Hi RPM,
Ok, against my better judgment, I'll give you as objective an assessment as I can - I'm not sure it will be worth much.
First the caveats; until I read your post I had never heard of "Victory Family Church." Since then, I've been to their website and read all their links, listened to one sermon, pt. 1 of "The Power to Get Wealth" and done a google search (including google news) on the Senior Pastor and the church. Almost every hit simply refers to their eye-catching sign which apparently has everyone in a tizzy.
The church itself is as you guessed is independent, in terms of their theology they are generally Charismatic, possibly Pentecostal, they are also into "Word of Faith" or "Name it and Claim it" and "Health and Wealth" preaching, although they are far from being the worst examples I've seen. The message I heard made all the typical word of faith exegetical leaps from Israel and the patriarch's material prosperity to faith supposedly being the infallible key to our own and assured us that it was God's will that we all be prosperous, apparently ignoring the fact that Christ and His Apostles were far from prosperous, that Christ promised us tribulation and not riches in this world, that we are warned time and time again not to make mammon our goal, that being rich makes it harder to get into the kingdom and draws our hearts away from Christ and consumes us with worldly cares, that earthly riches are only so much worthless dust in the end, and even that "not many" of the mighty and powerful of this world are called and that in Christian history, with a few notable exceptions, the majority of the Christian "giants of the faith" have been either poor (like John Bunyan) or of moderate means (like Jonathan Edwards). For that matter, if this theology is right, I've been going in the wrong direction since 1997, seeing as our income has been more than cut in half since going to seminary and entering the pastorate (I can think of several other men who could say essentially the same thing.)
Anyway, unless the message I heard was an aberration (which I doubt considering there were 3 others with the same title, there is very little gospel preaching, and a lot of telling people what they want to hear about getting what they want and meeting their "felt needs" (which is essentially the same thing Joel Osteen, Kenneth Copeland, etc. have built their careers on).
That said, RPM, I think you could probably find 100s of churches just like this one in the state of Texas alone, and many of them far, far, worse. In any event, there is no "world dominion" threat there. Personally, I think its much ado about nothing. Seems to me, they came up with a gimmicky sign that made it to AP and are currently enjoying their 15 minutes in a relatively low-power spotlight. I may be missing it, but I don't see what the big deal is, yes the Christian world is full of men seeking mammon, but they don't learn that from Christ, they bring that in with them from the world. One only needs to think back to the days of the S&L rippoffs or ENRON to realize that Texas real-estate, banking, communications, construction, etc. are also full of men madly pursuing mammon to their own destruction as well and that when those men are in charge of a company or a bank they can ruin far more lives, than the few congregants listening to Pastor Bates.
Anyway, thats my .10 cents. Really nothing to see here, move along.
- SEAGOON
