wondering what Michael Guglielmucci and Todd Bentley are saying to the Church

Oh dear. First Todd Bentley, now Michael Guglielmucci. It hasn't been a good month for the Church, and especially not its charismatic bits.

Briefly put, Michael Guglielmucci is an Australian youth pastor from Adelaide, so tragically stricken by the effects of terminal cancer that he needed an oxygen tube to manage on stage. The disturbing bit of that being that his cancer was something he'd entirely made up, fabricated and faked, and had sung and preached about to thousands of people. Like he's doing below.


The full story is throughout the Australian press.

And Guglielmucci has now been speaking to the media about why he did it. His claim is that he's 'addicted to porn' and needed, essentially, a credible-sounding illness to distract himself from it and cover it up from others. He claims that his obsession with porn is so strong that he has been losing his hair and throwing up every evening, and that he therefore needed a socially-acceptable explanation for these symptoms.

But losing one's hair and constantly vomiting are not symptoms of over-involvement with porn. Instead, they are fairly common and widespread reactions to stress. So why, given that Guglielmucci's "symptoms" arose through the horrendous pressure of being both a minister of Christ to young people and a man struggling with a life-consuming obsession, why could he have not admitted all this to those he chose in his church and/or family and asked for help and support and prayer?

I would like to hope that such help, support and prayer would have been readily and discreetly forthcoming. Yet the Church, as a whole, does not have a good track record of dealing maturely or compassionately with people's sexual difficulties. The Church is still saturated by a such a simplistic dualism in which people are morally responsible for what goes wrong with their minds but powerless over what happens with their bodies, and assumes that body and mind can clearly be delineated from one another. So by presenting himself with a form of cancer known as having no environmental causes rather than an ambiguous and somewhat amorphous sexual and/or obsession-type problem, Guglielmucci became a victim of a disease, a hero and a role model rather than the pervert he may have been regarded as. I'm not excusing Guglielmucci's behaviour, and I'm not suggesting that deceiving people by fabricating cancer is ever remotely acceptable. But I think that the Church, by expecting so much and so intensely of its leaders, whilst often offering disproportionately little to support them, must bear the blame for pushing some of its leaders past what they can cope with...