Promises Pt. 01

"Mister Johansson, before I hear your opening remarks I feel the necessity to warn you and the gallery, that if the members of your client's cheer squad continue to disrupt these proceedings I will clear the court and continue this trial in camera. Now if I could have your opening remarks if you please."

Johansson rose to his feet and a tentative applause emerged from the gallery before it was cut short. "Your Honour, the defence submits that there is no case for the church to answer. The promises in question were made by God, and it is God that should be in court not the church of God, a church that is only doing His work on Earth." He sat down.

Judge Foley looked at him. "The plaintiff has a cause for action and whether your client or God has to answer this claim is up to this court to decide. The Plaintiffs have sued this church, not God because they contend that God never made any such promise, and this is the matter that they have brought before this Court. Unfortunately for your client, God isn't, nor does he need to be, in court to defend this action."

"God is here." Mayotte's voice carried to the bench and not much further. "God is everywhere."

Judge Foley glared at him. "As the counsel for the plaintiff has pointed out, this is a secular matter, heard in a secular court. The plaintiff claims that the Shining Light Christian Church, and Pastor Mayotte have committed deception with their teachings, in particular those involving the collection of tithes. This is the charge to be heard by this court. Counsel for the plaintiff has, in his opening remarks, indicated that, in order to prove that this matter is the responsibility of the defendants, he will find it necessary to question the church's beliefs and teachings, and their scriptural validity. As this is central to their case, I rule that it is within the power of this court to allow him to do that. Mr Henderson, you may proceed."

Henderson rose. "Thank you your honour. For my first witness I call Mister Francis McIvor to the stand." Frank took the stand and was duly sworn in, having significantly chosen the Bible instead of making an affirmation. Henderson walked toward the witness stand. "Mister McIvor, just for the record would you state your full name."

"Francis James McIvor."

"And your occupation is?"

"I am self employed as a builder."

"Doing what exactly?"

"I'm what is known as a 'spec builder', that is I buy a block of land and build a house on it and then sell it."

"Simple as that?"

"Well it's never really as simple as that, but I hire good tradesmen as sub-contractors and ensure that they do work of the highest standard. I pay them well and on time, but they are aware that, if their work is not up to my high standards, not only is the rectification at their expense but they will no longer get any work from me. I have never had any trouble on that score and I have used the same sub-contractors for the last fifteen years."

"Do you make a lot of money doing this?"

"I keep my profit margins low because I don't need to make a huge profit on each house. As long as there is enough money coming in to satisfy the needs of my family on a day to day basis and provide the occasional luxury, my wife and I are happy."

"What would happen if you didn't sell one of your houses quickly?"

"I don't know because that has never happened. I don't have to advertise, because the Real Estate agents know where my next house is, and they take prospective clients to meet the owners of previous houses. The goodwill that I have built up in this business is worth more than any advertising could possibly hope to achieve."

"So you have thought this through very carefully, you have established a business based on trust and you stick to your game plan. You are not prone to making left field decisions are you?"

"No, I try to anticipate every eventuality and have a contingency plan in place in case something unforeseen crops up. I invest a lot of thought and planning into everything that I do."

"Mister McIvor you are a Christian are you not?"

"Yes I am, and I have been for as long as I can remember. I went to Sunday School as a child and then church, religiously."

"Would you tell the court how long you have been a member of the Shining Light Christian Church?"

"For more than ten years."

"Did you just go to church or did you become involved in other ways?"

"On a number of occasions I would help out with building maintenance, I'm in the building trade, with carpentry and painting, things like that."

"Did you receive remuneration, were you paid, for the work that you did?"

"No. I put my name forward as a volunteer when I first began going to that church and I was approached by them whenever work needed to be done, but money was never mentioned. In fact I was out of pocket each time I worked for them because I had to take time away from my own business and on a number of occasions I used my own contractors when the job was urgent or specialized work needed to be done."

"Did the church pay their wages?"

"No."

"Did they ever offer to reimburse you for those wages?"

"No, never."

"So, as well as the money that you have donated in tithes to this church you also donated time away from your business when you could have been earning money, and the wages of contractors that you used for several jobs?"

"Yes."

"When and why did you decide to launch this legal action against the Shining Light Christian Church?"

"Only recently. I've had it in the back of my mind for some time. A year ago I began to have doubts about the veracity of some of the church's teachings, they didn't ring true. I began by cross checking the Scriptures that they quoted in support of their teachings and in the vast majority of them I found that they had either been deliberately misinterpreted or they had been taken out of context."

"Instant coffee theology."

"Instant coffee theology?"

"Yes, I remembered years ago been told that if you searched hard enough in the Bible it would tell you what brand of instant coffee to drink."

"Did you find that reference?"

"Objection! I'm sure that this is all very interesting but what relevance can it have to this matter?"

"Mister Henderson?"

"Your honour, if I am allowed to proceed I can demonstrate the relevance."

"Very well. Objection over-ruled."

