Samuel Rodriguez is a prominent Hispanic evangelical who is often a guest speaker in non-charismatic circles. Rodriguez, the president of The National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference (NHCLC), has – for example – partnered repeatedly on various projects with Russell Moore and the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) of the Southern Baptist Convention. According to the NHCLC website…
CNN and Fox News named Rodriguez, “The leader of the Hispanic Evangelical movement”. NBC/Telemundo called him “America’s most influential Latino Evangelical leader”. Rev. Samuel Rodriguez was nominated by TIME magazine for their “100 Most Influential People in The World” list in 2013 and his description of the Latino faith community emerged as their April 15, 2013 cover story, The Latino Reformation.
Rodriguez, and the NHCLC also have strong ties with the New Apostolic Reformation and Cindy Jacobs, a highly controversial and well known false teacher within American evangelicalism. Any true God-fearing, Bible-believing Christian should be running from this camp at full speed. So what does Rodriguez actually stand for? According to NHCLC website, their mission statement reads:
Joining the Christianity of Martin Luther King Jr. and Billy Graham. The Lamb’s Agenda reveals the crucial connection between biblical social justice and spiritual righteousness.
Rodriguez says he grew up in a “very Christian” home, and apparently received a prophetic utterance from the Lord to become a preacher while watching a well known false teacher, Jimmy Swaggart, on television as a child. In an interview with PBS he says:
… when I was 14 years old, I had my epiphany, my Damascus moment, which was simple: I was viewing a very well-known televangelist [Swaggart] around 10:00 in the evening, back in the early ’80s, and it resonated with me. Something in my spirit, something in my heart said, “Samuel, you’re going to do that one day; you’re going to preach.”
Like all charismatics, Rodriguez has lots of stories of the miraculous, and all of them happened in Third World countries a long way away from television cameras or any form of substantiation. In a video posted by Charisma Mag, Rodriguez claims to have healed a man blind from birth.
Riiiiight.
So, here’s the thing. God can heal whoever he wants. But every single time (literally every…single…time) charismatics tell us these stories it’s in a third world nation, years after the supposed event occurred, and there’s no video evidence or corroborating testimony.
Pics or it didn’t happen.
