Didaché

A teenage girl healed of deafness at an 80,000-person revival? When Philip Anthony Mitchell, pastor of 2819 Church in Atlanta, announced that she had removed her hearing aids at the Access event in Arlington, Texas, the claim spread fast, picked up by Malachi O'Brien and Charisma Magazine.

Justin Peters has questions, starting with the wording of the post itself. Anyone helped by a hearing aid, he points out, was not completely deaf. He explains the difference between a psychosomatic healing, a temporary relief driven by adrenaline, expectation and emotion, and an organic healing that has no medical explanation. Peters credits Mitchell for preaching sin and repentance, but shows how his promise that every sick body could be healed puts him squarely in the charismatic camp.

Along the way, Peters revisits John G. Lake's supposed healing of a deaf teenage girl, which the Spokane Press debunked. He also plays 1990s documentary clips of Benny Hinn showing how easily people are convinced they've been healed. Then he turns to Acts 3 and 4, where a man lame from birth walked, leaped and praised God, and even the Sanhedrin admitted they could not deny it.

As a cessationist, Peters believes God still heals when it is his sovereign will. He also believes no one possesses the gift of healing today. This episode matters because it equips believers to test sensational miracle claims against Scripture rather than headlines.

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You can tell a lot about a preacher by who he endorses. So what does it mean when Jack Graham, pastor of Prestonwood Baptist Church, one of the largest Southern Baptist churches in America, records a video congratulating Benny Hinn on 50 years of ministry and praying that God will "continue to use you in a great way"?

Justin Peters plays that endorsement alongside a who's who of charismatic leaders praising Hinn, including Andrew Womack, Bill Johnson and Joseph Prince. He then shows why Graham cannot plead ignorance. Documentaries from the 1990s and early 2000s show people declared healed of cancer who died within months, a planted polio "healing" nobody checked, hospital-issue wheelchairs brought in for the stage, and prayer requests left on the floor once the money was removed. Clips from 2023 show Hinn, despite repeated public repentance, again calling for $1,000 and $10,000 seeds and telling people not to let their minds rule their giving.

Peters, who wrote his master's thesis on Hinn, explains psychosomatic healings and why it is charismatics, not cessationists, who hold a low view of the Holy Spirit. Working through Romans 16:17-18, 2 John 9-11, Titus 1 and 1 Timothy 5:22, he argues that a pastor must refute false teachers, not bless them, and that Graham, who has also endorsed Paula White, has disqualified himself.

One of a pastor's most solemn duties is protecting the flock from wolves. This episode is a sobering reminder to be careful who you trust with the shepherding of your eternal soul.

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Randy Clark once invited Benny Hinn to speak and pray for impartation, despite Hinn's decades of problematic teaching on healing, because Clark wanted the anointing. Afterward, Clark had to privately correct Hinn's theology for his own people. Brandon Kimber shares that story publicly for the first time here.

Justin Peters sits down with Kimber, producer of the American Gospel docuseries, to talk about American Gospel 3: Spirit and Fire. It's an 18-episode project, six years in the making, on the Holy Spirit, the New Apostolic Reformation and Bethel Redding. Kimber grew up in a church swept up in the Toronto Blessing, and Peters came out of word-faith prosperity teaching himself.

They go through the errors underneath the recent scandals. These include Bill Johnson's mandate to do greater miracles than Jesus, physical healing guaranteed in the atonement, and a "charismatic deism" that makes man responsible for answered prayer. They also cover Matthew 3:11 pulled out of context, prophetic packages sold to businesses, and guided trips to heaven that Kimber calls necromancy. Jesse Westwood's story shows what dead-raising theology does to grieving people.

Against all of it, Peters and Kimber point to the sovereignty of God. They draw on Job, Isaiah 53, Nabeel Qureshi's story and the death of Kimber's own father from Alzheimer's. Sometimes God is most glorified in us when things are not going well.

This isn't cessationists attacking charismatics. It shouldn't take clergy sexual abuse or a cover-up culture to expose these red flags. Bad doctrine hurts people, and this conversation shows how to recognize it.

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While secretly carrying on an adulterous affair that lasted five years, Steve Lawson stood before a room of students and warned them that sexual immorality would cost them their ministry, their marriage, their family and the respect of everyone they loved. Two years after that sin came to light, he has written a book about it: Mercy in the Wilderness: How I Fell and What I Found.

