Spiritwatch Unchained

Ask Mitt Romney This: When Does He Expect To Become A God Over His Own Planet?

2011-09-07T23:45:00.002-04:00

In our last blog entry, we considered just what might happen if the political journalistas in the media who come out of the woodwork every two to four years did what an indignant Brigham Young University professor's demands of them. It was a humdinger and it actually makes me smile. The apostasy at hand might really get a beating then.

Mr. Lane Williams, the professor I refer to, believes that the political press ought to be taking to task the evangelical Christian countercult movement for bearing what he calls "false witness" against Mormonism. He thinks the current crop of Presidential wannabes like Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry, Sarah Palin and others should somehow be coached into taking a stand against what he perceives as mean-spirited religious bigotry. He passionately believes that for Christian researchers (such as myself) to call the Latter Day Saint Church a cultic movement that teaches unorthodox heresy and has open dreams of American theocracy is somehow a "false witness" about his faith - not to mention his horribly misunderstood employer.

Now this would no doubt delight some indignant Mormon apologists to no end. They would delight hearing a Jon Huntsman or a Ron Paul give them an indignant yet malleable soundbite their publicists could use to take such "False Witnesses" to task with. For them, hearing public figures of this stature take a position against "religious bigotry" would certainly be a faith-building and heartening spectacle. I concluded my blog entry observing that this kind of public spectacle is nothing any perceptive Mormon apologist, not to mention LDS leader, really wants to have done.

Light shone on the carefully groomed image of Mormonism will show the dust, cracks and awkward signs of extensive shoring and reinvention it has done for over a century all too plainly. The polished patina that decades of LDS public relations have spread over it would quickly be revealed for what it is .. a veneer for an sectarian cultic movement that itself has been responsible for false witness about Christianity for over a century, preaching heresy out of an apostate mindset that reckons itself to be "the Restoration" of true Christian faith.

There is one little detail Mr. Williams has inconveniently overlooked, however.

Perhaps the media might, just might, as it is often wont to do, go places with their questions that Mr. Williams might not want them to go. Any good media-savvy public figure knows that a spin cycle can only be sustained so long and that eventually, momentum gets lost and friction causes it to stall and then become irreversibly slowed to a stand still. And Mormonism's flight before the cameras under the harsh klieg lights of objective examination stalls really quickly, so it instead follows the flight paths of least resistance by busily occupying itself in a self-proclaimed mission of proclaiming its "restored gospel," deftly avoiding controversy or too close attention to its sharper edges by fielding heartwarming commercials, service projects by LDS Cub Scouts, and inviting people to hear the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sing at Christmastime.

What might happen is that someone in the media might actually start asking the following reworked questions, inspired by the one Williams originally suggested:

"Do you think Mormonism has borne false witness against evangelical Christianity according to the countercult movement?”

"Do you believe that these Mormon doctrines about men becoming gods over their own planets are really what historic, orthodox Christian faith believes?"

Where do we see the Christian faith prior to the birth of the LDS church in 1830 teaching us that we may become gods? When has that bizarre truth claim ever been a part of the doctrine and a practical pursuit established as historic Christian faith? These are not simple "differences" but vast gaping chasms in the very fabric of Mormonism that are never explored. Heavens to Murgatroyd, those are worth asking, Mr. Williams!

Therefore, asking Presidential candidates if Mitt Romney's version of "Christian belief" actually twists and distorts Christian truth claims is a claim I'd love to see Wolf Blitzer discuss on "The Situation Room" or watch Elisabeth Hasselbeck on "The View" throw that piece of meat out for her cronies to chew on.
Perhaps another question along the same vein might actually be asked of Mr. Romney:

"When does he expect to become a god .. before or after the 2012 Presidential election?"

It's a fact of life that American presidents have to be voted into office by a notoriously fickle, partisan electorate full of people who have the power to deny them that for any one of a million reasons. That's such a messy and earthy reality no presidential aspirant can ignore. Ah, but such carnal concerns are beneath the reign of the supreme being known as Elohim in Mormonism, or more warm fuzzily, the "Heavenly Father" According to Mormon teaching, He actually calls all "worthy" LDS people to become actual gods just like He is, to become "exalted" beings who achieve actual divinity and rule over an actual literal, planet somewhere in the cosmos as part of His "Plan" for humanity. It would be interesting to ask Mitt this question in a town hall meeting.

Now Mr. Romney might assure us that his church's policies will never influence his guidance of the state, the same way John Kennedy said the Papacy would not run America. While we may want to take his word at face value (because we like to be nice people who do so out of polite courtesy), skeptical people knowing the LDS propensity for high level political brinksmanship and activism know all too well that there needs to be more questions asked about how Romney's faith informs his moral and ethical decision making. It's not unfair to ask if someone who believes that they are a literal, actual god-in-waiting is going to exhibit a genuinely impartial subjection to far more mundane American political principles, like loyalty to the Constitution and the separation of church and state. It is no secret that the founder of the Mormon Church, Joseph Smith, had unashamedly open political ambitions that were dominated by Latter Day Saint religion and for a time he controlled a virtual theocracy in his day happily energized by his church's membership. Things like political and religious dissent and freedom of the press became an intolerable background noise which led him and his Mormon leaders to take the law into their hands and did not exactly endear them to pioneer America .. and the response of 1840's Mormonism in Illinois to those who opposed their beliefs and practices should not be forgotten today as a cautionary tale.

I'd like to see the imaginative news editor with spine enough to ask these questions of Mr. Romney. I'd recommend he get a Pulitzer if he dared to press them to him. I think the American electorate deserves an answer to that one among many questions. This belief is one of the worst kept secrets of Mormonism and sharp producers and reporters in the political media will realize that the LDS Church's deceptive dodge of examination of this finer point of their theology is indeed a point worthy of journalistic exploration. The media's abysmally shallow perspective and lack of visceral fortitude (or "lack of a pair" as some might say) on touching off genuine controversy about religion in the political circle prevents this. They have enough fun trying to gauge Rick Perry's shadowy ties to the Religious Right and getting the extent of them so wrong, I don't expect them to be too doing much about exploring Mormonism's godmaking.

And while Mr. Williams would possibly blow a gasket believing this line of query to be another assailing of "false witness", it's actually a most cogent and reasonable one to ask of Romney since the LDS Church has long believed and taught the deification of men. All "worthy" Mormons know this well. Mr. Romney, being of this elite group of LDS social order, is not ignorant of this foundational LDS tenet either and neither (wink wink) is Mr. Williams. They just won't talk about it publicly among heathen "Gentiles" who they would reckon are unable to handle this truth claim.

To highlight how hidden in plain sight this doctrine is, review the following bit of research supplied by researcher Aaron Shafovaloff:

These three current LDS church training manuals quote the late Mormon "prophet" Spencer W. Kimball as teaching that good LDS people are divinely created by "Heavenly Father" with the capacity to become a god.

"Each one of you has it within the realm of his possibility to develop a kingdom over which you will preside as its king and god. You will need to develop yourself and grow in ability and power and worthiness, to govern such a world with all of its people."

(“The Matter of Marriage” [address delivered at the Salt Lake City Institute of Religion, Oct. 22, 1976], 2).

Latter Day saints argue that Kimball's teaching here was either misunderstood, distorted or at the very most, misguided. They assert that such a teaching is completely unknown to the LDS body politic, and that such a nefarious claim is the work of "anti mormons" out to discredit the church. But so you can see how this blasphemous assertion is firmly embedded in LDS teaching online click the following links below here:

Doctrine and Covenants 130 -- Teacher Resource Manual (This is for the training of LDS teachers who instruct high school level youth in LDS settings.)

“Chapter 4: Teaching Children: from Four to Eleven Years,” A Parent’s Guide, 23 (This manual is provided to LDS parents for the teaching of their younger children. They even put the quote under the section, "Teach Children to Accept and Understand Their Gender Roles")

Doctrines of the Gospel Student Manual (a manual written for college students, despite the domain its hosted on).

Now these teachings are plainly accessible on the Internet for anyone to read, as well as proof that Mr. Romney's charitable foundation donates millions of dollars to the LDS Church to help promulgate these bizarre and unbiblical beliefs.

Nowhere throughout the two millenia of church history can it be found that the Christian Church taught that Christians are gods in embryo, ready to become rulers over their own kingdoms and planets. The Apostles Creed, the New Testament and none of the church fathers or theologians of the first several centuries ever truly embraced this self-aggrandizing dogma.

And yet Mr. Williams and Mr. Romney want us to believe that their religion's unbiblical and warped view of God is derived from the Christian faith that has stood for two millenia? We beg to ask just who is bearing "false witness" here? Methinks it has nothing to do with the countercult community.

To quote the Old Homey, the Lord don't play that ..

I am the LORD, and there is none else, there is no God beside me: I girded thee, though thou hast not known me: That they may know from the rising of the sun, and from the west, that there is none beside me. I am the LORD, and there is none else. I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things. ..

For thus saith the LORD that created the heavens; God himself that formed the earth and made it; he hath established it, he created it not in vain, he formed it to be inhabited: I am the LORD; and there is none else. I have not spoken in secret, in a dark place of the earth: I said not unto the seed of Jacob, Seek ye me in vain: I the LORD speak righteousness, I declare things that are right. Assemble yourselves and come; draw near together, ye that are escaped of the nations: they have no knowledge that set up the wood of their graven image, and pray unto a god that cannot save.

Tell ye, and bring them near; yea, let them take counsel together: who hath declared this from ancient time? who hath told it from that time? have not I the LORD? and there is no God else beside me; a just God and a Saviour; there is none beside me. Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God, and there is none else. I have sworn by myself, the word is gone out of my mouth in righteousness, and shall not return, That unto me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear.

Isaiah 45:5-6, 18-23.

There's only one God who will ever control our destiny, and it's not Joseph Smith.

Nor will it be Mitt Romney even in his own neck of the cosmos. He might be President some day, but he will never be a god, no matter what his carefully hidden convictions assert. Nor will any other Mormon.

They will all bow their knees before Him, who the New Testament shows is none other than the Lord Jesus Christ himself. Mormons and Joseph Smith will be rather rudely surprised ..

How Peculiar A People: Brought To You By Brigham Young University

2011-09-02T14:58:00.000-04:00

When well established cults who have become institutionalized in Western civilization flex their cultural musculature of victimized ecumenism to assert how mean certain Christian perspectives about them can get, the cracking of their sinews can make a really strange noise. Add to that a self-righteous demand of the larger world around it to control information that covers its ideological private parts and it's almost like a scratching record of whining like no other. We quote one shrill demand here:

As a student of what scholars call framing theory, it is obvious to me that words like “cult” have great power to influence perception. Furthermore, out-of-context, simplistic explanations of our beliefs about the end of the world, about historic polygamy, about alleged secrecy or about alleged prejudice all can add to this impression that Mormons are cultish and possibly dangerous. ...

... Indeed, journalists might ask Michelle Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee and all the rest: “Do you think the countercult movement in evangelical Christianity has borne false witness against Mormonism?”

Given the prevalence and growth of the countercult movement, is it any wonder that the idea that Mormonism is a cult has branched into the press over the last 40 years? Is it any wonder that so many evangelicals have great disdain for Mormonism? ...

... It is time to remove the word “cult” from the descriptions of Mormonism and time for a deeper, yet respectful, journalistic accounting of the "countercult" movement much responsible for these terms, and it is time for our evangelical friends to stop supporting financially those who mock and distort the faith of others.

Just so we know where this verbal hammer is falling, consider the source of this reproachful demand. It originates from a teacher at Brigham Young University, one Lane Williams who teaches journalism and communication within this bastion of the Latter Day Saint Church. Is there any wonder that a teacher whose paycheck is covered by Mormonism's foundational corporate machine would not excoriate Christian countercult researchers who are a bane to their authoritarian agenda?

But for such a smart man, Mr. Williams really sets forth a pretty dumb idea. To cluck over how mean and nasty the Christian countercult movement is about identifying rightly that the LDS Church is a cultic movement while trying to simultaneously portray the poor Mormon Church as victims of religious discrimination is quite stupid. He actually wants to see a media focus on this question at a time when plenty of solid objective information on LDS cultism compiled by the Christian countercult movement is only a mouse click or two away for any thinking American to consider. Whine as he and his tribe might, the truth claims made are out there for rational consideration.

Mr. Williams' campaign may be playing to Mormon Peorias everywhere, and may inspire LDS intellectuals and elites on the Wasatch Front, as well as the cottage industry of Mormon apologetics institutionalized in groups like FARMS and people such as Daniel Peterson. I rather suspect that if they are truly thoughtful people, which I believe they are, that they are instead going to feel a deep inner disquiet at the thought of LDS belief being brought to light once more. For the public record, it seems, indicates conclusively that Mormonism is still not being widely received, no matter how optimistic its ecumenical reach seems to be: consider this political commentary that certainly cannot but trouble thinking and yet pious Mormons who might want Mr. Williams' crusade to break the surface of public attention to what promises to be a messy election season ahead:

The current presidential campaign began with two cautionary tales fresh in the minds of political strategists:

In 2008, candidate Barack Obama broke ties with his Chicago pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, after videos surfaced of Wright sermonizing that U.S. foreign policy played a role in the 9/11 attacks. "America's chickens are coming home to roost," Wright said. Obama was so close with Wright that the Democrat took the title of his 2006 book, "The Audacity of Hope," from one of the pastor's sermons.

Republican Mitt Romney was the other example. The former Massachusetts governor had struggled to address concerns about being Mormon despite a major faith-and-values speech in 2007 in Texas.

He quoted the New Testament and declared his belief in Jesus. (Many Christian denominations don't consider Mormons to be Christian.) He commended the deep faith of the Founding Fathers and decried secularism. And like Kennedy, he promised that "no authorities of my church, or of any other church for that matter, will ever exert influence on presidential decisions." Yet, polls continued to show an unwillingness to vote for a Mormon, especially among white evangelicals, who form a large segment of the GOP.

"That speech probably drew more attention to his Mormonism than it was worth," said Ed Kilgore, a former policy director at the centrist Democratic Leadership Council who oversaw programs that urged Democrats to talk about the values behind their policies. "It raised a lot of questions and didn't really resolve them."

Romney is once again seeking the GOP presidential nomination. He has barely discussed his religion so far.

Politicians like to quip that they're not running for theologian in chief. Still, they face increasingly complex questions on doctrine — prompted in many cases by their own attempts at highlighting their faith.
Click here to read the rest of this insightful Yahoo! News article if you wish.

The legacy of Mormonism embodied in its historic belief of being "the only true church" on the planet, well established hierarchy of unquestionable spiritual authority and the social elitism it engenders can't be easily obscured with a public relations campaign that tries too hard to make Mormons look like everyone else. Mormons long considered themselves a "peculiar people" (in keeping with their cultic passion for exclusivism and spiritual dominance over the Gentiles when they felt they could assert it) and now unhappily find that Western cultural pluralism has a long memory. When the recent grotesquerie of present day Mormon fundamentalism became more exposed, uglier memories have been revitalized. The convicted sexual deviant and former FLDS patriarch Warren Jeffs actually is more faithful to the true and randy spirit of the religion as preached and practiced by its founder Joseph Smith, Brigham Young and others. This has also not been forgotten very easily lately, either - especially with LDS activism against homosexuality and abortion as visible as it has been.

So it actually would NOT serve the First Presidency of the Latter Day Saints for attention to be brought to their antichristian doctrines, practices and rituals at a time when they don't really seem to know whether they want to remain apart from society or a part of it.

But hey, let's do it.

