What's being missed about the Osteens

Unless you've been hiding under a rock lately you know about the Osteens latest crack up. Now it's time for what all three of you have been waiting for--my thoughts. I've read a lot of responses to their idiocy so far, from Cosby, to Horton. My person favorite was Lutheran Satire, and I would commend to you to go now and read what Matt Walsh (said here) and Al Mohler had to say. But of them only Walsh seems to almost grasp what is really going on here when he says,

"...From real, redemptive, hopeful, and triumphant, to shallow, corny, and incomplete. From a promise of eternal salvation, to promises of a bigger house and a nice car, until we die and all of these things turn to ash, leaving us alone with our neglected souls."

And as good as those are, the one who really nailed this was C.S. Lewis. I'll give you the three relevant quotes from Screwtape letters that I had in mind.

"We want a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbows end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the alter of the future every real gift which offered them in the present... An ever increasing craving for an ever diminishing pleasure is the formula. . . . To get a man’s soul and give him nothing in return–that’s what really gladdens Our Father’s heart."

Bingo. That's the real problem here. What Osteen said about giving glory to yourself makes everyone run around like a rock hitting a hornets nest, but the problem lies in what the prosperity gospel is, which too few people are pointing out. I don't mean to say that all the others have not correctly identified the fact that this prosperity gospel isn't glorious, or Christ dishonoring, or evil, because they have. What I do mean to say is that nobody is pointing out how this is a program straight out of the deepest pit of hell that might have been penned by Wormwood himself.

See, the insidious killer is that the Osteen message first teaches you to be dissatisfied with your current blessings. Forget counting them one by one, now's the time to demand more! It encourages you to sell your current happiness with everything to buy the mere potential of being happy with more stuff later. You liquidate everything you already have, including your current joy, to maybe one day sorta if you're lucky get more of that material stuff which might make you happy. Go up and read that Lewis quote again. That's exactly it. And the tempter keeps them from asking themselves, "If I'm unhappy with all my current possessions, why should I be any happier with more of them? Does my life really consist in the abundance of my possessions?"
The Osteens would have you burning all of the present upon the fire of the uncertain future. We give up our cake on the promise of eating a mouthful of ash. And when the time comes to eat our ashes we can't even get that.  

The fall of the churches of Christ

I've got it now, I feel it in my bones. I understand where the churches of christ went wrong.
But first, a story told in parts. 

2 Chronicles 18:1 "Jehoshaphat had riches and honor in abundance; and by marriage he allied himself with Ahab."

2 Chron 21:1, 5-6, 19 "Now Jehoshaphat slept with his fathers, and was buried with his fathers in the city of David. And Jehoram his son reigned in his stead... Jehoram was thirty and two years old when he began to reign, and he reigned eight years in Jerusalem.And he walked in the way of the kings of Israel, just as the house of Ahab had done, for he had the daughter of Ahab [Athaliah] as a wife; and he did evil in the sight of the LORD... And it came to pass, that in process of time, after the end of two years, his bowels fell out by reason of his sickness: so he died of sore diseases."

2 Chron 22:1 - "And the inhabitants of Jerusalem made Ahaziah his youngest son king in his stead.

2 Kings 8:26 - Two and twenty years old was Ahaziah when he began to reign; and he reigned one year in Jerusalem. And his mother's name was Athaliah, the daughter of Omri king of Israel.

2 Kings 11:1 - And when Athaliah the mother of Ahaziah saw that her son was dead, she arose and destroyed all the royal seed.

So let's recap shall we? There was a King named Jehoshaphat who was clearly good, but very softheaded, for he gave his son in marriage to Athaliah, daughter of Ahab and Jezebel. (I mean, honestly, it's not like he couldn't figure out that Jezebel and Ahab of all people were evil.) That son Jehoram was not good, and he strayed from the Lord. After his death his wife Athaliah killed the rest of the sons of David.

