The third annual Wild Goose Festival, attended by 2,000 people last week in North Carolina, was focused on unity through social action. Speakers included emergents (“progressives”) such as Phyllis Tickle, Brian McLaren, Philip Yancy, and Frank Schaeffer,. Speakers represented “Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant and Muslim.” In attendance were Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Baptists, and others. Kingdom building (e.g., saving the planet, disarmament, eliminating poverty), the downplaying of the importance of doctrine, contemporary music, and contemplative prayer are four of the elements that are uniting progressives and evangelicals, liberals and “conservatives,” Catholics and Protestants, Christians and non-Christians, and thus creating the end-time one-world “church.” Eric Elnes, one of the Wild Goose speakers, said that “Christians from different denominations and cultural backgrounds begin to see that theology becomes less important than the relationships necessary for addressing social challenges” (“So Many Baptists at Wild Goose,” Associated Baptist Press, Aug. 9, 2013). Phyllis Tickle, one of the founders of Wild Goose, rejoices that evangelicals, charismatics, Protestants, and Catholics are merging. “Where the quadrants meet in the center there’s a vortex like a whirlpool and they are blending” (“The Future of the Emerging Church,” Leadership Magazine, Mar. 19, 2007). These people are not merely changing doctrines; they are changing Gods. This is evident by the popularity of The Shack, which presents God as a non-judgmental woman. Sarah Cunningham, another Wild Goose speaker this year, concluded her talk with a prayer to “the God of the evangelicals and the progressives and everyone in between.” But God is not the God in a redemption sense of those who deny or downplay the necessity of the blood atonement and the new birth, doubt the divine inspiration of Scripture, and corrupt the doctrines of the New Testament faith. These are spiritual high crimes that Phyllis Tickle, Brian McLaren, and many other Wild Goose participants are guilty of, as we have documented in the book What Is the Emerging Church? Tickle says that the doctrine of “sola scriptura” is outdated and must be left behind (The Great Emergence, pp. 47, 151). McLaren says the Bible is “not a look-it-up encyclopedia of moral truths” and he has “a strong conviction that the exclusive, hell-oriented gospel is not the way forward” (A Generous Orthodoxy, p. 190 and p. 120, f. 48). McLaren’s objective is not to preach the gospel to lost sinners before it is too late; his objective is “about changing this world” (Everything Must Change, p. 23). McLaren wrote a glowing recommendation of Alan Jones’ book Reimagining Christianity, in which Jones calls the gospel of the cross a vile doctrine, claims that there is no objective authority, and says that Hindus and Buddhists are God’s people. (Friday Church News Notes, August 16, 2013, www.wayoflife.org [email protected], 866-295-4143) Comments are closed.
|
Archives
February 2020
|