JAMES MACDONALD WAS A BIT LATE IN MAINSTREAMING T.D. JAKES LOVE WINS MYTHOLOGY FORCED ROB BELL OUT OF MARS HILL BIBLE CHURCH PULPIT CBS NEWS: RICK WARREN GOES “GANGNAM STYLE” JOHN PIPER APPROVES OF THE ALPHA COURSE?

Confronting Abusive Leaders (9:29) from Chris Lawson on Vimeo.

Further reading

• FLAGSHIP CHURCHES PREPARE TO LEAVE AS LAWSUIT CHARGES SOVEREIGN GRACE MINISTRIES OF C.J. MAHANEY WITH COVERING UP CHILD SEX ABUSE
• MARK DRISCOLL VISION-CASTING DEAD BODIES HIS MARS HILL BUS WILL ROLL OVER
• CALVARY CHAPEL’S CHUCK SMITH JOINING THE EMERGING ECUMENICAL MAGISTERIUM?

On the eve of the Elephant Room 2 back on January 24th, in More On Mainstream Evangelical T.D. Jakes I pointed out that Apprising Ministries has been covering how even the heretical Word Faith movement continues heading toward acceptance within the mainstream of evangelicalism.

The fact is that when James MacDonald and Mark Driscoll attempted to open the door for Word Faith mogul T.D. Jakes into mainstream evangelicalism via their Elephant Room 2 a whole lot more evil than they even realize is also going to come slithering into the heart of the visible church along with him.

Jakes isn’t a godly man to be admired, he is a rebel against the Word of God who regularly teaches, and consorts, with a whole host of fellow WF heretics, e.g. Elephant Room 2′s T.D. Jakes Praising Paul And Jan Crouch On TBN 7-10-12. Note, this is well after supposed repentance by Jakes from WF as implied by MacDonald.

Interestingly enough one of the guests along with Jakes in ER 2 was Jack Graham, whom I told you about in Wishful Thinking About Women Pastors From Dr. Jack Graham? Briefly, Graham  is the pastor of Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, TX; the lead vision-caster for PowerPoint Ministries and:

Dr. Graham has served two terms as president of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest American Protestant denomination, with 16 million members and as president of the SBC Pastor’s Conference. (source)

Against this backdrop I point you to the Pastors.com of Rick Warren and a 2005 piece by Ken Camp called ‘Second Reformation’ will unify church, Warren tells Dallas GDOP, which has since disappeared from Warren’s website. This is an all too common occurrence with Rick Warren, so I saved the page on file here at AM.

Camp would write:

If Christians mobilize to confront the five “global giants” of spiritual emptiness, egocentric leadership, poverty, disease, and lack of education, it could spark a second Reformation, author Rick Warren told a multi-racial gathering of 12,000 Baptists, charismatics, nondenominational evangelicals, and others at Dallas’ Reunion Arena for a Global Day of Prayer rally May 15.

“The first Reformation was about belief; this one’s going to be about behavior,” said Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church in Southern California and author of the best-selling The Purpose-Driven Life. “The first one was about creeds; this one’s going to be about our deeds. The first one divided the church; this time it will unify the church.”

Warren led the assembly in “praying against the global giants” that lead to fear, loss of direction, and lack of purpose, noting spiritual emptiness is the greatest giant. (source)

Let’s leave aside that the “greatest giant” is not “spiritual emptiness,” but rather, that unbelievers are dead in their sins. Here I want to focus your attention upon these “Baptists, charismatics, [and] nondenominational evangelicals” at this event where Warren was selling his mythology of a second reformation and its social gospel.

Camp informs us that:

Organizers of the Global Day of Prayer, launched four years ago in Africa, expected the Pentecost Sunday event to involve up to 200 million Christians in 152 countries. This year’s event began with a worship service near the international dateline in Fiji and culminated with the Dallas event, telecast to 170 cities throughout North America, said Bob Bakke, director of the National Prayer Advance.