When Being a False Prophet Can Be A Drag

2011-08-31T08:13:00.003-04:00

You know it's hard being a false prophet nowadays. No, really, even though you sleep in great beds, command doting and mindless obedience of your own personal culture centered around what matters to you, have oodles of cash and can control people absolutely down to how many of them will have sex with you or how loud they will shout when you show up for the mandatory mass meetings they and your band of disciples will gleefully attend.

Not all that glitters is gold, however ..

Beyond all of those temporal joys, it's just a never ending drip-drip-drip of all of that pressure of indoctrinating and controlling your inner circle, dealing with the heathen outside your power who haven't been wiped out by the God you say you exclusively represent, thinking up new ways to speak for the Almighty using the same old dribble you say was His Word, paying high power lawyers to keep your critics at bay, and all of that micromanagement of your followers' lives .. basta!

To be perfectly honest, I'm not aware of any insurance companies that provide coverage to the mystics, avatars and pillars of spiritual power who just so happen to be also degenerate apostate wolves in sheep's clothing. I don't know how you'd even underwrite something like that, but many of the same characters could certainly afford whatever premiums a company could demand for them. Can you imagine being a customer service representative for a company devoted to that kind of work? I wonder how Flo or Erin might do talking to Gwen Shamblin about the claims she might want to make about the nasty turns of events she's had to face the past several years. Boy, it would be great to hear the recording of THAT kind of conversation .. for quality control purposes, of course, you understand. I wonder what kind of things her adjusters would have to do .. oy ve.

Things ultimately don't go the way false prophets like .. even after all of their demagoguery, they will Face The Music sooner or later. Lately, it's been Sooner ..

Warren Jeffs, the FLDS "prophet" and Mormon polygamous sexual deviant isn't doing too well as he serves hard time in a Big House for his Big Love. Nor is Harold Camping, the radio broadcaster who has prophesied the end of the world twice and now is awaiting his third prophecy of The End in a nursing home after a stroke. The annoying and troublesome impact of mortality caught up with New Age mystic Elizabeth Clare Prophet finally just a few years ago. And little god Paula White's ongoing "new season" as she steps into her Destiny involves even more lawyers.

It's not easy being a tool of Satan, I guess. But the fringe benefits in this world do a soul a lot of good, don't they?

Cultism And Fear: The Watchtower's Joy In Human Misery

2011-06-26T13:37:00.004-04:00

Cultic movements aren't terribly creative, just diabolically clever at using the same old basic elements found in human nature and social group dynamics in an infinate number of ways to recruit, deceive and enslave their followers. In our latest and by no means final article on the Franklin, Tennessee cult calling itself Remnant fellowship, we took a long hard look at the basic premise behind its chief claims to "Christian weight loss" and have long seen that it is fear that motivates its members and not faith.

Fear is a horrible thing to live under and the testimony of cult members who have left places like Remnant and others all universally attest to this. The underlying dynamic of dread, horror and anxiety that they indoctrinate their followers in can and does profoundly and often irrevocably affect them in many adverse ways. It paints the world and reality in frightening colors that cause them to shrink from it, to shun it and to abandon their hearts and minds completely to the worldview the cult they've joined demands they embrace. It more insidiously weighs them down with a view of themselves as people incapable of thinking or believing for themselves apart from a complete reliance upon some prophetic authority figure or organization to dictate to them how to live and think, how they can feel approved or holy, how they might be "saved."

This is one of the reasons why cultic movements are societal scourges whose legacies are ultimately some of the most hideous of evils in our world today. "Spiritual direction" such as these groups "suggest" is irresistible when the fears they've indoctrinated their followers to be vulnerable too, "direction" that often plays upon their purely human weaknesses and frailities. It compels them to shed personal goals and self-esteem as casually as one might pull off dirty socks, to distance or cut-off any longstanding personal relationships out of a perverse zeal, and to generally become completely mind controlled slaves to the ideology their cult preaches as the ultimate truth.

It's then that the truly warped and evil nature of antichristian and antisocial cultism becomes most apparent. When you are convinced that the world is owned by Satan and will be destroyed and that the only ark of safety is under Group X's covering, your thinking will change to an unimaginably relentless black and white way of thinking and your values, your lifestyle choices, your destiny as you are permitted to follow it will change as well. You will learn to enjoy feeling a part of the only "true" people of God on earth and will, inexorably, find yourself settling into a security based upon belief that everyone else is wrong, evil and beyond any worth.

Such is the thinking of the Watchtower Society, a classic case of cultic misanthropy on a towering scale that has spanned the globe for over a century via its Jehovah's Witness constituency using its phobic preaching of its own false prophesies and false gospel. This outstanding new video created by an ex-Jehovah's Witness so completely demonstrates how cultism's usage of fear will lead compassionate people into becoming merchants of fearmongering who actually gain pleasure in the horrors of life in our fallen world.

The dry, trenchant observations made in this video about the fear mongering and joy in human misery found among many Jehovah's Witnesses can be found easily in places like Remnant Fellowship .. or, sadly, too many churches around us.

Standing On The Promises Of God - Remnant Moles, Pay Attention

2011-04-14T00:13:00.001-04:00

The cultic movement Remnant Fellowship has had a long standing objection with my assessments of their religion, culture and leadership as being cultic, antichristian, abusive and manipulative. That is fully understandable when one realizes that spiritual darkness hates it when Biblical light is being shed on it. Their contentions with me over the past years are as legion as the devils that I believe infest their fellowship, as are the conflicts many other cults passionately commit themselves to in efforts to silence dissent and intimidate those who would call them to account. For a bit of information on some of these, check out this link and this link.

My point here is simply that my struggle is far from being the only one. Cults across the nation are suing those who have criticized them with litigation in many another court room.

It is silence on their evil doings that enables cults to achieve the societal disruption and spiritual deception they wreak .. with the church herself being their chief target. We've said it here before and will say it again: Jesus said it would be this way:

For there shall arise false Christs, and false prophets, and shall shew great signs and wonders; insomuch that, if it were possible, they shall deceive the very elect. Behold, I have told you before. Wherefore if they shall say unto you, Behold, he is in the desert; go not forth: behold, he is in the secret chambers; believe it not.

The Biblical prophecy made here by Jesus Christ Himself is being fulfilled by this cult's very existance and heretical mission. I have found that, unless it directly affects them, however, most people don't care much about these kinds of divine oracles found in God's Word unless its bagged up and processed in some nice neat way to help them prosper or succeed or feel good about themselves. But that's for another post for another time.

That thought always moves me to wonder where all the big mega preachers and religious movers and shakers who abide in Nashville have been during the ascendancy of this cult in their own backyard. Where were all of the silver tongued and fiery day prophets for truth who posture in their element there while Shamblin's Remnant Fellowship and other cults there locally devour those wandering out their back doors? Why does it take a mutt Pentecostal preacher of no standing or church pedigree to be the one to take this stand for truth to the antichrists who Jesus said would come to destroy the flocks of God? Why do I get the tens of thousands of dollars of legal bills while Nashville's pulpit ministry media budgets spend that in barely minutes of air time for yet another banal series about purely church-related issues?

Why? Because God raised us up to stand for truth.

Spiritwatch Ministries is devoted to speaking the truth in love to those who will receive it and to those who do not. And one thing is for sure: I won't be one of those that cults or false teachers mute and we shall not remain silent in exposing the darkness of this present age and if Shamblin et al have chosen to identify what the blacklight of their deception, then they will remain a subject for examination and discernment according to the Scriptures for the defense and proclaiming of the truth of the Christian Faith they choose to distort, pervert and deny.

Say what you will, but God has always told me, personally and verbally, in every time I grapple with error that destroys lives the same words:

".. you stand for me and watch as I stand for you."

And He has sustained me time and again in every battle for His truth that I have joined with and is why I have no fear of man anywhere concerning standing up for it. My freedom of thought, mind, speech and heart will never bow to the tyranny of those who seek to shackle and crush it, much less that which is used to destroy and deceive souls.

So when the continuing efforts by the Remnant cult's leaders Gwen Shamblin and Tedd Anger to intimidate me into silence about their antichristian doings failed again, this time in their fatally flawed attempt in a Tennessee appeals court to overturn the summary judgment I won against them, all I can do now here is smile .. and pray, as well as thank God for my lawyers Phil Anderson and John Belcher and the excellent upholding of First Amendment law in the court decision. Free speech is still alive in Tennessee.

For my God spoke the same thing to me when my lawyer phoned me with the news on the ruling this past week. I stand for the truth as it's known about this odious and toxic sect and both He and the truth have been my defense.

I don't know about the "god" Shamblin and Anger idolatrously serve, but my God lives. His truth is marching on as more of it comes out.

Morality Clauses Still Count? Amazing. The Latest On The Benny Hinn & Paula White ..uh, Incident

2011-03-16T21:35:00.000-04:00

Last July, a rather discomfiting bit of news was raised in the Charismatic and Pentecostal world galaxies when these picture surfaced in the National Enquirer, pictures that very plainly showed charismatic luminaries Benny Hinn and Paula White in a rather intimate setting outside a hotel in Rome. The account suggested they'd had a romantic encounter there and that Hinn had signed in under an assumed name, thus fueling speculation that this was what had indeed happened.

White and Hinn are well known globally for their preaching and teaching ministries and were known to cross paths now and then as they and their fellow "God's Generals" flitted all over the globe espousing fiery preaching of Christianity framed in the prosperity gospel. White had been divorced for some time from her husband Randy, but Hinn's own divorce from his wife Suzanne Hinn had yet to be finalized thus putting them both in a clearly unflattering light.

Both Hinn and White's denials of anything illicit or immoral were vehement and well publicized although coming several days after the reports first surfaced. It didn't convince too many people except those of their faithful followers and supporters who still hung in there with them even to this day. Hinn's assertion that he'd taken White along to Rome as a patron for the Vatican Museum seeking donations from her was categorically denied by the Vatican itself.

In the checkered world of Pentecostal/Charismatic ministerail morality, this is not at all uncommon - as deplorable as it might be, the spin doctoring of the activities of morally questionable preachers usually gets a late start and accounts of their failings are attributed to Satanic "touching of the anointed." Usually, this kind of moral failure is blithely ignored by the questioned, who hope time will quench the fires of investigation, but this time, the wrath of the accountants for Strang Communications, the publishing house that has made millions of dollars off of White and Hinn's writings, was incurred and led to a strange twist that won't let the matter lie. A lawsuit against Hinn was filed by Strang on February 17 for, of all things, Hinn's failure to abide by a morality clause written into a contract they had with him. Click here to read the suit.

Strang's suit invokes their moral turpitude clause which makes clear they expect their writers to embody a certain level of personal morality at the penalty of a cancellation of their contract with them and a return of moneys advanced to them. Ultimately, their beancounters saw how Hinn's behavior would damage their book sales and imperil their market share further in a fiercely competitive industry. They viewed Hinn's dalliance with Paula White even before the divorce ended as objectionable to this narrowly contextualized view of morality but did cite purely financial motivations for even bringing it up. There are hints that Hinn was confronted with a final choice to ante up but that he refused.

It's a faux pas in business. Strang's position is driven by money, in the end.

They could care less about morality, really. As to the Biblical injunction of Matthew 18 fitting here, which compels direct personal interaction of Christians with serious differences with one another, in a perfect world, where Christians really go to church, pray, evangelize, and pour their lives into one another and sacrifice everything for the Gospel while having for every man an answer, yeah, that would be nice.

But as has been alluded to, there is no actual functional spiritual unity based on the relationships of the Spirit within those professing to know Him between the superstars in our Full Gospel firmament and ordinary old Sister Schmoe and Brother Blow attending First Church, Anywhere. People such as Hinn and White live at an exalted level with a coterie of spiritual sycophants with All Access badges behind a phalanx of security people with wires in their ears and have their green rooms everywhere. It's to such people that any "relationship" is seriously extended. Watching Hinn sweep in and sweep out at will his venues without ever actually talking to real people is an act of efficient event management .. not koinonea.

It sure looks good for the cameras though.

This is why I deeply admire Christian pastors who don't participate in such largesse. Watching Chris Moody in my home church and having watched Mitch Maloney, Kelvin Page, John Lombard and other pastors stay at their church's altars ministering to their flocks reminds me that there are still shepherds who truly smell like sheep.

Paul Crouch once famously said he was "accountable only to the Body of Christ" when taken to task about the heretical false teaching that The Bighair Network airs .. but what does that mean? Not a darn thing. These demigods are on another plane .. and I assure you, it ain't higher than us. If Matthew 18 is going to mean anything, it means they'll have learned humility and true submission to the accountability of the Christian congregation they are nominally part of. None of these people, for all of their pulpiteering, know what that means. But boy, it looks great in the latest DVD series.

Back when the story broke, I bought a copy of the 8/2/2010 National Enquirer, which this article was in and dug it out after filing it. It claims Hinn checked into a Hotel Hassler in Rome, which exists, under the name David Solomon and stayed three nights there. The picture of the hotel room is called a "presidential suite" although the hotel's website calls it the "grand deluxe". He was not wearing his wedding ring and looked happy said observers. Hinn was in Rome to meet with Vatican officials for some matter, which he later would say in a crusade in Oakland, California, per Charisma that the Vatican made him a Patron of the Arts and invited him to visit Rome.

He said patrons are asked to find donors to help maintain the Vatican's art collections, and he wanted White to become a donor. "I let her come with me to Rome so she can donate money," Hinn said. "That was stupid on my part. And for that I do ask forgiveness."

Why the Vatican still needs an art collection at a time when churches are closing all over the West due to lack of priests to preside in them and when hundreds of thousands of people suffer horrifically without any help after being abused by the deviants among the said priesthood is beyond me. What's worse is that Hinn and White actually might do such a thing while their own ministries suffer downturns is beyond belief.

I guess their Seasons include supporting an apostate church's grotesque vanity and rank materialism while its slaves suffer. Think about it .. all those millions of people could be giving millions more to help poor old Benny and pitiful little Paula through their Seasons are going to fund the Vatican's dusty museum hallways.

I've been there, done that, got the T-shirt back in 1982. I've walked the Vatican and seen its unbelievable opulence. THEY DON'T NEED ANY MORE ART WORK.

Now Hinn and White are human beings just like you and me. Who would begrudge them the desire for love and companionship? Yet there's a lot to be said about their propriety here and I don't need to go over it. They are not in the position to be dating or looking like they are if Hinn technically isn't divorced .. and how the Hinns split still is strange. What a sad and strange spectacle this all has become. Stay tuned.

How Christians Scandalize Their Church - Thoughts Drawn From The PTL Meltdown 24 Years Ago

2011-03-14T21:28:00.014-04:00

Jim Bakker, sadly, was a pioneer of not only one of the first big TV ministry empires, but of one of the most massive "fails" of all time that millions to this day still have to deal with.

The example of Bakker and the PTL Club's sad implosion exposed a sad pattern for the church that it should have learned from. It also showed that the church seems almost unwilling to learn, setting out to establish that the hero worship of "the anointed" has to be restored at all costs for us to show "Christian restoration" as opposed to true, equitable discipline and accountability.

In the midst of these extreme and obvious examples also proceed the more prosaic but no less tragic failures such as the lamentable fall of ministers all around. And then you have the Juanita Bynum and Thomas Weeks grotesque disconnect as well as the ongoing mutancy of Jimmy Swaggart's renegade work. As well as Pastor B. O. McSnort's extortion from the Big Ugly Church of God of his youth group's donation account money, as well as his youth group leader's wife .. not to mention Paula White and Benny Hinn's dalliance last July in a hotel in Rome when Hinn was not even yet technically divorced from his wife ..