Justin Peters is joined by pastors Jim Osman of Kootenai Community Church in Sandpoint, Idaho, and Steve LeBlanc of Sherman Bible Church in Sherman, Texas, to ask whether this book should ever have been written. They play the clip of Lawson's purity warning, and Peters asks plainly how it is not Titus 1:16: they profess to know Him, but by their deeds they deny Him.

The three men explain why adultery permanently disqualifies a man from the office of pastor and elder, drawing on Proverbs 6:32-33, 1 Corinthians 6:18 and the qualifications in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1. They answer the usual appeals to David and Peter, challenge Lawson's comparison of his wilderness to that of Moses, Elijah and Jesus, weigh whether he could ever teach a Sunday school class or a men's Bible study, and question the motive of selling the book.

This is not personal hostility. It is a loving warning to the sheep that giftedness never entitles a man to a platform, and that true repentance looks like quiet faithfulness, not a comeback.

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When a country music legend dies, roughly 99.5% of conservative evangelicals become practical universalists in a day. That line, from pastor friend Mike Stone, frames Justin Peters' response to the death of Dolly Parton at 80 and the many — pastors included — who have ushered her straight into heaven.

Peters lets Dolly speak for herself, playing clips from a 2016 Larry King interview where she affirms the LGBTQ movement and says "if you're gay, you're gay." Then he goes to the text: Romans 1:26-27 and what he calls the wrath of God's abandonment, when God gives people over to depraved minds; and 1 Corinthians 6:9-11, where Paul lists the sexually immoral, idolaters, adulterers, effeminate, homosexuals, thieves, the greedy, drunkards, revilers and swindlers among those who will not inherit the kingdom of God. Romans 14:22 lands too — blessed is the man not condemned by what he approves.

He also addresses Parton's Playboy appearance and The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, the difference between stumbling into sin and swimming in it, and why singing "He's Alive" settles nothing when Satan believes Jesus is alive too. A Jesus who does not say what the Bible says, Justin warns, is an idol.

It does not end in condemnation. Verse 11 — "such were some of you," washed, sanctified, justified — is where Peters preaches the gospel and calls homosexual and heterosexual alike to repent and trust Christ. This matters because eternity is not decided by a hymn well sung, and loving people means telling them the truth.

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A viral clip claimed Coca-Cola's personalized can generator would let you print "Allah loves you," "Buddha loves you," even "Satan loves you" — but not the name of Jesus. Justin Peters decided to sit down at his own computer and test it, and what he found does not match the outrage.

Yes, "praise God," "God is great" and "Christianity" were rejected. But so were "Buddha," "Islam" and "Pepsi is better" — while "Pepsi is best," "Ku Klux Klan," "abortion is murder," "a fetus is a child," "praise Jesus," "Christ is God" and "Christ saves" all sailed through. Peters walks through the screenshots and concludes this looks like sloppy programming, not a corporate war on Christians. He also notes the source of the original clip: Cap Chatfield, "online pastor" at a charismatic church in Omaha that lets women preach to mixed congregations on the Lord's Day.

Then he turns theological. Believers should expect persecution — Matthew 5 and 2 Timothy 3:12 leave no exception clauses for Americans — but hunting for persecution where there is none is playing the victim card, borrowed straight from the social justice playbook. He sets a Coke can beside Paul's list in 2 Corinthians 11, Stephen's stoning in Acts 7, and Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley burning at the stake.

If every slight is called persecution, the word loses its meaning and Christians will be unprepared when the real thing arrives. Lost companies are not the enemy; they are the mission field.

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"We don't do money asks, and it's something that I'm really proud of." That's Courtney Copeland, on camera with her grandfather Kenneth Copeland at the Southwest Believers Convention — and Justin Peters spends this episode proving, clip by clip, that it is a bald-faced lie.

Peters starts with Kenneth Copeland Ministries' own website and its article on the Seven Laws of Prosperity, which promises a hundredfold return no bank in the world can match. Then comes the convention footage: George Pearsons receiving the speakers' offering and rattling off every way to give — envelope, check, card tap, text, phone, mail — plus a "word from the Lord" delivered right as the buckets go around, assuring thousands of attendees that everything at home will be fine. Most egregious of all, Pearsons tells people to name their seed "my healing," and to sow on behalf of sick friends, relatives, spouses and children, all while admitting the meeting was already well over budget.

