Friday, May 25, 2007

Car Wash Christianity

By Bobby

With the Religious Left's leaders being Warren, Hybels, and others in The Emergent Church movement, note how many churches have fallen to the trap ofthe Emergent Church. This column has great commentary on it:

All the sermons on Sunday became geared at healing relationships, or how to be a better you, and 10 steps to something I am told I am missing in my life, or the gospel according to the barbecue grill or some other funny little sermon, never about the Holiness, Mercy, Grace, Wrath, Judgement, or Justice of God or the Deity of Christ and I can't tell you the last time I heard the word HELL on a Sunday morning.

The concerns expressed by this author are mirrored in other articles, such as this one.

In a subsequent article, the author of the initial post elaborates on his concerns:

What are some of the lasting effects from the seeker movement on the church when the focus is on contemporary worship, and modernizing every thing in the church? Well it seems that it creates a contempt for church history to the point that it separates the modern church from her past with no connection to history of the Faith, and most today seem to wear it as a badge of honor. Christians today just don't have any connection or respect to the great hymns, their writers, theology, great preachers, and sound doctrine. So there is this dumbing down of the importance of church, a diminishing of the importance of worship, and the diminishing of the importance of the exalted charter of it. Now this appears to be a concentrated effort to systematically cut all ties with the whole history of the church, and in the process we have trained a generation of church goers to have contempt for historical Christianity, and the theology that is at the heart of historical Christianity, and all that is left is a man-centered theology and an emotional entertainment." [NOTE: Excerpt compiled after listening to GTY90 from Grace To You. An interview with John MacArthur and Phil Johnson titled "Straight Talk About the Seeker Church Movement".]

As the author says in the initial post, after talking about the "worship minister with rock star like credentials" who says things like "God is not concerned with putting his stamp of approval on your worship" and the invitational hymn being "Desperado" by the Eagles, "And they have the gall to call this church?"

3 comments:

  1. We should live in the past?

    Do you live in the past?

    Isn't the only thing we have the present?

    Maybe these folks are living expressions of the Christ life as it is manifesting itself today...just as you are...one life many expressions.

    Sure there is truth, but isn't truth a person not a concept or theology?

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  2. Rick,

    The only person I know of who is actually "truth" is Christ. Otherwise, we're all flawed human beings.

    Humans can express truth, and to a certain extent one can argue that truth is love, but I think it incorrect to suggest that humans "are" truth. Truth is immutable, consistent, unchanging - not words I'd use to describe fallible mankind. I think that kind of thinking leads to the dictatorship of relativism of which Benedict SVI speaks.

    Truth is not subject to whim or changing standards. Truth is truth whether it be the past, present or future.

    Speaking of which, as for your comment that all we have is the present - well, I certainly hope not! Life is far more than the present. The past is a treasure of knowledge which we can use in the present, to enhance our hopes for the future.

    Mitchell

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  3. People do not understand anything it seems when you consider Churchill warned those who forget history are destined to repeat it.

    What actually happens at church today with the "circus church" movement is not engrained in any denomination. This is common in churches of all denominations. For Catholics, Pope Benedict XVI has warned about some of the "emergent" tactics. For Protestants, it has been a mix of both older and younger ministers involved in warning of these tactics.

    Charles Colson once warned churches ignoring the hymns of faith will come at a cost. Consider I attended a January 22 concert featuring friends singing, among other pieces, selections from Dvorak's "Biblical Psalms". Those are the songs we have ignored too long because of the push to play the latest in Top 40 songs from EMI, Vivendi, Warner, GIA, or Oregon Catholic Press.

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