With the ashes of Todd Bentley's sanctification of his adultery by "prophet" Rick Joyner still drifting in the wind, it's obvious that the church still hasn't learned these most crucial lessons of all, which it seems more clueless then not about ..

Our love that covers a multitude of sins isn't something to be used to cover or defend a continuance of them

Our eyes should be entirely focused on Jesus Christ and His concerns first and foremost

Our high esteem of Christian leaders should be tempered with the realization that men/women of God are still in the end, just men/women like you , people with feet of clay who stumble and fall JUST like you .. and who aren't above correction, admonition or removal

Our leaders in the position to address the moral and ethical failures seen among us should be approachable and able to directly address and rein them in

Had all the anonymous people involved in all of those invisible places where the sin and failure had to first have been seen in the lives of so many of our fallen leaders spoke up, life for many of these might be so different. How many people "spoke into the lives" (what a strange expression) of these "fallen generals" to actually deal with the core failings they manifested at some level in their private and public lifestyles?

Sin and the flesh being as carnally suave and deceptive as it is, I realize that such a perspective isn't always able to penetrate the poker faces of those who are confronted. Human nature has an almost limitless ability to rationalize and disguise itself behind open appearances of holiness and orthodoxy - and our trust in what we see is where we miss what our discernment from other sources overrides this. Perhaps it's not possible to head off all of these troubles. But I am certain that SOME of them very likely could have been.

I didn't "see the light" about who God was until 1980 and didn't come to Christ until 1981. I did so with absolutely no connection or attention to TV ministry at all. My encounter was one with the Spirit and the Word and Christian testimony I encountered while joining the Navy. As quickly as new life came to me by my faith in Christ so did offense, carnality, temptation and I almost didn't make it through. Only the grace of God brought me through it all.

I had heard of PTL through my mom, who was saved, and watched a bit of it with her around 1979 but it was completely incomprehensible to me. Really. The God gabbing and God giggling I saw was beyond my ability to grasp. I think one can say this and say that it was just my carnal and pagan side trying to grasp spiritual things. Perhaps that had something to do with it.

But frankly, there was so much of what I saw those one or two times that sounded nothing more than what today we'd call the Christianese that obscures Christian truth and revelation from anyone who might even be casually seeking what Christians put so much attention on. It seemed so much more like a variety TV show having fun and games with an audience waiting to get the punch line. Then I watched a couple of TV specials around that same time by ABC's 20/20 and CBS's 60 Minutes that pioneered what would become the standard liberal media bias and focus when it came to the then emerging "Religious Right."

Each show interviewed evangelical leaders and critics and framed their responses the way they wanted to by using seamless editing. Between shots of giant Jesus rallies and soundstages, they intrepidly followed ministry money, fund raising and bill paying, dug up improprieties, made their conclusions. And then they interviewed bright eyed followers and got sound bites from them which made them look like brainless sheep blindly following dynamic, fire breathing Furies who happened to be "televangelists" pioneering "pray TV." It became obvious to me that the TV programs were more aimed at showing what kind of Elmer Gantryesque shysters the TV producers wanted their viewers to perceive PTL et al as. And even then, while an unbeliever, I saw the attack dog approach and was turned off by the press' inexplicable hostility, driven by their own agenda dedicated to the defense of their gods.

I guess what's important is that the effect of both of these media convergences in my pre-Christian pagan mindset is that I just steered completely away from watching any Christian TV at all .. that, I think, probably saved me from a lot of subsequent confusion when 3 years later in 1983 after discharge from the Navy, I had little to do with Christian TV when I started going to church every time the doors were open.

Aside from viewing "The John Ankerberg Show", which I found to be the most stimulating 30 minutes of Christian TV I caught regularly from August 1983 onward, I just didn't care to watch Jimmy Swaggart's telecast, the "700 Club" or the PTL Network's shticks. My discipling focus never got hung up on the media - it stayed on my knees, before Scripture, alone with God and in community at church, meeting with believers and witnessing to whom ever.

I am certain there was a lot of blessing that came out of the Christian community that was attracted to the PTL empire and I think the motives and intentions of all were initially pure. But the need for money to finance silly dreams that had little connection to the urgent reality of the need to evangelize and disciple people in obedience to Christ's Great commission is what destroyed Jim Bakker and the PTL Club.

And I raise my own personal recollections of those times because, I remember one exchange on 20/20 back then with Bakker that I think said a lot about what I'm talking about in regards to accountability and correction. Bakker was confronted with the fact that back around 1979, he'd started a fund raiser on his show specifically to finance the construction and creation of a TV station somewhere outside the U.S., collected a huge chunk of cash, and then instead diverted it to PTL general operations. He was leaving viewers to believe that their giving was going to this project instead. 20/20 apparently found someone who had records to corroborate this rather unbelievable state of affairs, confronted Bakker with it on camera, and he flat out admitted to it, as well as stating explicitly that PTL had engaged in dereliction of their duties.

My point is that while dirt may have been dug up on PTL, PTL should never have created the dirt to begin with.

What I come away from in reading and research into the PTL fall, since having become a maturer Christian then I was in 1983, is that this pattern of evasion, covering and rationalizing that PTL freely engaged in is something far more dug into Christian culture then is believable. But it happened. God alone knows how many other such matters on so many other levels took place. Bakker's book "I Was Wrong" doesn't really begin to touch this, although his candor is helpful.

His marriage with Tammy Faye seemed to go askew around 1978-1979 .. and it was then, around 1980 that a Jessica Hahn crossed paths with him, thanks to the "ministry" of a John Wesley Fletcher. That fundamental issue should have rung peals of church bell alarms for EVERYONE at PTL at that time. But the circus went on, and the Bakkers continued to act like everything was AOK.

But again, my point is simply that Christian history seems to infer that when Christians are in the position to speak up and confront the failings of our own leaders and do not do so, the subsequent fall from grace will take so many others down with it then need to go with them. As I said, perhaps it's foolish to expect that we can stop everything and keep the Body of Christ from suffering the reproach it does.

I just cannot shake the feeling that there's more that can be done then we do .. and do not because we want to be politically correct.

The Lack Of Faith In Rome Is Disturbing: The Pope On Protestant Resistance As Futile

2011-02-10T15:08:00.009-05:00

Like never before in the past twenty years, the apologists and faithful within Roman Catholicism have striven for the high road in enjoining Protestants to fellowship and dialogue with them. Hoping to engage them on their "faith journeys," these zealous folk have appealed not only to Protestants of all stripes but to lapsed Roman Catholics who have left the church in an earnest effort to bring them "home" to the fold of Rome. Media campaigns and interfaith initiatives abound from many religious groups from the Bahai to the United Methodist Church to the so-called "Church" of Scientology and these efforts are just one more voice in the marketplace that spirituality in the last days has become.

What is not easily recognized is how long Roman Catholicism has used the efforts of people of every Christian persuasion as a way to do an end run around Protestantism's distinctives, trying to show how such division is an affront to Christ and that to continue to maintain them is so, well, "unchristian." Since 1935, joint efforts by ecumenicists in the Anglican Church and by Roman Catholic leadership have resulted in an interfaith initiative called the Week Of Prayer For Christian Unity which the Papacy has seized on with great zeal over the past fifty years since the end of World War II. The 2011 edition of this weeklong emphasis was summarized on the Catholic Culture website, to wit:

At a January 25 Vespers service closing the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, Pope Benedict XVI said that ecumenical work is a “moral imperative” for all Christians.

The Holy Father reminded the congregation at the basilica of St. Paul-outside-the-Walls that Jesus prayed for unity among the faithful. That unity, he said, “cannot be reduced to recognizing our reciprocal differences and achieving peaceful coexistence.” The followers of Christ cannot be satisfied until they have achieved full communion, he said.

True Christian unity, the Pope continued, “cannot be realized only at the level of organizational structures,” but must be forged among the faithful, “confessing the one faith, celebrating divine worship in common, and keeping the fraternal harmony of the family of God.”

You can hear a Vatican media report on the "encouraging convergence" of "Christian unity" by clicking here (requires a Real Player)

Hence, the papal demand to unceasingly press for a common "confession" and a "divine worship" as a moral imperative that Jesus prayed for is actually a veiled call for Protestants to cease their resistance and refusal to acknowledge Rome's supremacy. Roman Catholicism has historically called curses in the name of God upon anyone who doesn't toe its line and submit to its authority and until the Papacy recognizes and apologizes to Christian conscience itself for engaging in such blood thirsty fulmination, any discussion of "unity" with Rome is little more than hot air. Renouncing the anathemas called down upon Protestants at the Roman Catholic Council of Trent would be a nice place to start but it hasn't happened. So for a variety of dunder headed Protestant ministers and theologians to go for a ride with Roman Catholic figures working to turn their movements into subjects of Rome again is just one of the many signs that the apostasy of the last days, the "mystery of iniquity doth already work."

In a day in which the faith which Christ preached, died and rose again for is continually revisioned as being the exclusive province of Church A or Church B, it is not difficult to see just how much the Catholic Church has become another multinational organization fighting for market share in a deathmatch with the encroaching influences of Evangelical and Protestant missions efforts confronting it globally. Catholicism has long found itself under siege on all religious fronts, finding its priesthood, polity, tradition and rigid obedience to the Papacy increasingly tuned out by more and more Roman Catholics itself, let alone those outside it's fold.

Interestingly, for all of its labors, it would seem that Mother Rome isn't finding much success for its fruit: in the National Councll of Churches' annual Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches, we find that the cultic Mormon Church and the Pentecostal movement the Assemblies of God enjoyed almost the exact rate of growth in the United States in 2009 as the Roman Catholic church itself did. For such radically missionary and evangelistically oriented movements to set forth such sluggish growth rates, however, raises far more questions than answers about the advance of Christianity in the last days - namely what Christianity is being seen as in America, and why movements supposedly energized by the Spirit of God barely are keeping ahead of U.S. population growth of 0.9 %.

An excellent article on the heavyhandedness of Roman Catholicism's attempt to define Christianity by it's own monolithic denominational self-identity make itself the chief deserves some consideration. You see, the whole point of an apostasy is to fall away from the original pattern of belief or faith and Roman Catholicism, being the corrupt and apostate church that it has become by abandoning Biblical faith, is surely one of the greatest leaders of apostacy today.

Why is Roman Catholicism unbiblical? Click here to read why from one powerful voice, who, while long gone, still speaks today.

Being Unmutual .. Continued

2011-02-08T21:15:00.002-05:00

The LDS Church's historically smothering conservatism has been preserved by the power of Mormon groupthink that binds its members together in a culture completely given over to the exaltation of the church's authority, obedience to its dictates and a supreme control of member's behaviors by ritual, sexism and unbiblical doctrine. Beginning with its missionary zeal to bring the world under the subjection to its

There have always been malcontents, nonconformists and noted apostates who have left the church's fold out of conscience sake, having found it's hypocrisy, smothering of objective truth and exclusivism at odds with a more sober and humble view of reality. Millions more have stayed within it, swallowing their objections, and one ex-Mormon's views on the future of a cultic church movement filled with such vast tension with itself are more insight on what it costs to be unmutual .. this is from my friend Eric Kettunen's "Recovery From Mormonism" site":

I expect to see a polarization within Mormonism quickly develop. The vast majority of the old guard do not have the perspective to recognize that their worldview is deficient, and will not be prepared to absorb the information required to see that they may be a problem, so their behavior will not change. The real battle for hearts and minds will occur in the generation that is now under 30 years of age, and even more importantly, for their children. Some will stay with their parents’ paradigm and others will either leave Mormonism or radically redefine the role of religion in their lives. ...

The Mormon institutional structure should be expected to remain largely unchanged due to its paralyzingly conservative decision making mechanism. All significant changes must be unanimously approved by the 15 top leaders, all of whom are old and male. .. However, an increasing degree of individual flexibility will be permitted to members as a matter of practical necessity as Stake Presidents and Bishops are faced with more and more people like me.

As I was told, it does not matter what I believed as long as I keep my mouth shut and so didn’t disturb the orthodoxy of others. As long as I kept that rule, I was free to participate on whatever terms I choose. This approach has become common, and will lead increasing numbers of Mormons to lead double lives. They will attend at least some Mormon services and often hold responsible leadership positions while participating anonymously on Internet bulletin boards and email lists where they can express their real beliefs and develop a sense of community with others and clarity of self perception that can only be achieved within this mode of expression.

This will cause increasing numbers of Mormons to justifying lying (or such creative use of language that the difference between it and lying is immaterial) during temple recommend interviews when asked to confirm their beliefs. It will cause increasing number of Mormon young people to enter a baffling world of grey as they begin to understand their parents’ ambivalent position regarding religious belief, practise, what it means to keep a promise and answers questions honestly, etc. This should be expected to cause a continued erosion Mormon community’s moral fabric.

On a lighter note, these same forces will continue to cause ironies like currently serving Mormon Bishops who consult with people like me regarding how they should counsel faithful Mormons about issues related to sexual morality, sexual practises within marriage, masturbation, whether young people or mature couples should serve missions, etc. These Bishops tell me that they don’t dare discuss these questions with their Stake Presidents or other Mormon file leaders because they are out of touch with the reality related to these issues, and in any event discussions of that kind would require the revelation of the Bishop’s heterodox beliefs. Bishops of this kind are usually closet heretics who believe that they can do more good “from the inside” walking what one such man eloquently labeled the “path of inner darkness”, then they can from the outside. Read more of a truly prophetic tale here.

There are untold millions of stories in the Cultworld; this has been just one of them. At least a few more will follow ..

Being Unmutual - What It's Like When You Think For Yourself In Cultic Organizations

2011-02-07T01:26:00.001-05:00

One of my favorite TV shows is the iconic 1967 series "The Prisoner," created and starring the late Patrick McGoohan. I've been a fan since it was shown as a summer series fill in on CBS in 1969. For those of you who never tuned in, the drama revolves around the struggle of a top secret agent to resist the surreal interrogation he is subjected to after being spirited away to a Kafkaesque town called the Village. The Village is populated by other agents who have been captured and broken by its' sophisticated technological and psychological coercion as secret information is ruthlessly stripped from them by their unidentifiable captors and become unwitting instruments they use to compel McGoohan's character to give in to them. He is given a new name and identity, Number Six, and told to answer their questions or be prepared to live the rest of his life there under the threat of having it extracted from them in mind and personality shattering ways.

The whole series' fascinating premise pits Number Six's steadfast resistance against the Village's totalist social milieux as programmed by a variety of Number Twos, men and women who are effectively the warders of the Village who want to get him to talk. It's a great show and perhaps the most innovative and disturbing television series of all time .. and a reverie from it shows indeed how art often can only slickly approximate the all too horrific and real life drama that goes in our world today when the freedom of conscience is challenged.

In one episode, Number Six's resistance to the Village's social order results in him being labelled "unmutual," which is the ultimate anathema that can be pronounced on a Village resident. He is accused of defying the Village's groupthink perspective so disruptively that it destroys social cohesion and harbors a destructive subversion of it's overwhelmingly conformist status quo. He is then forced to choose between submission to their demand or a complete frontal lobotomy of his brain itself. When the whole community physically attacks him and drags him off to a hospital for this to be done, the drama is one of the most terrifyingly unnerving paroxysms of violence in the whole series, because it is done with such faultless civility so as to save the Village from the spread of antisocial "unmutuality."

To harbor such attitudes is also the unforgiveable sin in cultic movements of all persuasions. This is where cultism itself becomes most observable - when no other worldview or valid perspective other than that which is rigidly adhered to be a given organization at the pain of drastically punitive and manipulative social sanctions - anything from being labelled a tool of Satan publically to having one's wife completely abandon you for thinking differently from the authoritarian leadership she and you looked up to.