That's the story of the Churches of Christ.
If you go in to those churches today you will still see the Jehoshaphats, the 70 and 80 year olds who are loving, committed, faithful, and almost gone. They're fairly hardline usually, they'll tell you that if you don't go to their church you'll go to hell, but they do care deeply for people, even if their doctrines are off-kilter. These saints are beloved, and when they die they are mourned.
You'll also see the 50 and 60 year old Jehorams. They are more numerous, often cruel, legalistic, and show little of the good humor of their parents. Their doctrines are skewed like their parents, but they don't seem to have the humility to accept it.
You will not see the grandchildren. They are dead now.

The church of Christ has always been wed to the spirit of the age, going all the way back to Campbell and Stone. That wasn't much of a problem when America was full of pioneers and independent families and generally everyone was Christian, but it did become a problem when the culture really moved, some time around the 1970s. That time when the culture moved and the church moved with her it would be fatal. Sadly, the Jehoshaphats, since they had grown up with the idea of being married to the culture didn't think anything of consigning their children to it either. They didn't see the fundamental change this one represented, so they gave their sons in marriage to Athaliah, spirit of the age. They put away their hymns and began singing Gather songs. Out went talking about the attributes of God, in went how God makes me feel and what I promise to do. They had knowledge of the old ways and doctrines, but they failed to pass it down to their own children, whose loyalties switched from their parents to their wives. Christianity isn't like brown eyes where you automatically get it from your parents. If it's not properly translated that's the end.

And that's where it went. That's how it happened. Jehoram grew up cruel and legalistic, in a time of selfishness taking the form of his wife. She, the spirit of the age put an end to his progeny. There would be no more children, those my age. That missing and barren generation is gone and the churches of Christ have reached the end, failing to pass on the gospel to their youth.

Because they wanted to be relevant and cool and in touch with their feelings. The lesson here is timeless.

Goodbye to FBC

Hey Executive Pastor,

I have a question for you. There were two men: an old man, and a young man, both Christians, both loved their families, although sadly the old man had two adult sons who grew up to be non-believers. The first son took an interest in spiritual things on occasion but largely just lived out what he thought was the good life, while the second was as hardened as one of those “new atheists”, and often spoke out often against the evils of orthodox Christianity. The young man had one son, still a boy, who was soon to hit the teenage years.

One day, out of concern that his son would grow up to be a godly man who loved the lord, he went to the older Christian whom he looked up to and began plying him with questions. Out of his own experience the older man told the younger what he had done to raise his two boys. Eventually they made this a regular part of their routines, and the younger man began putting the advice into practice.  He began to tell his son how the Bible was full of old useless beliefs that tended to make people into rigid fundamentalists if followed, and how real happiness lay in having a close knit family and community, and living missionally. Soon the boy started to imbibe the instruction of his father and started to show signs that he would turn out like the older man’s unfaithful children. He quit caring about reading the Bible in his private time, got into more fights, made unwise decisions, ditched Sunday school and threatened to quit church altogether.

What advice, if any, would you now give to the younger man at this point?

Because you are the younger man. Willow Creek is old enough that their legacy has become evident to all by this point. And it’s a bad one. No scratch that, it’s a disaster. The older son is Rick Warren^[1] who has been working with Catholics come home while the younger is the Emergent Church^[2] which has turned its back on Christ altogether. We’ve seen the fruits of Willow Creek and its bad. But this isn’t really surprising, I mean just consider the church growth plan of Willow Creek itself. First all the bloody words, the ones that hung too close to the cross are eliminated. Words like justification, penal substitution, and atonement. Then the rest are modified to mean something else, words like community and grace. Then, over time, with those fundamental doctrines and their old meanings gone the preaching of the gospel itself gets forgotten in favor of practical matters such as parenting and social justice. To a Willow Creek church Christianity is about how to turn bad relationships into great ones; but Paul reminds us, “The gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you… [is] that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.”

