The Room I Grew Up In

I was a little girl the first time I watched it happen, and I did not have a single word for what I was seeing. My mom was at the front of the room. Someone touched her, and she went down, backward, the way you go down when your body has stopped being yours. They laid her out on the floor and covered her with a blanket, and they told me it was the Holy Spirit. Then, this is the part that stayed with me, everyone just kept going. The tambourines kept rattling. The dancing kept going. Somewhere behind me, out of absolutely nowhere, a voice went up shouting in a language I had never heard in my life, and nobody translated it, and nobody stopped, and nobody even turned around. The shouting and the singing rolled right over the top of my mother lying motionless under a blanket on the floor, as if nothing unusual had happened at all, because to them nothing unusual had. This was normal. This was worship. I stood there, small and confused, watching my mom disappear under a blanket while a room full of people celebrated, with no idea whether I had just watched something holy or something I should have been afraid of.

Before I tell you anything else, you need to know I am not writing about these rooms from a safe distance. I stood in one. This was the season my mom’s fire was lit, and it burned hot. It is the same stretch of time when she was given the soft pink Bible with her name engraved in silver on the front, the one that would eventually be handed to me unopened. There were revivals in those years, and I remember them. But I saw what I saw, and a child does not forget watching her mother go down under a blanket while the tambourines never miss a beat. The question I could not ask back then is the question this whole chapter is built around, and it took me most of my life to be able to say it out loud. What exactly touched my mother, and how would anyone in that room have known?

You have to understand what I was carrying into that room, because it was not nothing. I was a Catholic kid. I had already walked the sacraments. I had already knelt in a quiet building where nobody raised their voice, where the only sounds were a bell and a murmur, and I had already sat in a small dark box and told an old man in a dress my nine-year-old sins and called him Father. That was what church was. That was the whole of what I knew God to be like. Then I was standing in a room with tambourines and dancing and my mother on the floor under a blanket and a stranger behind me shouting in a language nobody explained. Sit with that for a second and imagine being the child in the middle of it. That is a tremendous amount of spiritual weight to hand a kid. It is a tremendous amount to hand anyone, but it is far too much to hand a child who is still young enough to believe that every adult in the room knows exactly what they are doing.

I did not have the words for what was wrong with it then. I only had the feeling. It would be years, deep into my own walk with Jesus as a grown woman with a Bible finally open in my own hands, before I read what Paul actually wrote about that. If anyone speaks in a tongue, he said, there must be an interpreter, and if there is no one to interpret, that person is to keep silent in the church, because God is not a God of confusion. I sat there and read it and thought about that voice behind me and how not one person in that entire room turned around, and how not one person interpreted a single word of it, and how the service simply rolled on. The instruction was right there in the Word the whole time. Nobody in the building was following it, and nobody seemed to know they were supposed to.

There was a cassette tape in our house from those years. I remember listening to it. It was a recording of my mom being spoken over by a pastor, and he was telling her things about her life and about her health, specific things, the kind of specific that makes a room go quiet and makes a person feel personally found by God. I was a kid listening to a tape of a man telling my mother about her own body. I did not question it. Why would I. Everyone around me treated it as the most normal thing in the world.

I want to be honest that I did not walk away from that place hating it, because I did not. Years later, as a grown woman, I made the drive back to that same spirit-filled church in Ohio, and I asked the pastor there to preside over my wedding. That is how deep this ran, and how sincerely I still held it. These were not strangers to me. This was mine.

I was a little girl the first time I watched it happen, and I did not have a single word for what I was seeing. My mom was at the front of the room. Someone touched her, and she went down, backward, the way you go down when your body has stopped being yours. They laid her out on the floor and covered her with a blanket, and they told me it was the Holy Spirit. Then, this is the part that stayed with me, everyone just kept going. The tambourines kept rattling. The dancing kept going. Somewhere behind me, out of absolutely nowhere, a voice went up shouting in a language I had never heard in my life, and nobody translated it, and nobody stopped, and nobody even turned around. The shouting and the singing rolled right over the top of my mother lying motionless under a blanket on the floor, as if nothing unusual had happened at all, because to them nothing unusual had. This was normal. This was worship. I stood there, small and confused, watching my mom disappear under a blanket while a room full of people celebrated, with no idea whether I had just watched something holy or something I should have been afraid of.