We'll be looking at examples of what this kind of "sin" looks like in the next few posts .. such as this profoundly disturbing snapshots which you can read at in full in the links for each one ..

In the beginning the church put very few restraints on me and everyone seemed so on fire for God and radical in their devotion. Slowly over time I started to see that what was presented to me in the beginning was dramatically different from what I found myself dedicated and committed to in the end. I found that being a member in good standing was dependent upon unquestioning submission with the church's headship, vision, teachings, and doctrines.

By the time I had a clear understanding of what The Fellowship believed and practiced I felt trapped. I saw no way out short of loosing my friends and living under the curses the church places on ex-members. Read more here.

How does "unmutuality" get addressed? Here's the nice, sanitized version that sounds so pious it seems scandalous to fault it: but the implications are chillingly clear ... this is a quote from the an unofficial Unification Church website that can't be accessed without creating an account with it to access it's writings ..

We need to recognize our wrong/negative thinking habits and reprogram ourselves with correct/positive thinking habits. Let's start with grateful thinking and a habit of report prayer when we can confess and repent and make new determination at the end of each day. That will help us avoid a vicious cycle of self-accusation "guilt-tripping" that saps our spiritual energy and pulls us into depression and despair.

Read more here if you want to sign in to look for the complete article.

More to follow ..

When An Educator's Faith Becomes An Messy Issue

2011-02-06T00:00:00.000-05:00

Ah, the great enterprise of academic scientific inquiry just isn't what is used to be these days.

At one time, Western science's post-Enlightenment "tolerance" of religion among it's practitioners was more or less an uneasy truce that juggled materialistic skepticism and metaphysical wonder freely. With the rise of radically atheistic humanism in the last century or so, the stakes have now considerably changed with naturalism clearly the most dominant line of reasoning, a perspective firmly rejecting the supernatural or metaphysical from any serious consideration in its theorizing. Never mind that it's psuedo scientific theories on the universe's origins following evolutionary lines are easily as bizarre a tale as any they might harangue others about, namely, those who feel God created the universe and man.

So once you consider these are the Biblically foretold last days when most of our repositors of empirical discovery are also those who "did not like to retain God in their knowledge" (Roman 1:28), is it any wonder that a Christian professor finds himself told to get with the program? Nah. That's what University of Texas educator and researcher Dr. C.R. Haskell had the unmitigated temerity to do: he missed the memo circulating among his fellow astronomers and physicists that retaining this incovenient theistic belief could short circuit your career path. He just happened to get asked about his faith when seeking to become employed at the University of Kentucky by those interviewing him, which, after confirming his unfortunate bent towards Christianity, became too much to handle and very likely resulted to his being passed over for a job he seemed qualified for.

It's yet another all too familiar tale of how secular institutional bigotry, paid for by millions of tax dollars collected from Kentuckians who are largely Evangelical, gets a free ride at the expense of one man's conscience. Even an anti-creationist screed, in reporting on the affair, couldn't ruffle it's righteous feathers enough to cover up the UK's intolerance. It's all just another dispatch from the apostacy .. any surprise is clearly coincedental.

Proverbial Example Department Part 47: How Cults Use The Media - an open letter to KDVR, Denver, Colorado

2011-02-05T11:47:00.006-05:00

To whomever this will concern:

In 2007, the Fox News Network did a piece, through the "Geraldo At Large" show on January 9, 2007, casting some perspective on the activity of a abusive and cultic movement in Tennessee which I have become too familiar with. I am a Christian minister here who has tried to aid those affected by its activity for several years. This movement is called Remnant Fellowship and uses it's self proclaimed "prophet" and founder Gwen Shamblin's "faith based" diet program called the Weigh Down Workshop as a recuiting tool. It has caused untold amounts of disruption in marriages and families and preaches a message that essentially asserts that excess weight is the equivalent of moral failure with a religion based upon this principle finding expression in the Remnant movement.You may watch this brief report as aired in 2007 here.

It is being reported on the Weigh Down Workshop website as I type that Gwen Shamblin and her local cadre of disciples in Colorado are going to be featured not once but twice on the Fox affiate KDVR's "Good Morning Colorado" show on the morning of February 4, 2011. If this is true, several questions and observations have to be both asked and made:

Is it really too much to expect that due diligence into uncovering the questionable background of a controversial figure like Gwen Shamblin might be done by a news agency before rushing ahead to publicize her imbalanced work?

Does the word "google" mean anything to your producers who are going to be giving Shamblin and her local group in Colorado free air time?

It is difficult to believe that they could have missed the innumerable warning on a variety of Internet news and perspective sites that show how abusive this cult's teaching and practice has been. Can a news organization really be so crass as to give publicity to a cultic movement it criticized 4 years previously for the sake of Arbitron ratings?

The bling truly is the thing, as has been said .. and this can be seen so clearly in reference to Shamblin's publicity tours in recent years.

Now, I just don't get it. You hope to see socially responsible broadcast journalism now and then. But the KDVR Fox organization completely fails to realize how its' dalliance with faith based weight loss is actually part of a cunningly executed gambit by a cultic movement. It's been used to get free press for the recruitment drive of a dangerous cult that its' parent network exposed a few years ago.

Thanks to KDVR, scores of vulnerable people ill equipped to discern the seductive deception of this group's claims to "permanent weight loss" will be fully exposed to it's siren song. I have tried to help at least three different families in your state impacted by this group there and thanks to you, the very real possibility is coming that more will be soon be calling.

Here's another word for you, KDVR: how does it feel to be completely "pwned" by a cult?

Your organization can still stop these appearances tommorrow morning. That would be swell. However, I don't know if your skeleton crew will be awake enough to check this inbox, much less get it to whoever is in charge that gives a hoot about stuff like journalistic integrity so early in a cold winter morning on a Friday. But who knows, maybe you will?

A lot of people in Colorado will be watching that I personally know. Make us proud.

Cordially, Rev. Rafael D Martinez, Director, Spiritwatch Ministries

**********

This the text of an email that was sent to KDVR. So far, no response. I honestly didn't expect one, but as my grandpa always liked to say "uno nunca sabe .. "

It goes to show you that heresy and deception still always loves company .. and bully pulpits.

It's Not Unusual: Atheists Masquerading As Pastors, No Biggy

2011-01-30T17:01:00.000-05:00

He was indeed--in a Baptist seminary!--a specimen of the "young man ruined by godless education" whom the Baptist periodicals loved to paint.

But he stayed.

He clung to the church. It was his land, his patriotism. Nebulously and quite unpractically and altogether miserably he planned to give his life to a project called "liberalizing the church from within."

It was a relief after his sophistries to have so lively an emotion as his sweet, clear, resounding hatred for Brother Elmer Gantry.

One of the sad realities of the day is that the institutions we look to for stability and grounding in our morally bankrupt era are often just as shot through with the uncertainty and corruption that we hope to find refuge from. Children often find parents to be horribly petty and abusive. Schools often become havens of incompetence, bullying and godless humanism. Taxpayers behold governments they're told to trust rife with corruption and favoritism. Situations as diverse as major league baseball's steroid scandals to politicians on the take abound.

Everywhere you look, things are sometimes not always what they seem.

Of course, life doesn't imitate art as much as art patterns itself after it. Popular literature feasts on this when it comes to depicting how the faithful lose their faith. The unforgettable catechism apostate seminary professor Dr. Bruno Zechlin gave to divinity student Frank Shallard in Sinclair Lewis' savage screed Elmer Gantry is a bygone generation's serialization of such a thing, while the bizarre hunt to punish God in Preacher Jesse Custer's quest in the profane "Preacher" graphic novels occupies the attentions of today's twenty and thirtysomethings. All of the passion concerning losing religion that these literary works express are eloquently echoed by more mainstream works such as Dan Barker's "Losing Faith in Faith" and a library of other such books as produced by atheist organizations. Atheists in Western society today are seeking and finding like never before vast audiences among many formerly "religious" people that strike a chord with their own inexorable slide into disillusionment, apostasy and then disengagement from any connection to religious faith. This cottage industry, with figures like Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins holding court from late night TV soundstages to book signings attracting thousands, has been reenergized and seeks more air time, so the more imitation it can do, the better.

Losing faith, in the still religious West, is increasingly viewed as a great human interest perspective that always gets readers and viewers looking for its depiction and description. In today's confusing times, where dogmafights turn off so many, the freedom to express such irrationality publicly in places where it might influence othes is of course a scandalous faux pas of social convention. People of faith, of course, are amazed at such audacity and help the ratings of the media keep on keeping on.

So when ABC last November decided to air a news segment on the apostacy of two U.S. ministers give up their faith anonymously so as to keep their pastoral jobs, in the same vein of a Custer or Shallard, we took notice. Of course, ministerial apostacy on the job isn't unknown but their desire to keep it hidden by not wanting to lose their livelihood is certainly well understood. What's equally noteworthy is when we find that sometimes the parishioners who've submitted themselves to such men actually can find it within themselves to applaud their stand. Incredible but true, this 2003 article details such a thing. I certainly don't think the 2 preachers above would find such support in the Bible belt where they seemed to operating from.

Got a while to spend here? .. check out the Frank Turek and Christopher Hitchens debate on the existence of God. The comments on the video are almost as interesting as the video itself.

Why "Good People" Really Aren't As "Good" As They Might Be ..

2010-06-06T13:08:00.006-04:00

One of the most perplexing yet predictable foibles of human behavior is to behold seemingly "good" people do some very bad things, and quite often, under the guise of high ethical, moral and religious idealism. This is at the heart of cultic social order as well as the foul springs of human nature itself. People who in all other respects appear to be upright and impeccable in character are often turn out to be characters of a darker nature then ever suspected. This is what true depravity is, the sullied and evil bent within us all that makes all in need of a Savior.

It's what we do in the light of that need of a Savior that makes the difference. False religions, cults and the philosophies of a thousand

It is a personal relationship with Jesus Christ alone that will bring anyone into a position where His Spirit transforms them. Only the righteousness and purity of the sacrifice at the Cross of Christ can ever truly change anyone. Out of such literally saving grace, any man or woman wanting real change in their lives is empowered to actually see it come to pass - as God Himself truly intervenes to do so. Those who seek to live seemingly blameless lives any other way outside of knowing Jesus ultimately find that they are truly, as the old song says, "lost and undone, without God and His Son .."

So it's inevitable in our amoral world that you'll find people who profess to know this grace and who instead are following a code of conduct find themselves in company with completely secularized and irreligious people when it comes to not being as "good" as they seem to be. It's that fallen side of humanity that reigns supreme in the human condition today, that part of us all that is drawn to pursue our self-centered good even if it comes at the expense of others. Being creatures of supreme self-justification, we even rationalize away those troublesome moral dilemmas our selfishness evokes with the pious thought that "it's for their good .. we're just speaking the truth .. they'll learn to appreciate this .."

This is what's behind the mindset that drives people who engage in unethical, immoral and even unspeakable acts of social savagery that can wreak havoc in the hearts and minds of those who are its subjects. Mentioned only briefly in the news, this bit of insight into the darkness of the human condition needs to be considered far more squarely than it is. It says much about the dire state of our society if left to itself when the issues of power, authority and control over people come to the forefront.

You can review a 2008 CNN news video on the research done into this, as well as a CBS "60 Minutes" broadcast from the mid 1990's that provides fascinating and chilling perspective on how "good people" can act out so badly.

Slouching Toward Gommorrah, Part 1,890 - Lesbian Bishop Now Ordained And The Gay Rights Agenda Moves On

2010-05-15T13:13:00.007-04:00

Homosexuality is a common human condition. It's same sex attraction, along with all of the culture that supports and condones it are impulses and social constructs that the Bible views as sinful conditions that people choose to embrace out of any one of a thousand reasons. There are those who argue that this is a genetic issue and that homosexuality is a genetic predisposition, and there are those who religiously argue that God made homosexuals to be homosexual, in complete contradiction to the plain Biblical view that God fashioned humanity to follow two sexes.

It took the fall of man in the Garden of Eden and the estrangement of humanity from His Lordship over them to ultimately result in the development of same-sex culture, in which men are attracted to men and women to women and who seek to create a distorted revisioning of what human relationships and sexuality should be.

It's taken the last two hundred years of secular humanism's uber-tolerance for any "alternative lifestyle" as equally valid to the other to fully blossom in human consciousness in the West and the last fifty to see homosexual culture come out of what it calls "the closet" and boldly, shamelessly claim to be just as normative as heterosexuality. Taking cues from the civil rights movement, gay rights activism now engages us with sophisticated, emotional and zealous challenges to view it as a condition that deserves the same kind of legal protection as the rights of women and minorities. Much of Western society has fully embraced this warped mindset that flies in the face of the Bible's teachings on homosexuality and now view narrowly those who feel otherwise as intolerant "homophobes."

Along with this cultural cooption of every known human institution to support and nourish the homosexual lifestyle came a full blown abandonment of Biblical fidelity by a variety of mainstream Protestant denominations, one being the Episcopal Church in America. It's just another sign of the end time apostacy, one that shouldn't surprise anyone, and something that no one today - except the gay friendly press and culture - will take any note of because it's now so common. Today, in Los Angeles, a female Episcopal bishop will ordain another female Episcopal priest to the bishopric, one who is openly gay and has had a partner since 1988. This is the same branch of the Episcopal Church in America whose first openly gay bishop, Gene Robinson, informed us that Paul's condemnation of homosexuality in Romans 1 was not directed at gays, of course. His discussion of this passage resonates with the gay religious agenda today:

We have to understand that the notion of a homosexual sexual orientation is a notion that’s only about 125 years old.“That is to say, St. Paul was talking about people that he understood to be heterosexual engaging in same-sex acts," said Bishop Robinson. "It never occurred to anyone in ancient times that a certain minority of us would be born being affectionally oriented to people of the same sex. So it did seem like against their nature to be doing so.”

With the plain thrust of the Bible thus brushed aside, it's no wonder that such advances that homosexuality has made in the world have achieved the change of public opinion as they have. Such a shift of Western culture wasn't lost on the founder of the largest gay church movement in the U.S., one time Pentecostal preacher Troy Perry. What Biblically-informed Christians would call his "fall" as he fully embraced homosexuality while pastoring a Pentecostal church is seen by him just a bit different than they do. Many Christians ask if he could have been "restored" if only something "different" had been done for him when he openly turned to homosexuality in 1963. Of course he could have .. but as far as Perry was concerned, there wasn't a problem to begin with. He'd embraced the view that God created him to be homosexual. How can you begin to bring restoration to anyone who hasn't even come to any perception of how fallen they are? How do you lift someone up who stands in the muck of their sin and narrowly looks back at you to say "God made me this way and God don't make junk!"

I own an unexpurgated copy of Perry's autobiography and after reading his account of those years, I wanted to take a shower afterwards. Without getting any more lurid than the truth already is, Perry defiantly relates to how he evangelized in Alabama as a Church of God preacher while simultaneously engaging in "pleasant sexual interludes" characterized as "tender exploration" without a glimmer of regret. He continued in his folly even while taking a piano playing wife and dutifully fathering two children. His only regrets seemed to be that he got caught and that he never was "true to himself" and separated from his wife by telling her "The time has come for me stand up and find me. I've got to know who I am." In fact, after drafted into the Army in 1965, the only "fear of God" you see in Perry was his terror that he might be struck dead on the spot in a gay bar in Hollywood for DRINKING BEER. That says much about where his skewed morality had gone.

