Hank Hanegraaff, Counterfeit Revival: Looking for God in All the Wrong Places, Revised and Expanded. Thomas Nelson, 2001.
Referenced in: Congregational Renewal through Spiritual Revival
LifeandLeadership.com Summary
Transformative revivals appear frequently in scripture and Christian history. An important piece of appropriating God’s work in revival is to distinguish between true and counterfeit phenomena. The first step toward this is to understand how God brought revival in biblical history, and let these genuine episodes serve as benchmarks for the current day. Works like Walter Kaiser’s Revive Us Again help in this quest. Also helpful are critiques of modern incidents that claim to be revival but bear signs of false religious experiences. Some of these are exposed in Hank Hanegraaff’s Counterfeit Revival.
Hanegraaff affirms the importance of genuine revival, but looks unfavorably on other events which he believes misuse scripture, make outlandish claims, and abuse people spiritually. He is especially critical of Vineyard Churches and the Brownsville Assembly of Pensacola. One may not agree with all of Haanegraaf’s review, but his book certainly gives evidence of thorough research, fairness to those he opposes, and overall reasonableness. He exposes biblical error on a variety of fronts, challenges the claims of signs and wonders, and reveals both the obvious and hidden dangers of false revival. See other resources on this subject in the resource guide on Spiritual Revival.
From the Publisher
Hank Hanegraaff documents the danger of looking for God in all the wrong places and goes behind the scenes into the wildly popular and bizarre world of contemporary revivalism. Hanegraaff masterfully exposes the stark contrast between these deeds of the flesh and a genuine work of the Spirit by contrasting modern “revivals” with the scriptural examples of God’s movement among His people.
About the Author
Hank Hanegraaff serves as president and chairman of the board of the North Carolina-based Christian Research Institute International. He is also host of “The Bible Answer Man” radio program, which is broadcast daily across the United States and Canada as well as around the world through the Internet at Equip.org.
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