Wealthy Pastors Promote Reconciliation, Renewal in Middle East

note: the following is satire. Any resemblance to reality is purely coincidental.

As the Minnesota Monitor reported on Friday, April 27, 2007, "Pastor John Hagee, founder and chairman of Christians United for Israel, will be a special guest of Pastor Mac Hammond of Living Word Christian Center in Brooklyn Park for 'A Night to Honor Israel'. The [Minnesota] event will join together two of the highest-paid pastors in the country, both of whom have faced criticism for their large salaries and benefits in their respective states.' " Texas megachurch Pastor Hagee, who comes from a long line of fundamentalist preachers concerned with furthering an idiosyncratic agenda on resolving conflicts in the long troubled Mideast region, founded the nonprofit organization "Christians United For Israel", in early 2006, to promote his boldly visionary Mideast renewal plan to Americans, and especially American Jews, and to lobby politicians who can help bring the project to fruition.

Previous journalistic coverage of Pastor John Hagee has noted the pastor's "Prosperity Gospel" teachings and, under those, Hagee's exhortations, to his San Antonio, Texas, Cornerstone Church congregation members, to hold dollars bills or other paper US currency up to the heavens in a ritualistic flourish one ethnographer has stated bears some resemblance to the practice, by South Pacific Island Cargo Cults of the mid 20th Century, of building earthen airplane "landing strips" as magical enticement to lure planes stuffed with modern consumer goods to land and disgorge their riches. Stated one member of Hagee's church, "Pastor Hagee's told us all about the plot, by those environmentalists, to create a United Nations satanic one world order by whipping up people's fears with all that "Global Warming" hooey, but those environmentalists have got one thing straight, God sure does love green. The paper kind, that is. And lots of it."