Hank Hanegraaff being chrismated into the Greek Orthodox Church on Palm Sunday, 2017.

In 1994, I was thrilled to discover a voice on Christian radio that dared critique the Word of Faith movement, of which the so-called “Prosperity preachers” are proponents. That lone voice belonged to Hank Hanegraaff, host of “The Bible Answer Man” radio show. At the time, Hank had authored an informative expose of the Word of Faith movement called Christianity in Crisis. This book became very helpful in breaking my addiction to watching the Trinity Broadcasting Network and searching the Scriptures to see whether their claims were true.

I have listened to his program less and less over the years, as I have become more and more Reformed, but I have been similarly grateful for much, if not all, of the work Hank and the Christian Research Institute (CRI) he runs have produced which helped me understand much about the pseudo-Christian cults like Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc., as well as other errant movements and world religions.

After about 30 years of defending orthodox Protestantism, I was saddened to learn today that yesterday, Hank, his wife and two of his twelve children were officially made members of the Greek Orthodox Church. His doing so means he has behind the scenes come to repudiate the essentials of the Christian faith which relate to justification before God and the sole authority of Scripture.

Former CRI colleague Rob Bowman has written on Hank’s conversion as the latest in a long line of Evangelical leaders who have converted to Orthodoxy as well as Roman Catholicism. He also defends Protestant distinctives against the errors of Eastern Orthodoxy by means of Reformed confessions which express the system of doctrine contained in the Scriptures. Read “Evangelical Apologist Hank Hanegraaff Converts to Eastern Orthodoxy” at The Religious Researcher blog

The Evangelical movement is in dire need of Reformation back to the foundational confessions of Protestantism, and away from its multi-faceted spectrum which embraces even Word of Faith errors and heresies, among other erroneous teachings and practices. Protestants need to pray that their churches become Reformed according to the Scriptures and the biblically-based practices of the ancient church.