Before I tell you anything else, you need to know I am not writing about these rooms from a safe distance. I stood in one. This was the season my mom’s fire was lit, and it burned hot. It is the same stretch of time when she was given the soft pink Bible with her name engraved in silver on the front, the one that would eventually be handed to me unopened. There were revivals in those years, and I remember them. But I saw what I saw, and a child does not forget watching her mother go down under a blanket while the tambourines never miss a beat. The question I could not ask back then is the question this whole chapter is built around, and it took me most of my life to be able to say it out loud. What exactly touched my mother, and how would anyone in that room have known?

You have to understand what I was carrying into that room, because it was not nothing. I was a Catholic kid. I had already walked the sacraments. I had already knelt in a quiet building where nobody raised their voice, where the only sounds were a bell and a murmur, and I had already sat in a small dark box and told an old man in a dress my nine-year-old sins and called him Father. That was what church was. That was the whole of what I knew God to be like. Then I was standing in a room with tambourines and dancing and my mother on the floor under a blanket and a stranger behind me shouting in a language nobody explained. Sit with that for a second and imagine being the child in the middle of it. That is a tremendous amount of spiritual weight to hand a kid. It is a tremendous amount to hand anyone, but it is far too much to hand a child who is still young enough to believe that every adult in the room knows exactly what they are doing.

I did not have the words for what was wrong with it then. I only had the feeling. It would be years, deep into my own walk with Jesus as a grown woman with a Bible finally open in my own hands, before I read what Paul actually wrote about that. If anyone speaks in a tongue, he said, there must be an interpreter, and if there is no one to interpret, that person is to keep silent in the church, because God is not a God of confusion. I sat there and read it and thought about that voice behind me and how not one person in that entire room turned around, and how not one person interpreted a single word of it, and how the service simply rolled on. The instruction was right there in the Word the whole time. Nobody in the building was following it, and nobody seemed to know they were supposed to.

There was a cassette tape in our house from those years. I remember listening to it. It was a recording of my mom being spoken over by a pastor, and he was telling her things about her life and about her health, specific things, the kind of specific that makes a room go quiet and makes a person feel personally found by God. I was a kid listening to a tape of a man telling my mother about her own body. I did not question it. Why would I. Everyone around me treated it as the most normal thing in the world.

I want to be honest that I did not walk away from that place hating it, because I did not. Years later, as a grown woman, I made the drive back to that same spirit-filled church in Ohio, and I asked the pastor there to preside over my wedding. That is how deep this ran, and how sincerely I still held it. These were not strangers to me. This was mine.

Which is exactly why the night it finally clicked was so hard. I was grown, half-watching a late-night infomercial, and there was Benny Hinn on a stage in a white suit, swinging his coat at a crowd, and row after row of people going down like wheat in front of him. I sat straight up. I knew that. I had seen that motion, that fall, that blanket, that room. I had watched it happen to my own mother when I was small enough to need someone to explain it to me, and nobody ever did. Here it was, decades later, packaged and broadcast and sold at two in the morning between commercials. The exact same thing. The exact same fall. I finally understood that what I had witnessed as a child was not a one-time visitation of God on a small church in Ohio. It was a technique. It has a name, it has a lineage, and it can be performed on cue by a man in a white suit for a television camera.

I want to be careful with this chapter, more careful than with almost any other, because the people at the center of it use the name of Jesus constantly, quote Scripture fluently, and have led people who were genuinely suffering to believe they encountered God. Some of them may have. I cannot see a heart, and I am not the judge of one. What I can do is what all of this has asked you to do from the first page. Look at the moves. Watch the pattern. Ask, honestly, whether the thing wearing the name of Jesus is actually doing what Jesus did, or whether it is doing something much older that has simply learned to speak Christian.

This is not a chapter about one person. It is a chapter about a practice, and the practice has a bloodline you can trace by name.

