While the revivals seem to be impacting millions, some evangelical leaders are opposed, and even pastors from Lakeland area churches are warning that Todd Bentley “is doing more harm than good.”

Senior Pastor Shane Skelton, Calvary Baptist Church in Lakeland, Florida said he briefly attended one of the nightly meetings. He has also been following the nightly broadcasts so that he can know what’s going on in the community and with his church members.

When describing his experience, Skelton said, “I am going to have to come down on the side of the negative, I am against what he [Bentley] is doing for several reasons.”

“I believe it threw more light to emotion than it did to doctrinal standards,” Skelton said. “I looked at it very closely because I actually had some folks who went to it, and I had to deal with them going up on the stage, and they didn’t get healed for whatever reason, and it created a lot of stir and controversy within my church.

“One of the biggest issues I have with it, is that it makes God a means to an end and not the end. People come from all around the world to receive healing, and they come from all around the world to get what they wanted, which was healing or a better life, and God became a means to that end, instead of God being the end. God should be the end of everything, whether we have good health, a good marriage and so on,” said Skelton. “God is not a link in the chain to get you what you want. He’s not a lucky rabbit’s foot. He’s not magic genie in a lamp. He is God, whether we have good health or not.”

Skelton also expressed concern that “revivals” were not actually calling people back to God. “[A] lot of the things I watched on the broadcasts were nothing more than pumping up people’s emotions,” he said. “There is no revival to it. Revival is returning to the holiness of God. I don’t see any bars being shut down in Lakeland. I don’t see any fruit from it as far as the town turning back to holiness and righteousness.”

Hank Hanegraaff, author and host of the popular "Bible Answer Man" radio program, said what’s going on in Lakeland is a “counterfeit revival.”

“I think what you have in genuine revival, is you have powerful, expositional preaching, and the preaching emphasizes an esteem for Christ, an eternal perspective, and a focus on essential Christian doctrine, as opposed to what you find in ‘counterfeit revivals,’ with its excesses, airs, and extremes, which are I suppose personified in Todd Bentley, as much as anyone I’ve seen in recent history.”

Hanegraaff said he believes that the term “revival” is often misused in our culture. He believes people need to get back to basics, into the Word of God, and get the Word of God into them.

“I think we have a misplaced sense of revival, in that we are looking for revival in all the wrong places,” Hanegraaff said.

Martha Hollowell, a graduate from Fuller Seminary, who holds a degree in Cross Cultural Studies and serves as the prayer coordinator for her church Messiah Christian Church in Richmond, Va., attended several evenings of the Florida Outpouring revivals at the beginning of July with a group from her church. Although she said she did not go expecting physical healing, she said her experience was a positive one. On July 4, she saw Bentley speak.

“Todd Bentley was there only one of the four nights that I was there,” said Hollowell. “That service was a slightly different evening. They had planned on having a baptismal service, and 3,000 people lined up to be baptized. It was amazing. The focus that night really was, not so much on physical healing, but on healing from drug and alcohol abuse.”

She described the Florida Outpouring as “a revival for the church.” She said a huge number of people who are attending are Christians, not non-believers.

“I know I’ve been praying for a revival for a long time. What I mean by revival is seeing people coming to Christ in large quantities. I’ve studied about revivals, so I understand that is not all there is, and that a lot of times, revival was first about reviving the church so the church can then go out and win people,” Hollowell said.

“What I went for, and what I feel like I came back with, was a renewed sense of purpose and an excitement that God is going to move, not only in the church, but in reviving the church so that we can reach out to society,” Hollowell said.