Promises Pt. 04

Chapter 8

Trial Day 6

These people honour me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men.' Isaiah 29:13, Mark 7:6-7

Cynthia Mayotte's death dominated the news media. Speculation was rife that there was a connection between her death and the case in progress. Much was made of the fact that Mayotte and Janine had been alone in his office, and several attempts were made to contact him, before the police were dispatched to force an entry into the church. While the speculation wasn't concerned with Mayotte having killed his wife, it did centre on his relationship with his Personal Assistant, the insinuation being that he may have arranged to have his wife killed because of it.

Because of this there was no chance of smuggling Mayotte into the court. This resulted in him and Janine having to run the media gauntlet. While the police were in attendance they offered little in the ways of protection. While Mayotte resorted to 'No comment" in answer to the myriad of questions thrown at him, Janine wasn't quite so lucky. She was the 'other woman', she was young, she was attractive and to make it even more titillating, she was a former prostitute. She was not about to get a free run. "Miss Elliot, what is your relationship with Pastor Mayotte?"

"I am his Personal Assistant."

"Is there any truth to the rumour that you two are lovers?"

"No comment."

"Was he a client before you found religion?"

"No comment."

"Are you carrying his love child?"

"Don't be ridiculous!"

"Then you deny that you are pregnant?"

"I don't have to answer such a ridiculous question." She eventually found the safety of the courtroom, only to be greeted by the cold-eyed stares of those people there who were members of the Shining Light Christian Church, they had already convicted her.

As Mayotte sat down he noticed a C4 envelope on the table in front of him with his name typed on it. He opened it and a large photograph fell onto the table, it had a note held to it with a glider clip. 'Guess who spent the night with the enemy.' The photograph was of Janine clearly waving to someone as she was leaving Henderson's house. The time and date stamp on the digital photograph clearly put it as having been taken the morning after Janine had been supposed to seduce Henderson.

The note was signed, 'A friend'. Mayotte was shaken by what he saw, and was at a loss for an explanation. He knew that she went to Henderson's, but assumed that she would have left after the troops had. She had lied to him with her explanation as to why she didn't call in at the church before court. What else had she lied about? Was her involvement with Henderson really innocent?

Henderson and McIvor walked in and Henderson glanced towards Janine. He read the extreme hurt in her eyes. His heart went out to this girl caught up in something, so far out of her league, that she was in danger of floundering. He wondered if the church would bother to throw her a life line in her time of need.

"Mister Johansson, are you ready to proceed?"

"Yes your Honour. I call Pastor Calvin Coolidge Jones to the stand." Jones was not in the court room so a court officer was instructed to call him. Jones' name echoed up the corridors but there was no answer.

"Mister Johansson?"

"Your honour, Pastor Jones is the principal witness for the defence, and without his evidence our case is in jeopardy. I ask for the court's indulgence while we try to locate this witness."

"Do you have other witnesses that you can call so that we don't have to adjourn the case while you locate your witness?"

"Yes your Honour."

"In that case I'll issue a subpoena to encourage Pastor Jones to attend and give evidence." A court officer was dispatched to Jones' hotel in an effort to locate him.

Johansson had one final throw of the dice, one last desperate course, to try to make up the lost ground caused by Mayotte's poor showing. The only course of action open to him was to discredit the person who caused that harm. "I call Michael Henderson to the stand."

There was a buzz of excitement. What was he on about calling the counsel for the plaintiff as a witness?

"Don't worry I know what he hopes to achieve, it won't work." Michael whispered to Frank as he stood and headed for the witness stand. As he sat his eyes briefly met Janine's, and he tried, in that brief moment to reassure her that everything was going to be fine. He was confident, just as he was sure that the opposition had been investigating him, and his background.

"You are Michael Henderson?"

"Yes."

"Have you ever been a member of a Pentecostal church?"