It runs at least as far back as Kathryn Kuhlman, the mid-century healing evangelist who did more than anyone to popularize the phenomenon called being slain in the Spirit, the crowds falling backward in rows under an invisible power. When Kuhlman died, a young man who had traveled by bus to one of her services and never got over it picked up the mantle. His name is Benny Hinn, and for decades he has been the most recognizable faith healer on earth, blowing on crowds and waving his white suit jacket across auditoriums while hundreds of people collapse in waves. Hinn openly credits Kuhlman as the influence that shaped his ministry; he wrote an entire book about her, and he has spoken of visiting her tomb to feel what he called the lingering anointing. In our own moment, the practice has found its newest and most viral vessel in a Los Angeles pastor named Kathryn Krick, who calls herself an apostle, whose filmed deliverance services reach close to a million followers on a single platform, and in whose videos people shake, convulse, collapse, and lie on the floor with their limbs jerking while she stands over them declaring that demons are leaving and the anointing is flowing.

Three generations. One practice. Let me walk you through the moves, because by now you know them, and once you see them here you will not be able to unsee them.

The first move is to question the Word. Take the word apostle, which Krick wears as a brand across the top of her ministry. Scripture is not silent about who an apostle is. The New Testament sets a specific bar. An apostle was someone who had seen the risen Christ with their own eyes and been directly commissioned by Him, which is why Paul, defending his own apostleship in 1 Corinthians 9:1, asks, Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus our Lord? The original apostles were eyewitnesses of the resurrection, a closed group with a closed qualification, and the foundation they laid, Ephesians 2:20 tells us, was laid once. To take that title today you first have to quietly question whether the Word actually meant what it said about the office. The verse did not change. The definition got loosened until it was roomy enough to climb inside. This is the pattern move underneath the whole practice: Scripture's plain teaching, that God is not the author of confusion, that all things should be done decently and in order, gets softened just enough to make room for the spectacle.

The second move is to deny the consequence. The historic warning of the church, drawn straight from Scripture, is that not every supernatural manifestation is from God, and that the ability to produce signs and wonders is not proof of divine approval. Jesus said so Himself, in the most frightening verse on this subject in the entire Bible. In Matthew 7:22-23 He says that many will come to Him on the last day saying, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name? and He will say to them, I never knew you. Read that slowly. The people being turned away are not atheists. They are people who cast out demons in His name and performed miracles in His name, and He calls them workers of lawlessness whom He never knew. Jesus is telling you, in advance, that demon-casting and miracle-working done in His name can come from someone He does not know. The consequence the movement must deny is exactly this one. It must teach you that the power is the proof, when Jesus explicitly warned you that it is not. It is worth noting that even Benny Hinn has at times admitted he moderated his theatrics because they distracted from the healing, which is a quiet confession that at least some of what the crowd was watching was theater, not the Holy Spirit.

The third move is to impugn God's motive, and here it becomes plainly about money. Watch what happens to the God of grace. The gospel says the gift of God is free, that Christ purchased your freedom in full, that there is nothing left to pay. But across this practice, deliverance and healing are repeatedly tied to giving. This is the point at which the healing ministry and the prosperity gospel become the same machine. Paula White, whom you met earlier here, shows up again right here, because this is her lane too. In one clip I found, she tells the room plainly that she will not be laying hands on anyone until the six-figure seed she is calling for comes in first. One hundred thousand dollars, standing between a believer and the touch of the laying on of hands, one of the oldest and most tender pictures of blessing in the entire Bible. If those hands feel familiar, they should. They are the same hands you watched laid on the President of the United States in the Oval Office, chapters ago, free of charge. The anointing, it turns out, has a price list, and it depends entirely on who you are. Krick's ministry, as documented by multiple Christian observers, likewise ties breakthrough and deliverance to sowing a seed. The quiet message underneath is always the same: that God is holding your freedom just out of reach until your money arrives, that the Father who gave His own Son will not give you deliverance without a payment first. The God who is generous is recast as a God who withholds, and you are told the withholding is your fault for not giving enough. It is not just your finances being promised a return anymore. It is your very deliverance from evil placed behind a paywall.

