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Todd Bentley believes God acts through him to cure cancer, heal the deaf and raise the dead.

So do hundreds of thousands of people who have visited his raucous revival meeting, now in its third month and broadcast nightly from a huge tent in the middle of Florida.

The 32-year-old Canadian, tattooed to the fingers and neck, puts a palm to the forehead of the sick, desperate and faithful. Bentley yells “Bam” they collapse and he proclaims them cured. Attendees dance in the aisles, shout to Heaven, laugh, shake violently and cry.

Such revivals aren’t new, but Bentley’s stage show has become a phenomenon in the religious world - for both its pull and the criticism it has attracted - in just a few months.

He claims to have medical proof of mass healings, but has not produced widely convincing evidence.

His tactics, sometimes violent, have made skeptics even of Pentecostals who believe in concepts that aren’t accepted by all branches of Christianity such as speaking in tongues, miraculous healing and spontaneous twitching from the Holy Spirit.

“Some of the language used during the Lakeland Revival has created an almost sideshow atmosphere,” wrote J. Lee Grady, editor of the Pentecostal magazine Charisma, in an online column. “People are invited to ‘Come and get some.’ Miracles are supposedly ‘popping like popcorn.’ … Such brash statements cheapen what the Holy Spirit is doing.” Grady wrote another column this week expressing concern that the Lakeland event has the potentital to cause a “charismatic civil war.”

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