"I have never officially been a member of a Pentecostal church, but I did at one time attend one on a regular basis. Now before you ask if I have a grievance against the church, yes I do, and just so we don't have to go through a boring question and answer process, I will volunteer the information that you are searching for."

"I attended the church, actually it was more than one of them, because of my wife. I was in love with her, I still am, even though we are no longer married, and while I wasn't a Pentecostal, to me one Christian was the same as any other, she was uncomfortable with that. Unfortunately for me the Pastor at the church she was attending at the time, was of the view that I was an 'unbeliever' because I didn't go along with his hard-line fundamental views. For instance he asked me if I believed that the only way to get to Heaven was through Jesus Christ, and when I replied that, as a Christian, I believed that the way to Heaven was through Jesus, but I wasn't going to put myself above God by telling Him that He couldn't admit someone to Heaven, just because that person didn't agree with me. This was enough for him to tell my future wife that she shouldn't marry me, because to do so would be to, 'yoke herself to an unbeliever'. We had to marry in the Registry Office, but his comments were to haunt us for the rest of our married life."

"He had applied rules to my acceptance by him. Rules that he believed, or claimed, were from God, but they weren't, because God and Jesus applied no such rules. Jesus didn't require the Centurion to become a Jew before he healed his servant. Jesus didn't tell the Samaritan woman he met at the well that she would not receive the waters of life unless she went home, packed her bags and left the man with whom she was living, because he wasn't her husband. There are many examples where Jesus healed people, blessed people and provided for people but no examples where he applied any conditions prior to doing these things. Yet here is a supposed Christian church applying conditions on people who want to become members. Nowhere in the Bible does it tell me that I had to endure a dunking in a pool, and emerge speaking in tongues, to be a Christian. But to be one of them, I had to comply with their membership rules, it's their rules, not God's, so why should the church insist on it?"

"My wife was firmly entrenched in Pentecostal ideology, thoroughly brainwashed by Pentecostal ideology, and if we ever had a religious discussion and I didn't agree with what she had been taught, we would end up arguing, and if I was able to prove to her, scripturally, that I was right, she would just tell me to take it up with 'leadership', knowing full well that such an action would be a waste of time, because they would not change their interpretation. That's not to say that I didn't attempt to discuss theology with them."

"One Pastor that I spoke with claimed that he didn't have a problem with me disagreeing with him, and he was willing to discuss my differences with me. But then he added that he hoped that I would always remain 'teachable', the inference being, that he would discuss teachings with me while ever I was prepared to concede that he was right. In my experience with different Christian sects, the one that was least 'teachable' were the Pentecostals. They rejected out of hand all reality except their own. They rejected out of hand all 'truth' except their own."

"I became even more frustrated at my wife's lack of curiosity, her blind obedience to the Pentecostal teaching demonstrated how little she cared for me. It was a painful revelation for me."

"That will be all." Johansson was now sorry that he had called Henderson to the stand; he had hoped to prove that Henderson's hatred of the Pentecostal church would manifest itself in anger, anger that would have distorted his thinking. But here he was lucidly and systematically demolishing the church. All he could think of now was damage control.

"Your Honour, Mister Johansson opened this can of worms, and I don't think it is time to shut it now. I could always cross examine myself, and achieve the same result as if I just keep going as I am."

"I agree with you."

"I object!"

"Mister Johansson," Judge Foley stared directly into Johansson's eyes, the message in that stare immediately and abundantly clear to the recipient. "I am fully aware what you had hoped to achieve by calling your opponent to the stand, and I allowed it. I must also allow Mister Henderson the opportunity of reply. As he suggested, we could go through the rigmarole of a cross-examination, but, also as he suggested, this court will be better served if he continued his explanation."

"As your Honour wishes." Johansson sat down, defeated.

Henderson acknowledged Judge Foley. "The more that I witnessed of the way that they operated, the more I became convinced, that the Pentecostal church was financially wealthy but spiritually bankrupt. Everything was for show, from the concert at the beginning of the service to the way the preachers delivered their message. They were entertainers, not messengers of God. And then there were the constant demands for money by playing on the greed of their followers."

