Welcome Dan at Necessary Roughness

I added Necessary Roughness to my blog list. He updates fairly often and participates at Bailing Water.

More Lutheran Heroes

And by proxy, the CLC (sic)

Someone has been trying to promote the Church of the Lutheran Confession (sic) as an alternative to WELS, the Little Sect, and Missouri.

I won't let those comments through because the CLC is worse than the rest, always praising themselves while aping the Shrinkers in the larger groups. The more influential pastors are Paul Tiefel (cousin of James) and David Koenig. Both of them attack anyone who questions the Shrinkers in Lutherdom. As Dale Redlin said about both men, "They constantly have doctrinal problems, and they never listen to anyone."

David Koenig devoted an hour service (all sermon - nothing else) to a rant saying that Lutherans are wrong about evangelism. The Catholics and Reformed to it right. So the CLC (sic) made him a world missionary again. There may be a few Lutheran members among the legalists in that sect, but the pastors are anything but, and they are even more spineless than the garden variety.

Steve Kurtzahn is a hoot. He was CLC and is now WELS. He likes to comment on LutherQuest (sic) about the superiority of WELS. I think his congregation has issued a "divine call" to everyone in the parish except the church mice.

As regular readers recall, Koenig asked Valleskey if the Sausage Factory president really did go to Fuller Seminary. Valleskey had denied it to my face, but he admitted it to Koenig. Poor Dave leaves no thought unrecorded, so he sent one of his ferocious letters to me, including that fact. When I published this information, Koenig went ballistic on me. Apparently Valleskey was not at all happy with the leakage.

Plagiarism and the Emerging Church, Becoming Missional? What A Shock!

The current heroes of Lutherdom are featured on this graphic. Missing are: Josh McDowell, Waldo Werning, Kent Hunter, Robert Schuller, and a few others.

MacArthur: The Emergent Church is a Form of Paganism

Paul Edwards (On Crosswalk.com - oddly enough)

"The Paul Edwards Program," WLQV Detroit

Paul Edwards, host of “The Paul Edwards Program” on WLQV in Detroit, interviewed pastor-teacher of Grace Community Church John MacArthur about the emerging church movement in America. Paul begins the interview by asking Pastor John to respond to a radio interview with prominent emerging church leader Doug Pagitt. In the clip from October 22, 2007, Pagitt denied that there is a place of eternal conscious torment for persons who die apart from faith in Jesus Christ.
Paul Edwards: Help me with this—the emerging church prides itself on conversation, having a conversation, so let’s have a conversation. How can you have a conversation with someone, when you’re not even speaking the same language?

John MacArthur: Let me just cut to the chase on this one: [Doug] Pagitt is a Universalist. What he was saying is real simple. He was saying when you die your spirit goes to God and judgment means that whatever was not right about you, whatever was bad about you, whatever was substantially lacking about you, gets all resolved. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a Buddhist, a Hindu or a Muslim—doesn’t matter whether you’re a Christian really; we’re all going to end up in this wonderful, warm and fuzzy relationship with God. That’s just classic universalism.

I think you know it’s most helpful, Paul, to go back and kind of recast how we view these people. He’s not a pastor; he’s not a Christian; that’s not a church. When you call yourself a Christian and you call yourself a pastor and you say you have a church, all of that has to be—to be legitimate—defined biblically. And if it’s not, that’s not a church and you’re not a pastor and you’re not even a Christian.

What you have here is a form of false religion … A form of paganism that basically wants to be thought of as Christian because it gains a certain ground. But the underlying bottom line of this whole emerging movement is they don’t believe in any doctrine, they don’t believe in any theology. They don’t want to be forced to interpret anything in scripture a certain way and the out is, “Well the Bible isn’t clear anyway.” In other words, we don’t know what it means; we can’t know what it means.

Brian McLaren says nobody has ever gotten it right—we haven’t got it right now—so let’s not make an issue out of anything. Let’s just be open to everything. Let’s not take a position on theology, or for that matter, on morality or behavior because, hey, there’s no judgment anyway so we’re all going to end up in God in some ethereal, eternal relationship. And that’s just non-Christian. It is blatantly, flagrantly non-Christian. It’s as non-Christian as any false religion.

Edwards: [When “Emergents” and many seeker-sensitive church advocates say “We do church a certain way,”] it seems to me that they do it by totally ignoring the book of Acts and the Epistles.

MacArthur: I’m going to seem anachronistic if not an outright dinosaur at this point. I believe the church has one function, and that is to guard the truth, to proclaim the truth and to live the truth. So you take the Word of God, you teach it, you proclaim it, you protect it, you defend it, and you live it, and that’s a church. The Word of God rightly divided, rightly understood.

That’s not the idea in a seeker church; that’s not the idea certainly in an emerging church. Everything becomes style and contextualization and everything is built around the manipulation of people’s hot buttons as if we were selling a product like any other product in our culture. This fails to understand that the only real power in the spiritual realm is Divine and that God works His power through His truth, and that’s all that matters.

