The News Beats

The upcoming Radicalis conference scheduled to take place at Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, February 9-12, will include speakers Rick Warren, his ministry team, and what is shaping up to be a line-up of, well, the usual suspects for apostasy.  One headliner is Brad Powell, Senior Pastor, Northridge Church.  Powell is slated to discuss his process of successfully transitioning congregations “from static to dynamic,” and to go from “irrelevance to relevance.”¹  It is important to understand that in the nomenclature of compromise the term irrelevance means small, but faithful congregation; and the term relevance means applying marketing schemes to attract more dues-paying customers by employing sensual lures in the areas of church lighting, music, and entertainment.

For a glimpse of the marketing program Powell will be promoting at Radicalis, a look back to his marketing ideas from 2007, as originally covered here at TheNewsBeats.com, will be insightful:

Brad Powell: Holy Spirit Hot Sauce, or Marketing Genie in a bottle?

December 30th, 2006 by David Dansker

Billed as the “Change Without Compromise 2007” conference, Brad Powell, Senior Pastor of Northridge Church, MI, is marketing his church transition workshops by comparing Church fervency to a bottle of hot sauce. Referencing Revelation 3:15-16, Powell contends the comparison “isn’t that far off,” and he claims that by purchasing his hot ideas your church can “move from static to dynamic, from cultural irrelevance to relevance, and from ineffective to effective.” Of course, “20% growth annually” might also be inside the bottle too. Workshops include Marketing and Communications (or, “What’s On Your Label?”); Volunteers (how to develop and maintain them); and Programming with a Purpose. “Your services can be ‘all killer, no filler’! Experience the process… from the pastor’s series thoughts… to the final walk-out music. Hands-on training that’ll rock your programming world” (workshop, deatails).

Upon successful completion of the Powell transition, it sounds like a pastor can process attendees through church services with all the efficiency and thrills of a major theme park ride. The cost for the conference and workshops is $179. While we didn’t see a workshop on holding them upside down long enough to shake the money out, it seems safe to deduce that the mechanism is built into the package.

The-if you will excuse the phrase-selling points for this tabasco-talk are Powell’s own numbers: 12,700 people for weekend services, and 2,100 “decisions for Christ” last year alone. When considering these, and Powell’s merchandising campaign, two things come to mind. One is 2Peter 2:3: “And through covetousness shall they with feigned words make merchandise of you: whose judgment now of a long time lingereth not, and their damnation slumbereth not.” The other thing is that Pilate got probably as many “decisions for Christ” in a single day; they decided to crucify him.

Notes:

The book Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton is a collection of collegent digressions where the author toys with reversing positives into negatives and examining what is right side up wrong side down in a lateral thinking game.  It is an exercise of applying thesis against antithesis from an arbiter’s middle perch;  the vantage point which seems to imbue those who successfully entertain such exercises with enviable perspicuity.  This is the stuff passed around dormitories where unsuspecting sophomores have their Bohemian days.

It is sad that those rumored to have maturity in the faith would take the time to study under Chesterton, and cite him in their own works on the faith. At point is John Piper, who is pressed by admirers to be some Christian thinker of our times.  Indeed, Piper has authored several Christian books over the years.  Nevertheless, he remains so impressed by Chesterton’s prose lamenting mankind’s lack of conviction for the truth that he included it in his book Brothers We Are Not Professionals, and Piper quotes this from him:

What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place.  Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition.  Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be.  A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth.¹

This, for all its purported value in assertiveness training for truth bearers , is but nothing more than a self-affirmation that Chesterton was a living example of his own complaint.  It will turn out well for all those who were enamored with Chesterton, for all his sophistry, and who later discover that he was a fool; he would as soon doubt the word of God as toy with the implications of doing so.

On page 30 of Orthodoxy, Chesterton caves under the scientific evidence available to him in 1908, and joins the throngs of Darwinists happy to call God a liar:

If evolution simply means that a positive thing called an ape turned very slowly into a positive thing called a man, then it is stingless for orthodoxy; for a personal God might just as well do things slowly as quickly , especially if , like the Christian God, he were outside time.²

Appealing to the fact that God can do things the way He chooses to argue in favor of theistic evolution is asinine.  Where the Bible is silent, good men may speculate, but to contradict it where it has spoken is to wield the sting of poison.  On the subject, thus saith the Lord:  “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Gen 2:7).