Along the way Peters answers John Copeland's claim that the Holy Spirit weaves the messages together, points out that these platforms never preach Philippians 1:29, and applies Jeremiah 5:30-31 and the warning about itching ears. He closes with Benny Hinn laying hands on Kenneth and Gloria Copeland — neither healed — and a direct, unsparing call for these teachers to repent and trust Christ.

It matters because real, sick, desperate people are being told their healing has a price tag.

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Bill Johnson told a crowd at the 2026 Southwest Believers Convention that he has personally watched people healed the way the sick were healed in Acts 5, when Peter's shadow passed over them. Justin Peters' answer is blunt: no he hasn't. Everyone carries a smartphone — where is the video? And where does the text even say the shadow healed anyone?

Working clip by clip through the Bethel Church pastor's message, Peters tests each claim against Scripture. Johnson's line that recognising "the actual presence of God" is the supreme value collapses under Psalm 139:7-10 and Jeremiah 23:23-24, where God fills heaven and earth. His claim that the Holy Spirit indwells every believer but does not rest upon every believer runs straight into Romans 8:9, 1 Corinthians 6:19-20 and Galatians 4:6 — and Peters argues it is charismatics, not cessationists, who hold the low view of the Spirit, since "spirit-filled Christian" is simply redundant.

He also takes on "your shadow will always release whatever overshadows you," the twisting of "seek first the kingdom," and Johnson's heaven-to-earth divine health teaching, which Peters names as an over-realised eschatology — noting, without joy, that Johnson's own wife died of cancer, and that the faith healer still wears eyeglasses.

This one matters because meaningless spiritual-sounding platitudes are how false doctrine gets past discerning ears. Acts 3:6 shows what a real miracle looked like.

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A preacher claims YouTube demonetized his channel because he was pulling more viewers than Jimmy Kimmel. It takes about two minutes with a public analytics site to prove that false — and Justin Peters does exactly that.

Jesse Duplantis is one of the fixtures at Kenneth Copeland's 2026 Southwest Believers Convention in Fort Worth, Texas, alongside Bill Johnson, Jonathan Shuttlesworth, Mac Hammond, Creflo Dollar and Benny Hinn. In his first message of the week, Duplantis told the crowd YouTube had shut off his monetization for too many views and compared him to Jimmy Kimmel. Peters pulls the SocialBlade numbers on screen: Duplantis has 277,000 subscribers to Kimmel's 22,100,000, and 61 million lifetime views to Kimmel's 16 billion — a factor of 262. Average views per video: 13,000 against 2 million.

Beyond the numbers, Peters points to the pattern. Word-faith preachers spend almost no time in the text, filling roughly ninety percent of their time with stories about themselves. Scripture describes such men plainly: greedy, eyes full of adultery, many following their sensuality, caring only for themselves. And a man with no fear of putting words in the mouth of the God who spoke the universe into existence and upholds all things by the word of His power will have no hesitation about exploiting you either.

This one matters because it hands listeners a concrete, verifiable example of a celebrity preacher lying — and a reason to stop trusting him.

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At 89, Kenneth Copeland preached his own conference sitting down, wearing eyeglasses, losing his place between Romans 10, Romans 5 and Hebrews 11 — and he has a pacemaker in his chest, arthritis in his fingers, and back surgery ahead of him. This is the man who has taught for over 60 years that healing is always God's will and yours the moment you're ready for it.

Justin Peters walks through footage from this year's Southwest Believers Convention in Fort Worth, where Jesse Duplantis, Creflo Dollar, Benny Hinn and Bethel's Bill Johnson all shared the platform. He notes Gloria Copeland's visible decline — Benny Hinn laid hands on her and prayed last year, and she is worse now — and recalls her own cruel words about the sick lacking faith.

The heart of the episode is an interview Copeland's granddaughter Courtney did with him, where she openly admits she is struggling to understand why her grandfather is still in pain. Peters traces the 2004 back injury that cancelled four crusades, the ruptured appendix, the sciatic nerve, and Copeland's admission that the Lord led him to a born-again neurosurgeon.

He also answers Courtney's framing of karma, the law of attraction and manifestation as biblical, correcting the misuse of Proverbs 23:7 and Proverbs 18:21, and names these as New Age techniques welcomed into Word Faith theology.

Peters closes with a clear gospel appeal — Christ satisfied God's wrath on the cross, not in hell — and Exodus 4:11, Psalm 119:71, 2 Kings 13, Galatians 4:13-14 and Philippians 1:29. It matters because this bankrupt gospel has exploited the poor and sick for decades, and souls are at stake.

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