Faith healers are frauds

One of the New Zealand big shot faith healers in the 80s was a guy named Bill Subritzky – a faith healer. Also very wealthy… funny that.

One of my uncles raved about him, telling stories about how people were healed and demons were cast out of people and that once a person even slid up the side of the wall defying gravity as the demon was cast out of him. He also told me about a dark cloud that had appeared over one venue, but there were no clouds anywhere else.

He never witnessed any of this stuff himself, but as usual, Christians tend to believe these stories when they’re handed to them and so did I and even spread those stories myself. It made me very excited about going to a Subritzky crusade.

One day I went to one at the Epsom Girl’s Grammar (Auckland, NZ) in the school hall there.  Nothing particularly exciting happened. It was pretty dull really, just like any church service where people are prayed over. The only cool thing he did was narrowing down to various rows where a person was suffering from a particular physical affliction or personal issue.

‘Someone at the back area there is struggling with the sin of lying. I feel God wants to address that situation and help you overcome it.’

Or, ‘I feel God is telling me that in the 4^th row on the right side there is someone there who suffers from back pain. It’s been an ongoing problem and God wants to heal you.’

They were always things that were common to people and usually were described vaguely, so the odds were someone fitted the bill and would have the courage to raise their hand. If nobody did then Bill would change it slightly. ‘Not so much the back perhaps, but the upper back. The shoulders or the neck maybe. Yes, it’s pain in that particular part of the body.’

Sure enough, someone raised their hand. Hallelujah! Bill is right again!

Once on stage he prayed for them by laying on of hands or some other theatrical method and then nothing particularly startling happened. 

One time I watched a TV show where it was claimed that faith healers often used forms of hypnosis. I was outraged when they brought footage of Bill up, using those particular methods. ‘How dare they? Bill doesn’t do that every time.’

Now I can see through open eyes that it is all about trickery. Exposes on faith healers are available to be viewed on the Internet and one can see how they pull off their cons. Being vague, reading people’s responses and other techniques sucker people in and make them think he’s hearing from God. Then other techniques and even sneaky tricks are done on the stage to make people think a healing has happened and even make a person feel temporarily better. Once they go home though, it becomes obvious that the afflictions never actually went away, however most of the witnesses at the time would never know about that. All they saw was a person apparently being healed by the miraculous hand of God. 

I saw Bill in action a few times throughout the 80s. Never once, did I witness any miraculous healings and I certainly didn’t see any demons causing a person to slide up the side of a wall. I was very disappointed.  In fact, I never saw anything like that ever during my 40 years in churches. 

I’m not accusing Bill of being a fraud, but I am accusing the people who spread crazy stories as being liars, or at least perpetuating lies, even if unwittingly. Even Bill said once that we would not see the types of things people claimed happened at his meetings.