And most importantly of all: none of the churches which have adopted the Willow Creek model have survived beyond the first generation. Part of that is because Jesus promised to take away lamp-stands from unfaithful churches, and part of it is because the willow creek plan is a futile chasing after the wind. In order to become relevant and appeal to people they gave up faithful exegetical preaching and threw out the doctrines that caused offense. But as the culture has waned and become more decadent they responded by jettisoning everything which offends with increasing speed to match pace. They are so desperate not to offend the culture that they have become the culture, and in this they are no different than the PCUSA, the United Methodists, the Crystal Cathedral, or the hour of Power. They are little more than a business enterprise, and the churches like them that have not fallen with a crash yet are merely sitting on the sand waiting for the storm.

And right now this is the plan for FBC. You hired the David Harris for the summer, a man who is much more of an Emergent new age guru than he is a historic Baptist. You’ve given up the ESV we used to use in favor of the abridged TNIV Bible, “The Story” because it’s more accessible and administratively streamlined. The Bible classes are being changed to a uniformity of small group instruction. The result of these decisions has been that serious believers have quietly left and the attitude of “Who cares? They’re not our target market” hangs in the air. What’s going to happen is that eventually, over time, your programs will grow stale, the new people will stop coming in, the youth will leave, and that will be it. Scott will not help this^[3] since he’s in full agreement with your goals and methods, and that’s why you’ve been excited to get him on board. Oh sure, he might possibly extend the reach of the model down a generation, but eventually the problem will catch up to him too. Ultimately he can’t succeed because the whole thing is too deeply flawed.

Does that offend you? I’m sorry to. I know I’m coming off as one of those crusty obnoxious old school Baptists who stroke their long white beard and shake their canes in grumpy admonitions at “change” and “kids these days.” I’ll admit to that. But that doesn’t mean I don’t deeply care for the people at FBC whom I love very much. I expect at this point to be dismissed completely as blind, hidebound, or stiff-necked, but please heed my words, for I came from the Churches of Christ.

Did I ever tell you about my people? My old denomination? I love them still, much more than they love themselves, but they are in the middle of a very deep hole and won’t listen to those of us who tell them to stop digging. They meet faithfully every week to dialogue passionately about cultural events, hold classes about popular worldviews, and sing out of date songs about feelings. They gnash their teeth that our culture is devolving and their churches are shrinking but are powerless to stop it or even know why it’s doing that. They want to be trendy and relevant, so they preach about topics found in the Bible, just not from it, and don’t grasp why that doesn’t work. They were once good, like King Jehoshaphat, but they gave their son in marriage to Athaliah of the family of Ahab their grandchildren were slaughtered at the feet of Baal. Like Lot they walked by faith with Abraham but began compromising until they ended up alone in a cave with sons who were also grandsons. In another generation the denomination will cease to exist. And why? Because like Esau they sold their birthright of timelessness for a bowl of relevant porridge. They were practical with the Scriptures rather than faithful to it.

 

I know you are excited and have been celebrating how great FBC is, but in closing I hope you hear the words of Jesus afresh, “You say, I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing, not realizing that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire, so that you may be rich, and white garments so that you may clothe yourself and the shame of your nakedness may not be seen, and salve to anoint your eyes, so that you may see. Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline, so be zealous and repent.”

Yours in Christ,
Philip

 

[1] I’ll just give one quote from Warren, “God won’t ask about your religious background or doctrinal views. The only thing that will matter is, did you accept what Jesus did for you and did you learn to love and trust him?” because with that, Warren has opened the door on everything from Modalism or Mormonism being okay.

 

[2] Here is Brian McLauren on the supremacy of Christ, “And during his lifetime, Abraham—like Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad—had an encounter with God that distinguished him from his contemporaries and propelled him into a mission, introducing a new way of life that changed the world...How appropriate that the three Abrahamic religions begin with a journey into the unknown.”

 

[3] To his credit Scott has not fully embraced the Willow Creek methods. However, he said in third service during his try-out sermon, “This is salvation: God votes for you, Satan votes against, and you cast the deciding vote” and when asked during the Friday night Q&A about how he planned to reach the youth he said, “with technology.” That is an answer that demonstrates someone doesn't have a firm grasp of the sufficiency of Scripture.