"In their defence the Pentecostal church will tell us that they need money to do the work of God and that other churches demand money for the same reason, but the difference is, that the Pentecostal church is one of the few that turns these demands into a scriptural imperative, to be obeyed, even if you place yourself in financial hardship."

"When I first started going to a Pentecostal church, no, even before that, when I first saw a Pentecostal worship service on television, I was immediately drawn to make comparisons with the Nuremburg rallies of pre World War Two Germany, I was immediately drawn to comparisons with a mosh pit at a rock concert. The process was the same, the achieved outcome was the same; caught up in the euphoria, those there would believe anything and everything, that they were told. In the case of Nazi Germany they believed totally in the Aryan 'Master Race' of racial purity because that is what their leader Adolf Hitler told them to believe, and they were too scared to challenge him. The Pentecostals believe in the Evangelical 'Master Race' of religious purity, and their followers are too scared to challenge that teaching."

"If you ever have the time you should watch some of the shows coming out of the States through HTTV, it's an education in greed. Here you have a broadcasting network that's on air 24/7, it sells time to preachers who want to gain access to their viewers. The directors of the network are incredibly wealthy from monies earned through the network, but they don't need to use their own money for anything. They live in any of the many mansions or condominiums that the church owns, bought using cash so that there was no paper trail leading to the church."

"Whenever they need to travel, they use the network owned executive jet, it's not leased, it's owned by the network, and it is a multimillion dollar plane. This network holds a twice a year Praise-a-thon to beg for money, to keep the network on the air, when they have millions of dollars in cash and hundreds of millions in Treasury Bonds. And do you know what the most obscene thing is? The overwhelming majority of the donations that they get are from people who can't afford to give this obscenely wealthy organization from their low income. They are suckered into giving by the promise of wealth beyond measure in return for their giving. They are even encouraged to go into debt, with the promise that their debt will be repaid by God, it doesn't happen."

"While one of the network's rules limits the time that these preachers can ask for money, and sell merchandise, to a minute at the end of the broadcast, there is a banner scrolling across the bottom of the screen the whole time, with a donation hot line that people can call to pledge money. This is a constant subliminal demand for money, and it works! They have a prayer line, where people can call in with prayer requests, and from this they add the names to their mailing list, and a couple of days after the phone contact, the people receive a begging letter from them."

"While the history of the Prosperity preachers is littered with the obscenely rich, those that succumb to the fortune that they have gained in this way, and would do anything to get more, names like Oral Roberts, Jimmy Bakker, Kenneth Copeland, Joyce Meyers, Benny Hinn, the list goes on. These people have built up huge financial empires on the back of the poor, by dangling the carrot of riches beyond measure. This is obscene in the extreme, and certainly does not in any way follow the teachings of Jesus, who told the rich young man to divest himself of his wealth before he could become a follower. That young man, just as this organization, chose his wealth over the work of God."

"Yes I do have a problem with an organization that promotes itself as a Christian church, but whose ideology is diametrically opposed to that of Christ."

"Yes I do have a problem with an organization that has totally ignored the Christian mandate of help for the poor and disadvantaged in our society. Jesus never turned away a request for help, a request for healing, but one church that I used to attend, when approached by one of its members for assistance, told this woman to go to the Salvation Army. I ask you, is that a Christian attitude? This church had replaced the work of God, with its obscene quest for wealth and power, at the expense of the very same people it is meant to help."

"Yes I do have a problem with an organization whose leaders swan around the world displaying their wealth, wealth that they have gained from the very people that they are supposed to help."

"Yes I do have a problem with the obscenity of this situation, these organizations enjoy tax relief, because they claim to be a Christian charity, when Christian charity is not part of their ideology, and that they are in fact, a huge corporate vortex sucking the life out of everyone and everything around them."