I think the illusion of success is created by crowds. You’ve probably heard recently that Bill Hybels, who is the guru of the seeker movement, has openly confessed that they did a big survey and found they’ve been doing it wrong.

Edwards: “We made a mistake,” he said.

MacArthur: Yes, we made a mistake. And so, the solution is—one of the lines in the statement was—we gotta get a blank piece of paper and start all over again. That’s exactly the problem. Why do you want a blank piece of paper when you have all kinds of paper full with the Word of God?

Edwards: Right.

MacArthur: If you want a biblical mandate and you want to do ministry biblically, you teach and preach the Word. I don’t think it matters whether you have smoke and mirrors. I don’t think it matters whether you wear a tie, or don’t wear a tie, whether you wear a black T-shirt and holes in your knees or a blue suit. (I think there are reasons to go with the suit rather the grunge approach—of dignity, respect, sober mindedness, seriousness, loftiness, etc, etc.)

At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is that we proclaim the Word of God. Look, I’ve been doing this for so long, and I haven’t changed anything. Contexts come, contexts go; fads come, fads go; styles come, styles go. I just keep doing the same thing. We show up on Sunday morning, we sing a little bit, we pray, we open the Word of God and explain His meaning to the people. The people just keep coming and coming and what I say goes around the world, on radio, and then it gets transferred into 50 languages and books and commentaries because [the Word] knows no boundaries. It knows no cultural restraint, because the Word of God is transcendent.

Edwards: One of the things I get most frustrated about is whenever people like you who are standing for truth point out the error both in the emergent church and in the seeker movement people will immediately run to 1 Corinthians 9 and begin screaming, “You know Paul said, ‘I became all things to all men,’ which means to the grunge I become as grunge, to the Universalist I become as a Universalist.” But in 1 Corinthians 9 Paul isn’t saying that we compromise the message and we become whatever the audience needs us to be in order to make the gospel palatable.

MacArthur: Well, of course not. All he is saying is there’s a foundation in the proclamation of the gospel with the Jew and there’s a different starting point with the Gentile. If I’m going to evangelize a Jew, I’m going to start with the Old Testament because that’s the substantial basis. So every time the Apostle Paul preached to the Jews he started with the Scripture—the Old Testament Scripture. Every time he evangelized Gentiles he started with creation. For example, in Acts 14 and Acts 17 he talks about the unknown God. Who is the unknown God? He’s the God who made everything—that was the foundation.

All he is saying in 1 Corinthians 9 is you must understand the starting point of your audience and here’s the point: ideologically. In other words, how do they think ideologically, philosophically, religiously? What are the ideas, the theories, the viewpoints that they hold? It’s not about identifying with their lifestyle; it’s not about being able to converse about every episode of South Park, every R-rated movie and every Rap song—that’s not it at all.

How do people think religiously, how do they perceive truth?—those are the starting points that Paul was establishing. That’s a far cry from saying that to reach this generation we must do their music, we must dress the way they dress, we must live the way they live, we must be familiar with the baser components of their culture. That’s a million miles from what the Apostle Paul had in mind. He was talking about those things that controlled their thought process and their worldview.

Paul Edwards: Help me with this—the emerging church prides itself on conversation, having a conversation, so let’s have a conversation. How can you have a conversation with someone, when you’re not even speaking the same language?

John MacArthur: Let me just cut to the chase on this one: [Doug] Pagitt is a Universalist. What he was saying is real simple. He was saying when you die your spirit goes to God and judgment means that whatever was not right about you, whatever was bad about you, whatever was substantially lacking about you, gets all resolved. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a Buddhist, a Hindu or a Muslim—doesn’t matter whether you’re a Christian really; we’re all going to end up in this wonderful, warm and fuzzy relationship with God. That’s just classic universalism.

I think you know it’s most helpful, Paul, to go back and kind of recast how we view these people. He’s not a pastor; he’s not a Christian; that’s not a church. When you call yourself a Christian and you call yourself a pastor and you say you have a church, all of that has to be—to be legitimate—defined biblically. And if it’s not, that’s not a church and you’re not a pastor and you’re not even a Christian.

What you have here is a form of false religion … A form of paganism that basically wants to be thought of as Christian because it gains a certain ground. But the underlying bottom line of this whole emerging movement is they don’t believe in any doctrine, they don’t believe in any theology. They don’t want to be forced to interpret anything in scripture a certain way and the out is, “Well the Bible isn’t clear anyway.” In other words, we don’t know what it means; we can’t know what it means.

Brian McLaren says nobody has ever gotten it right—we haven’t got it right now—so let’s not make an issue out of anything. Let’s just be open to everything. Let’s not take a position on theology, or for that matter, on morality or behavior because, hey, there’s no judgment anyway so we’re all going to end up in God in some ethereal, eternal relationship. And that’s just non-Christian. It is blatantly, flagrantly non-Christian. It’s as non-Christian as any false religion.