Let the writer here repeat himself from an earlier defense of the Bible where this verse was treated:

At one time, and in one instance, man was fully formed up to his nostrils before he had any life in him at all-no living cells struggling for survival, no grotesque mutating and mindless devouring as protoplasm. God completely formed him out to the dust of the ground and then breathed into him the breath of life, and by miraculous means man became a living soul; not an intermediate soul, not half a soul, but a living human soul in its entirety starting life in the image of God.³

What then of these Christian writers who fawn over purveyors of heresy?  Is it a case of much learning making them mad?  Festus leveled that charge against the Apostle Paul in an attempt to discredit him and the gospel (Acts 26:24).  Of course it was not true, but the charge itself is not without meat.

We should have discussions about what’s important, but not forget the rule and caution of discussion.  The more that we dialogue, the further away from the point we get.  This is why conclusions are necessary in writing, and, more importantly, why we who are in the faith must strive to finish well.  The Lord does not lie, though his ways are past finding out; God made man out of the dust of the ground during one day, he raised another from the dead in only three.  Let the redeemed of the Lord sing: “Great and marvellous are thy works, Lord God Almighty; just and true are thy ways, thou King of saints” (Rev 15:3).  We must contend for the faith.  Let us not write so much about something that we remove ourselves from the something we’re supposed to be about.  Nor let us knowingly endorse those in our citations who deceptively plant seeds of doubt attacking the word of God.

Notes:

^1. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, (1908): quoted in John Piper, Brothers We Are Not Professionals (B&H Publishing, 2002), 162.

^2. G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, (Dodd and Mead, 1908; New York: First Image, 1936), citation to the First Image edition. 

^3. David Dansker, “Immediate Man,” TheNewsBeats.com/TheBibleBeats.com, February 16, 2008. http://www.thenewsbeats.com/bible/?p=30

Churches across the land will be exposed to compromise again this year as pastors relinquish their pulpits to psychologists. Already, speaking schedules are being booked at near capacity for these counselors to come in and take authority over flocks, and to instruct them in the intimacies of marriage and romance. Take for example Drs. Les and Leslie Parrott, clinical psychologist and marriage and family therapists. This year their “Becoming Soulmates Seminar” is being held at churches all over the country, and in Canada, and includes twenty-nine bookings to date.[i] The Parrotts have also appeared on Good Morning America, CBS This Morning, CNN, The View with Barbara Walters, NBC Nightly News, and Oprah; and their work has been published in Family Circle, Redbook, Men’s Health, Focus on the Family, Brides, and USA Today.[ii] Insight as to their message might be gleaned from another of their series also appearing at churches entitled Love Talk, which includes the book by the same name, online assessment, DVD’s, small group workbooks, and leader’s guide.

In Love Talk, the duo claims to translate “psychobabble” into an “easy to understand language,” which can be used by them to teach couples how to “speak each other’s language.”[iii] It is fitting that these psychologists have finally come to accept the arch pejorative of their craft as a descriptive neologism: babble means confusion of tongues.

The concern that pastors should have regarding these counselors is that they continue to be received by major audiences through popular, nationwide secular programs. By this it may be presumed that they cannot be preaching the exclusive message of the gospel. Indeed, when going to the world marketplace with their merchandise, they should cast a broad net. A look at their product description for Love Talk gives an idea of how broad:

In this six-session Zondervan GroupwareSmall Group Edition DVD curriculum, acclaimed relationship experts and real-life couple Les and Leslie Parrott are back with a wonderfully insightful guide for improving the single most important factor in any marriage or love relationship— communication![iv]

The term “any marriage” sounds all inclusive and applicable to the saved, unsaved, and unequally yoked, but do they expand their claim of nourishment and efficacy to explicitly extra-biblical unions? The terms taken together, “any marriage or love relationship” (emphasis added) would seem conclusive that they do. The point is that their product of therapy is designed and marketed to people in non-Christian, extra-biblical, romantic unions. It cannot be purely comprised of Christian corrections and reproofs, or even predominantly Christian. The short is that for the world this is a therapy of the world, but for the Christian to turn towards this instruction they turn away from biblical counsel.

Sincere, but negligent pastors are in for a rude awakening when they see and hear how Biblically anemic these programs are. In the aftermath, they will be scrambling to supplement them with scripture. Then will it finally occur to them that they had the material all along, could have done a better job; and that they did not need to hire famous, smiling faces, but only seek the face of God?

Notes:

(more…)