Bibliographic record
Abstract
The charismatic stream popularly called the “prosperity gospel” lives uncomfortably on the edge of the Pentecostal movement. Its location is in part due to controversy surrounding its teaching and practices. It is scorned by non-Pentecostals and Pentecostals alike for its apparent shameless appeal to material wealth. The animus against the prosperity gospel by mainstream Pentecostals in particular is judged in part due to weak biblical exegesis, over-claims for results, temptation to greed, and absence of a theology of suffering. This essay is a brief case study of Kingdom Covenant Ministries, Toronto, and its Jamaican founder and pastor, Pat Francis. The purpose is to explore her understanding of the prosperity gospel and how it is lived out in her ministry in Canada’s largest multicultural city. I begin by reviewing the two historical movements which have shaped the prosperity gospel: its Pentecostal roots and neoliberal economics. This will be followed by an overview of Francis’s prosperity gospel theology and its outworking in her ministry. The paper concludes with a series of reflections intended to locate her Kingdom theology and ministry within a broader typology offered by theologian, Howard Snyder, and raise questions regarding the strengths and dangers of the robust promotion of wealth accumulation, even with the most laudable of motives.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".