Faith Healer Brings Crusade To Seattle -- Followers Laud Him; Skeptics Call It Theatrics

It may be debatable theology and questionable medicine, but it's great theater.

A large woman dances on tiptoes around her wheelchair. A man who says he was shot seven times in the arm twirls it around like a windmill. A teenager with asthma swoons into the arms of a perspiring older man, who eases her to the carpet and sprints to catch someone else who's also about to fall.

Benny Hinn raises his hands toward heaven and the TV cameras.

Praise God for another miracle healing!

Hinn, the faith healer and televangelist, is bringing his Miracle Crusade to Seattle tomorrow and Friday.

At 44, he is considered by many to be the faith-healing industry's new superstar, the successor to such fallen miracle-dispensers as Jim Bakker, Robert Tilton and Jimmy Swaggart.

Some 10,000 people attend Hinn's Orlando, Fla., church every week, and 3 million people have attended his international crusades since 1990. His daily half-hour television program is broadcast to 98 million homes. He has 400 staff members and brings in an estimated $50 million a year.

But Hinn is trailed by controversy and a corps of skeptics who say his theology is misguided and his miracles unsubstantiated.

One of the most outspoken is Hank Hanegraaff, president of Christian Research Institute, which studies cults and interpretations of Christianity that deviate from a strict interpretation of the Bible.

According to Hanegraaff, Hinn uses theatrics, peer pressure, crowd manipulation and group psychology - not tricks - to effect his miraculous healings. His stage persona was the inspiration for Steve Martin's faith healer in the movie, "Leap of Faith," and he's been known to fling an invisible "Holy Spirit" toward the audience like a softball.

"You have to create the atmosphere," Hanegraaff says. "But I'm saying the emperor has no clothes."

Hector Avalos, a Pentecostal faith healer as a child and now a religion professor at Iowa State University, says what passes for faith healing isn't miraculous at all.

Avalos says people often are mistaken about their illness - they will say they have "a kidney problem" when it's really a transient backache. Doctors do occasionally misdiagnose, as happened with boxer Evander Holyfield, whom Hinn "healed" of what doctors thought was a heart condition. Later it was determined he suffered from sarcoidosis, which causes the growth of small, fibrous tumors in the tissue it attacks.

"Looking back, I never really saw anything miraculous happen," says Avalos, who is now an agnostic.

Hanegraaff and Avalos agree that the danger in faith healing is that people with life-threatening illnesses such as cancer or diabetes will stop taking their medications after they've been declared healed.

Hinn declined through a spokesman to be interviewed before his Seattle visit. But he said in an interview last spring with CNN's Larry King that he only prays with people that they'll be healed. God does the miracles, he said, "I'm just his instrument."

If God doesn't choose to heal someone during the crusade, he said, "I tell them, `Don't give up.' "

God didn't choose to heal Ron Smiddy of Wenatchee during a Hinn crusade two years ago in Tacoma. Smiddy, 49, who lost the use of his legs in a motorcycle accident 26 years ago, tried to lift himself from his wheelchair but couldn't.

"It just wasn't God's time," Smiddy said recently. "Nothing's changed with me. All my paralysis is still the same. I've felt a tremendous power of electricity go through my body. That's the anointing power of God. But I'm still waiting and believing and praying."

Avalos doesn't believe Hinn is a fake.

"Most faith healers are not really charlatans," Avalos says. "Most of them really believe in what they're doing. It's just that when you get to the media stars like Benny Hinn, it's harder to tell."

Sally Macdonald's phone message number is 464-2248. The e-mail address is: smac-new@seatimes.com

----------------- Times of services -----------------

Televangelist Benny Hinn will bring his Miracle Crusade to Seattle's KeyArena for three services: 7 p.m. tomorrow and 10 a.m. and 7 p.m. Friday. There is no admission charge.