Ten days of individual and small-group prayer preceded the rallies, and 90 days of service through Habitat for Humanity, prison ministries, and other community outreach initiatives follow the Global Day of Prayer.

Jack Graham, pastor of the predominantly Anglo Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas, and T.D. Jakes, pastor of the mostly African-American Potter’s House in southwest Dallas, served as co-chairs for the North American event. (source)

You can see above, that in violation of 2 Corinthians 6:14-18, the SBC’s Dr. Jack Graham yoked himself with reputed modalist (denies the Holy Trinity) and heretical Word Faith prosperity preacher T.D. Jakes. It appears obvious that Jakes was already considered to be a charismatic non-denominational evangelical by Graham.

Since his Pastors.com reported this, Rick Warren also apparently considered T.D. Jakes an orthodox evangelical as well. Now as we look back at what we just learned about this 2005 event, ER 2 begins to look even more like a predetermined setup designed—at least in part—to further advance Jakes within the evangelical community.

Further reading

• EMERGING ECUMENICAL EVANGELEPHANTS AND THE WORD FAITH MOVEMENT
• ELEPHANT ROOM 2′S T.D. JAKES SAYS TBN’S PAUL CROUCH LED BY GOD TO LAUNCH JAKES’ MINISTRY
• WF PASTRIX PAULA WHITE: AS PAUL IS TO TIMOTHY, SO T.D. JAKES IS TO ME

Apprising Ministries has been warning you of growing syncretism within contemporary evangelicalism. One stream of this perversion of the Christian faith is the ongoing embrace of Word Faith prosperity preachers.

Prophet-pastor Steven Furtick gave this a real jump start with his Code Orange Revival in mid January of this year. This event was chocked full of WF prosperity preachers including Furtick’s Favorite Preacher In The World.

By the way, that would be the most notorious of WF spiritual snake oil salesmen, T.D. Jakes. This noted, we’re now seeing these WF heretics—even those as blatant as Rod Parsley—being given credibility as never seen before.

Speaking of WF flakes, well known evangelicals are even openly praising the Trinity Broadcasting Network itself—that nefarious haven of heretics—e.g. David Jeremiah Praises “Vision God” Gave To TBN’s Paul Crouch.

Now, I first told you about Bil Cornelius, pastor of Bay Area Fellowship (BAF) of Corpus Christi, TX in Seeker Driven Prophet-Pastor Mentor Bil Cornelius WelcomesRev Run To Church. BAF has long been quite influential.

As a matter of fact Leadership Network reminds us that BAF, firmly in the Seeker Driven camp, “has been listed in Outreach Magazine’s 100 Fastest Growing Churches in America.”1 Cornelius is no lightweight in that crowd.

Earlier today, actually a couple of times, Cornelius would tweet:

(source)

Notice that one of Cornelius’ guests is John Bevere of Messenger International who later tweeted:

(source)

Since Bevere set that one right on a tee for me, I decided to share with him some cold, hard, truth:

(source)

You need to realize that this kind of “unity” between the Seeker Driven camp and the Word Faith camp is not of God. It’s all part of delusions which, if one persists along their selfish course, will really not end well for them.

Their destination is into the coming Global Family of the Antichrist:

The coming of the lawless one is by the activity of Satan with all power and false signs and wonders, and with all wicked deception for those who are perishing, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved.

Therefore God sends them a strong delusion, so that they may believe what is false, in order that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness. 
(2 Thessalonians 2:9-12)

Further reading

• STEVEN FURTICK AS TELEVANGELIST AT LAKEWOOD CHURCH OF JOEL OSTEEN
• JOEL OSTEEN MOVING ONE STEP CLOSER TO MAINSTREAM EVANGELICALISM
• PRISCILLA SHIRER EXCITED HER BROTHER PERFORMED AT JOEL OSTEEN’S HERETICAL WORD FAITH CHURCH

Endnotes

1. tiny.cc/n17oq, accessed 11/28/12. ↩

Apprising Ministries last talked about Rob Bell, former rock star icon of the Emerging Church, in pieces such as Rob Bell Affirms Gay “Christians” & Brian McLaren Is Really Happy and Influence Of Richard Rohr On Rob Bell And His Love Wins Mythology.

