A Preachers Trick

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Lacy Stevenson is a faithful member of one of Atlanta s mega churches, Mt.

Pastor Warren McBeth is one of the youngest pastors to run a multi-million dollar mega church at the age of 35 years old with over 25, members. Both gets thrust into a sea of mass destruction when one is caught up in federal indictments of conspiracy, murder, bank fraud, money laundering Lacy Stevenson is a faithful member of one of Atlanta s mega churches, Mt.

Both gets thrust into a sea of mass destruction when one is caught up in federal indictments of conspiracy, murder, bank fraud, money laundering, wire fraud, and prostitution! No one can be trusted and where is God when you need him? Lacy finds that love doesn t conquer after all. She soon falls in love then she asks herself is he is the ONE? What she doesn t know is that even men of the cloak can be very deceiving but when an investigation of her church is launched, she finds that she s right in the middle of the drama. But when some of her congregation members get arrested, she soon finds out that she was being used as a pawn in this game of tricks.

Now her life is on the line, people that she thought she could trust went bust, and now she finds out she s pregnant!

Who is the father? Now threats are being promised to her if she keeps the baby.

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Black mail become embedded on her tongue and then backfires in her face. Will Lacy get her life back or will she just lie down and play dead? Paperback , pages. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about A Preacher's Trick , please sign up. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Mar 11, Shanetra added it. Had to stop reading this so many errors, misprints mid sentence it gave me a literal headache. Seemed like it was going to be good though.

Christie rated it it was ok Dec 09, Nikki rated it it was amazing Oct 09, Linda Strickland rated it it was amazing Jan 30, Artesure rated it really liked it Dec 10, LoveLee Kourage rated it liked it Jul 03, Keecia rated it it was amazing Feb 23, Natalie Shipman rated it really liked it Dec 29, Simmons rated it liked it May 23, We laid hands on the woman, prayed for her sickness to be healed, and boom -- she went down quicker than Michael Spinks. After the service, our pastor a professional faith healer went to my parents and told them he saw something "special" in me.

A Preacher's Trick

I've no idea what it was, maybe the extra pizzazz I put behind slapping the Jesus into that woman, but the pastor took me under his wing. My formal training started when an elderly gentleman came to the pulpit to be healed. I believe his name was Don, and he'd been a member at the church longer than I'd been alive. He was in the midst of a cancer scare, and eventually stepped forward. At this point I still believed in miracle healing, and here was my first chance: I was going to cure someone of cancer. I laid my hands on him and demanded God take his cancer away.

At no point did I realize how weird it was that I believed cancer was the sort of thing God assumed people were cool with unless explicitly told otherwise. Later that month, Don got a clean bill of health from the doctors. It was a miracle! Or at least it seemed like one if you didn't know what I knew: Don had never actually had cancer. The "scare" started because my pastor claimed God had told him Don was going to die unless he received a massive dose of Vitamin P rayer.

The faith healer giveth cancer, and the faith healer taketh it away. See, faith healing works best with people who are probably going to get better anyway. Some healthy young person has a cold or flu? If you tell them they're healed, the power of suggestion and a bunch of cheering people will make them feel momentarily better.

And by the time church comes 'round next week, they'll be over whatever was ailing them.

See a Problem?

Yep, we are taking credit for the general concept of an immune system. Our congregants would write their fears and problems down on a prayer card "for God" before each meeting. We'd read them in secret, and then repeat their prayers back to them word for word while we laid hands on them.

It was easier for them to assume "miracle" than it was to think their trusted spiritual leaders were running a con. Don's cancer scare wasn't a one-off. We're not some sort of Holy MRI, but they believe whatever we say. And when simple gullibility wasn't enough, we got by with a little help from our homeless friends. Yes, we hired hobos as actors. We often did outreach to the homeless in the city, so we knew where to look.

The first time I was involved, the person we hired was just passing through. He was trying to get back home he was somewhere from the south , and we offered to pay his way. He was our final act of the service. I had instructed him to hobble up on stage with a wooden cane. He was probably in his late 40's and wore fatigues, so he looked like a soldier who had fallen on hard times.

When he got on stage, I instantly laid in on him, screaming for God to heal this man's lame leg. After about a minute of hollerin' at God, I told the guy to start taking steps without his cane, and then encouraged him to run a bit, which he did fine. While he was doing that, I tried to break the cane over my leg, which only ended up giving me a bruise.

6 Tricks I Learned (For Scamming You) As A Faith Healer

Instead, I threw it away from the stage. When the guy finally tried to get off the stage, he ended up falling. He was fine, but he also was drunk we said "touched by the Spirit," which is a euphemism we suggest everybody uses from now on. On one occasion, we had hired a young "actor. I placed him in a wheelchair, and gave him a backstory about being struck by a drunk driver. He was the last person to be "healed" that day, and I wanted to make sure we ended with excitement. After he was rolled up on stage, I went into my God-hollerin', and then forcefully dumped him out of the wheelchair, demanding the power of the Lord compel him to walk.

He toppled onto the stage, and then slowly stood up.

I got to pretend I was magic, Mystique got to pretend he was an actor, and the congregation got to pretend their weekly donation was the same as having healthcare. Everybody won except for actual sick people, and we tried not to let them up on stage. We did something called psychic surgery.

We'd have someone lay on a table, and beneath the table would be a bowl of chicken gizzards and livers mixed with blood. We'd lift the person's shirt up and act as if we were going to take out a tumor or an infected gall bladder or like, a possessed kidney or something. We'd pretend to cut the stomach open, putting a hand in front of our fingers to hide it, then pull out the gizzards and the liver, calling them "cancer" or "Yendik, the Kidney Demon.

I wouldn't perform this sort of act until after the first year of faith healing. By then, I knew we were phonies, so it wasn't a big surprise when I learned that the surgery act was basically performance art. My pastor told me that an act like this bolstered the congregant's faith and "portrayed a deeper reality," which is a line I plan to use if the IRS ever audits my income tax returns. My first psychic surgery patient was a teenage girl named Courtney, whom I had known for quite some time.

She was a friend of mine, and her parents were devout members. This put a lot more pressure on me, which I think was my pastor's plan all along. If I was really in this "scamming the faithful" thing for the long haul, I'd need to get used to lying to friends. Courtney's family believed she was infested with a bad case of Demonitis. Her mood had changed lately and she'd been acting depressed -- almost like some sort of teenager.

Instead of talking through her issues, her parents found it easier to have them theatrically ripped out of her, as if she was the frightened peasant from The Temple of Doom. I had her lay on the table, pulled up her shirt to bare her stomach, and placed my hand in front of where I was "making" the incision. I secretly grabbed a chicken gizzard from below the table and made a big gesture of struggling to pull it out.

Then it was a matter of cleaning up her stomach and helping her back to her family. Courtney did actually get better afterward, in that she started fitting in at school. Apparently she'd just had one too many chicken gizzards in her general vicinity, and it was keeping her from socializing properly. That first psychic surgery was a major blow to my faith.

But it wasn't so easy to give it up altogether. It was ingrained into me from a young age, and a part of me didn't want to let go.

I still wanted to believe we were serving God and helping our community.

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