I found this blog about him when I was looking for more information about
Todd Bentley...the Canadian evangelist who is making local preachers very nervous with the over 30,000 people he is drawing in a week.
The blog is mostly about Marjoe Gortner, who is telling all about the
methods he used as a child evangelist.He tells about the time he was campaigning for Jerry Brown.
“I was campaigning for Jerry Brown when he was running for governor,” he said. “I gave speeches when he couldn’t show up. This was a whole different kind of speech for me, because I didn’t know the people and the whole thing was political. One time I was supposed to go to a rally for a thousand AFL-CIO workers in San Francisco, and I thought, Oh, no, how am I going to talk to these guys? I needed a hook to get the audience, because I knew a person’s mind is usually made up within the first minute or so. If they like you and you say the right things at first, then you can take them on to other things they might not ordinarily agree with. But all I had to go on was that, and structures of speech I knew from preaching.”
He paused again, allowing us a moment to consider his predicament.
“When I got there they were a little hostile,” he continued, “and I was very nervous about it. There was a podium with two flags on it, an American flag and a California state flag. I walked up – it was very quiet – and as I was walking up there it came to me, I don’t know from where. I grabbed the American flag and I crinkled it in my hand. I looked at it and sort of gave it a little toss back against the wall and said, ‘I remember when Betsy Ross made that flag. Today it’s made in Japan.’ Well, a roar went up as that struck a chord in those workers, and I was God from that moment on.”
He really did become disillusioned.
What got to Marjoe, he explained, and eventually drove him out of the business were many of the same disturbing aspects of the Evangelical movement we had noticed in our own travels and interviews.
“When I was traveling,” he said, looking back on the old days, “I’d see someone who wanted to get saved in one of my meetings, and he was so open and bubbly in his desire to get the Holy Ghost. It was wonderful and very fresh, but four years later I’d return and that person might be a hard-nosed intolerant Christian because he had Christ. That’s when the danger comes in. People want an experience. They want to feel good, and their lives can be helped by it. But then as you start moving into the operation of the thing, you get into controlling people and power and money.”
He talks about Reverend Moon.
...."he has followed the curious rise of America’s religious cults, among them Reverend Moon’s Unification Church.
“Moon is doing the same thing I do,” said Marjoe, “only he’s taken it one step further. He’s suggesting to people that he is the Messiah. In my religion, the old-time religion, it’s total blasphemy to suggest that. Moon has gone too far, but that’s a heavy number on people, because everyone wants to meet a Messiah.”