You’ve seen that since departing Mars Hill Bible Church Bell has been coming out of the closet as the full blown pro-homosexual progressive neo-liberal I told you he was. A source close to Bell himself tells me that he was likely even getting set to perform same-sex marriages at MHBC.

Well now it seems there’s some further vindication for me concerning what I’ve told you all along about this apostate. In ‘Love Wins’ raised hell for Rob Bell at Mars Hill, The New Yorker says G-Rap’s Matt Vande Bunte tells us:

Fallout from Rob Bell’s bestselling “Love Wins” book pushed him to leave the West Michigan megachurch he founded, according to The New Yorker. And the television show Bell went to work on in California has stalled, Kelefa Sanneh writes in the magazine’s Nov. 26 issue.

In a profile of Bell called “The Hell-Raiser,” Sanneh chronicles the former Mars Hill Bible Church pastor’s personal “search for a more forgiving faith,” and concludes that he might fit better on the beaches of southern California than in a West Michigan pulpit.

The article states that Bell’s controversial book about the existence of hell “put pressure on the people around Bell, who found themselves having to defend statements they might never have heard, let alone approved.” It quotes Bell’s wife, Kristen, saying that she stayed away from Mars Hill some weeks after the book was published because she was exhausted by stories about former members criticizing her husband’s writing.

“There was a cost,” Kristen Bell said. “And part of the cost was, we couldn’t keep doing what we were doing at Mars Hill.”

Sanneh reports that Bell and “Lost” producer Carlton Cuse failed to get approval for a pilot of “Stronger,” a spiritual drama to which ABC bought the rights. Instead, Bell and Cuse are teaming on “a faith-inflected talk show,” and Bell’s doing a lot of surfing.

You can find an abstract of the article here. A subscription to The New Yorker is needed to access the full article. (source)

It seems Rob Bell may have miscalculated just how far he’d led his flock into his emerging apostasy. Vande Bunte’s goes on to share a few “snippets” from The New Yorker piece; such as:

From his come-to-Jesus moment at age 10 to his writing of “Love Wins,” Bell is portrayed as evolving from a theological conservative to an ambiguous evangelical pastor who let worshippers “think that he was however evangelical they wanted him to be,” to a heretic worthy of scorn from orthodox churchmen.

In the historical context of a broader Christian dialogue about hell, Sanneh describes the development of Bell’s theology as emphasizing one side of an evangelical equation that conceives God “as both an intimate companion and a wrathful judge.”“Forced to choose between his personal Jesus and his perfect Bible, he chose Jesus, and set out to reexamine the store he thought he knew,” Sanneh writes

Sanneh quotes one of Bell’s mentors, Calvary Church pastor emeritus Ed Dobson, in a way that evokes the Jedi-Padawan relationship between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker and foreshadows Bell’s alleged fall from evangelical grace:“Not all of the elders felt like I did – some of them were concerned that he was inexperienced,” Dobson recalled about the start of Bell’s ministry in Grand Rapids.

“But I told them, ‘Look, he can communicate. He really doesn’t know the Bible, but, if we can add the Bible to his communication skills, we’ll have a winner.’” (source)

You can read Vande Bunte’s article in its entirety here.

