Benny Hinn readies for crusade and defends lavish
healing ministry
August 17, 2007
Stuart Laidlaw
Faith and Ethics reporter
Pastor Benny Hinn, in Toronto this weekend for two days of miracle
cures and old-time gospel, makes no apologies for all the money his
far-flung ministries take in each year.
"The gospels are free, but the means of delivering the gospels is
really expensive," Hinn, who got his start in Toronto 30 years ago,
told the Star.
Tonight and tomorrow, Hinn brings his Texas-based Miracle Crusade
to the Air Canada Centre, attracting up to 20,000 to each of his
three shows.
The shows are free but, as at all his crusades, donations will be
sought and many buckets will be passed as the audience sings
rousing hymns along with a mass choir amid a light show worthy of a
rock concert. While Hinn acknowledges people come mainly to see and
take part in the healing miracles, that is left to the feverish end
they will first hear him preach, pray and sing in his trademark
white suit.
But Hinn arrives under a cloud after the CBC's The Fifth Estate
this week challenged his claims of miracle cures and described a
lavish lifestyle of fancy cars, a 7,000-square-foot ocean-side
mansion and luxury travel to five-star hotels on a private
jet.
In the show, reporter Bob McKeown estimates Benny Hinn Ministries
takes in as much as $250 million a year in donations and proceeds
from sales of such items as autographed bibles.
Hinn, who keeps his finances private, doubts the show will hurt
turnout at the ACC.
"They will never stop people from coming to meetings such as
ours."
Followers donate money, he says, to ensure his work, including
curing the sick, continues.
"They believe that God heals and they want to see something like
this go on. They also understand it takes money to rent
stadiums."
Hinn's sessions have gained a reputation for sudden miracle cures
for cancer, blindness, diabetes and even AIDS over the past 30
years since his humble beginnings in a church hall at Bloor and
Yonge. People dramatically fall to the floor proclaiming their
health after a touch from Hinn's hand.
Hinn, however, professes to having nothing to do with making
anybody healthy. "The Lord has not called me to heal people," he
says. "He heals the people."
After the prayers, songs and preaching from the charismatic
minister, Hinn tells the crowd he is getting a message from God
that people in the audience are being cured, and he asks them to
come to the stage. The Fifth Estate used hidden cameras to show
staff screening audience members coming forward, ensuring none with
obvious physical ailment get near Hinn.
"It's always somebody that has some kind of illness that can't be
readily seen" that makes it to the stage, Justin Peters, a Baptist
minister in Mississippi who studied Hinn, tells the CBC.
Hinn says the cures take place in the audience, not on stage, so no
one still in a wheelchair is allowed on stage. God, he says, has
obviously not cured these people.
"I won't let them up, because they haven't been healed," he
says.
The CBC tracked down some of the people claimed to have been cured,
only to find that they were either still sick, never had the
condition they were supposedly cured of, or had died.
Speaking to the Star, Hinn says he is forced to rely on the word of
those coming to his crusades to tell him they are cured.
"It's not my job to claim that they are healed. I have never done
that," he says. "I'm not a doctor."
Hinn defends his use of luxury hotels and a private Gulfstream jet
detailed by the CBC, saying they offer greater efficiency and
security.
"People in my position will have threats," he told the Star. "If
you ask for a secure (hotel) floor, you're going to pay more
money."
Hinn also criticized the CBC for using hidden cameras and old
footage he says depicts his wife just before she had a nervous
breakdown.