Kicking and screaming, but is he healing?

LAKELAND, Fla.

Todd Bentley says God acts through him to cure cancer, heal the deaf and raise the dead. So do hundreds of thousands of others who have visited his raucous revival meeting, now in its third month and broadcast nightly from a huge tent in the middle of Florida.

The 32-year-old Canadian, tattooed to the fingers and neck, puts a palm to the forehead of the sick, desperate and faithful. Mr. Bentley yells, “Bam,” they collapse and he proclaims them cured. Attendees dance in the aisles, shout to heaven, laugh, shake violently and cry.

Such revivals aren’t new, but Mr. Bentley’s stage show has become a phenomenon in the religious world - for both its pull and the criticism it has attracted - in just a few months.

He claims to have medical proof of mass healings, but has not produced widely convincing evidence.

His tactics, sometimes violent, have made skeptics even of Pentecostals who believe in concepts that aren’t accepted by all branches of Christianity such as speaking in tongues, miraculous healing and spontaneous twitching from the Holy Spirit.

“Some of the language used during the Lakeland Revival has created an almost sideshow atmosphere,” J. Lee Grady, editor of the Pentecostal magazine Charisma, wrote in an online column. “People are invited to ‘come and get some.’ Miracles are supposedly ‘popping like popcorn.’ … Such brash statements cheapen what the Holy Spirit is doing.”

When Mr. Bentley performs healings, often wearing jeans and a T-shirt, aides bring the sick up both sides of an elaborate stage. The preacher’s assistants tell the audience each person’s condition and how far they came to be cured: from Europe, the West Coast, up to the Northeast and beyond.

Like a psychic, he will proclaim someone in the crowd has a particular kind of tumor, growth or affliction. “Someone’s getting a new spinal cord tonight,” he yelled in one service.

Mr. Bentley gives the credit to God, but Christian critics say he rarely opens a Bible or sermonizes about Jesus Christ. They worry he is too little about conversion, too heavy on his own hype and too focused on self-proclaimed miracles.

“How can you be too focused on miracles?” Mr. Bentley shouted to another packed house.

The revival sprang from Mr. Bentley’s April visit to a Lakeland church for a speaking engagement. He has traveled the world as head of Fresh Fire Ministries, based in Abbotsford, British Columbia, but never received a fraction of this exposure.

Thanks to Internet streaming and live broadcasts on the satellite channel GodTV, Mr. Bentley’s revival has outgrown four venues in Lakeland and drawn more than 400,000 in person from across the country and around the world, promoters say.

GodTV estimated its viewership has more than doubled since it began televising the event each night, and Web hits have risen from 25,000 to 200,000 weekly. Mr. Bentley’s own page is now getting 8 million hits a month, he said.

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