Vessles of Wrath, Vessles of Mercy

Romans 9:22-23 "What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory"

Alistair pointed this out to me, and I can't believe I didn't realize it before. Set right down in what is perhaps the hardest passage in all of Romans, Paul makes a statement that God's purposes are only for mercy, and ours are for destruction. Traditionally I had understood this as "I'm fitting vessels for wrath to endure forever, and I'm fitting vessels for mercy to endure forever. But on closer inspection I realized I was importing this bad understanding into the text, not getting it out of it.
I'll put the passive voice in red and the active stuff in green.

"What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which He has prepared beforehand for glory"

What is God doing in the first half of this sentence? He's enduring. He's putting up with. It takes long suffering and much patience and He's waiting them out. And notice what He's not doing, He's not fitting them. That must mean that man fits himself. This is like Pharaoh, who Paul also doesn't forget to mention earlier in the chapter. How did Pharaoh fit himself for destruction? By rejecting the grace of God. By throwing away the second, third, and hundredth chance given to Him. By continually fighting against God.

What is God doing in this verse if He's not fitting the vessels for wrath? Why, preparing the vessels for mercy of course. And how do you prepare someone for mercy? You have them fall and endure their sinfulness. It's the same action, but depending on the will of the person it gives two different results. God outfits everyone for mercy, it's just that the non-elect fit themselves for wrath by rejecting that mercy while the elect God makes to accept it.

The hole in the mind

I've heard humans called "leaky vessels" and I think that's a very accurate term. There is a hole that opens up in our minds put there by God's grace, and taken control of by sin--the hole in the mind.
The hole is a gift in the sense that it allows us to forget the things of sin done by and to us, it helps us move forward. But sin opens it up and has it leak out the things of God, and I'm convinced that the older we get the bigger the hole becomes, and the less energy we have to fix it or seal it closed, or pour new things into the mind. The old people I teach have largely forgotten all that they had learned because they are too weak to close the hole, and it drains them completely. In extreme old age a second childhood onsets because the hole has claimed all the knowledge and memories. Alzheimer is what happens when the hole grows too big as well, ultimately killing the person and leaving the body behind after the mind has drained out.

This is a call to the young then, to fill the mind with as much as soon as possible. Because it won't be long until the same amount of work only gets them to the break even point, and it's not long after that until the leak is so bad that there is no stopping it.

Remember your creator in the days of your youth.

The Unjust Steward

Luke 16:1-9 ESVUK: "He also said to the disciples, “There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was wasting his possessions. And he called him and said to him, ‘What is this that I hear about you? Turn in the account of your management, for you can no longer be manager.’ And the manager said to himself, ‘What shall I do, since my master is taking the management away from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg. I have decided what to do, so that when I am removed from management, people may receive me into their houses.’ So, summoning his master's debtors one by one, he said to the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ He said, ‘A hundred measures of oil.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, and sit down quickly and write fifty.’ Then he said to another, ‘And how much do you owe?’ He said, ‘A hundred measures of wheat.’ He said to him, ‘Take your bill, and write eighty.’ The master commended the dishonest manager for his shrewdness. For the sons of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than the sons of light. And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of unrighteous wealth, so that when it fails they may receive you into the eternal dwellings."

This has always puzzled me, but at last I think I have the key to it. The important part in understanding this is in grasping what is not written--what the context of the parable is. In Luke 15:2 the Pharisees were grumbling about the tax collectors and sinners being dirty losers; in response Jesus gives three parables about searching and seeking that which is lost, the third of which is the most powerful. In that one the older brother (representing the Pharisee who was lost while nearest to God) looked down upon his brother for being poor, foolish, and generally unworthy. This parable follows on the heels of it. It's short too.

"What is this I hear about you?" says the owner, who heard that the chief steward was being unfaithful. (Notice he had no idea of the corruption of the manager, he's just thinking the guy is sloppy or lazy, not evil.) The man then pulls a fast one on his master, who was so stunned that all he could do is marvel, and commend him for his shrewdness.

