From: SECBH@CUNYVM.BITNET
Newsgroups: talk.religion.misc
Subject: Prayer Warriors to Zap SF
Message-ID: <90249.093426SECBH@CUNYVM.BITNET>
Date: 6 Sep 90 13:34:26 GMT

The following is from the S.F. Chronicle's front page, 9/1/90 and
is reprinted without permission.  I have picked it up from a posting     wn.
in another newsgroup and did not see the actual newspaper article.
Here it is in all it's looney glory:

'Prayer Warriors' to Battle S.F. Demons on Halloween

[Texan] Charismatic evangelist Larry Lea came to San Francisco yesterday
and promised to make this year's Halloween festivities in San Francisco
even livelier than usual.

Lea, a rising televangelist and leading proponent of "spiritual
warfare," has ordered his army of prayer warriors to descent on the city
on Halloween to battle the ruling spirits of witchcraft, drugs, and
sexual perversion.

"We need to reverse the curse on Halloween night," Lea told about 250
Northern California pastors, who joined the 39-year-old preacher for
lunch at the S.F. Marriott Hotel, where they planned their Halloween
assault on Satan.

"This is not just kids having fun," he said.  "There is actual worship
of the devil."

(continued on to page A4, headline:)'God's Green Beret' Plans to Assault
S.F. Demons

Lea, who distributes "prayer army dog tags" to his Bible-waving
warriors, is part of a fast-growing movement inside Pentecostal/
charismatic Christian circles that sees satanic princes and "territorial
spirits" ruling over particular cities, industries, and subcultures.

Last summer in Anaheim, Lea turned out 6,000 angry free-lance exorcists
for a three-day "Prayer Breakthrough" designed to "inflict serious
damage" on the forces of darkness in Southern California.  Nearly 7,000
militant believers showed up "to clobber the devil" in Chicago, where
they shouted, stomped, brandished imaginary swords and spoke in tongues.

This Halloween, Lea brings his crusade to the S.F. Civic Auditorium,
where his army of charismatic Christians will come face-to-face with the
costumed brigades of satanism, paganism, and promiscuity.

In an interview after yesterday's pastors' luncheon, Lea said the rise
of satanism and New Age spiritualism has changed the nature of
Halloween.  Dick Bernal, pastor of 5,500-member Jubilee Christian Center
in San Jose and another proponent of spiritual warfare, says he has
personally battled Bay Area spirits who told him, "this is our turf."
According to Bernal, a member of the pioneer family of after whom [sic]
S.F.'s Bernal Heights was named, the city is ruled by the Spirit of
Perversion.  Oakland is controlled by the Spirit of Murder, San Jose by
the Spirit of Greed, Watsonville by the Spirit of Poverty, and Marin
County by the New Age Spirit.

Ever since the Gold Rush, Bernal said, the free-thinking Spirit of Self
has been holding sawy over Northern California -- an "independent,
haughty spirit that encourages people to join the New Age movement."
"This area has been the launching pad for a lot of things we consider
unbiblical -- free sex, the homosexual movement, acid rock," said
Bernal, a 45-year-old preacher who became a "born again" Christian a
dozen years ago.  "There are strong spirits of perversion and greed."

C. Peter Wagner, a professor of church growth at Fuller Theological
Seminary in Pasadena [Calif.], said the idea of "territorial spirits"
ruling over specific cities is being taken very seriously among many
Pentecostal Christian and other conservative evangelicals.  "The
Catholic Church uses rites of exorcism to remove demons from buildings.
Buildings are a territory," said Wagner, who has coordinated a spiritual
warfare network of Christian leaders promoting the idea.  "Satan can't
be omnipresent, so he has to delegate this to a hierarchy of demons."

Bernal's church, which has become a South Bay powerhouse since it was
founded nine years ago, holds annual conferences where teams of prayer
warriors are sent out to such places as abortion clinics, New Age
centers, and the offices of the San Jose Mercury News, to battle demonic
forces.  Meanwhile, prayer teams are dispatched to Mount Hamilton, the
Santa Cruz Mountains, and the tallest buildings in the South Bay "to
pray over our city."

Proponents of spiritual warfare say two books have inspired their
crusade -- the Bible, which often portrays Jesus as battling demonic
spirits, and Frank Peretti's "This Present Darkness," a best-selling
novel that has fueled the imagination of Pentecostals, charismatic
Christians and other evangelicals who stress such "gifts of the spirit"
as divine prophecy, faith healing and "speaking in tongues."

Some observers say the movement has begun to revitalize the ranks of
charismatic Christianity, which was devastated by the 1987 sex-and-
salary scandals of televangelist Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker, the
nation's best-known Pentecostal preachers.

Professor Ron Enroth, a Christian sociologist at Westmont College in
Santa Barbara, criticized the "spiritual warfare" movement for
overindulging in subjective revelation and divine prophecy.  "Rather
than facing up to the structural problems of our society, they find a
demon behind every problem.  They are looking for quick fixes by pushing
God's buttons," Enroth said.  Enroth, who is researching a book on
"fringe churches," also accused Lea of putting on a "supernatural
sideshow" and promoting "the latest charismatic gimmick." Lea, who has
donned military fatigues in previous crusades, is "coming on like God's
Green Beret and whipping people up in a militaristic manner," Enroth
said.

Lea said the angry intensity and militant feelings in his crusades "are
not directed at flesh and blood."  "We love people.  The real problem is
with the unseen forces -- the puppeteer making the puppet jump," said
Lea, who predicts "militant power-praying will be one of the earmarks of
the church in the 1990s."  Lea, the former pastor of the booming Church
of the Rock in Rockwall, Texas [adjacent to Dallas to the east], now
serves as the "bishop" of 70 pastors and 40,000 members of churches that
grew out of his Dallas-area ministry.  Lea is also the former dean of
the seminary program at Oral Roberts Univ. in Tulsa, Okla.

Roberts, another leader in the charismatic movement, became notorious
for his 1987 plea that his TV fans send him $4.5 million or else "God
will call me home."

During the next two months, Lea will be promoting his San Francisco
prayer blitz on his daily "Change Your Life" television show, which is
aired on 40 independent stations across the country.  Lea says he has
signed up 280,000 prayer warriors through his TV ministry, and he
promises to reach his goal of 300,000 "intercessors" by the opening of
his three-day Halloween crusade.

-------------- END NEWSPAPER ARTICLE ----------

Clearly, this year most of the weirdos will not be the ones in costume.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jack Carroll               Somewhere beyond both space and time,
            Is wetter water, slimier slime...
                           And in that heaven of their wish
                           There shall be no more land, say fish

                                                 Rupert Brooke