In a 2010 article, Anton Bosch, pastor of Sun Valley Community Church, Sun Valley, CA, wrote:

Most people, whether Christians or not, have some ideas about a future life that could be called heaven. Many of those ideas are misguided or plain wrong and, sadly, even reasonably well taught Christians may have wrong ideas of what heaven is all about.

In a recent Time magazine article, the author said that many Christians are beginning to understand that heaven really is about making this earth a better place. I think he is right – that is what many people believe. But they are wrong. We cannot make this earth into heaven. Unfortunately, that is the agenda of much of the church today. They believe that the purpose of the church is to create heaven on earth and they work very hard to change the various structures of this world.

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LifeNews.com reports:

Following the death of journalist and reporter Mike Wallace, an interview he conducted with Planned Parenthood founder and eugenicist Margaret Sanger made the rounds across the Internet over the weekend.

Below are clips from the interview Margaret Sanger gave to Mike Wallace in 1957. During the interview, Sanger talks to Wallace about why she became an advocate for birth control, abortion, stopping so-called overpopulation, and talks about the Catholic Church, and morality.

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Warren B. Smith of Mountain Stream Press writes:

In today’s evangullible church, countless believers are yielding to the temptations of our Adversary and falling away (Luke 8:13). Giving in to the compromised teachings of the emerging apostate church, once faithful believers are succumbing to the deception that Jesus warned would come in His name.

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Jared Moore of SBC Voices asks whether allegory is now a pandemic problem in the SBC:

Growing up in a Southern Baptist Church, along with serving Southern Baptist Churches in ministry for over 10 years, I knew that allegorizing the Scriptures in the pulpit was a problem in the SBC. However, I did not have any hard data to confirm my assumptions…until now. In 2009, Chipley McQueen Thornton analyzed 171 sermons delivered at the meetings of the SBC from the years 1997 through 2006, in order to assess allegorical tendancies in contemporary Southern Baptist preaching. His findings are discouraging.

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Herescope carries an editorial by Rev. Dr. Orrel Steinkamp, highlighting how evangelicalism has had its attention diverted from the Gospel to ineffective political attempts to legislate morality. View article →

In an article entitled Scripture Amidst the Shadows, Pastor Larry DeBruyn writes:

Increasingly, evangelical-emergent leaders are viewing the Bible as “metaphor” – to be constituted of less than literal language from which the reader subjectively derives spiritual meanings. To fully grasp the sense of God’s Word, the reader must do so through the lens of the metaphor. This “new hermeneutic” asserts that ignoring the nuances of metaphor makes the Bible unintelligible. For example, Eugene H. Peterson (well-known composer of The Message) states in Eat This Book that “if we do not appreciate the way a metaphor works we will never comprehend the meaning of the text.”

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William J. Broad writes in the New York Times:

The wholesome image of yoga took a hit in the past few weeks as a rising star of the discipline came tumbling back to earth. After accusations of sexual impropriety with female students, John Friend, the founder of Anusara, one of the world’s fastest-growing styles, told followers that he was stepping down for an indefinite period of “self-reflection, therapy and personal retreat.”

Mr. Friend preached a gospel of gentle poses mixed with openness aimed at fostering love and happiness. But Elena Brower, a former confidante, has said that insiders knew of his “penchant for women” and his love of “partying and fun.”…

But this is hardly the first time that yoga’s enlightened facade has been cracked by sexual scandal. Why does yoga produce so many philanderers?…

One factor is ignorance. Yoga teachers and how-to books seldom mention that the discipline began as a sex cult.

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Freelance writer Warren B. Smith has updated his 1995 article about authors M. Scott Peck and Matthew Fox, which showed an example of how the New Age movement was entering the church. Smith writes:

What I didn’t know in 1995 was that a then obscure Methodist minister by the name of Leonard Sweet had already written a 1991 book entitled, Quantum Spirituality: A Postmodern Apologetic. In his book, Sweet aligned himself with the Cosmic Christ (p. 124) and described Peck and Fox as two of his “personal role models” and “heroes” (p. viii). He also went so far as to heretically hail the mystical Catholic New Age Chardin as “Twentieth-century Christianity’s major voice” (p. 106). Because Leonard Sweet himself is a major voice in the evangelical church today—speaking in worldwide Christian conferences and to the leaders of major denominations regularly—it is imperative to understand what this man really believes and not just what he conveniently says when challenged about his beliefs.

I have updated my 1995 article with some minor revisions to demonstrate the influence Peck, Fox, and Chardin have had on popular church figures like Leonard Sweet.

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