This is simple advice. The Pharisees are like the dishonest man, corrupted, since money corrupts, and people who have it are rotten, and more importantly they are actually cheating God out of what is due Him. What's Jesus message? Start using your money better. Stop looking down on the poor. Look guys, you don't even have to stop being evil, just start doing better. You look down on those sinners because they are poor and destitute, but you yourselves are worse off because you're using the money you have badly. It's better to be those people who have nothing than to be you who have something are are blowing it. Be like the unjust Steward and make the most of your time and treasure.
"If then you have not been faithful in the unrighteous wealth, who will entrust to you the true riches?"

Of course we know how that went.

"The Pharisees, who were lovers of money, heard all these things, and they ridiculed him."

Luke 13:1-2 ESV: "There were some present at that very time who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. And he answered them, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered in this way?"

This is very interesting to me because there's an unrecorded question here in v1 that goes something like, "Jesus why did they die there?" Or perhaps, "Did God not care about the honor of His house that He would let them die there?" And Jesus answers what is really behind their question, I suspect, by cutting the heart of the matter and reading their minds. But it's not what I would have expected at all.
The Romans weren't known for their wild and unrestrained barbarism. That would be the Assyrians. Those guys would come in in their red capes, pile up the skulls of the infants they had slaughtered, and turn them into thrones to sit on. Those were the Ghengas Khan level bad guys. But the Romans? Not so much. If they came after you once they had conquered and pacified you it's generally because you deserved it. These Galilean men did something wicked to provoke Rome, like murder or thievery, and thought they could hide in the temple where the Romans were not supposed to go, and God surprised them here by dealing out justice.
Then Jesus asks a question, "And you think they were worse sinners?"
To which I would have answered "Yes of course they were! Look Jesus, as evil killers, they got what was coming to them. That's what happens when you sin like that."

But look what He says next, "No."
Oomph. Everything I thought was just upended, and then the worst part comes,  "I tell you, unless you repent, you will all likewise perish."
And just like that Jesus levels the ground. It doesn't matter if you have committed fewer sins than your neighbor, if you die and go to hell, it's cold comfort. In the greatest sense, all men are not more or less sinners than each other. The presence of hell is so horrid that it erases all the real differences.  Repent.

Seeker Sensitive, Biblically Unfaithful

"Go into all the world, making disciples of all men..." Jesus said. Which means we are meant to go. Get out into it, leave this place. The disciples understood well enough when they took the message to Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and out into the world. So much so that the gospel went ahead of even Paul, the Apostle to the Gentiles, into Rome.

This is the mandate for Christians, we are to be seekers of people, like our heavenly Father, going out after them, pursuing them. After all, is the Holy Spirit not the most passionate seeker of men? We are to get out there, where they are at, in their homes, gardens, and places of employment with our message just as He does.
But the Seeker sensitive movement rather has everyone coming to a church building to hear the word. The congregation isn't going out after the world with the good news, they are luring the non-believers into their lair. That means Church isn't the place that the believers gather anymore to recharge and regroup with passionate devotion to God Almighty, it's the place where non-believers are converted (if they ever actually are) with gentle stories and kind words.

And if that's true (which it is) then it means the Seeker Sensitive Church by nature absolves us of our responsibilities to evangelism. It's an easy chair, and it's too easy. People in them settle into a kind of stupor, content to invite people to their Sunday service, absolved of their duty to the world. Seeker Sensitive paradigm has a lot of problems, as I've said before, but I think this one might be the most pernicious, and the most hidden problem. It makes it so easy to stop being passionate about evangelism that one almost can't help turning the whole effort over to the professional pastors. 

Unbelief, Salvation, Atonement, and God's Glory

Alistair Begg made a comment that got me thinking about the necessity of unlimited atonement in the face of divine election. He pointed out, quite correctly, that it is God who assigns, and consigns, men to hell. (My phrasing). This doesn't minimize the truth that everyone who wants to go to hell does, because hell is a destination freely chosen by men, but it does mean those who choose hell were directed to do so by God's sovereign decree. The reason for this being that if men had the final veto, then man's obduracy would be greater than God's grace. In a sense, man would be sovereign. So God must have condemned them to hell because otherwise He would not be supreme, and His supremacy would not be maximally expressed.