Further reading

• ROB BELL AND POSTMODERN NEO-LIBERALISM
• ROB BELL COMES OUT GAY AFFIRMING
• STRAIGHTENING OUT MICKEY MAUDLIN’S LESSONS FROM PUBLISHING ROB BELL’S “LOVE WINS”

By Apprising Ministries special correspondent Bob DeWaay

“And they were continually devoting themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.” (Acts 2:42)

A soldier in Iraq emailed CIC a few weeks ago. His message exposes an alarming trend in evangelicalism: to replace the Bible with man-made programs. Here is a portion of the email:

I am currently serving in Iraq. I am in the Army National Guard. “A lot” of PDL [Purpose Driven Life] study groups have sprouted up at various camps around Iraq. The people in my unit have done the PDL study 3 times now! They started for 3 months, then again started again for 3 months, and AGAIN started the “same” study. (continuous back-to-back-to-back) At no time have I EVER seen one of them carry a bible into the study. I finally decided to join them on their 3rd study (I was given the book before we deployed on Dec. 1, 2003 and I have never looked at it until mid-August 2004)…I didn’t know anything about the book and I was the only one who brought their bible and used other bible passages that pertained to the chapter that day. It just seems like this “study” is sweeping quickly and people are replacing the ever-living Word of God for a man-made book. A good friend and I have been talking a lot about the principles and teachings of Rick Warren and his ‘light’ approach to the gospel. It seems no one is preaching the Word of God.

Critical Issues Commentary has received dozens of similar emails from around the world. These emails express alarm that “Bible studies” no longer study the Bible and that sermons are no longer based on sound exegesis of Biblical texts. Literally, the Word of God is too often being pushed aside in Christian circles.

This article focuses on the Biblical means God has provided for all Christians to grow in the grace and knowledge of the Lord. These means may not be flashy, popular, or trendy, but they will always be effectual when practiced in faith. The following are NOT God’s means of changing lives: mystical practices, self-help groups, Purpose Driven Life study groups, contemplative prayer, twelve step groups, or going to meetings where people are “slain under the power.” These and other popular programs are sad, unbiblical substitutes that eventually lead to spiritual impoverishment.

Means of Grace in Church History

Many evangelicals are not familiar with the expression “means of grace,” terminology that is common in Lutheran and Reformed theology. The reason many are not familiar with the idea of “means of grace” is that they have alternatives in their traditions like “spiritual disciplines” often billed as “secrets to a deeper spiritual life.” Unbiblical practices such as “contemplative prayer” have found their way into many churches under the ill defined banner of “spiritual disciplines.” Alternatively, since they are defined in Scripture, means of grace do not multiply as innovative spiritual practices are invented. We need to understand means of grace and see that they are God’s plan to provide for our growth in conformity to the image of Christ.

The Roman Catholic view of “means of grace” is the concept of sacraments that work “ex opera operato” (by the work done).¹ The idea is to do the work according to the prescriptions of the church as administered by the priesthood, and thereby receive grace. The Lutheran and Reformed understanding of “means of grace” developed from the rejection of this idea. The reformers emphasized the Word and sacrament (in that order), and the necessity of faith. They limited the sacraments to baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Louis Berkhof explains: “With the Reformation the emphasis was shifted from the sacraments to the Word of God. Luther gave great prominence to the Word of God as the primary means of grace. He pointed out that the sacraments have no significance apart from the Word and are in fact merely the visible Word.”² Some Reformed theologians like Charles Hodge added prayer as a means of grace.³ Hodge makes an important statement about means of grace: “All means derive their efficacy from the ordinance of God; as He has ordained the Gospel to be the means of salvation, it must be efficacious to that end.”⁴

John Wesley warned about people who despised means of grace because in church history so many had followed the outward signs only without a heart renewed by the Holy Spirit.⁵ Wesley defines means of grace: “By ‘means of grace’ I understand outward signs, words, or actions, ordained of God, and appointed for this end, to be the ordinary channels whereby he might convey to men, preventing, justifying, or sanctifying grace.”⁶ Wesley held to the following as “means of grace”: “The chief of these means are prayer, whether in secret or with the great congregation; searching the Scriptures; (which implies reading, hearing, and meditating thereon;) and receiving the Lord’s supper, eating bread and drinking wine in remembrance of Him: And these we believe to be ordained of God, as the ordinary channels of conveying his grace to the souls of men.”⁷

For those who think “means of grace” are only the domain of Lutheran and Reformed theology, I suggest reading Wesley’s sermon.⁸ His understanding of sinners groaning under the weight of sin and alarmed by the wrath of God shows a far greater understanding of the gospel than is common today. He suggests to such ones that though God may providentially work in various ways, they should avail themselves of the means of grace: “And in the mean time, the sure and general rule for all who groan for the salvation of God is this, — whenever opportunity serves, use all the means which God has ordained; for who knows in which God will meet thee with the grace that bringeth salvation?”⁹ Wesley certainly did not hold to the “say this little prayer after me” version of salvation.

