News Snippets From All Beats

Viewpoints gleaned by pastors from celebrity globetrotting grow stranger and stranger. Addressing a crowd of concert goers at the Verizon Amphitheater in Irvine California on Saturday, Francis Chan, pastor of Cornerstone Church in Simi Valley, told the story of a talented marathon runner who began his career one night on his birthday while inebriated. After sharing many highlights of the man’s running career, Chan used the inspirational story as an incentive for Christians who might be struggling too long to find God’s will.

According to Chan, they are too worried about making mistakes, and God rewards his people based on the just-do-it scale of good intentions: it doesn’t matter if whether it was God’s will or not, the fact that you acted is what counts. Chan recounted an earlier time in his own life when he boldly proclaimed to some students that God was going to use them all to start a church in a specific area, and that in fact it didn’t turn out that way. Obviously drawing great comfort from the runner’s story for assuaging his conscious, Chan rationalized that it was acting that counted, and that false pronouncements of God’s will were thus mitigated and excused.

The marathon runner in Chan’s example for getting Christians out of the starting blocks and into service did not run the race to obtain Christ, as far as we know. The service Chan pitched was social service in terms of aid to Africa, where Chan has visited. It is a very sad day to see Christian leaders dissuade people from seeking to do God’s will, and encouraging them to run another race.

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At the Campus Crusade for Christ International global students missions conference, speakers showed an alarming use of the new communitarian catch phrases and terminology that are infiltrating Christian circles. Words like “collaboration,” “cooperation,” and “justice” were banded about by speakers with an emphasis on the secular religious quest of finding “common ground.” This is the language of circle-jerk control meetings, or small groups, where members are guided through a process of shedding diverse and conflicting beliefs to arrive at the vaulted, and hallowed, plateau of “common ground.”

The problem in adapted these phrases is that it lends acceptance to the actual processes they represent. These exercises are antithetical to the gospel message, and open Christians to being susceptible to these methods designed, not to circumvent prejudice, but to suspend rendering a righteous judgment based on existing knowledge of God’s word (or at least knowledge of a subject that is already possessed). Such a confidence in facts is too dogmatic for the process of sustained malleability requisite for continual change; the state in which one must be suspended in order to be easily diverted, absent any friction generated from being grounded to a rock of truth.

The cause for this disease is often too much interaction with the world on pretense of being relevant to the extent of becoming unequally yoked together. Cures include: reading more scripture, and concentrating on spreading more salvation message and far less “justice” message. The time is fast approaching when justice is exactly what is going to be meted out, and only the salvation in Jesus Christ will save men from having to receive it.

(read about it in The Christian Post)

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