The News Beats

Christians today are largely unaware of the communists tactics for taking over individuals and controlling populations.  They should make themselves aware because these are now being used successfully in churches to take them over, change their mission, and steal their wealth.  For a complete expose on the communist process of brainwashing the reader is encouraged to read the seminal work on the subject by the author who first printed the term “brainwashing” in the English language.   In Edward Hunter’s Brainwashing: The story of men defied it, Hunter not only reveals the process, but what has proven to be the best and most effective strategies for surviving and defeating it.  Although the threat of communism is thought to be a relic of the past that has been largely discredited, and today nonexistent, it has never been more important to understand its powerful tools and its success in enslaving  men in a false religion.

The “communist theologians”¹ are at work today in American churches and have taken most of them over without firing a single shot. The mechanism used are small groups that can collectively be referred to as Life Groups.  Understanding how church Life Groups are being used to extinguish Christianity can be demonstrated by examining one aspect of Communist proselytizing.  This one is the process for producing confessed sinners who can receive absolution from their crimes by “reform” and “rebirth” into the Communist religion.²  It is a strategy for producing offenders though a process of forced self-criticism, and confessions of the supposed crimes that surface in them, in small group settings which are all facilitated, or led, to achieve the desired result.  With the exception of changes made herein of enumerating the clauses, some bolding, and elaboration in brackets; the following is a paragraph from Hunter:

The communists have made confession the medium for their principal propaganda drive among their own subject peoples.
1. They first determine the conclusion they wish to put across,
2. then they select the details which add up to this fake hypothesis.
3. Their problem then boils down to finding people with experience approximating these details as closely as possible.
4. By befogging the minds [by facilitators leading group members in individual response-confessions through mundane, vague, and trivial agenda points to fatigue mental acuity], they endeavor to convince them that they fill the bill!³

Number three is the reason why Life Groups are segregated by age and often by sex when enough congregants are available.  All these will have similar experiences, or conditions, and have approximating details, or circumstances, to draw from.  These can be capitalized on to more easily lead small groups to predetermined positions of agreement for obtaining desired, although undisclosed, results.  The results are the desired responses the leadership wants from the congregants on varying items that present in the life of maintaining the organization and the leadership, but these are secondary to the actual purpose of the Life Group programs.  The main purpose of the process is the process; it keeps the whole groups in submission and under control of the leadership. This is why a key component of Life Groups is individual confessions of failures and short comings; to confess means to submit. The tactic for instigating confessions takes on the form of a debriefing analysis under the guise of searching for a better way a member could have performed a task, or responded to an incident in their personal life.  Certainly, members must self-criticize themselves before they can suggest an improvement.

Usually, the targeted results revealed to the Life Group members are the completion of community service and beautification projects.  These are supposed to comprise some physical evangelistic witness of the church’s compassion for the community.  While the leadership does, indeed, hope to draw more members to feed off by these public relations exercises, the service projects are themselves part of the communist strategy of enforcing the concept of submission.  People are prodded into to ‘doing life together’ in such groups to achieve the eradication of the individual mind, development of the symbiotic thought process of conformity; and to deprive the individuals of as much of their leisure time as possible to preclude an individual mind from reemerging.

To ensure that the collective remains intact, Life Group facilitators at Real Life Church in Valencia California are instructed to focus on “application and accountability”  which fosters a tedious and time consuming process.⁴  Facilitators are to “fearlessly challenge the people” in their groups “to come up with specific ways they can act on what the group is focusing on,” and even to encourage them to “break into accountability partners for a few weeks at a time” to ensure they adhere to their tasks.⁵  Nothing is left to chance or the Spirit, or goes unmonitored.  Accountability partners are even assigned for prayer time during the week, and group members must use Bible verses to design and commit to action items  with the clear inference that their progress will be reported on to the leadership by the accountability partners.⁶ Ideally, a Life Group member will be too mentally and physically fatigued by the process to reflect and evaluate with outside information, such as the Bible, to ever get a thought or desire of breaking free from the organization. The leadership remains the leadership, with power, prestige, and salaries.

