Anyone Heard of Tall Tales and "Witnessed" Miracles in Church?

[AnonSan]

Other than the stories and miracles mentioned in the Bible, I recall hearing stories and seeing "miracles" that were meant to preserve the church's innocence and co-dependency. I forget the specific details of alleged tales and eye-witnessing accounts that "proved" God is real, but these are the ones I experienced/heard:

 

• A woman living alone was being assaulted by an intruder late at night. However, she was saved by shadow figures who stalked and scared off the intruder. The woman saw that the shadows were in fact angels sent by God in disguise protecting her in return of being faithful to God.
•  A man and his 5-year-old daughter got stranded in the forest in the dead of winter in the middle of the forest. As he carried his daughter trying to find shelter, he repeatedly called upon the name of Jesus out of desperation. He eventually found shelter and help that the father now believes putting his trust into God's mercy is what saved them. 
• The last time I attended summer camp, the power went off in the evening. We were told to pray Satan was causing the disruption. Everyone praised the Lord when it came back on. The same night after the power outage incident, the camp faculty found that one of the vans got broken into, which only a Bible was taken from it. The driver for the van proclaimed that it was God's plan that the carjacker had a change of heart afterwards and decided to take the Bible out of guilt. 
• Someone I met online reached out to me and told me of her experience in Poland. A massive storm struck a summer camp which their church sermons were held in huge tents. The tents were very close being pulled away from the storm, that was, until all 800 participants began praying in unison. Again, they blamed Satan for disrupting and distracting the "oneness."
• I was at a summer college conference in the Midwest for a week. One of the evening meetings involved showing an old sermon from the church's founder. In the middle of it, the video went out. Once again, the Satan blame propaganda ensued, and the leaders there made us pray in unison. The intellectual suicide there was the last straw for me, so I ditched the meeting and chilled in my dorm for the night. I became officially done with the Local Church's system. 
• Allegedly, there was a brother who was chosen to be drafted in the NFL to play for the SF 49er's. Instead, he chose to attend the Full Time Training in Anaheim (FTTA)- my church org's training boot camp)- because God revealed to him that being one with the Lord was more important to take a once in a lifetime opportunity of his professional career.
• A brother attending the FTTA met his future wife when he got an accidental whiff of her lingering shampoo scent from her damp hair as she walked past by him. He got smitten upon the first impression of her and eventually got married after they graduated. The take on this alleged anecdote is to appeal Christians that by being simple-minded and naive will allow God help to guide you to your best interests. 

 

 

[TheRedneckProfessor]

I heard a lot of similar stories when I was in the church.  But it was never, "This happened right in front of me."  It was always, "This happened at my cousin's sister-in-law's neighbor's son's ex-wife's church," or, "This happened in an underground church in Papua, New Guinea, where believers have to hide their faith because the local witch doctors have so much control over the minds of the villagers."  That was one of the red flags that finally caught up with me.  Because I came from a very large, and very "on-fire" type church.  Surely if god was going to do great and mighty things, he'd have done them in our church.  But he never did.  All he ever did was really mundane things like some single mother finding an extra $20 so she could afford a week's worth of Ramen for her kids and still get her nails done, or some college kid passing their final exams (which they had also studied really hard for; but praise jesus anyway).  All of the "big" miracles, like people being cured of cancer or being raised from the dead--they always happened somewhere else and we only ever heard about them through second-, third-, or seventeenth-hand information. 

 

I did have one schoolteacher who decided to quit buying clothes for herself (she was very into fashion and considered it to be pride) and, instead give her normal clothes money to charities or to the church.  She promised the lord that she would never buy herself so much as a pair of socks; but donate all of that money and just trust god to provide for her clothing needs.  It's a noble thought, really; and I have to give mad respect to the few christians who are really willing to put their money where their mouth is.  Unfortunately for her, god's taste in fashion must have peaked during the era of disco boogie nights; because all of her clothes seemed about 20 years older than a person her age should have been wearing.  ill-fitting and reeking of mothballs.  But god provided; and, for her, it was her own personal miracle.  Shine on, Mrs. Denton, you crazy diamond, you.  