I will be the first to admit that he very likely was treated like trash by the Church of God overseers who were supposed to help him and who instead gave him the right foot of fellowship. That was very definitely a profound and seriously flawed way to have addressed Perry's problem, but in light of his own self-justifying account, you can see where his heart was. Troy's lust and religiosity were, in his mind, perfectly balanced when he decided God "made him" that way and started to develop his gay theological monstrosity through the founding of the Metropolitan Community Church. I really don't believe he'd have done any differently regardless how the Church of God overseers approached him.

The controversy is endless, much of it generated by gay activists who passionately excoriate and condemn the attempts by the Church today to address the homosexual condition compassionately and Biblically, without immediately resorting to the ferocious hellfire and damnation posturing of past Christian positions. They draw no distinction between those who resist homosexuality on moral grounds and those who just are vicious and hateful people who would torment homosexuals as quickly as anyone else they could bully (painting both groups as "homophobes" guilty of spilling the blood of people like Matthew Shepard). This emotion laden argument easily drowns out those who would still affirm homosexuality to be a perversion of human nature, one no more evil than any other. Gay rights activists now routinely demand the identification and condemnation of these dissenters with a pogram of social, political and personal ostracization as intolerant as the "hating" they want to expose. By pointing out that any and every person with objections to homosexuality use "hate speech" betraying an antisocial "homophobia", the gay rights movement daily advances in culture with little to stop it. With the rise of another clumsily executed pro-gay Presidential agenda foisted upon us by the machinations of the Obama administration and the Democratic control of Washington, things don't appear to be getting any better.

And a Church that should know better slips further into the mud .. just as Jesus said it would.

Seeking to care for and understand homosexual people in a sincere attempt to bring them through reparative therapy is where the best hope for homosexuals lies. The Exodus International movement among others has sought to pioneer this approach, even as radical gay activists try to discredit it by infiltrating ex-gay support groups and programs to do so. They do this, I think, because it has genuinely helped many who sincerely want to know if they can change. Exodus' testimonials of change can't be denied, even if there are those who return to homosexuality itself. Homosexuals can be healed and can be transformed into a uniquely personal new creation, not denying who they themselves are, but by helping them rediscover the connections they need to find to reorienting their passions and drives that have been sexualized by same sex attraction. It's not a wiping out of who they are personally but a healing of the breach within their sexuality that colored their overall direction of life. That is what healing of the homosexual looks like, which Exodus advocates, so courageously champions in the face of an increasingly intolerant culture pro-gay hatred.

What has helped me the most in understanding and trying to deal with how to help homosexuals was the work of Christian therapist Elizabeth Moberly who wrote a great book called "Homosexuality: A New Christian Ethic" that was eye opening. There were 2 talks she gave at the Church of God seminary back in the late 1980's during a conference on the family that I heard that provided profound insights into homosexuality that need to be heard by all Christians desiring to help them. It's changed my views on the subject and I believe her insights, controversial as some may find them, are consistent with Biblical teaching on homosexuality and human nature as well as sound, sensible psychological observation into human behavior. Her book is well worth the find and it is barely even 75 pages long, but outstanding, concise and easy to understand. In short, she advocates the position that "the homosexual condition involves legitimate developmental needs, the fulfillment of which has been blocked by an underlying ambivalence to members of the same sex."

There has been, in her assertion, a trauma or deficit in a homosexual's relationship to their same-sex parent (that can - but not always - involve sexual abuse, emotional distancing, family issues, etc.) that, in their years of puberty and psycho-sexual development, they somehow try to start to work out through sexual and social relationships with the same sex. It's a mind-kinking argument, but I believe it holds the key to helping these tormented men and women.

Sadly, for those who've abandoned whatever restraint they may have had, or who were taught that any concept of such a thing is unhealthy repression, the homosexual culture rolls onward. And the Troy Perrys, Gene Robinsons, Katherine Schoris and Mary Glasspools of the the apostate church of the last days are ready to invoke the Deity in their godspeeds.

Silence Is Golden ... For Cult Groups

2010-05-09T14:08:00.005-04:00

The greatest ally of spiritual tyranny is no different then its secular variety - silence.

The spiritual holocaust of cultism that descends upon and consumes so many daily in societal circles is so mundane, so prevalent and so stitched into the fabric of human life that we've come to accept its uniquely authoritarian grip as just "the way it is." I can think of innumerable times throughout my life before, during and after I became a Christian in 1981 of how many times I've beheld some anonymous outrage, family dysfunction, or incident in the lives of people around me which could be directly attributed to some kind of doctrinal or social extremism that cultism itself has seamlessly blended into their life with. As the old commercial goes, it's as American as mom, apple pie and Chevrolet. No one remembers the tragic example of Kitty Genovese any more - it happens daily all over the nation. Does the name of Derrion Albert ring a bell, the boy beaten to death in Mr. Obama and Ms. Oprah's Chicago ring a bell, the boy whose attack was captured on cell phone video by teenagers who said nothing? Nahh, didn't think so. People nowadays, locked into their own little circles of concern, would rather just look the other way .. but take a picture or two on their Droids to email someone around the corner.

With something so common, you'd think American common sense and our commitment to freedom of conscience might have better equipped the body politic. Nahhh. When the kick to the side of one's spiritual head finally lands and rouses the average victim of cultism to a soul-withering perception of what it has cost them, and reaches out to seek solace, understanding, escape and perspective, they fail miserably. It's for this same reason - there's no help easily found because those who might, could and should help are clueless about what the problem even i. It's because those who could speak out, say something, contend with the horror and withstand it were silent.

Listen to a cult survivor, struggling to ground herself in a balanced reality outside the shadowlands of the cult she left, as they discuss what the consequences of this perpetual silence spell out in no uncertain terms for them:

Telling people that I once was in a cult is like telling people I was born with six fingers or I was abducted by aliens. The reaction is about the same. They look a little confused at first, like maybe they didn’t hear me correctly. Then the looks of disgust (at my being such a freak, I suppose), pity (at my probable insanity), and suspicion (that I have just inadvertently criticized their beliefs) flit across their face as they try to quickly put on their game faces. It is unnerving to say the least.

I probably should not bring the subject up. At all. Ever. But, I have not figured out how to avoid the topic yet. That could be because I am only 29 years old and a very large portion of my adult life (age 19-26) was monopolized by the event. So, there are not very many things to refer to in my adult life outside the circumstances of the cult.

It smarts when I see how people can be so blind to cultism's destructive legacy. But it aches worse when I realize that this is not the way it should be. In any one of a hundred different ways, the vicious twist of cultism that emerges from the warpings of the human spirit could have been unwound, corrected compassionately, smoothed out and made something uplifting. That's where it usually begins .. on the road of good intentions exhibited by people of passion, conviction and vision who became sidetracked onto a darker path. And in any one of an infinite number of ways, in too many places throughout the world, it was never addressed. Those who could have intervened, confronted, checked, influenced this misguided flow of human interaction did not do so. They remained silent. Therein lies the misery of human existence when it comes to cultism.

Those who could say something .. stayed silent.

And the progression of cultism through the most benign and noble of vocations like therapy, leadership and religion became a blitzkrieg of abuse with the nicest of intentions. It all reminds me of the famous poem written by a pastor whose opposition to the rise of Nazism in Germany resulted in his imprisonment in Dachau:

When They Came For Me

by Pastor Martin Niemoller

When the Nazis came for the communists
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.
Then they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
I did not protest;
I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews,
I did not speak out;
I was not a Jew.
When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out for me.

People are people .. if they could remain silent for a Hitler's Germany, they will readily keep muzzled for a Munz, a Shamblin, a Jeffs, a Koresh, a Manson or any other false teacher and leader everwhere else who are every inch, heart and soul, true cult leaders. Yahweh alone knows how many people had the opportunity to intervene and never did. Why, this is America, it is said .. everyone has a right to their opinion. Even if those opinions result in the tragic decimation of families, darkening of their souls and crushing of consciences for the sake of some "new truth" that decides everyone not adhering to it is of "Satan's world."

With such silence by those in the position to change for the good, cultism's bright future is assured as we stroll down the avenues of the end times toward an assured Judgment Day. As my old friend and mentor Paul Carden once said so well,

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for God's people to do nothing.

And we have done just that so well for too long.

Visions Of Glory: A Memory Of Jehovah's WItnesses

2010-04-24T19:39:00.000-04:00

Most Jehovah's Witnesses today simply wouldn't know who the late Barbara Grizzutti Harrison was. Harrison had been a member of their sect who left the Watchtower after a stint of service at it's Brooklyn, New York headquarters many years ago. As in all cultic movements defectors who leave for any reason at all immediately become personae non gratae among their social circles, unwelcome dissidents whose presence would taint their social circles with intolerable examples of independent thought and noncompliance. Cultism's ability to engage in a purging of its culture's collective mindset guarantees that such people are branded as traitorous non-persons whose views and experiences are painted with scarlet letters and who are people who essentially cease to exist among them.

For many people in movements like the Watchtower, it's easy to turn such people into pariahs whose malcontent alone is proof that they are not to be listened to. This helps guarantee that their troubling insights be no longer heard, let alone believed - and that the control of the sect over the hearts and minds of their people is rendered absolute and complete. Matters of conscience mean nothing at this point. However, Barbara's life - as anyone's - isn't something one can just dismiss at hand, and what she saw and experienced there is a frank testimony to how a sect illegitimately controls and dominates its' own so completely that it can only be called abusive and yes, cultic.

Several years after leaving the Watchtower and slowly reembracing Roman Catholicism, Harrison penned a personal memoir she wrote of her years growing up within the Watchtower organization after being brought into it at the age of nine by an enthusiastically converted mother. Her book was among the first modern exposes of life as a Jehovah's Witness that deserves to not only be remembered but enthusiastically recommended for personal study.
I first came across this book as Joy and I were starting out in our first forays in countercult ministry back in 1993 and was stunned at how one's view from the outside of something not only misses so much detail and context about it, but can make it appear to be what it is not.

It is gripping, reading and can be read in full at this online version of the book by clicking here: if you want to understand what being part of something larger than yourself when it's giant jackboot heel is poised to come down on your head if you slip up, this is a book you'll never forget:

An excerpt of Harrison's writing ..

There was guilt, and there was glory: I walked a spiritual tightrope.

I feel now that for the twelve years I spent as one of Jehovah's Witnesses, three of them as a member of the Watchtower Society's headquarters staff, I was living out a vivid dream, hallucinating within the closed system of logic and private reality of a religion that relished disaster; rejoiced in the evil of human nature; lusted for certitude; ordered its members to disdain the painful present in exchange for the glorious future; corrupted ritual, ethics, and doctrine into ritualism, legalism, and dogmatism.

I was convinced that 1914 marked "the beginning of the times of the end." So firmly did Jehovah's Witnesses believe this to be true that there were those who, in 1944, refused to get their teeth filled, postponing all care of their bodies until God saw to their regeneration in His New World. (One zealous Witness I knew carried a supply of cloves to alleviate the pain of an aching molar which she did not wish to have treated by her dentist, since the time was so short till Jehovah would provide a new and perfect one. To this day, I associate the fragrance of cloves with the imminence of disaster.) ...

.. I rehearse, I jealously preserve preconversion memories; they flash before my mind like magical slides. I treasure a series of intense, isolated moments. I hoard happy images that are pure, unsullied by values assigned to them by others.

Afterward, there was nothing in the world to which I was permitted to give my own meaning; afterward, when the world began to turn for me on the axis of God’s displeasure, I was obliged to regard all events as part of God’s plan for the universe as understood only by Jehovah’s Witnesses. Afterward, meanings were assigned to all things. The world was flattened out into right and wrong; all experience was sealed into compartments marked Good and Evil. Before my conversion, each beloved object and event had the luminosity and impurity of a thing complete in itself, a thing to which no significance is attributed other than that which it chooses to reveal. ..

After my conversion, I began immediately to have a dream, which recurred until I released myself from bondage to that religion twelve years later, when I was 21. In the dream, I am standing in my grandmother's walled garden. At the far corner of the garden, where the climbing red roses shine like bright blood against the whitewashed wall, stands a creature icy, resplendent, of indeterminate sex. The creature calls to me. In my dream its voice is tactile; I feel it flow through my veins like molten silver. I am rendered bloodless, will-less; the creature extends its arms in a gesture that is at once magisterial and maternal, entreating and commanding. I walk toward its embrace, fearful but glad, unable not to abandon myself to a splendid doom. The creature seizes me in its arms and I am hurled out of the garden, a ravaged Humpty-Dumpty flying through dark and hostile space, alone.

I understand that dream to have been telling me my truest feelings, which my conscious, waking mind censored for long hard years: I understand it to be my soul's perception that my religion had isolated and alienated me from the world, which it perceived as evil and menacing, and which I regarded, at the bedrock level of my being, as imperfect but not un-good; my religion savaged those to whom it offered salvation.

For twelve years I lived in fear.

One remembers the words of Roy Batty as he watched his antagonist Decker losing his grip on a rain-slickened skyscraper's edge in the film "Blade Runner":

Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.

When A Guru Behaves Badly: Deepak's Deconstructing Dissing

2010-04-21T07:15:00.001-04:00

When Christian truth claims get caught in the crossfire of the culture rejecting them, their opponents (who would hate to be called such) resort to their usual spin doctoring to depict Christianity and its origins as something too far fetched and intolerant for any reasonably intelligent person to consider. It's the standard modus operandi for generations of skeptics from Ingersoll to Bill Maher who typically focus their antagonism towards Christianity along irreverent, probing philosophical lines. The self-centered spirit of secular humanism, which is at the heart of most modern rebellion today, freely imbibes from this well.

In so doing, their ridicule is now acceptable entertainment in our culture today, as gratifying as the religious humor cranked out by the likes of a Tyler Perry or Mel Brooks for the same audience, but with an appeal to the definitely atheistic eye. Such humor lights up the metaphysical boredom of the masses who, in laughing at the predicaments of the targets of their scorn or parody, provides a pop rationale for living any way they choose simply because they saw X or Y do the same. Such is life in our apostate world, a world in which a generation that neither knows nor fears the true God reaches for cultural predominance.

So when the scions of the syncretic New Age philosophy join in the frey, it's always telling to see how their supposedly enlightened spirituality targets Christian truth claims with a vicious malignity no better then the arena-baiting of today's pundits. Such is the example of Hindu ayervedic teacher Deepak Chopra.

A former adherent to the Transcendental Meditation guru Mahareshi Mahesh Yogi (the same one who found fans in the Beatles in the 1960's and who single handedly opened the floodgates for Eastern mysticism in the West that would morph into the New Age movement of the 1970's and beyond), Chopra finally severed his ties with TM and set out on his own path by writing, lecturing and speaking about his version of Ayurvedic wisdom, which is basically a form of Hindu occultism. Chopra's teaching is, like Mahesh Yogi's, a retread of Hinduism made more palatable for Western ears hearing buzzwords like "empowerment workshop", "awakening" and "yoga" and not knowing, or even caring, that they relate to a world religion based on the worship of other gods, including those of the self.

It was when his teaching finally found an audience in New Age-enthralled media goddess Oprah Winfrey in the early 1990's, the champion of all things ticklish to the ear, and who introduced him to the world at large via her TV show that his fortunes soared. Winfrey's highlighting of Chopra on that bully pulpit of daytime television, along with others like Gary Zukav, Marianne Williamson, Shirley MacLaine and Eckhart Tolle, guarantees millions of new disciples for their New Age ideals which in turn further solidifies its fundamentally antichristian worldview and philosophy, hidden behind a supposedly sublime "spirituality."

