16 Rejoice always; 17 pray without ceasing; 18 in everything give thanks, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus. 19 Do not quench the Spirit; 20 do not despise prophecies, 21 but examine all things; hold fast to that which is good; 22 abstain from every form of evil. 1 Thessalonians 5:16-22 (LSB)
As many of you know, I had to leave our old church in Olathe, Kansas back in 2004 because I opposed the leadership’s efforts to take our church down the Purpose Driven path. Why did I oppose it? I had already experienced it in a former church in Oklahoma and knew what it entailed….
I knew that what was coming was not a spiritual deepening of our Church, but rather a restructuring of everything to be a church for the “unchurched.” Yes, that’s right, we would no longer be focused on the Bible as our source of truth and direction, but would instead be focused on not being offensive to the unchurched so they would feel comfortable coming to our church. The preaching of the Gospel was not on the menu. Forget about Hell, and judgment and calls for repentance. No, anything that might offend the unbeliever would not be allowed. I was preparing to for a week long business trip to Seattle and my pastor gave me a book to read while I was gone. I looked at it. It was Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Church. It was then that I realized that my premonitions about what he and the other leaders were up to was right on target. I took the book and smiled, but I did not promise to read it. One other nugget for what was going on between me an the leadership at that church. I had been in the midst of a 2 year personal revival. God had drawn me into a much closer walk of repentance, prayer, and Bible Study during that time. I had tried several times to share what God had been showing me about where he wants all of us walk before Him walking in repentance, seeking to be the disciples of our Lord Jesus that He wants us to be and that is found no where in the Purpose Driven model. I shared my revival in a deacon’s meeting one Saturday morning and the snickering and scoffing from those behind the Purpose Driven push was palpable. One of them even told me that I was just excited about it, but it would wear off.
However, this is what happened instead. I began doing a massive amount of research behind both the PDC corruption and the Church Growth movement in general. One of my online searches lead me to a blog called Slice of Laodicia. One of the admins was Ken Silva. I began participating in discussions there about the PDC corruption as well as pushes to bring in John Ortberg’s Monvee “church program.” Ken liked my responses to those who supported these things and my usage of scripture to back up what I said. He contacted me offline and asked me if I would consider being a writer who would contribute to his new blog, Christian Research Network. I prayed about it and agreed to do it. Also, I had started my own blog Possessing the Treasure so Ken suggested I post there then simply post to CRN and link back to my post on my blog. I am still doing that. Ken and I became very good friends. I was broken-hearted when he died in 2014. We talked a great deal about Rick Warren as well as Monvee. Here is what he said about it. “This stuff is chocked full of Pelagianism and mysticism. What’s going on is for years now these people read and quote from their own books. Add in the deception of a false unity received in the practice of CSM and what we see is people trying to please people. They think they’ve come up with a Christianity that the world will want to embrace. People like us who insist upon Scripture are embarrassing to them. Bottom line: They think one can intellectually choose to be a Christian if we make it sound good enough to the unchurched.” I sure miss Ken. We would have group discussions that seemed to be all over the place then he would nail it with a comment like this.
CSM is an acronym for “Contemplative Spiritual Meditation.” It is a perverse melding of Christian prayer with Eastern mysticism. Bottom line, these people are deceived. They have been taken in by deceptive spirits because they have not “tested” every spirit, but have, instead, eagerly sought spiritual influences from outside the Church. The Word of God expressly warns believers against this sort of thing. In this post I would like to unpack 1 John 4:1-6 which does indeed address this. <Continue reading post>