[◊ Krowb ◊]

@TheRedneckProfessor,

 

I have had two pastors in my life who both claimed to have seen miracles of god right in front of them.  One saw a man healed of broken legs.  The other saw a man raised from the dead!  In both retellings, from the pulpit, they were both on mission trips in Central America when god showed his power to the locals.  Very convenient that no one else on these trips were able or willing to corrborate the stories.

[TheRedneckProfessor]

32 minutes ago, Krowb said:

@TheRedneckProfessor,

 

I have had two pastors in my life who both claimed to have seen miracles of god right in front of them.  One saw a man healed of broken legs.  The other saw a man raised from the dead!  In both retellings, from the pulpit, they were both on mission trips in Central America when god showed his power to the locals.  Very convenient that no one else on these trips were able or willing to corrborate the stories.

Now, we heard those kinds of stories, too.  Quite often from missionaries.  Usually the "miracle" took place in Soviet Russia; because those were the twilight days of the Cold War and communism was still very much the enemy of god and his chosen people.  There were all kinds of horror stories about the secret underground churches behind the Iron Curtain, though the one that I immediately recall supposedly happened behind the Bamboo Curtain in communist China.  The story goes that the authorities had discovered an underground church meeting in secret; and the glorious and heroic soldiers of the People's Liberation Army stormed the place in the middle of the service.  They stood the pastor's wife up in front of the congregants there and demanded that she deny christ and spit on a bible.  She refused; and the commander of the squadron drove a chopstick into each of her ears until the blood burst forth and spurted all over her husband's stoic visage.  But (god is good!), she allegedly never lost her hearing--never suffered a single moment of deafness.  She even answered the commander when he again demanded she deny christ and spit on a bible; naturally, she told him that she would not.  Of course, the missionary telling this story to our congregation didn't actually witness the event himself.  He heard it from a friend of a colleague whose former partner knew the assistant pastor of a different church in the same province.  

 

We did occasionally hear a story that was supposedly first-hand; but, exactly like your South American stories, nobody else was available to corroborate the facts.  One missionary had personally witnessed villagers raised from the dead in some West African country or other.  Another had seen a guy who had been blind since birth suddenly able to see after being anointed with oil and prayed over (with the laying-on of hands, of course); but that "miracle" happened in the Siberian Tundra and the locals could not talk about it openly for fear of the Soviet commissars.  We should be thankful that god only performs unverifiable miracles; because it really does demonstrate that he is all mysterious and shit.

[◊ Weezer ◊]

5 hours ago, AnonSan said:

The take on this alleged anecdote is to appeal Christians that by being simple-minded and naive will allow God help to guide you to your best interests. 

 

Or help guide you to the church’s best interests.  

[older]

On 11/17/2023 at 12:31 PM, AnonSan said:

• A brother attending the FTTA met his future wife when he got an accidental whiff of her lingering shampoo scent from her damp hair as she walked past by him. He got smitten upon the first impression of her and eventually got married after they graduated. The take on this alleged anecdote is to appeal Christians that by being simple-minded and naive will allow God help to guide you to your best interests. 

 

  

Well the truth is that she followed the advice of the hair products marketers and used the right product which turned the guy on.

 

And I personally experienced a miracle. I hated going to church, and one Sunday the snow was quite deep so my parents decided to stay home, so I got to spend the day sledding down the hills across the road. 

[♦ Fuego ♦]

All of the "spiritual warfare" tales... The satanic panic of the 80s-90s... I promoted a guy for 9 years who claimed 27+ dead-raised, flying motorcycles, trucks that drove under water, limbs and eyes re-grown. Years later I figured out that his brand of Pentecostalism holds that if you honestly believe your imagination is true, then it is true and anything to the contrary is the devil. So believe a miracle has happened and it is yours. "When you pray, believe that you have received it and it will be yours" Mark 11:24 His tall tales bring in lots of money.

 

Then again, now that I've learned more about the probable life of Jesus, and how the stories were written long after his life, and how the words he spoke in the gospels were at best an approximation given by Greek speakers quite long after his death, and sometimes a scribal addition or redaction, all of it amounts to the same kind of tall tales we find in all mythology.