So in taking cues from the shifting cultural winds they've inspired, and being the pragmatic and sensitive spiritual teacher he is, Chopra's willingness to assail Christianity itself as he lambasts those who embrace it in the political process here in America is to be expected. When he appears on newscasts to recast Jesus as a sage who gained all of his wisdom from the paganism of the East of his day, his colors become quite clear. The sacred fire of "tolerance", of which Chopra and his tribe claim to be guardians, is scrupulously with held by them from those who would be disciples of Christ and who would live their lives practicing their faith. Hugh Hewitt's commentary on how Chopra's targeting of Christianity well argues that his own speech is a hate crime no less onerous or threatening. Click here to read it.

As usual, the purveyors of cultural "transformation" have places for every thing under the sun in their pantheons of the new idolatry of today, except, of course, the notion that Jesus alone is the Way, the Truth and the Life. Such "hate speech" doesn't fit on their altars.

That's fine with me. I'll preach it and live it out anyway. If that principle alone brings upon me their anathema of being a producer of "hate crime", I'm guilty as charged.

Incidentally, an excellent book on the blasphemous errors of the New Age written by Christian author and activist Vishal Mangalwadi is now available for free download here. Enrich your reading time with his outstanding book "When The New Age Gets Old," available in .PDF file format. And don't forget to visit Vishal's wonderful blog and website for his probing, thoughtful essays and writings on how Eastern thought seeks to eclipse the light of Christ. I had the opportunity to sit under Vishal's eye-opening teaching on the Eastern mindset at a Cornerstone Festival in 1986 and get to meet him as well.

What Do You Mean By Christian "Apologetics?"

2010-04-14T22:22:00.003-04:00

The term "apologetics" is drawn from a Biblical Greek word "apologia", and doesn't mean one's "apology" for being a Christian! The world literally means to give a reasoned defense, a verbal speech in defense of oneself. Paul the apostle had to resort frequently to this when facing down the rebellious Corinthian Christians who challenged his authority (1 Cor. 9:3): "Mine answer (or apologia) to them that do examine me is this .." An apologetic is a verbal defense, an explanation for one's beliefs and practices. Therefore, Christian "apologetics" is the process of defending the claims and teachings of Christianity.

As Edward John Carnell once put it "Apologetics is that branch of Christian theology which answers the question, Is Christianity rationally defensible?" (emphasis author). Christian apologetics goes beyond simple proclamation of Biblical truths, whether in traditional preaching or systematic theology: it not only seeks to proclaim these truths but provide the answers to whoever might raise critical objections to the Christian faith. Carnell also goes on to explain the two fold purpose of apologetics:

First, to bring glory to God. Just as we would defend the words of our earthly father, so we defend the words of our Father in heaven. Secondly, to remove from critics any excuse for not repenting before God. Men who refuse Christ because of presumed 'logical errors' in Christianity are men with a self-righteousness in the area of knowledge. They are resting on props which must be pulled away.

Christian apologetics, then, is a balanced and reasoned defense of the truth claims of orthodox and historically Biblical Christian faith and practices, with the aim of glorifying God and bringing those objecting to or distorting the faith to see not only their error but their need of a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Flannery O'Connor Country Redux: The Brian Nichols Story Remembered

2010-04-13T07:38:00.003-04:00

Five years ago, a desperate man broke out of a Georgian jail where he was facing rape charges and in the process murdered several people in an orgy of calculated rage. On the run from a massive manhunt, armed, dangerous and with absolutely nothing to lose, something else happened to Brian Nichols as he took a hostage and hid for several hours - and what happened was an uncommon visitation of grace that intervened in his life that deserves to be recounted.

Here's the story by Ashley Smith, the hostage, as told by a Wall Street Journal column writer.

This story needs to be remembered for in the Christian life, the weapons of our warfare, as the Scripture says, are not carnal

Next Up: The Contention Of Discernment, Brought To You By The Intolerant Jesus And His Bigoted Apostles

2010-04-07T17:43:00.000-04:00

.. be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive; but speaking the truth in love, .. grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ:
Ephesians 4:14-15

Then spake Jesus to the multitude, and to his disciples, saying ..
Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell? .. Ye blind guides, which strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel. Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!
Matthew 23:3, 24-25

Then Saul, (who also is called Paul,) filled with the Holy Ghost, set his eyes on him, and said, O full of all subtilty and all mischief, thou child of the devil, thou enemy of all righteousness, wilt thou not cease to pervert the right ways of the Lord?
Acts 13:9-11

Western civilization's descent into postmodern amorality continues largely unabated. It's now possible to label anyone's criticism of anyone or anything else as hate speech inspired by intolerant bigotry in an effort to deflect or nullify its plain thrust. Such a strategy is employed when attempts are made by the discerning to understand the immoral and/or unethical influences that cults and extremist philosophies exert over the lives of millions of people. This kind of approach increasingly finds cultural traction in the West as it becomes more and more sensitized to the civil liberties of the individual apart from the prevailing social order that it may come into conflict with.

To support this controversial perspective, civil libertarians and social engineers who adhere to it have developed a new generation of social custom that have been popularly called political correctness. A lot of bandwidth over the years has been spent about what this term means, but there's no question that to be politically correct is to be, simply put, profoundly sensitized to avoiding any sort of offense to anyone's personal persuasions. The slowly prevailing trend in Western culture, which is advocated as the highest mark of social convention, is for complete conformity to the prized secular value of inoffensiveness. So things like teaching Biblical absolutes, Judeo Christian values and personal lifestyle choices and expressions of thought based upon them are pretty much fair game in a politically correct culture that views anything smacking of absolutism as bad manners at best and a hate crime at worst.

This is well illustrated in one of my favorite science fiction novels, the classic Dune by Frank Herbert, by the decisions made by the fictional Commission of Ecumenical Translators who are given sway over the known Dune galaxy to advance the rejection of any opposing arguments or critical views between religious faiths claiming "the one and only revelation". The universe's peace and stability, they believed, rested upon suppression and elimination of any belief that there could be just one definitive truth, revelation or faith .. it welcomed all spiritual claims equally as valid, to be fitted into an ultimate cultural mosaic that would advance peace and prosperity on the basis of a harmony that brooked no opposition to alternative perspectives.

This view of political correctness in Herbert's 1960's novelization is a great example of how all encompassing this value-free approach to life wants to make human society. Such an ideal has preoccupied Western society and it is this prevailing wind of cultural thought that sweeps over all expression of personal thought and conscience today in America and beyond, profoundly coloring and affecting human interaction. While I certainly advocate personal freedom of conscience, respect of diversity among people and individual choices of lifestyle they might make, I roundly reject any kind of cultural brinkmanship that demands my compliance to not offend anyone with anything like an opposing view based upon my own convictions. Any intellectually responsible individual should recognize such a perspective as incomparably more inclusive and defensible to those who insist that there are no absolutes at all (a bizarre belief that self-destructs by actually stating an absolute when insisting that there are none).

But it is this kind of warped cultural zeitgeist that Christian discernment in the last days will find itself battling with as well. For when the heat is finally on and the light is brightest in the eyes of false teachers and cultic leaders who don't like it, they resort to knee jerk reactions to valid questions that use this political correctness as their shield against them. When presented with Biblical reasoning and personal testimony that exposes the spiritual emptiness and error of their ways, cults and false teachers find a convienient dodge in the marketplaces of public discourse where their false teaching is confronted by calling criticism "intolerance" and discernment "religious bigotry." It serves to twitch the antennae of the politically correct and summons philosophical unity and support from a variety of parties that wouldn't agree any other way, thus furthering the advance of error, heresy and religious abuse that stems from it.

The Lord Jesus Christ is the very incarnation of God Himself as the Bible says so clearly again and again (John 14:9 and Hebrews 1:3 are just two places you can see this). Jesus is not just loving - He is love itself (1 John 4:8, John 15:9) If you want to see what love looks like, you'll see it in the person, character and attitude of Christ Himself as He strode throughout our sinful world of pain to fulfill the Triune God's steadfast determination to show mercy and love to an evil, gainsaying world that didn't deserve it as John 3:16-17 and 1 John 3:16 beautifully express it. The only reason this world hasn't been plunged into judgment sooner than it has deserved it is because of that unfailing, eternal love that God regards fallen humanity with, through the person of Jesus and manifest in this veil of tears by His Spirit. Thanks be to God for such grace!

The apostles of Jesus gave us the greatest examples of walking out a Christian lifestyle that embodied that same grace of godly charity. They intended on being examples of what they beheld in the Master and lived lives of struggle through which their triumph over adversity by their faith in Christ (1 John 5:4) helped establish the faith of the newborn Church itself. They suffered and endured endless rounds of persecution, deprivation and spiritual assault with delight, cheer, joy and godly love in settings completely unimaginable to most Western believers (1 Corinthians 4:9-16, 2 Corinthians 11:23-30, 1 Peter 4:11-15, Hebrews 6:11-12, 1 Thessalonians 1:5-7, ). Their utter willingness to spend and be spent for others (2 Corinthians 12:15) to advance the Kingdom of God in a world that hates Him and His truth is a sure sign of their apostolic authority and grace.

And these very same divinely inspired examples were also - as Scripture shows - as defiantly confrontational as needed when the message of the Gospel and the truths of God's Word were opposed and distorted by false teachers. The example of Jesus and His apostles was not marked just by their love, endurance and patience but by their resolute willingness to call out the sinful, the deceptive and the injustice that they encountered as they preached the Gospel and called the world to repentance. They fearlessly lifted up their voices to expose, refute and identify those sources of spiritual deception and religious abuse where ever they found it as well as the social institutions that gave it the authority it usurped. This is a dimension of their example that few people know about or admit to, but it is there, nonetheless. "Contending for the faith" isn't just some motivational aphorism, according to their example, but is a Biblical mandate to intentionally engage in a very real, very literal contention for the sake of Christian truth.

The verses I cited in the opening lines of this post show that the same loving Jesus who took children into his arms to bless them and laid his hands on dying lepers also did not hesitate to take up a whip to beat covetous merchants who defiled the temple with their crooked dealings and lambast the Pharisees as "snakes" worthy of the fires of hell. The same apostle Paul who wept over the souls of the congregations he cared for also unsparingly gazed upon an occultic magician who opposed his preaching and called him a "child of the devil." They asserted an authority by the power of the Word and Spirit of God that unblinkingly faced down by both word and deed those satanically inspired deceivers who sought to overthrow truth. The stakes are high - the spiritual destinies of those who are audiences to these contests. There are none higher.

Such decisive action effectively flies in the face of the cultural idolatry done in the name of political correctness, but that's never been the concern of Christ or the apostles: read these verses from Scripture and see just how seriously they took this:

Watch the example of Jesus:

And he entered again into the synagogue; and there was a man there which had a withered hand. And they watched him, whether he would heal him on the sabbath day; that they might accuse him. And he saith unto the man which had the withered hand, Stand forth. And he saith unto them, Is it lawful to do good on the sabbath days, or to do evil? to save life, or to kill? But they held their peace. And when he had looked round about on them with anger, being grieved for the hardness of their hearts, he saith unto the man, Stretch forth thine hand. And he stretched it out: and his hand was restored whole as the other. Mark 3:1-5

Then the Pharisees and scribes asked him, Why walk not thy disciples according to the tradition of the elders, but eat bread with unwashen hands? He answered and said unto them, Well hath Esaias prophesied of you hypocrites, as it is written, This people honoureth me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. Howbeit in vain do they worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men. Mark 7:5-7

The same day there came certain of the Pharisees, saying unto him, Get thee out, and depart hence: for Herod will kill thee. And he said unto them, Go ye, and tell that fox, Behold, I cast out devils, and I do cures to day and to morrow, and the third day I shall be perfected. Luke 13:31-32

Woe unto you, lawyers! for ye have taken away the key of knowledge: ye entered not in yourselves, and them that were entering in ye hindered. And as he said these things unto them, the scribes and the Pharisees began to urge him vehemently, and to provoke him to speak of many things: Laying wait for him, and seeking to catch something out of his mouth, that they might accuse him. In the mean time, when there were gathered together an innumerable multitude of people, insomuch that they trode one upon another, he began to say unto his disciples first of all, Beware ye of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy. For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known. Therefore whatsoever ye have spoken in darkness shall be heard in the light; and that which ye have spoken in the ear in closets shall be proclaimed upon the housetops. Luke 12:52-54, 13:1-3

And when Simon saw that through laying on of the apostles’ hands the Holy Ghost was given, he offered them money, Saying, Give me also this power, that on whomsoever I lay hands, he may receive the Holy Ghost. But Peter said unto him, Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money. Thou hast neither part nor lot in this matter: for thy heart is not right in the sight of God. Repent therefore of this thy wickedness, and pray God, if perhaps the thought of thine heart may be forgiven thee. For I perceive that thou art in the gall of bitterness, and in the bond of iniquity. Acts 8:19-23

Now I beseech you, brethren, mark them which cause divisions and offences contrary to the doctrine which ye have learned; and avoid them. For they that are such serve not our Lord Jesus Christ, but their own belly; and by good words and fair speeches deceive the hearts of the simple. Romans 16:17-18

Them that sin rebuke before all, that others also may fear. I charge thee before God, and the Lord Jesus Christ, and the elect angels, that thou observe these things without preferring one before another, doing nothing by partiality. Lay hands suddenly on no man, neither be partaker of other men’s sins: keep thyself pure. 1 Timothy 5:20-22

Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. But shun profane and vain babblings: for they will increase unto more ungodliness. And their word will eat as doth a canker: of whom is Hymenaeus and Philetus; Who concerning the truth have erred, saying that the resurrection is past already; and overthrow the faith of some. 2 Timothy 2:15-18

Alexander the coppersmith did me much evil: the Lord reward him according to his works: Of whom be thou ware also; for he hath greatly withstood our words. At my first answer no man stood with me, but all men forsook me: I pray God that it may not be laid to their charge. Notwithstanding the Lord stood with me, and strengthened me; that by me the preaching might be fully known, and that all the Gentiles might hear: and I was delivered out of the mouth of the lion. 2 Timothy 4:14-17

A man that is an heretick after the first and second admonition reject; Knowing that he that is such is subverted, and sinneth, being condemned of himself. Titus 3:10-11

Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world. Hereby know ye the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world. 1 John 4:1-3

I wrote unto the church: but Diotrephes, who loveth to have the preeminence among them, receiveth us not. Wherefore, if I come, I will remember his deeds which he doeth, prating against us with malicious words: and not content therewith, neither doth he himself receive the brethren, and forbiddeth them that would, and casteth them out of the church. Beloved, follow not that which is evil, but that which is good. He that doeth good is of God: but he that doeth evil hath not seen God. 3 John 9-11

If they were physically among us now, in this gainsaying fallen culture of today, it's easy to see how quickly how these mandates and examples of Jesus and the apostles would be quickly labelled as intolerant religious bigotry. They'd be tried immediately by self-anointed cultural elites in their media-driven star chambers and be summarily found guilty of hate crimes and violence.

It remains to those who claim to be disciples of Christ to decide which side of this cultural divide they will choose to identify with - whether contending for the Faith, once delivered to the saints (Jude 3) is something they'll obey or opt out from. The Biblical prophecies about the last days we've been reviewing here in this blog show, sadly, that far more professed Christians will inexplicably embrace darkness as light and jettison confrontational discernment as antisocial and meanspirited traditional thinking that truly enlightened people will reject.

In the meantime, for those whom the discerning contentions of Jesus and the apostles is enough of an example to follow as an act of worship and love of God's truth, the daily prayer of "Uncle Bud" Robinson, a Nazarene preacher from White County, Tennessee (just north of where we live), will resonate like a trumpet call from on high .. may it be as much yours as it is mine ..