The name the Chinese Communists have for their service learning groups is the Daily Life Committee.⁷  Because the Communist government controls civil law, they can mandate daily attendance for maximum control.  All implementations of these control groups outside communists countries usually begins with weekly or even bi-monthly schedules before being ratcheted for more frequent attendance.  The Los Angeles Unified School District began their professional development meetings several years ago with approximately one meeting per month, and many sites utilized the control group model of facilitated small-group consensus. Today, those meetings are held weekly, and are mandatory.  Life Groups typically start out meeting once a week.  Part of the reason for the surge in megachurches developing satellite campuses is for the facilitation of more frequent Life Group meetings by making them logistically feasible.

The church Life Groups follow the basic pattern of the Chinese Daily Life Committees which have sign-ups for committees on recreation, sanitation, food, and study.⁸  The pretense of the concept of servant-leader, which leads Life Group members to imagine some autonomy, is maintained by giving Life Groups a predetermined list of likely community service projects as examples; with the encouragement of identifying their own community project.  In reality, this relives the leadership of duties by assigning more of the volunteer work onto the Life Groups.

Actual boundary conditions for Life Groups are tightly controlled and regulated.  For instance, in most of these Life Group programs conduct is strictly prescribed and includes pre-scripted answers to possible questions group members may encounter while performing their work, and almost always they are prohibited from any actual evangelizing.⁹  Christian evangelizing is not to be the goal of these groups because it is no longer the goal of the churches they belong to.  True evangelizing would require group members to learn more scripture and thus more doctrine, and those who were as yet unconverted would either convert, or depart, and the converted would grow stronger in the faith.  All of these results would be detrimental to the leadership.

If your church has instituted Life Groups and is encouraging you to join, they may only be innocent efforts to encourage fellowship and support. This case, however, would be one of the very few exceptions, and probably would soon succumb to the Communist paradigm.  One reason for this is that the curriculum which direct these groups is often turned to for resources, and these implement a program of brainwashing and control.  When the table is set for Satan, he usually shows up. We are warned that in the last days perilous times would come; times that would sap the strength from many.  The implementation of Life Groups is the utilization of a process to create a new organism having a form of godliness, but denying, that is disavowing by contradiction, the actual power thereof (2Tim 3:1-5).  We are also told this would be a device of traitors to the faith, and that from such we are to turn away.  What Christians need to understand is that Communism is not a philosophy or theory of government so much as it is diabolical process by which the Devil sets up his anti-church body. It has assisted him in ushering in the Apostasy.

Notes:

^1. Edward Hunter, Brainwashing: The story of men who defied it, (New York: Pyramid Books, 1958; San Francisco: American Libraries, 2006), 240. http://www.archive.org/details/brainwashingstor00huntrich/ (accessed August 8, 2009). Citations are to the American Libraries (online) edition.

^2. Ibid, 237.

^3. Ibid, 242 (bolding, enumerating, bracketed added).

^4. Real Life Church, “Session Guidelines For Facilitators And Co-Facilitators,”

http://www.reallifechurch.org/FAITHNETWORK_UserFileStore/fileCabinet/ministries/d34af287-7b8a-41d8-b4bf-84b420d6eaa7/SessionGuidelinesforFacilitatorsandCoF.pdf (accessed August 9, 2009).

^5. Real Life Church, “Session Guidelines for Facilitators and Co-Facilitators”

^6. Real Life Church, “What a Typical Life Group Looks Like,” http://www.reallifechurch.org/FAITHNETWORK_UserFileStore/fileCabinet/ministries/d34af287-7b8a-41d8-b4bf-84b420d6eaa7/WhataTypicalLGLooksLike.pdf (accessed August 9, 2009).

^7. Edward Hunter, Brainwashing, 179.

^8. Ibid, 179.

