incipient deception that opened the door for the invasion by what you now say that you oppose. Does it not trouble you, Mr Lancaster, that Elim and DIRECTION magazine remain at the very forefront of not merely compromise with, but propagation of these very malignancies? Does your hypocrisy know no bounds, John Lancaster? How can you of all people, sound an alarm against deception when you yourself have been the arch apologist of deception on a grand scale?

It is to begin with too late, Mr. Lancaster. Elim has demonstrably been an import agent from everything from ‚   Morris Cerullo (under federal fraud indictment in the USA after being found responsible by the crown coroner for the death of people he falsely pronounced healed who stopped taking vital medication in the UK) to your Toronto Experience. The time to stop the cancer was 13-14 years ago, but the only thing you tried to stop, Mr Lancaster, were those who tried to stop it.

You let the mad bull out of the barn and now you want to bolt the door and admonish others for the ramifications of your own twisted deeds.

Variously some have described you as a ‚   stooge for the Elim leadership, used by them to lend credibility to the Toronto deception. Others (not myself) have frankly dismissed yourself and George Canty as half senile old clowns no longer capable of thinking rationally or judging biblically. Others still believe your were too blinded by the religiosity of spiritual pride to appreciate your own babbling ignorance of the very Word of God you pose to teach to others.

I myself will leave judging your motives to God and let others decide for themselves the cause of your absurd antics. What troubles me however, Mr Lancaster, is your unbelievable religious hypocrisy.

How can you, the defender of the Toronto lie that you taught the church was a move of God ” “ now cast yourself as a beacon of discernment? How can you, the apologist for Elim ” “ the very fountain of what you now denounce now place yourself as its warning light? How can you who promoted ‚  the Toronto counterfeit revival ‚   as a ‚   “move of God”  now issue rebukes in the very magazine that for years has published and advertised these same outrages?

I would welcome a public debate with yourself or with any spokesman for the Elim Movement in the UK or New Zealand still prepared to defend what you did.

Mr. Lancaster, your legacy was already one of a deceiver. Now it has become one of a hypocrite among hypocrites.

(JJ Prasch)