She was not finished. In the spring of 2025, while she was serving as the sitting head of the newly created White House Faith Office, I watched an infomercial with my own eyes in which her ministry promised that anyone who gave one thousand dollars during Holy Week would receive seven supernatural blessings, drawn from Exodus 23. An assigned angel. Enemies defeated. Prosperity. Sickness taken away. Long life. Alongside those seven blessings of Almighty God, the giver would also receive a beautiful Waterford crystal crucifix.

I could not help but pause on that one, because a few things happened to me at once. Immediately, I was transported back to my apartment bedroom at two in the morning, watching a miracle-water infomercial and reaching for my phone. Twenty-two years had passed. The product had upgraded from spring water in a little packet to crystal from Waterford. The spirit behind the offer had not changed at all, and this time, I recognized its voice. As I sat with that recognition, other things began to echo in the same voice. A Bible with a price tag and a presidential signature on the cover. A campaign caption reading Let's Make America Pray Again. Now a White House Faith Office with this very same mouthpiece seated at its head, receiving the grateful spiritual reassurance of American Christians who believe their nation is finally being prayed over. The same seed sold from a television studio was being sold from the White House, and nothing about the mechanism changed on the way there except the letterhead. It happens in all of them. That has been the claim of all of this from its very first page, and she is the walking proof of it, carrying the same seed catalog from system to system, all the way to the top.

The fourth move is to offer the counterfeit. This is the one I need you to see most clearly, because it is the reason this chapter sits exactly where it does here, at the doorway of the New Age, and it is the reason I could not leave it out.

Before I show you where those mechanics come from, I need to be clear about something, because none of what follows is an accusation or a rumor. These things really happen. They are filmed, broadcast, and posted by the ministries themselves, proudly, as proof of power. Kenneth Copeland stood in front of cameras in the spring of 2020 and blew what he called the wind of God at the coronavirus, declaring the pandemic destroyed on the spot, on his own broadcast, and you can watch it for yourself right now. Paula White can be found on video doing what she has done in services for years, blowing her breath on people, and the people fall. I do not need anyone's video for that last part, because I have seen it with my own eyes, in the room, live. I watched people go down under that breath, people just like my mom, sincere, hungry, reaching for God with everything in them. It was real. Something genuinely happened to them. That is precisely what makes this the most serious question in this entire chapter. Not whether power is present. Whose.

While we are on the subject of breath, I have to show you the most sobering contrast I found in all of Scripture, because it reads like a foreshadowing aimed directly at everything you just pictured. Men stand on stages and blow their breath on crowds, and the people fall down. Now listen to what the Word says about the breath of Jesus. 2 Thessalonians 2:8 says the Lord Jesus will slay the lawless one with the breath of His mouth. Revelation says a sharp sword proceeds from His mouth to strike the nations. The counterfeit breathes, and believers fall to a stage floor and get back up. The real One will breathe, and the entire two-thousand-year machinery of deception, along with the men who built it, maintained it, and profited from it, will fall and will not get back up. Their condemnation is just. Romans 3:8 says it in exactly those four words, and the justice of God is the testimony of the whole Book. That, right there, is why this site exists, why every chapter of it was written, and why I will not stop saying it until He comes. I am only echoing the call that Revelation sends out to every church and every soul still standing inside any of these systems. Come out of her, my people.

In the Hindu and Tantric traditions there is a practice called shaktipat. It is the transmission of spiritual energy, called shakti or kundalini, from an elevated guru to a follower. The guru transmits this energy through one of a few specific means: through touch, often a touch to the forehead or the head; through gaze; through a spoken word; or simply through their powerful presence in the room. When the energy is transmitted, when the kundalini is awakened in the follower, the follower's body responds with what practitioners call kriyas. I am going to list the documented signs of kriyas as the shaktipat gurus themselves describe them, and I want you to hold the videos in your mind as you read. Involuntary shaking and trembling. Violent convulsions. The body twisting in all directions. Falling to the ground. Rolling on the floor. The body moving snake-like across the floor. Eyes that will not open despite the person trying. Spontaneous vocalizations and crying out. One shaktipat guru describes the body undergoing convulsions like a dying fish. Another lists the body falling to the ground and beginning to jump from place to place. These are not my characterizations. These are the descriptions the kundalini masters give of what happens when the energy passes from the guru to the disciple.