"Yes I did find it, after a great deal of searching. But it was during that search that I came to realize that the answer is irrelevant. The relevance of the exercise was, that some churches have developed a very profitable habit of taking a Scripture, a word of Scripture or a passage, out of the context in which it had been written, and using it to justify an agenda. You became aware of a similar situation occurring in the teachings of the Shining Light Christian Church, did you not?"

"Yes, often. It became apparent that, in many cases, what the preacher would do was, to either count the number of references in his concordance, and use that as a statistic to show that there was strong evidence in support of his teaching, or cite a small section of the Scripture that seemed, on the surface of it, to support his agenda."

"So, as a result of this you began to lose faith in the teachings of the church?"

"Yes, and it wasn't only the Shining Light Church that was guilty of this process, on a number of occasions I watched the religious shows that are on television in the early hours of the morning and those preachers did exactly the same thing, it would appear as if they have been taught to do this by the Pentecostal movement, it was obviously a reasonably common practice among the televangelists. They preached with such fervour and passion that you were swept up by the rhetoric and lost sight of the fact that, while they could quote the Scriptures chapter and verse, it became obvious that their preaching was based on the word but not the meaning."

"Did you ever challenge these teachings?"

"While it had been mentioned on a couple of occasions that I can remember, that if a person didn't agree with a teaching they would be quite happy to discuss it with them, there was however no mechanism in place to facilitate this, in fact on a greater number of occasions it was made abundantly clear that the teachings of the church should never be questioned as they were the 'Word of God'. I have often wondered why God gave us the power of reason if He then wants us to suspend that reason, which is what this church asks us to do."

"So you believed that the church discouraged intellectual discussion on Scripture and its teaching of it?"

"Most certainly. They were anti-intellectual because that was the line of least resistance, it required no intellectual effort on their part to accept, and it suspended critical thinking. Its teachings are experiential rather than theological, there is a continuous parade of anecdotal evidence of the urban myth' type, of healing miracles, of financial blessings that were, in most cases at least four degrees of separation from the witness. The result was that none of these examples could be supported by empirical evidence."

"Do you believe that you can intellectualize Scripture and still have faith in God?"

"Most certainly, in fact I believe that we should study the Scripture and question our teachers so that we may reach a better understanding of God and what he is about. If 'Bible Study' is merely a rehashing of what is accepted as 'right teaching' then it misses the point, it has no point. Paul tells us in Romans Chapter 12, verse 2; 'Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is - His good, pleasing and perfect will'. To me this tells us that we should not continue to do and believe things simply because that's what we've been taught, but that by thinking about it we will be able to gain a new insight into and, a better understanding of, God's will"

"What are the major influences on the teachings of the Shining Light Christian Church?"

"There seems to be little emphasis on the ministry of Jesus and his teachings. There is an emphasis on his miracle healings and other miracles which are used as examples of what is possible for the 'born again Christian'. One particular example that I have heard used on several occasions, by several different Pastors, was of a funeral where the deceased was restored to life by prayer. What wasn't explained was why the coffin, instead of being in body of the church in full view of the mourners, was in the church basement with a camera on it. Or why, as is usual, the lid wasn't screwed down and the person inside was able to raise the lid and emerge. For this example to have any validity it would have had to happen in the church in full view of the mourners, not removed from them. It has all the hallmarks of a set up, a con, a deception."

"They emphasize that a Christian life is one filled with financial blessings, that God wants us to have these blessings, and that all we have to do to achieve these blessings is to pray for them, and tithe. There is no mention of using our God-given talents and actually working to achieve our comfortable way of life."

"The teaching on tithes in the ministry of the Shining Light Christian Church, did it ever mention the passage, 'If you tithe diligently your finances will increase seven-fold'?"

"On a number of occasions, but although I have searched the Bible I have found no evidence of that passage."

"So you're telling the court that this passage used by the Shining Light Christian Church to encourage the practice of tithing does not exist?"

"Yes. I remember reading somewhere that Adolph Hitler once said something like; 'A lie told often enough will be believed.' the Shining Light Christian Church uses a similar philosophy."

Henderson turned and walked toward his seat. He stopped, deep in thought, he turned to face Frank, "Mister McIvor, do you know of anywhere in the Bible where Scripture is bought into question?"

Mayotte smiled to himself, what a stupid question! Why would the Bible even suggest that Scripture should be questioned?

"Well yes. In the book of Jeremiah no less a person than God says, and I paraphrase here,' If you could pass me a Bible so that I may read the rest of that Scripture it will give an insight to my thinking on this matter." He opened the Bible and flicked through until he found the passage he was looking for. "'How can you say you have the law when the lying pens of the Scribes have treated them falsely? The wise will be put to shame; they will be dismayed and trapped. Since they have rejected the Word of the Lord, what kind of wisdom do they have? Therefore I will give their wives to other men and their fields to new owners. From the least to the greatest, all are greedy for gain; prophets and priests alike, all practise deceit. They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. 'Peace, peace,' they say when there is no peace. Are they ashamed of their loathsome conduct? No, they have no shame at all; they do not even know how to blush so they fall among the fallen; they will be brought down when they are punished."

