What James Cameron doesn't know about resurrections

People have been coming back from the dead by the hundreds during the past 15-20 years. All over the world, stone-cold-dead people are being resurrected by the fervent, focused prayers of Christians praying in the name of Jesus.

By now, the totals are likely over a thousand. No exaggeration, no joke. My own book "Megashift: Igniting Spiritual Power" documents 52 countries where at least one person has been raised from the dead – with named eyewitnesses ... who have street addresses ... and phone numbers ... and fax numbers ... and e-mail addresses. I even throw in a few photographs. In other words, my little shoestring-budget book clobbers the nonexistent scholarship of James ("Titanic") Cameron. What he doesn't know about resurrections could fill a book – and it does: mine!

So now that Cameron has been trashed by, umm, pretty much everybody who ever got past the eighth grade and has access to a computer, it's time to state a monumental fact that even our better-informed intelligentsia have failed to notice:

The main factor that has made the resurrection of Jesus Christ so iconic and yet so arguable for 2,000 years is its seeming uniqueness.

That seeming uniqueness has made His resurrection more lustrous, yet also more debatable. While it continues to add an aura of awesomeness to the Christian Gospel story, it also appears to complicate the problem of proving the resurrection through purely scientific means. Science labs don't welcome non-repeatable, sui generis events; and emotionally loaded, one-off events from 20 centuries past are even less welcome.

But now the situation has changed. Boy, has it ever. Christ's resurrection is still definitely unique in demonstrating the certainty of the Father's forgiveness of sin at the cross. But as a simple, biological return from death, it is now just one instance in a very large, growing and increasingly believable category.

Today, China and Mexico are the foremost countries in the world for resurrections. My best estimate for Mexico is well over 300. That count is mostly from U.S.-based Freedom Ministries, who eventually got so annoyed at American tourists coming down to wander around, take photos and gawk at the natives that they stopped counting at 300 about five years ago.

The raised-body count in China could possibly be even higher. Lots of stories cross my desk, but they're still hard to tally because public reports on activities of the underground house churches draw heavy persecution, even in these "enlightened" days when Chinese pols are trying to clean up their wretched public image before the 2008 Olympics.

But to give you some feel for the situation, I'll describe one incident. It concerns my friend Curtis Sergeant, who is now on Rick Warren's staff at Saddleback. On a recent intelligence-gathering visit to South China, his first stop was a top house-church leader. They had hardly started talking when the phone rang. After a brief conversation, the leader hung up and started packing his suitcase, saying, "Sorry, have to go."

Curtis was understandably put off. He protested, "Hey, I came a long way to talk with you! What's the rush? Why can't you at least wait a few hours?"

The distinguished gentleman replied, "I just got word that two of our national leaders have been murdered in the Northeast, and I have to go see if God will bring them back from the dead."

Such is daily life these days on the front lines of the great invisible war between, good and evil, life and death – or to put it more concisely, God and Satan.

Those who would try to disparage the long-ago resurrection of the Lord now face a far harder problem: explaining away the many hundreds (or thousands) of today's easily verifiable resurrections that are staring us in the face from 52 lands, including the U.S. and Canada.

They cannot defend their outdated skepticism by arrogantly claiming that third-world peasants are too dumb to recognize final death and often lack scientific instruments to show a flatline. When a Christian from, say, rural Mexico sees a body with no pulse, no breathing, dilated pupils and stiffening limbs, I think he's well within his rights to reply, "We don't have to show you no stinkin' flatline!"

And please, the reports in "Megashift" are not "near-death experiences" (NDEs) under anesthesia where a patient passes out for a few minutes, goes down a long tunnel, sees a bright light, then encounters Jesus (or Mary if he's a Catholic or Buddha if he's a Buddhist, etc.). Six percent of all resuscitations from cardiac arrests now produce such NDEs.

No, what we're seeing today is the real thing. For instance, you've seen my periodic reports about the work of Iris Ministries in Mozambique run by my friend Heidi Baker and her husband, Rolland. When I spoke with her last fall, she said they've now counted 60 resurrections in their ministry.

And exactly who is doing all these resurrections? Heidi herself? No, Iris Ministries has now taken in 5,000 orphaned children – whom they somehow feed day after day, with no visible means of support (hint, hint). And while Heidi has seen many people healed through her prayers (very often deaf people), she has had only one resurrection. What about the other 59? They've almost all been done by the kids.

Moral #2: James Cameron and his clan have no clue what kind of world they're living in.

James Rutz is chairman of Megashift Ministries and founder-chairman of Open Church Ministries. He is the author of "MEGASHIFT: Igniting Spiritual Power," and, most recently, "The Meaning of Life."

Ok.
The article says photos and street addresses.

I want to see photos and street addresses.
And death certificates. I want to see death certificates.
Once I have seen these things, I will take them (trust me, I will; or rather, I will dispatch people with this information), and I (or they) will go to the families of these people who were resurrected. We will talk to the resurrected, film them, talk to their families, etc.
We'll look at the death certificates and talk with the doctors. And we'll talk with the funeral homes too.

Medicine resurrects the dead every day in emergency rooms. Sometimes, it resurrects the brain dead even after an hour of death, in a particular case.

If there are really people out there who have been pronounced dead, given a death certificate, medical care has ceased, and they've been transferred to the morgue for burial, I want to actually see the evidence he's talking about.

One case is all that is needed to prove it, but because of the possibility of fraud, I want the addresses, photos and death certificates, of THREE.

That's all I ask.
Should be easy.
Should be a piece of cake, really, a snap of the fingers.
I have the resources to ensure a THOROUGH investigation (you have no idea how thorough), and I assure you that if they are true, the megaphone will be ON and the whole world will be called to rejoice.

So, what do you say?
Three names. Three addresses. Three death certificates. In the Anglosphere or Francophonia. That's all I ask.

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