This isn’t satire, but it sounds like it. The Vision Church in Atlanta, Georgia, has added a psychic medium to their church staff. The medium, Lakara Foster, claims to be able to communicate with the dead. The church licensed her to Gospel ministry and hired her as staff so that she can help parishioners communicate with their deceased relatives.
File this under, “I kid you not.”
Rolling Out first covered the story in a post entitled, Black Girl Medium, At a Church Near You. The church says that her ability to communicate with the dead is one of her “spiritual gifts.” Her doctoral dissertation title was, ” Every Good and Perfect Gift Is From Above (James 1:17): Making The Case for the inclusion of Psychic Mediumship among the Spiritual Gifts of the Modern Church.”
Apparently, Vision Church thought highly of her dissertation and agreed that necromancy was a New Testament spiritual gift.
Foster told the publication:
I kept my gift of psychic mediumship a secret from my family and friends for a long time. It was my freshmen year of college where I began using my gift to help others by connecting them to their loved ones to provide them with healing, closure, and peace. For 20 years I only worked off referrals so if you came to me for a reading it meant you were open to receiving it, which means I wasn’t met with many skeptics. However, by the end of 2017 things began to shift for me on a deeper spiritual level and I felt a calling to help more people heal from grief and the passing of their loved ones.
Here’s a video of Lakara Foster using her ‘spiritual gift.’
Foster found charismatic churches to be prime real estate for her career as a psychic medium, channeling the dead.
She also linked her gift to racialism:
One of the reasons I pursued my doctorate on this topic is because I really wanted to understand my gift from the intersections of Afrocentrism and Christianity, and why the church believes this gift shouldn’t be considered a spiritual gift among those listed in the Bible.
We would presume that the church doesn’t believe this gift is a spiritual gift listed in the Bible because it’s literally not listed as a spiritual gift in the Bible.
Furthermore, the Scripture explicitly forbids this type of behavior from among God’s people and even establishes the death penalty for it.
“Do not turn to mediums or necromancers; do not seek them out, and so make yourselves unclean by them: I am the Lord your God.” – Leviticus 19:31
Also:
“When you come into the land that the Lord your God is giving you, you shall not learn to follow the abominable practices of those nations. There shall not be found among you anyone who burns his son or his daughter as an offering, anyone who practices divination or tells fortunes or interprets omens, or a sorcerer or a charmer or a medium or a necromancer or one who inquires of the dead, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord. And because of these abominations the Lord your God is driving them out before you. – Deuteronomy 18:9-12
And:
“A man or a woman who is a medium or a necromancer shall surely be put to death. They shall be stoned with stones; their blood shall be upon them.” – Leviticus 20:27