And that fits because we know that God does all things for His glory; His goal is always to maximize the manifestation of His attributes. That's basic Calvinism (or Bible) 101, and it automatically means hell is necessary, because otherwise God could not maximally express His justice and wrath against sin, and it automatically means He sends men there. But it doesn't automatically mean limited atonement is true. "Wait," you say, "if God doing all things for His glory means there must be a hell, and it necessitates it be peopled in specific cases, then shouldn't it also mean Jesus paid only for the sins of those who would be saved?" You would think so, but it doesn't. Just the opposite actually.

For if no atonement was made for the non-elect, then they are in the same boat as the fallen angels-- they aren't going to heaven, and they can't, no matter what they do. No forgiveness is waiting for them because no forgiveness is possible. I'll say it again, God cannot possibly, under any circumstances, or hypothetical considerations, forgive them, because an invincible amount of sin is keeping them from Him. God is literally unable, not merely unwilling to save them. And does that situation maximally express His glory? Absolutely not. His great patience and loving kindness is best seen when every barrier to salvation has been torn down and He beckons sinners earnestly, having paid the price already. His glory is best seen in that there is nothing He has left undone, no hurdle remains to be jumped on His part.

So just as the obduracy of men in the first case means they must not be the ones in the drivers seat or God would be less glorious, so too does it mean the only barrier to their salvation is their own obduracy, lest His glory be lessened. The Calvinist who has their first principles in order must then realize that in some way both things are true, and that the Scriptures wholeheartedly affirms both things together. "For God hath concluded them all in unbelief, that he might have mercy upon all."
It is appropriate given that apparent contradiction that Paul's next words are what they are.

"O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out! For who hath known the mind of the Lord? or who hath been his counsellor? Or who hath first given to him, and it shall be recompensed unto him again? For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things: to whom be glory for ever. Amen."

David and Jonathan

1 Samuel 18:1-4: "And it came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking unto Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul. And Saul took him that day, and would let him go no more home to his father's house. Then Jonathan and David made a covenant, because he loved him as his own soul. And Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that was upon him, and gave it to David, and his garments, even to his sword, and to his bow, and to his girdle."

The point, as I've always been told, is that David loved Jonathan and Jonathan loved David, because they were both manly men. And that's good. Men need to love each other more. Men need to bond into deep relationships with other men.
...Thank you focus on the family, for always giving me the wrong answer.

I visited a friend in Phoenix this last week, and at last, after many years, I believe I understand this section of Scripture. First let me say that if it didn't use the word love I would hesitate to myself, because it's so different than the eros of a marriage, or even the philo of a friend or brother. It's something beyond both that that finds itself in the service of God. It's a helpful clarity for agape, although it's something more specific than that. There are, I think, two things that makes it special, three which makes it unique.
1) David and Jonathan saw that the other was completely, 100%, souled out for God. They had given themselves fully and without hesitation, body, soul, mind, to Him.
2) Both had similar experiences in trusting God for combat. Both Israelites, both about the same age.
3) Both saw that the blessing and favor of God was upon the other.