"Mark put it very succinctly when he records Jesus quoting Isaiah: 'These people honour me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men.' Or even more succinct is the 'Message Bible' translation: 'These people make a big show of saying the right thing, but their heart isn't in it. They act like they are worshipping me, but they don't mean it. They just use me as a cover for teaching whatever suits their fancy, ditching God's command and taking up the latest fads.'"

"If you cast your mind back a few years there was this thing called the 'Toronto Blessing' that swept through Pentecostal churches, it was touted as a spiritual gift that had hundreds of people falling about laughing uncontrollably, but where is it now? Now what Mark said, is what I call prophetic, because it applies explicitly to what is happening now, over two thousand years after the words were written. To paraphrase the words heard so often over the Pentecostal pulpit; 'That is truly awesome prophecy!'"

"A couple of days ago Pastor Mayotte called me an atheist, I assume that was because I was challenging his teaching, his doctrine. In answer to that, I am not and never have been an atheist. I was brought up in a Christian family and, while I may have not always attended church, I held onto my Christian principles, my Christian outlook on life, I tried at all times to love my fellow man and I certainly tried to love God unconditionally, I tried at all times to not do anything that would harm, or cause pain to, my fellow man."

"Such, unfortunately cannot be said for the teachings of the Shining Light Christian Church, and other similar churches. Theirs is the antithesis of the teachings of Jesus Christ, they place many, many conditions on the love that they dispense, and, if you challenge their teachings you are punished. There is little evidence of love in the Pentecostal church doctrine. It claims rigid adherence to the word of God, but that claim cannot be substantiated. It claims Jesus as its spiritual leader but it is guilty of the practices that he criticized in Matthew 23."

"It is interesting to note that, on several occasions I have discussed the various worship practices with Pentecostal Pastors, and while they have separately agreed with me on the individual elements of these practices, and how they are not supported scripturally, whenever I attempted to combine these elements into a whole, they would have none of it. A case of; the sum of agreement with the individual elements equalling total disagreement with the whole."

"That is why I agreed to take on this case. It was not for the money, because I am doing it for nothing. When my client came to see me with his enquiry about this case I felt ashamed. I felt as if I had let the world down by doing nothing about what I had witnessed in these churches. I recalled the Parable of the Good Samaritan, and likened myself to the Priest and the Levite, who did nothing to assist the mugged traveller, who saw a wrongdoing and did nothing to help, whose complacency was just as much a sin as the robbers that had left him there, when I should have been like the Samaritan, who rendered more than aid."

"Here was a man willing to put everything, his life, his reputation, on the line for this cause, and it made me so ashamed of my lack of action that I jumped at the chance, because, it finally gave me the motivation to do something that I should have done ages ago. It is not about my seeking revenge for my broken marriage, it is not about my client seeking recompense for the money he has contributed. It is about someone, us, taking a stand against this organization whose creed is 'Greed is good, greed is God'!"

"When we look back into the history of our religion we find that there have been many precedents for what my client and I are doing now. We have already mentioned the Prophet Jeremiah and the way he had to endure hardship because he spoke out against the church of his time".

"We have the example of Martin Luther who, disgusted with the corruption he witnessed in the church of his time spoke out against it and was excommunicated for his troubles. The Pentecostal, along with other Protestant churches, should be thankful that he did, yet here they are trying to stifle that very same process."

"We saw Copernicus who was forced to recant his theories, because they went against the teachings of the church on the creation of the Universe and Earth's position in relation to the sun, and the rest of the Universe, theories that had already been proven by the Maya in Central America."

"We saw that Galileo was excommunicated when he proved that Copernicus was right, and that the Sun did not revolve around the Earth as the church believed. It wasn't until late last century that the church finally admitted it had been wrong, and rescinded the excommunication."

"And of course we can't forget the biggest of all, Jesus Christ. He was killed, not because he claimed to be the 'Son of God' or the 'King of the Jews', or even the Messiah, but because he spoke out against the corruption and false teaching of the church of his time."