“You pinned me up against the wall outside of our high school classroom, with your hand around my neck…”
A Baptist preacher from Florida has laid a wild claim against Kelly Slater, greatest of all time etc, in a to-camera piece that has just surfaced on YouTube.
Michael Criswell is well known for his powerful sermons and unwavering commitment to spreading the Word of God via a YouTube channel which counts almost one hundred thousand subscribers.
Criswell also spent a year and a half at the same Cocoa Beach high school where, he says, Kelly Slater gave him hell for an imagined slight against a third party.
“Kelly Slater, you and I met in an extraordinary way, after you pinned me up against the wall outside of our high school classroom, with your hand around my neck, after you misunderstood something I said to Krista Guidash,” says Criswell. “I’m thankful to your brother Sean Slater for what he did that day. I tell more of that story in this video…”
It gets weirder.
“Even though I no longer knew you or followed your life, I started having recurring spiritual dreams about you and they have continued for over 25 years, as best as I can remember, leaving me with quite a burden for you. In one of the dreams I had about you on Dec 28, 2015, you can hear that I recorded that something bad was going to happen to you, which as you will hear in the video, was followed 18 months later by the worst injury of your career at JBay, where you broke your foot.”
And weirder,
“PLEASE KELLY SLATER, I KNOW YOU ARE SUPER BUSY…JUST WATCH THE FIRST 10 MINUTES OF THIS MESSAGE FROM YOUR FORMER COCOA BEACH HIGH SCHOOL CLASSMATE!”
The name “Criswell”, of course, is often associated with the renowned W. A. Criswell, a prominent figure in the Southern Baptist Convention.
Under Criswell’s leadership, the Southern Baptists returned to their conservative roots, and his influence resulted in thousands of pastors being trained in conservative theology. He also popularized verse-by-verse preaching of the Bible, a practice that had become nearly extinct.
As a tribute to his legacy, the W. A. Criswell Sermon Library was established to preserve and promote his spiritual heritage. The library features many of his sermons, including “Death in Detente,” which was a watershed moment in the battle over the Bible within the SBC, and “Whether We Live or Die,” a powerful message from the 1985 Pastor’s Conference at the Southern Baptist Convention.
Compelling and weird.