"Oh Lord, give me a backbone as big as a sawlog, ribs like the sleepers under the church floor, put iron shoes on me and galvanized breeches, give me a rhinoceros hide for a skin, and hang a wagonload of determination up in the gable-end of my soul, and help me to sign the contract to fight the devil as long as I've got a fist and bite him as long as I have a tooth, then gum him till I die. All this I ask for Christ's sake. Amen."

You Can't Keep The Only Good Man In History Down!

2010-04-04T06:04:00.004-04:00

It was Friday.

The Pharisees thought they'd solved their troublesome religious problem that threatened their authority. The Romans had washed their hands of their part in handling a civil disturbance in one of their conquered provinces. The Jewish mob of easily excitable pilgrims passing through the temple there in Jerusalem assumed another blasphemer had been dealt with. The disciples of Christ all assumed that their Master was gone and struggled with the dark nights of their souls and a shattered faith.

And world history as well as the skeptic, atheist and deconstructor over time tries to rationalize, mock or redefine away the plain facts of the matter, trying to "prove" that this was all a legend, a myth, a delusion.

The Lord Jesus Christ had greater plans. For Sunday was coming!

He AROSE from a grave that wasn't his, taking up again a life He laid down, paying a cost He didn't owe, and proving once and for all that He loved us first even we were and are still yet so unloving. The tears on every face can be dried .. the hurts and pains of humanity's misery can be healed .. and the doors to Heaven opened up once more!

Praised be to God, Jesus is ALIVE!

And because He lives, all who trust Him and Him alone for salvation can live also! It's there He has sealed our every victory, grappled and beaten every enemy, bestowed unspeakable spiritual giftings and authority to walk as He did, and dried every tear

Sing it brother Keith!

Being Mormon Before Being Mormon Was Cool: It's Ok To Be "Mormon" Once More

2010-04-03T14:03:00.004-04:00

How the times they are a-changing.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, long before the 1838 adoption of this official title to identify itself, had been called the "Mormon Church" for years by both its members and its detractors from upstate New York to Ohio, Illinois and Missouri. At times embraced as a badge of honor and rejected as a mocking epithet, the term came into popularity from its earliest days when people recognized its unique claims about the alleged visitations of an angel by that same name. This became more the case when Joseph Smith authored and had published a so-called translation of supposedly sacred texts that came to be known as the "Book of Mormon."

Ever since late 1800's, the LDS Church has grudgingly sought to educate the "Gentiles" outside of it that they consider themselves to be "Latter Day Saints" and not Mormons. Even while accepting it among their own social circles as part of their identity, the church officially disdains the title still, especially when the church came under greater attention then before in the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympic games. An official statement makes no bones about this. In their elitist attempt to distinguish themselves as "The Restoration" unlike any other, the LDS Church's attempt to distance themselves from their popular identity as the "Mormon Church" has been a largely useless attempt to focus their public image on a seemingly innocuous if not long and cumbersome corporate title.

Until now.

With new attention focused on LDS fundamentalist groups scattered across the Western United States, whose emphasis on patriarchal priesthoods that indulge in wholesale sectarian polygamy claim to practice the purest form of Mormonism, the LDS Church's historical twists and turns have become impossible for them to shake. So, it would seem, with the coming of the LDS Church's annual assembly this year, the leadership has now concluded that if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. The adoption and usage of the term "Mormon" now appears to be flourishing like never before. This will have enormous implications for those wanting to be discerning when it comes to the claims of the Mormon revelation and its supposed authority. Throughout Salt Lake City, it's now cool to be called "Mormon" once more. Click this link for a story on this strange issue, which as it usually goes, is indeed stranger than before.

The Only Hope For An Apostate And Evil World of Pain

2010-04-02T06:51:00.003-04:00

Do you think we've got problems on this planet?

Do you look upon this increasingly filthy and lawless world and wonder how much longer things can go as they are?

Are you filled with pain of secret scars and silent anguish?

Do you wonder how you can go on?

There was a Man two thousand years ago who took upon Himself the pain of you, me and creation across all time itself as He was murdered.

All for our evil, our sin, our rebellion.

All for mine. All for yours.

The greatest argument for the truth of the Good News He came to tell us of can be seen below .. in that He took at the cost of His own life the burden He didn't have to bear, to dry the tears you cry, bring light to darkness, and truth to a world of lies.

Think about that today, Good Friday. This world doesn't care what day it is.

Over two thousand years ago, He did.

Ruminations Coming: In The Meantime, A Public Service Announcement

2010-03-31T22:31:00.004-04:00

Maybe the term "naturalism" would be more exact. Still, atheism has a long standing affinity with the form of naturalism described above. It's the belief about the natural world that rejects any notion of any kind of higher power having any influence over the observable processes of the creation around us. They scorn the belief of a Creator who creates and then come up with this cock and bull story to solemnly inform us this is the only "provable" explanation for all of physical natural reality as well as ancient natural history itself.

This kind of scientific "theory" is what many of the best minds in the world are convinced explains how the world came to be. No wonder those who question it are viewed as ignorant and unwashed Neanderthals - to admit that truly critical examination of this bizarre fairy tale might have a point to concede would cause the whole house of naturalism's cards to blow away.

All We Are Is Dust In The Wind? Hardly ..

2010-03-29T22:09:00.004-04:00

I cannot stop watching this. I normally wouldn't post this on this kind of blog, but the haunting beauty of this video demands an audience.

The White Mountain from charles on Vimeo.

It's tempting to view this magnificent and compelling video and begin to feel the chill of how seemingly remote, miniscule, and lost we are in a bigger, larger world and universe around us.

And yet, the Word of God is so much clearer on where we fit in .. hear these portions of Psalm 139

O LORD, thou hast searched me, and known me. Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off. Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with all my ways.

For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O LORD, thou knowest it altogether. Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thine hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it. Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.

If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall be light about me. Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to thee. .. How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! how great is the sum of them! If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand: when I awake, I am still with thee. ..

Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.

Discernment Is Discernment When Truth Confronts Error

2010-03-28T22:31:00.013-04:00

In the early 1800's, the continuing advance of white Americans into the lands of the Cherokee Indian nation in North Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia were among many of the manifold pressures Native Americans had to deal with. Whether they faced unsuccessful negotiations with local governments or armed conflicts with white settlers and militia, the question faced by Native American tribes across the land was always the same - how to respond to the increasingly aggressive dealings of colonial advances that sought to push Indians further west away from their traditional homelands. It became one of the darkest and tragic moments of American history.

The situation almost changed dramatically in 1811. A fervent excitement swept Indian tribes across the East as efforts to form a great alliance among them to drive the whites back began in earnest. Indian shamans and many Indians themselves had long resisted the social seductions to give up their folkways, spirituality and culture for those impressed upon them by contact with white settlers and state governments. It was given a huge surge of support when word of a prophetic vision delivered by Tenskwatawa, the shaman brother of the great Shawnee Chief Tecumseh began to spread as well, emboldening those who favored armed warfare. Many unsettling and inexplicable occurrences that seemed to be supernatural visitations from the Great Spirit began to occur among the tribes, further bolstering the conviction that this alliance should proceed. Had this occurred, it's not hard to see - with the second British invasion of America iminent in 1812 - how American history could have been vastly different. For such a conflict to confront the young American nation on two massive fronts certainly would have changed the course of history itself - and world history as well.

So in May, 1811 the governing council of the Cherokee Indian nation could no longer ignore the issue and had to meet to consider certain visions claimed to have come to three Cherokees that advanced the same point of the Shawnee shaman and chief - the return to their former way of life and rejection of any futher white advances into their lands. The Cherokee were the most dominant and powerful of the Native American tribes of the Eastern United States and were clearly in a position to powerfully influence the smaller ones around them to proceed one way or another. Having almost 150 years of largely peaceful contact and interaction with white America, the Cherokee had come away from it profoundly influenced by many of their practical and cultural innovations from government to agriculture to trade. They were aware that such advances would help their own people grow - and had not yet come to fully believe that the United States would ever engage in the systematic expulsion of their people from the East in the debacle of the Trail of Tears.

But with the pressures at hand, tribal opinion was mixed and decidedly unsettled, and the council would be a place for the Cherokee nation to gather direction. As the accounts of the vision were discussed excitedly in the council at Red Clay in Bradley County, Tennessee (where our ministry is based), one lone Cherokee leader had serious doubts about them. Author John Ehle, in his book "Trail Of Tears" commented that Chief Ridge, a well known and well respected man among his people, listened closely as

the man among the three who had seen the vision closed by saying that if one would deny his message, the Mother of the Cherokees would strike him dead.

Ridge sat stone still as excited commentators roamed about the council house, most of them chiefs who were known opponents of acculturation with the whites; they were celebrating this revelation. Finally, Ridge got to his feet and asked for audience, and when the noise subsided, he made his speech.

"My friends, the talk you have heard is not good. It would lead us to war with the United States, and we should suffer. It is false; it is not a talk fom the Great Spirit. I stand here and defy the threat that he who disbelieves shall die. Let the death come upon me. I offer to test this scheme of impostors."

Even as he finished speaking, angry delegates assaulted him. He struck back at them and several fell; like a great bear he batted off his assailants. Eventually they overcame him, pummeling him, trying to knife him ... Ridge, once on his feet again, continued to defy the nay-sayers and their shamans. Again, furious chiefs assaulted him, but this time elder chiefs demanded order and enforced it.

Ridge, his clothing torn, bleeding from cuts, stood before them all. You see, he told them, I continue to live, so these prophets are deceivers.

"Trail Of Tears" (Anchor 1988), page 98-99

And history continues to change today as the last day deceptions of Satanic and humam design continue to get the P.R. they do as those in the position to confront and correct them utterly fail to do so, even embracing such "new truth" as divine revelation from on High.

What history have you changed today?

The Company Heresy Seeks To Keep - Some Thoughts

2010-03-09T06:40:00.017-05:00

Acts 20:29-30

For I know this, that after my departing shall grievous wolves enter in among you, not sparing the flock. Also of your own selves shall men arise, speaking perverse things, to draw away disciples after them.

2 Peter 2:1-3

But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction. And many shall follow their pernicious ways; by reason of whom the way of truth shall be evil spoken of. And through covetousness shall they with feigned words make merchandise of you: whose judgment now of a long time lingereth not, and their damnation slumbereth not.

Titus 3:10-11

A man that is an heretick after the first and second admonition reject; Knowing that he that is such is subverted, and sinneth, being condemned of himself.

2 Corinthians 11:3-4

But I fear, lest by any means, as the serpent beguiled Eve through his subtilty, so your minds should be corrupted from the simplicity that is in Christ. For if he that cometh preacheth another Jesus, whom we have not preached, or if ye receive another spirit, which ye have not received, or another gospel, which ye have not accepted, ye might well bear with him.

Ephesians 2:8-9

For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast.

I'm going to continue to explore what the Bible says about the end time apostacy and the kind of company that last days that end time heresy likes to keep .. or diss.

Read well, all you RF operatives out there. You believe you're reading this just to serve your ends. God is giving you merciful grace to consider your crooked ways by being allowed by study these. Don't harden your heart further and forget this day of visitation you are reading this under - because in the Judgment, you will be reminded of having been here where you need to be and where this could be your final chance to FREE YOUR MIND.

In my first post this year, I cited the prophecy of the Lord Jesus Christ Himself out of Matthew 24:1-14 detailing his stark warning that in the time preceding His Return to the world. When asked what would the signs be that heralded this, it's important to remember that the first thing He said was "take heed that no man deceive you." He did not point to social utopia or religious revival as a sign of His return but to a world staggering under the advance of deceptive figures he called false prophets and false pretenders claiming to be Him. Among these other signs were plagues, warfare and earthquakes in different places all over the world - all heralds of His coming that are largely being dismissed as "coincedence" by those who are clueless to His warning.

In my second post concerning end time apostasy as Scripture teaches, I spoke of what the Bible speaks about what the word literally means, emphasizing that the sense of the word in Scripture is that an apostasy is an abandonment or rejection of true faith, morality and conviction which God has ordained as acceptable to Him. I wrote that it always leads to immorality as sinful people act out their sinfulness on one another in the absence of any moral constraint and that mankind has suffered from the primal falling away of Adam and Eve from God in their failures in Eden to obey Him.

In this post, I want to share briefly on what the Scriptures say about another side of the Janus face of apostacy - how its unholy offspring that is called heresy routinely stalks and ensnares all manner of people as one of the most cunning devices of Satanic inspiration created to destroy the souls of men.

The word heresy is what we want to focus upon first. The word, coming from the New Testament Greek words hairesis, literally meant "a choosing" and in other contexts "a faction." The sense of the word was to define the act of choosing to divide from what was accepted as the established normalcy. Applied withing the context of the Christian faith, it was given wide usage in the Christian church (as cited in the Scriptures above) as it faced the first great onslaughts of apostasy in the first and second century that arose from within it. The iminent spiritual onslaught against the Body of Christ was what the great apostle Paul wept over with hot tears of agony in Acts 20, seeking to impress upon the Ephesian elders that these trials of strange fire from within would test the infant Christian church after he left, to see them no more:

Therefore watch, and remember, that by the space of three years I ceased not to warn every one night and day with tears.

Acts 20:31

The Ebionite, Marcionite and Gnostic heresies were among the first spiritual challenges that the first believers had to deal with, issues that the apostles grappled with in the book of Acts and alluded to in their Epistles to the churches. And these issues originated from earnest, passionately spiritual people who looked, acted and spoke just like Christians themselves but who preached "another gospel" setting forth "another Jesus" by the spiritual power of "another spirit" as Paul wrote to the Corinthians. With that kind of deceptive power, major confusion and disruption was poised to turn the Christian church into squabbling sects who would fade into utter obscurity, with the destiny of humanity itself at stake.

It's almost virtually impossible for the lukewarm and backslidden Christian church of today to fully appreciate just how much at stake their personal faith itself actually was in those first few years. Few of the self-centered Christians of today's casual Christianity seem to even care that the very shape of what they would believe and trust in concerning their temporal and eternal destinies could have been forever lost. But that is indeed how vital the issue was, and is and always shall be until the Lord Jesus Himself returns. History itself would have been also profoundly altered had the unbiblical truth claims of these groups had found the foothold they desired and therefore spiritually warped the truth of the Gospel itself - and hence the missionary outreach of the Church which transformed the ancient world. Heresy, as shown by the Bible and history, is indeed a pretty big deal then as now.

In his seminal book, Heresies (a book I've got in my list of favorites here on the blog), the late Harold O.J. Brown described heresy best as:

.. (designating) either a doctrine or the party holding the doctrine, a doctrine that was sufficiently intolerable to destroy the unity of the Christian church. In the early church, heresy did not refer to simply any doctrinal disagreement, but to something that seemed to undercut the very basis for Christian existence. (p. 2)

Heresy, then, is not only a teaching that denies orthodox Christian truth but a deceptive trickery claiming to unveil lost or restored truth. It results in the creation of a rogue spirituality that defies the Christian faith and creates division among Christians who were formerly united around apostolic doctrine and practice.