Though there are differences about what is included in means of grace (Lutherans do not include prayer, some Reformed teachers do not, Wesley included prayer but not baptism), there is agreement that there are ordained means through which God has chosen to work graciously. None of the historical positions claims that God cannot work graciously in other ways, but assert that these are the ordained means through which God confers grace to His people. All of the Protestant versions of means of grace deny that grace is inherently in the substance of the means or that it is conferred ex opera operato as Roman Catholicism teaches.

God’s Ordained Means
The Gospel

In his sermon, Wesley cited Acts 2:42 regarding “means of grace.” This passage explains the practice of the church that God formed on the Day of Pentecost. The context shows an important pattern of gospel preaching, repentance, baptism, and the practices of the Christian life. Let us consider the practice of the very first church and how they availed themselves of God’s ordained means.

First, Peter preached the gospel. Peter’s preaching was not at all like the watered down versions of the gospel common in many churches today. After preaching about the person and work of Christ and His resurrection, Peter indicted his audience concerning their sin: “Therefore let all the house of Israel know for certain that God has made Him both Lord and Christ– this Jesus whom you crucified” (Acts 2:36). The Holy Spirit was at work to “convict the world of sin, righteousness and judgment” as Jesus promised He would (John 16:8). This is the result: “Now when they heard this, they were pierced to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, ‘Brethren, what shall we do?’ And Peter said to them, ‘Repent, and let each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit’” (Acts 2:37, 38). God’s ordained means for saving the lost is the preaching of the gospel that includes the essential elements of the person and work of Christ, His resurrection from the dead, the wrath of God against sin, and the need for repentance and faith. Peter told them that this gospel promise was for, “as many as the Lord our God shall call to Himself” (Acts 2:39).

Not knowing whom the Lord will call to Himself, we are to faithfully preach the gospel to all people in all nations. God has ordained that He will save people through the gospel. Those who change the message to make it less offensive show that they have more confidence in man than in the power of God. The very first thing to be understood about God’s ordained means is that the gospel must be faithfully preached and no sorry substitute for it allowed into our practice. Paul said, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek” (Romans 1:16).

Peter then told them something that should not be overlooked: “And with many other words he solemnly testified and kept on exhorting them, saying, ‘Be saved from this perverse generation!’” (Acts 2:40). The phrase “this perverse generation”is a reference to rebellious Jewish leadership and their followers who had rejected Messiah. These early believers were Jewish and had very strong ties to the leadership in Jerusalem. These were faithful Jews present in Jerusalem from far off areas. They had undertaken the required pilgrimage to the Feast of Pentecost. The idea that “this generation”¹⁰ was facing God’s wrath was explained in Luke 11:49-51. For those early Jewish Christians to do what Peter exhorted them to do, would mean severing family, social and cultural ties in a most painful way. They were setting themselves up for persecution and rejection.

This fact that becoming a Christian means leaving behind one’s old life and entering a new gospel fellowship is rarely explained nowadays. But in Peter’s day they understood the cost and willingly embraced it. They were not just joining a church, they were leaving behind their most cherished relationships. Peter had heard Jesus teach this: “Jesus said, ‘Truly I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or farms, for My sake and for the gospel’s sake, but that he shall receive a hundred times as much now in the present age, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and farms, along with persecutions; and in the age to come, eternal life.’” (Mark 10:29, 30). These early Jewish converts were entering a new gospel family, by God’s grace.

Baptism

Read the rest