Now hold that beside what is filmed and celebrated every week, and beside the whole bloodline of it. A charismatic, venerated leader. An anointing said to be transmitted from that leader to the follower, a transmission this movement openly calls impartation. A touch, a pointed hand, a breath, a wave of a jacket, a spoken word, and then the follower shaking, convulsing, collapsing, jerking on the floor, unable to rise. The mechanism is not similar to shaktipat. The mechanism is shaktipat. The energy passes from the elevated one to the follower by touch and word and presence, and the follower's body manifests the exact catalog of kriyas that Hindu gurus have documented for centuries, and the only thing that has changed is the name spoken over it. Kuhlman's falling rows, Hinn's collapsing auditoriums, Krick's convulsing floor: it is one phenomenon wearing three faces, and its oldest face is not Christian at all.

That is the counterfeit in its most naked form. The serpent's oldest trick was never to get you to bow to something with horns and a pitchfork. You would run from that. His trick was to take a genuine spiritual hunger, the ache you feel to be free, to be touched by God, to feel something real, and to satisfy it with a counterfeit power that feels every bit as electric as the real thing, wrapped in just enough Scripture that you never think to ask where the current is actually coming from. A person walks into that room carrying real pain and a real longing for God, and they walk out having had a genuine supernatural experience, and they conclude that because it was powerful, it must have been God. But you already know, because Jesus told you in Matthew 7, that power is not proof. The question is never whether something happened. Something clearly happened. The question is who was on the other end of the transmission.

I am not telling you the people falling down are faking. I think many of them are experiencing something entirely real, and that is precisely what frightens me. I am telling you that a real experience and a holy one are not the same thing, that the Bible warns from Genesis to Revelation about spiritual power that does not come from God, and that when the observable mechanics of a Christian ministry are identical to the observable mechanics of kundalini awakening, the burden is not on the skeptic to explain the resemblance. The burden is on the ministry to explain why there is no difference.

If Jesus healed you, He never needed your seed money first, because He already paid. If the Spirit fell on you, He did not leave you writhing on the floor with no memory of the encounter, because the fruit of the Spirit is self-control, and God is not the author of confusion but of peace, as 1 Corinthians 14 says of the way He moves in a gathering. If a preacher laid hands on you, a true one would point you away from himself and toward the only name that saves, because that is what every real apostle in the New Testament did, every single time, without exception. When Cornelius fell at Peter's feet to worship him, Peter pulled him up and said, Stand up; I too am a man. When the crowd at Lystra tried to make gods of Paul and Barnabas, they tore their clothes and rushed in shouting that they were only men. The mark of a true servant of God is that they cannot bear to be venerated. The counterfeit feeds on it.

The exchange in these rooms is electric, which makes it the hardest one to walk away from. The experience wraps you up: the music swelling, the crowd pressing in, the hands, the falling, the feeling of power moving through the room with your name on it. One hand offers you that encounter, announced in His name. The other hand is holding the blame, because when the healing does not hold, when the breakthrough never lands, the failure is placed on your faith, never on the stage. Leaving is framed as the most dangerous move of all, walking away from the anointing, touching God's anointed with your doubt. So people stay, sicker and poorer and quieter, afraid that leaving the man means losing the God he claims to carry. It does not. God was never in the man's hands. He does not travel by stage.

This is rocky ground with a fog machine. The seed springs up in a single service, all heat and joy and instant green, and Jesus said exactly what happens next: when trouble comes because of the word, it falls away just as fast. When the healing does not hold, the shoot dies in a day. Nothing that grows that fast was ever going to last.

If you have been in that room, or a room like it, I am not writing to shame you. I am writing because you went there looking for Jesus, and that longing was the truest thing about you. The hunger was real. It was aimed at the right Person. It was simply caught, on the way to Him, by something that had learned to wear His name. Take the hunger and keep walking. The One you were actually looking for does not need your money, does not leave you on the floor, and does not want your worship pointed at anyone but Himself. He just wants you.