Claim: The pastor of New York's Times Square Church directed his church to prepare 2,000 sandwiches on
Example: [Porter, March 2009]
I received this e-mail today. Did
Should We Heed Wilkerson's Warning?
When I was a kid, I read about David Wilkerson who took the Gospel to the gangs of New York. I even saw the movie "The Cross and the Switchblade"
that was made about him. Many know about that, but most don't know what happened in his church just eight years ago.
In the fall of 2001, Pastor David Wilkerson, of Times Square Church in New York City, was warned by God that a calamity was coming. For six weeks they felt an intense burden and enormous heaviness. A critical need for intercession was so profound that Pastor Wilkerson canceled everything on the church calendar — mission's conferences, youth events and every guest speaker.
For six weeks, there wasn't a sermon. Instead, there was intercession for our nation with weeping and repentance. They knew something was coming and that something was bad. And that something was soon. So they prayed. And prayed ... and prayed.
[Rest of article here.]
Origins: Pastor David Wilkerson is the Founding Pastor of
According to the pastor:
There will be riots and fires in cities worldwide. There will be
For ten years I have been warning about a thousand fires coming to New York City. It will engulf the whole megaplex, including areas of
Pastor Wilkerson and his predictions of imminent catastrophe were the subject of several articles in WorldNetDaily (WND), one of which, published on 10 March 2009, related how the pastor felt he had been warned by God in the weeks just before the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York that a calamity was coming and that he should prepare for this event by making sandwiches, a revelation claimed to give credence to Pastor Wilkerson's recent prophecy of another tragedy:
And on the 10th of September they stayed up all night making hundreds and hundreds of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. By morning they had about 2,000 sandwiches. At So, when the guy who made the 2,000 sandwiches on
Then Wilkerson felt God telling him something that seemed rather bizarre. He felt God telling him to make
However, WND didn't undertake even a minimal fact-checking effort for the story, as a simple
The claim made in the World Net Daily article that Times Square Church staff
stayed up to make 2000 sandwiches the night before 9/11 is false. No one
authorized to speak on behalf of Times Square Church contributed information
to the article. Sandwiches were made on 9/11 after the towers were hit.
After we published this piece, WorldNetDaily scrubbed all traces of the erroneous article from their site.
The motif of one realized event's bestowing credibility on a prediction made about a second event yet to occur appears in rumors dating at least as far back as
World
Although this pipe dream sounds foolish, it nevertheless spread throughout the country rapidly. It appeared in widely circulated gossip columns, and a lot of Americans took it seriously. Yet this same rumor, in the setting of the period, to be sure, had appeared in every military conflict since the Napoleonic Wars. And it has been said that the rumor probably goes back into the Middle Ages.
In the wake of the anxiety rumors that swept the nation immediately after Pearl Harbor came a pipe-dream rumor which was undoubtedly the most popular of all: the weird tale of the man who picked up a strange woman in his car. Arriving at her destination, his passenger allegedly offered to pay the man for the gas he had used. But the man refused to accept the money, so the woman offered to tell his fortune. And, as the rumor went, mysteriously she told him, "There will be a dead body in your car before you get home, and Hitler will be dead in six months." Supposedly, then, on the way home the man had seen a serious automobile wreck and had taken one of the victims into his car to rush him to the hospital. But the injured person died
Last updated: 16 June 2009
 | Sources: |
Jacobson, David J. The Affairs of Dame Rumor. New York: Rinehart & Co., 1948 (pp. 378-379). Porter, Janet. "Heed Wilkerson's Warning." WorldNetDaily. 10 March 2009. NewsNet5.com. "Famed Pastor Predicts Imminent 'Earth-Shattering Calamity.'" MSNBC.com. 11 March 2009. WorldNetDaily. "Famed Pastor Predicts Imminent Catastrophe." 8 March 2009. WorldNetDaily. "Pastor Tells How to Prep for Imminent Catastrophe." 14 March 2009.