Edwards: [When “Emergents” and many seeker-sensitive church advocates say “We do church a certain way,”] it seems to me that they do it by totally ignoring the book of Acts and the Epistles.


Paul Edwards is the host of The Paul Edwards Program, a columnist and pastor. His program is heard daily on WLQV in Detroit and on godandculture.com. Contact him at paul@godandculture.com.

***

GJ - I want to steal a march on Brett Meyer and post the obvious - Universal Objective Justification is an ideal doctrinal partner with Church Growth and implicit Universalism.

One WELS DP denied to me that WELS has ever taught Universalism, but I mentioned the "evangelism" campaign with posters that read, for all the world to see, "You are saved, just like me." Everyone is saved = Universalism.

Everyone is forgiven, without the World, without the Means of Grace, without faith - that is the UOJ message and the basic content of Universalism.

Teaching grace (forgiveness) apart from the Means of Grace is Enthusiasm.

The WELS, Missouri, and ELS leaders cannot defeat the Schwaermer Shrinkers because they are also Enthusiasts, as long as they cling to UOJ.

Memo to Church and Chicanery - It's Not Working for the Babtists Either

The Christian Post

Southern Baptist Head: We Have a Vision Problem
By Lillian Kwon
Christian Post Reporter
Tue, Jun. 23 2009 06:02 PM EDT

Southern Baptist president Johnny Hunt delivered an impassioned and fiery message to fellow Baptist leaders on Tuesday, imploring them to get out of the lukewarm state found in many of America's pulpits.

Related
* So. Baptists Now a 'Declining Denomination'
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Referring to the recent national spelling bee word that had puzzled many, Hunt said, "America has not heard of the word 'laodicean' but I'm afraid that the Church has not perceived it."

His address during the Southern Baptist Convention's annual meeting in Louisville, Ky., was a challenge to a denomination that has begun to see decline in membership.

"How do you feel you're doing?" Hunt posed. "How do you feel the Southern Baptist Convention is doing?"

According to statistics recently released by LifeWay Research – the research arm of the SBC – Southern Baptist membership will fall nearly 50 percent to around 8.7 million by the year 2050 if the current trend continues.

Membership dipped by 0.2 percent in 2008. While losses only began in 2007 after years of growth, Ed Stetzer, director of LifeWay, said the rate of increase had been declining by 0.06 percent every year.

Titling his message "The State of the Southern Baptist Convention from Where I Sit," Hunt cited a passage from Revelation and indicated that many have become apathetic, indifferent and have lost enthusiasm.

"You can walk to the pulpit, you can lead the music, you can teach a Sunday School class and the attitude is 'I've been there and I've done that.' There's no tear in your eye, there's no fire in your soul, and there's no anticipation after delivery," he said.

"You can get to the point [where] you're so strong you can get up, read through your devotion, have this brief prayer and go. We become professionals. We know how to do it," Hunt added, lamenting how many have lost their dependence on the grace and Holy Spirit of God.

One of the greatest needs of the pulpits of America, he pointed out, is "more emulation of the truth of almighty God to match the exhortation of the proclamation of almighty God's word."

Southern Baptists this week will consider adopting the Great Commission Resurgence declaration, which reaffirms core Christian doctrines and aims to renew a passion for evangelism and church planting in America.

But Hunt is not concerned with simply adopting a document. After all, talk is cheap, he said.

What he's concerned with is seeing true commitment among Southern Baptists to the Great Commission Resurgence.

"I really do believe we need revival in the Southern Baptist Convention," said Hunt.

Revival, he indicated, must first happen in the more than 43,000 Southern Baptist pulpits in America.

"If God were to break the hearts of us, the pastors, and we would ... realize out there in those pews there's gold in them there pews! It's amazing how God's people will rise up and take a challenge," he highlighted. "They're not looking for a program to follow. They're looking for a vision to embrace."

He stressed that they don't have a money problem, for God has been good to them. "We have a vision problem," he said.

"God help us to get a vision of the lostness of the world," said Hunt, who is still convinced that the Gospel will be "taken and penetrate the lostness and the darkness of all nations" in his lifetime.

Hunt was re-elected for a second, one-year term as president of the SBC – the largest Protestant denomination in the country.

---

A good read - click here.


Rick Warren, on the far left, tries to distance himself from Robert Schuller now. (Sound familiar?) Ed Stetzer, on the right, is the fox in the hen house, doing "research" for the Southern Baptists while selling his goods to the Southern Babtists and anyone else who will listen - WELS, Missouri, the mini-synods and micro-mini-sects.

Both men seem to be reading the details of the Kirstie Alley diet.

Excellence in Smokescrees - WELS Church and Change

http://www.shepherdofthebay.com/Assimilation/Resources/4-Excellence%20in%20Worship.pdf

One of the crypto-phrases used by Church and Change is "excellence in worship."

James Huebner, trained at Fuller, Second Synod Veep, uses the same phrase on his church website.