"This could mean either the Scribes made deliberate or accidental mistakes when writing a law scroll, or, and this seems to me to be the context of this passage, that the laws that had been written down and were claimed to be God's laws were in fact man's laws. This church has claimed that the rules by which we are to live are God's laws, and should be obeyed without question. This passage not only casts doubts on the veracity of those Laws and obedience to them, but sets out some horrific punishment to those who make those laws. Either way, we should question Scripture because of this passage."

"So your contention is that the Shining Light Christian Church deliberately set out to deceive its followers by using contextually inaccurate Scripture references and false interpretations of Scripture, and by telling these followers that these teachings were of God?"

"Objection!" Johansson was on his feet in a flash.

"What grounds Mister Johansson?" Judge Foley asked.

"This question asks for an opinion."

"Your Honour, what I am asking this witness is the reason that he is taking this action, this reason is based on his establishing, as a result of his examination of the evidence, of the teaching of this church, that the church is guilty of deliberately misusing the Scriptures for its own venal ends. That is what this trial is all about."

"I'll allow it."

"Yes." McIvor answered.

"In your research into the history of the Christian church, to the best of your knowledge, are there other examples of where the church defied the teachings of Jesus?"

"Of course, there are many. For instance the Crusades of the Middle Ages, the stated purpose was to ensure that Christians had access to the Holy Land for their pilgrimages. That access already existed; Christian pilgrims were able to travel freely in and out of the Holy Land. The real reason was that the European powers wanted access to the trade routes coming out of Asia which were funnelled because of the geography of the region through the Middle East. The question that I ask myself is this; 'If it was a crusade 'of God' as was claimed; how come the Christians lost?'"

"At around that time, or a little before, there was a group of Christians in the South of France around Toulouse, Carcassonne and Beziers known as the Cathar. These ostensibly a Catholic sect, but they taught a non-Trinitarian doctrine, one which also centred on the recognition of the importance of Mary Magdalene in the life of Jesus, even claiming that they were married, which differed from that of the Catholic Church. As a result, so history tells us, the Pope of that time, Innocente III, hired a mercenary, Simon de Montfort to eradicate these people. This he did in a particularly vicious and bloody manner, burning many while others he threw bodily from the walls of their castles hundreds of meters into the valley below. This was the beginning of the 'Spanish Inquisition, not the finest hour in Christian history."

"Then there was the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre in France, where thousands of Protestant Huguenots were slaughtered on the orders of Catherine de Medici, the Queen Mother who just happened to be the cousin of the then Pope. The Catholic Church denies that the Pope had foreknowledge of this event, and claim that only 800 people died while the contemporary Protestant accounts put the figure at something like 200,000."

"Then there was the time when greed reigned supreme, the church was selling 'Indulgences' by which the wealthy could buy their way into Heaven. This caused Martin Luther to form a breakaway church, the Protestants. All of these events in history are examples of the church going against the teachings of Jesus and now we have the Pentecostal Evangelical church whose doctrine is diametrically opposed to the teachings of Jesus."

"You've obviously done your homework." Turning to Johansson. "Your witness."

Johansson made a show of consulting his notes before standing up. "Mister McIvor, You are out for revenge, are you not?"

"Not at all. I have looked around me at the way that this church has, and is, taking advantage of its members. It cries poverty but displays wealth. It asks for more while giving less. It pleads for money to continue its 'work of God' when it has enough money in physical and financial assets to enable it to continue its present level of work without calling for additional funds. It uses its members as a free resource, it imposes financial burdens on people who are in no position to give what it requires of them, yet what does it give in return?"

"It allows them to feel good about themselves for a couple of hours each week and that's about it. It has applied rules to its members that make them feel bad if they have any doubts about what is going on in the church. It is manipulating its members for its own gain, it is controlling the minds of its members for its own gain." McIvor stared at Mayotte and an unspoken message passed between them. On one hand it was saying; "If only you had been prepared to listen to another point of view", while on the other hand there was anger, "How dare you call into question what we are doing!"

"You say that you are not out for revenge yet you launch this legal action against this church, can you explain that?"

"This church, like other Pentecostal churches, understands only one thing, money. It worships only one God, money. In an attempt to try in some small way to prevent them from harming any more people who trust them, misguided though that trust is, I have decided to apply pressure on them to reform in the only way that they will understand, through money."

"So you see yourself as the saviour of the world, the white knight come to save these people who don't even realize that they need saving, who don't need saving." Johansson smirked.

"If I was to discover that a businessman was deceiving me and other people, and I felt that I could do something to bring attention to that situation, I would do it. This is just such a situation."

"So now you are saying that this church, a church of God, is guilty of deception?"

"There are two parts to the answer to that question, I believe, and I have proof of this, that this church is Christian in name only, and yes I believe that it is deceiving its members. I would not be doing as God would want me to if I ignored this situation."

The people in the public gallery were beginning to get uneasy, some were becoming openly hostile at the answers to the questions while others were beginning to take notice of the answers, and were nodding their heads in agreement. Two or three members of the jury were taking notes.