Every year more and more packages of small group curricula are marketed to churches under the pretense of helping pastors to do their job better. A popular theme this year is apologetics, and there are several products to choose from. Lee Strobel is broadcasting his “Investigation Faith” seminars, and his small group curriculum will be released this Fall. Strobel also endorses Garry Poole’s Seeker Small Groups (which is also endorsed by Nicky Gumbel, of The Alpha Course). Outreach Training’s Mark Mittelberg, who coauthored Becoming a Contagious Christian with Willow Creek’s Bill Hybels, encourages pastors to purchase their resources in order to get “key sharp lay leaders” to perform apologetics ministries, among other things.¹

It seems that nothing has been left to chance, or the Holy Spirit, at Outreach Training; they have even chiseled four “laws” of outreach ministry, with several codices for each. The first law, according to Outreach, requires churches to create an “identity” by using the marketing technique of “branding.”² Once the church designs a marketable image, they move on to work the sections in law number two which cover how to attract visitors. The first section in this law is titled “Doing Marketing God’s Way,” and it includes a particularly horrible take on the Pentecost, and advises that:

Churches and ministries should examine the communication channels (or media) available to them and strategize effective ways to use them for the Kingdom in their own communities.³

There seems, always, to be interspersed in these money making programs some talk about building something for the Kingdom, to lure the unlearned into thinking they are being extended an opportunity to construct an edifice to commemorate their meritorious sacrifices; if only to have it displayed as a small brick in the wall of the celestial city to come. All of this to be gained, claim the authors, by looking to the world’s method of marketing to know what to do. After all, this is the section on marketing, but it raises the critical point.

Are pastors allowing this shameless merchandising of the saints under their care because they really do need help doing their job; because they don’t know how to do it? What else to conclude but that too many young seminary graduates are actually psychology majors stopping over for the time being while they get up nerve to hang out their own shingles in practices elsewhere. Ambitious young men who are after more respectable and higher paying counseling jobs so that they can live in the houses they want to live in, and drive the cars they want to drive. Unless, of course, they could get the marketing right in one of these churches and build attendance into an income tsunami they could ride to prosperity on.

The authors of these programs counter that apologetics is some specialty ministry requiring their expertise and (well paid) assistance. They clamor that orchestrated attacks are mounting from the atheists, and time must be spent by pastors studying their arguments and crafting rebuttals. Yet, all atheism boils down to only one argument, and it is the easiest to rebut using only a book that pastors should already have in their possession.

The only thing that would establish atheism as the truth of the universe is the fact of Darwinian Evolution; and it is a theory that is almost effortlessly demolished, proved to be a universal lie, using only the first two chapters of Genesis. Are there not so many such men as are called pastors, who have faith in God and His word, who could teach from the first book in the Bible? Is it true that the best course for men in saving souls is that they should vex themselves by steeping their minds in the convoluted reasoning of reprobates and unregenerate men?

This is a digression of the worst sort. No such valuable time should be liberally applied to these pursuits, and especially not by pastors who admit, by their temptation to purchase these sordid professional development programs, that they lack familiarity with the Bible itself. Here is acquaintance on the subject of persuading those who would seek God, and what needs actually exists for supplementing the gospel. Open the book and read, even from the beginning. For our Lord spoke on this subject: “And he said unto him, If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead” (Luk 16:31).⁴

Notes:

^1. Katherine T. Phan, “Apologists Ask Churches to Step Up Response to Militant Atheism,” Christian Post, February 13, 2008. http://www.christianpost.com/article/20080213/31176

_Apologists_Ask_Churches_to_Step_Up_Response_to_Militant_Atheism.htm

^2. Resources, Outreach Training, http://www.outreachtraining.com/resources.html. (accessed February 20, 2008).

^3. “Doing Marketing God’s Way,” From Outreach, Inc. Products Division. http://www.outreachtraining.com

/documents/DoingMarketingGodsWay.pdf. (accessed February 20, 2008).

^4. This from our Lord’s account of two certain and particular men who died and received their separate and eternal reward, and here He quoth Abraham.