Todd Bentley's Lakeland Revival Healing Claims (2008)

Beginning April 2, 2008, Canadian evangelist Todd Bentley was invited to speak at Ignited Church in Lakeland, Florida for five days. He stayed for six months. The revival, broadcast live on God TV, attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors and global media attention. Bentley claimed healings of cancer, blindness, and deafness, and publicized twenty cases of the dead being raised to life.

On July 9, 2008, ABC's Nightline broadcast an investigative report focused on verifying Bentley's healing claims, his finances, and his criminal past. The investigators concluded that not a single healing claim could be independently verified. Separately, the Christian publication World magazine pressed Bentley's ministry for a list of verified healings; after prolonged delay they received twelve names, and follow-up found that several of those individuals had died of the conditions they were purportedly cured of.

The revival ended abruptly in August 2008 when Bentley announced he was leaving his wife. It subsequently emerged that he had been having an extramarital relationship with his female assistant and was struggling with alcohol. In January 2020, a formal panel of pastors convened by Rick Joyner and others concluded that Bentley was "not fit for ministry."

The Lakeland case matters for this dataset not as an authenticated healing but as the most thoroughly investigated and debunked mass-healing revival of the modern charismatic era. It illustrates the pattern critics identify: dramatic claims, no independent medical documentation, and in this case moral collapse of the healer himself.