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The prophet: JOHN HINKLE.
The platform: The Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN).
The prophecy: “The most cataclysmic experience that the world has ever known since the Resurrection…is going to happen.”
Hinkle had everyone’s ear, He claimed that God, “in the most awesome voice,” told him that “on Thursday, June the ninth (1994), I will rip the evil out of this world,”2
In his August 1993 newsletter, TBN president Paul Crouch elaborated on Hinkle’s pronouncement. The voice, said Crouch, was “so loud and clear that it sounded like a great bell being rung by his ear” (emphasis in original). 3
Four days before this apocalyptic event was to take place. Hinkle, pastor of Christ Church Los Angeles (formerly Christ Church Unity), assured parishioners that “the glory of the Lord is coming upon everyone in this world in such a way they will see it outside but 10,000 times more they will feel it inside.”4 As thousands waited anxiously for “D-Day” to arrive. Crouch assured his vast television audience, “John has promised to be our special guest on June 9th, 1994— that is, if we have not already been lifted to meet the Lord in the air!”5
Hinkle was a no-show on June 9th. And so was the “cataclysmic experience.”
Neither Crouch nor the pastor he made famous apologized for the false prophecy. Instead, they employed a tactic that worked for the Watchtower Society some 80 years earlier, Like the Jehovah’s Witnesses who predicted Christ would return in 1914, they proclaimed that their prophecy had come to pass — only invisibly.
Crouch hedged his bets early. On June 2nd he declared, “Something may happen invisibly.”6 Hinkle, however, waited for June 9th to come and go. Then he sent his congregation the following communique: “At first myself and others were very disappointed it did not take place in the way we expected. It did begin, and is continuing to take place, but it happened in the spiritual realm first.”7
In this final decade of the second millennium, prophetic pronouncements such as Hinkle’s seem almost to have become the rule rather than the exception. A growing cacophony of voices now claim to have discovered the date of Christ’s return.
Hinkle sounds like a joke.
Sounds like Crouch was duped by a mental patient who believed his own false prophesy so strongly, that Crouch started to believe it.
Remember that Crouch was a small time minister once who also had a vision and he felt a calling from God to build this current ministry.
It was so successful that maybe he thought God was sending him special people who would give him exclusives from God in some way.
In any case, every generation believes it is in the last days and as you know, Christ says we will "not know" the hour it comes and that He would be back like a thief in the night.
A case of a small town minister biting off too much to chew that was out of his league.