As I have thought about my own case I decided a confluence of these three things contributed to it. A similar religious history in the churches of Christ, at a similar age and stage of life in having a number of young kids, a similarly named wife, similar enjoyments like chess, reading, running, martial arts, a similarly good mind. The secondary areas of life match fairly closely, but the key piece was seeing the similar all encompassing burning passion for doctrine, and hearing the work that goes on at the church he has been called to pastor which validates it. I thought, 'this man has given himself totally to God without hesitation. I admire, rejoice in, and would see more.'
For that I see in him what I perhaps could have been, had God called me to being a pastor. There is something in seeing yourself with different eyes that causes joy to jump over the barriers and knock you to the ground. The result of which is when you spend time with them it goes too fast, and you come away greatly encouraged. It's not a jealous feeling, nor a brilliant one, nor a bright feeling, but rather feels more like a deep, swift, clear, straight river. It's not physical, touching, or sweet like a marriage can be. It's a little like going into battle and having your life in their hands, but it's more reflective, more focused than that. It's combat but at the same time like you're going on the jungle boat tour at Disneyland while big band music plays. It's not that you overlook their faults, which you immediately offer advice for, and it's not that you're polite and acquiesce to their propositions, no, you're still abusive in humor, still fully yourself, it's just that you are compelled to rejoice at seeing or considering them. Friend is too crude a word, and brother isn't specific enough. Knit-Soul is an odd an expression for the feeling, but it so unique that I suppose it gets closer than anything else. I feel it now. I wish I could describe it.

Teacher Training at FBC

So as a teacher at FBC, I’ve been invited to the teacher training seminar. Nothing unusual in that, we’ve been doing these things for awhile now, but I took a closer look and things have indeed changed.

Please consider this my personal invitation and recommendation to attend the Teacher Training event on Saturday, June 28 from 9 am to 4 pm in Rm E201 (lunch will be provided).

With the completion of the modular project and the arrival of a new Senior Pastor who is passionate about discipleship, FBC faces an unprecedented opportunity to reach our community. This is going to take workers for the harvest (teachers and leaders who are dedicated, passionate and united in their efforts). This kind of unity requires common experience, language and purpose, which is the goal of the day.

This event will be led by David Brown. David is one of our own. He and his wife Liz have been a part of FBC for the last 5 years, and he comes to us with 10 years of teaching experience as a professor at the University of San Francisco and more than 8 years of experience in Christian teacher training and development. In addition, his personal Biblical research in the area of spiritual maturity and stages of spiritual growth is extensive. This will be an informative, inspiriting and challenging seminar based on Disciple-Making Teachers, by Josh Hunt and Dr. Larry Mays. We will consider the integration of what we have already gleaned from the stages of maturity found in the book MOVE and the Biblical mandate to make disciples with proven principles that will influence individuals to take the next step in their relationship with Jesus.

So please say yes, and join us as we continue to prepare to launch a year focused on equipping adults for discipleship, spiritual growth and next steps toward maturity.

There is more to this than it first appears. It starts with the first underlined sentence which gives the game away. Actually it starts with the second paragraph not being truthful. The modulars are not ready yet, but that’s okay. The new senior pastor is indeed passionate about getting everyone to have a common language and testimony, and that’s less okay, but whatever, it’s still mostly accurate. The killer is the purpose of the all day event as to create a unity of language across FBC, because that language is Willow Creek. In other words, the purpose of the all day training is to get us to think and speak like a Willow Creek mega church staff. And that’s bad.

Continuing on we find out we’re being led by a Mr. David Brown, so far so good, whose leading qualification is a secular university professorship at one of the most insane cities in America. Things just soured a little bit. Now we come to the underlined phrase, we will be using the book Disciple Making teachers. I look up the book on Amazon, and here’s the preview:

… Bill Hybels of Willow Creek Community Church, for example, has led the way with the seeker-driven paradigm, the seven-step strategy, networking, and various other innovative ministry strategies. But when I hear Bill Hybels preach his average weekend seeker message or midweek New Community message, I think to myself, “Willow Creek’s strategy could be dead wrong, and he would still fill the auditorium.

You see, it’s really not about networking or the seven-step strategy or all the rest of those excellent approaches. It is about the fact that Bill Hybels puts it together on stage. When he talks, people listen. I just smile when I hear that Midwestern accent because I know he will probably deliver another great message.

It’s the same with Rick Warren, senior pastor of Saddleback Valley Community Church…

 It goes downhill from there, believe it or not. So the game’s up now, FBC is hosting an all day event where we are going to learn how to do mega church, Willow Creek style. Traditional Bible based teaching has fully gone out now, and what has arrived to take its place is the pale horse of community group facilitating. As it is written, “Come out of her My people, lest you share in her punishment.”