I encourage you ...

A young white man and two young white women walked towards us.  It was clear that they were not accidentally walking in our direction.  There was a purpose to their motion.

What did they want?

After we exchanged "how are you?" in various forms, they got down to business.

"We are here to encourage you."

I am not kidding.  You can check with the friend.  That was their intention.  To encourage us.

They were students at Redding, they said.  At the Bethel ministry.  One of them was from Washington state--from Tacoma.

We started gathering our stuff.  As they sensed that we were leaving, the young man asked, "do you have problems?  Like with your back?"

"Nope. We are good.  We are yoga people," I said as we walked away.

It turns out that the Bethel ministry is one heck of a strange place.  It is officially the Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry.  "Or, as students here like to call the place, Christian Hogwarts."

Surely that story is going to unfold well, right?

What is so special about this school?

The basic theological premise of the School of Supernatural Ministry is this: that the miracles of biblical times — the parted seas and burning bushes and water into wine — did not end in biblical times, and the miracle workers did not die out with Jesus’s earliest disciples. In the modern day, prophets and healers don’t just walk among us, they are us.

Aha, this is why the young man asked us about back pain.  He believes that he can heal!

The Bethel School of Supernatural Ministry is at the forefront of a burgeoning — and decidedly youthful — evangelical Christian revival. Some have called its movement the fastest-growing religious group in America — a loose network of churches, led by so-called apostles, who see supernatural gifts like prophecy and faith healing as the key to global conversion. While other religious movements struggle to retain members and draw in young people, Bethel attracts millennials in droves.

All this healing and magic approach reminds me of a famous fake in India!

America has all kinds of cults that make me wonder why this country is called an "advanced" country!  These nutcases in Redding are not the first nor will be the last.

For school assignments, students hang out in parking lots and grocery store aisles, asking strangers who use wheelchairs or crutches if they can pray for them to heal.

Surely that story is going to unfold well, right?

There is almost always a correlation between such religious nutcases and the local economic geography, right?

[Redding] has a high unemployment rate and a crime rate that’s almost twice the rest of California’s. Homelessness keeps climbing. So does drug use: marijuana, grown in the idyllic countryside surrounding the city, but meth too, and increasingly devastatingly, heroin, which is “exploding” across the county. Shasta County hospitals see three times the number of overdoses than the rest of the state averages.
Now residents swap stories of people found shooting up in the streets, cars broken into with cinderblocks in fits of desperation, and stores robbed, repeatedly, in broad daylight. In a Facebook group called “Redding Crime 2.0,” more than 27,000 members track down one another’s stolen cars, complain about homeless encampments, and post photos of shady characters caught dealing drugs in parking lots.

The only, ahem, bright spot here is this Bethel ponzi!

Bethel has devoted itself to fixing the struggling city of Redding, which is one of California’s poorest. It donates money to the police department. It buys out public buildings. It nurtures local businesses. It sends armies of students to clean the city’s trash- and syringe-strewn riverbanks. To the church’s leaders, Redding and Bethel are inextricable, and the city’s rebirth is one of the church’s most urgent missions.

Surely this story is going to unfold well, right?  Maybe this is the beginning of yet another Waco. Or Rajneeshpuram. Or Jonestown. ...

Gob bless America!