And those individuals who bring about this spiritual baiting and switching that leads to all of this trouble for the church are what the Scriptures we've reviewed above call heretics. The Bible's view of heretics, from the boldness of the occultic Simon Magus in the book of Acts to the seductions of the false prophetess Jezebel in the book of Revelation, shows that they are a bold and driven people. Heretics are both men and women who are brilliant, charming and engaging folks who can tell engaging stories, ooze appealingly earnest passion over their beliefs, and who can quote the Bible better than Jesus could. The Bible says they are driven by an agenda of self-aggrandizement based upon their measure of human nature and mastery of their misguided message. For all of their seemingly meek and humble bearings and origins, we would do well to remember Peter's warning is that such people are stealthy, cunning interlopers - wolves in sheep's clothing (Matthew 7:14) who sneak into the sheepfolds of the church to tell amazing tidings of deeper depths and higher heights they are called of God to lead them into.

As we've seen, heresy is a lonely beast and a social animal. It seeks company, craving a captive audience from people, who, through the best of intentions, end up in an alternate spiritual reality that is a mimicked version of the Christian faith. It can only replicate itself at the cost of Christians who have failed to get their own grip on sound Christian doctrine. So it's qute understandable why today's modern heretics who have a vested interest in posing as orthodox Christians quite obviously don't like being called heretics. It's difficult to pull the wool over the eyes of those they seek to bewitch if they are identified as someone who does just that!

So they do everything they can to prove their self-anointed calling as a lonely voice of truth in the world and convince their flocks that they alone have God's favor. They point to anything they can to find divine verification of their doings and their teachings. They demand complete and total surrender to their authority at the cost of their follower's eternal enlightenment or salvation. They cast a vision of a doomed world outside the social circle of their own sect. They cry aloud how they are being persecuted for "The Truth" when their ultimately corrupt doings are exposed and emotionally whine about how unloving and judgmental their unspiritual critics are, knowing that in this pluralistic day that they'll score points among people just for that evasive comment alone.

Their "Messages" are little more than legalistic busywork they bind to the shoulders of their folowers, a compulsion they impart to their flocks to follow their codes of conduct which involve self-denial or spiritual sacrifice to purify and perfect themselves. They ultimately indoctrinate them with a keen sensitivity to works-based self-righteousness

And they know that there are still enough people left for whom the concept of heresy and the figure of the heretic is still a trumpet call of alarm that hastens deeper discerning of their doings. In the end, the company kept - a host of neophytes forsaking all to become their leader's clones - shows just what kind of a spiritual dead end heretics follow. They are the blind leaders of blind followers who, Jesus said with terrifyingly evocative bluntness shall both "fall into the ditch" (Matthew 15:14).

And the tragedy of it all is that millions of people both within and without the church are being confronted with the siren songs of cultic heresy, voiced by cultic heretics who never fail to find new audiences ever day .. as this video so painfully dramatizes.

Bad Moon Falling - When A Cult's Empire Shows Its Strain

2010-03-08T07:09:00.002-05:00

Cultic movements, for all of their allegedly divine commission and exclusive claims to the authority of the Almighty, ultimately are no different then any other humanly organization since they are still populated by human beings filled with frailty, imperfection, sin and the same kind of self-centered drama all of us can fall into.

So when the aging "Reverend" Sun Myung Moon decided to finally start giving up his iron control over his Unification Church, vast business holdings and overall control a few years ago, the internecine squabbles within his "True Family" between factions of sons are of course not surprising. The fighting for ultimate control of the church, its business enterprises and the direction of the Unification movement worldwide - and the billions of dollars that underlay them - has long ago begun. Things have gotten decidedly uglier since Moon's more recent actions to turn over day by day operation to his sons have escalated their war of words and have even launched rival claims to their control.

Check out this link if you'd like to read a bit more.

Unificationists have long been used to having to turn blind eyes when seeing their "True Parents" and the "True Family" exhibit behavior that shows them to be far more subject to sin and falsehood then they would want to be known for. Any authoritarian cult with an elite clique exalted as royalty who exercise complete temporal and spiritual control over their followers will of course do all they can to spin, deny and cover up their failings. But the first salvos of this conflict are seemingly going to open a lot of eyes up within the Moon organization. May God's grace and His Gospel somehow get through to them as well!

When The Heresy Comes Home - some more thoughts

2010-03-07T07:21:00.000-05:00

I've been busy with life in general among other things, so unfortunately, I've not been blogging .. again! I try hard to strike the balance in personal time so as to do this, but alas, things are just too pressing.

As I regather my ruminations, here's a few interesting ones that I thought I'd post on the more memorable things that happen when the sectarian missionaries of error get put into places they don't easily adapt to. I'm not referring to situations involving gun toting Russian gangsters, desperate English housewives with see through negligees, or a Saturday Night Live skit either ..

Here's a link to a blog write up on when two Jehovah's Witnesses are temporarily gotten out of their box by a Christian "householder" .. with something as simple as questions ..

This one will take you to show how well disguised Unificationists (AKA Moonies, disciples of the antichrist Sun Myung Moon) will make themselves when working through their front groups.

The reveries of two former members of an abusive church in Louisiana and the Crossroads movement that became the cultic International Churches of Christ can be read in this bulletin board thread here. Both accounts took place decades and hundreds of miles apart .. but are, as almost always, frighteningly the same ..

And this De Novo article, written by a professedly Hindu agnostic, about the Latter Day Saint's missionary's attempt to sell his religion without revealing much of it, speaks volumes about how deception looks when its cloak falls off ..

The Prosperity Gospeliers On The Haitian Crisis

2010-01-17T15:24:00.003-05:00

I responded to a post on a bulletin board I do most of my online posting on concerning this subject. Most of my online personal commentary on the heresy and false doctrine advanced by Charismatic and Pentecostal extremism is made either on our website, in private emails to those who contact us, or on this blog.

The BB is frequented by many leaders, clergy and laity of my movement, the Church of God (Cleveland) where I am a licensed minister at. The post below piqued my interest concerning the possible reactions of those members of the Word of Faith clergy who might find some uniquely perverse ways to profit from the horrors of the Haitian calamity.

In case you've been under a rock for the past week, a natural disaster of the most horrifically first magnitude has tragically visited that Haiti with a 7.0 earthquake, destruction and the deaths of possibly over a quarter million people in a country where no decent infrastructure to supply food, water, shelter and medical care has ever quite existed. It was tough enough to live in a place like Haiti, but with thousands now dead and dying in the streets, the flow of commodities like food and basic living supplies cut off, hospitals and market destroyed, and no way to get fresh water easily, life just got inconceivable.

We can and should discuss Pat Robertson's ill timed lambasting of the Haiti for it's adherence to voodoo, but now is not that time. These precious people - be they voodoo practitioners or Catholic or anyone else - need our prayers, our giving and our assistance and for the West to dig deep and help out - click on the links following to the American Red Cross and another great relief organization, Operation Compassion, operated as a ministry of the Church of God if you'd like to help.

The post I reference, in a sad, yet inevitable jar from the stark reality of the horror, asked the question:

Are prosperity preachers in Haiti? I was just wondering if they could get a seed offering from some folks so they can get their 100 fold blessing and move to the next level. Maybe they could get some partners to stand in the gap to help their ministry. I hadn't noticed.

I responded ..

Post: A quick ck to see what the prosperity ministries are doing

Kenneth Copeland Ministries - says on their website they support Christian Haitian Outreach—Cares for orphaned and abandoned children in Haiti. They say they have people there, and it's likely these and others. They do point you to a relief fund where they say 100% of everything donated goes to "provide timely assistance to Partners and Friends affected by major disasters."

Not to worry though, you can also donate to Kenneth Copeland Ministries, their Elite CX Team and the KCM Scholarship Fund. It's right there alongside the KCM Relief Fund checkbox, so you can donate to run KCM, help pay for millions of dollars of new HD TV equipment and production, or subsidize the creation of more KCM clones.

Kenneth Hagin Ministries - No record of any ministries they directly support was found in Haiti, although it's possible RBC alumni may be there. But their massive Flash display shows you can follow them on Twitter, apply to RBC and ensure you get registered in their "Winter Bible Seminar."

Haiti is mentioned as a focus for prayer.

Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association - the Online Services website has a massive picture inviting you to offer "Help For Haiti", but by following the links, you get shuttled to a page where you can Sow a Seed to them directly with absolutely no information on what they are going to do to Help Haiti.

Rod Parsley.com - has a similar huge graphic, a link to several articles that make much about the suffering there, and thanks "for RUSHING your Bridge of Hope gift to help provide immediate earthquake relief and help me preach the Gospel to a lost and hurting world through our Breakthrough Television Broadcast."

Minimum suggested donation. $50.

Jesse Duplantis Ministries and Paula White.org - Both Jesse and Paula say in an article they are trying to figure out what organization with boots on the ground they can give to in order will best help the people. In the mean time, you can send in a donations to them.

Once again, the call for help is appealing .. and the help is desperately needed.

But as usual, as in most prosperity preacher mission products, they are cryptic, vague and short on any specifics. Why they have to handle any money at all you might want to donate is certainly open for some serious question. I guess giving to the Red Cross just isn't spiritual enough ...

I just hope people really are going to be helped by this, although HD suites certainly are needed to get the Broadcast out in the clearest way possible. Why, if we don't give for that, who will?

Analog TV ministry and unpaid satellite bills lead to an uncertain sound.

What Is The Tide Of End Time Apostasy? A New Year's Clarification

2010-01-08T08:20:00.009-05:00

After arriving home quite late from a Saturday trip up to Middle Tennessee for an ex-cultist support group meeting, I woke up really late this morning and decided to forego church services until tonight at my homechurch, the South Cleveland Church of God, here in the Holy City. I decided to spend a few moments this morning diving in to address the foundational issues concerning the content and scope of this blog, as I discussed in one of our last entries.

Many visit here may not fully understand what I am speaking of when I mention that this blog is dedicated to responding and critiquing what I have repeatedly called an advance of the end time apostasy that the Lord Jesus Christ predicted in Matthew 24. Perhaps a bit of explanation is in hand since so very few people understand what the Bible says about this, even if many of them recognize quite plainly that America and the world can scarcely be described in what we fancy to be "Christian." The issue goes far more deeper than we want to believe, but I want to keep this as easy to understand as possible.

The word apostasy literally means, from the Greek to stand apart, while another form of the word refers to the act of rebellion. The sense of the word in Scripture is that an apostasy is an abandonment or rejection of true faith, morality and conviction which God has ordained as acceptable to Him. The Bible also shows that this kind of spiritual rebellion against His revealed always leads to immorality as sinful people act out their sinfulness on one another in the absence of any moral constraint.

The apostasy of all apostacies that forever changed the course of human history was the fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, unflinchingly related in Genesis 3, was an act of disobedient sin (eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil) that in effect was a rebellion from God's revealed will (to eat of any other tree in the Garden except that one tree). It had cataclysmic consequences for us, cutting us off from fellowship from God and imparting unto mankind a sinful depravity that has resulted in several thousand years of tragic history in which violence, oppression, greed and immorality have had a free hand among the tribes of humanity.

The only hope for humanity is Jesus Christ. As a Christian minister and believer, I am called to embrace and preach an obedience and embracing of faith in the person, work and message of Jesus Christ as the literal salvation for us all. His Gospel, as the Christian faith follows it, is the summit of His Father's will for mankind to choose His Lordship over their lives for salvation as well as for responsible social lifestyle and order. Faith in Him and obedience to His commands will deliver us from ourselves.

As a preacher, I call men and women, as Christ did, to repent and believe His Gospel (Mark 1:15) but unlike the coercive religious figures in our world that demand an unholy usage of the power of the state to legislate this kind of obedience, I simply proclaim and admonish .. and leave those same people to make their own choice to do so and then live it out practically in their ethics and morals - in full awareness that God will judge all in light of His revealed will to them (Revelation 20:11-13)

That is all that the advance of Christian faith should ever attempt to do. Jesus did not call upon any earthly government to subsidize the creation of a state church or a divided Christendom to create a social utopia. He calls upon the sinful to embrace His transforming power by repentance from their sin and a faith in Him and to also become responsible members of the great Body of Christ, the "Church invisible" existing across sectarian and temporal divisions , to minister to the needs of a hurting world as well as call it to Christ. When the Church went beyond this mandate, it became a tool of statecraft and ultimately oppression backed by the rule of law, not of the Spirit of God (1 Corinthians 2:12-16) - and became part of the problem itself, becaming the fodder for agnosticism, atheism and the encouragement to explore antichristian spiritualities.

Be that as it may, in those places in the world where the Christian faith in the world has sought to provide a moral example to our fallen culture, and where it has not been embraced for any of the thousand reasons that people reject an active and legitimate faith in Christ, the apostasy of Adam still goes on.

Our blog seeks to show you where the entry points of this rebellion are pulling down whatever truth and relevance the church still has to establish its own rival religiosity and again highlight that what Jesus Christ said in Matthew 24 still has the most powerful urgency today. We seek to warn you to never forget what tidings of these very things imply for us, for it was Christ Himself who said bluntly that when you see these things coming to pass in human history, His Second Coming and Return to the earth to pour out judgment upon sinful mankind was at hand.

Let one of my favorites from the 1960's by none other than Barry McGuire further clarify just how warped and tragic the world is and where we are heading. You can walk out with an entertained shiver from the next blockbuster movie about the end of the world thinking you'll always be able to just go back to a reality where things always go on as they have (2 Peter 3:3-4), where you'll get dinner and go to work the next day and live life as you please.

But it won't ever really impart unto you the truly terrifying reality that the Eve of Destruction is indeed at hand.

But the end of all things is at hand: be ye therefore sober, and watch unto prayer.
1 Peter 4:7

Spiritwatch Ministries seeks to ensure no man deceive you as to the time and the hour. So if you're not sure where you stand, you'd better get ready .. and remember the challenge of Jesus Christ to this big, rebellious, irreverent world:

Nevertheless when the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?
Luke 18:8

How Cultism And Yoga Mix - Very Well, It Seems ..

2010-01-07T08:11:00.004-05:00

There's nothing more troubling to behold then when cultism, as it usually does, gets recognized in what many would view as the most mundane of human endeavors. When it does it stirs up controversy, a meating of the press and the documenting of claims and counterclaims through videography and interviews. Such recognition never surprises us though, for we've asserted over and over in our ministry and teaching about this social blight that cultism is always more than just a eccentric doctrinal unorthodoxy in the body politic of human life. It involves a robust and unethical cooption, a coercive takeover of the hearts and minds of trusting followers by manipulative leaders that cannot be denied, ignored or brushed away by the usual spin doctoring of cult group apologists. What we've pointed out is that cultism

can and does take forms that would surprise you. The social dynamics of the Weigh Down Workshop diet program when coupled to the Remnant Fellowship "church" are just such an example as is the seemingly benign outer forms of Scientology, est, and Red Chinese Communism.

So when we saw the CNN investigative reporting done by Kyra Phillips on the Dahn Yoga business empire and aired on the Campbell Brown show this week, once again we fail to be surprised. Cultism in any human enterprise is possible - and if you mix profit-centered business with pliable spirituality, add a few dollops of junk science and PR imagery and combine with a generous helping of blindly trusting people who will buy into a product line they think will work for them, the recipe will turn something disturbing up every time.

Check it out. The last segment of the 3 part series airs tonight, but they are all featured on the CNN website for viewing on demand.

A New Year To Discern : Some Thoughts

2010-01-06T08:30:00.006-05:00

Matthew 24:1-14

And Jesus went out, and departed from the temple: and his disciples came to him for to shew him the buildings of the temple. And Jesus said unto them, See ye not all these things? verily I say unto you, There shall not be left here one stone upon another, that shall not be thrown down.

And as he sat upon the mount of Olives, the disciples came unto him privately, saying, Tell us, when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?

And Jesus answered and said unto them, Take heed that no man deceive you.

For many shall come in my name, saying, I am Christ; and shall deceive many.

And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places. All these are the beginning of sorrows. Then shall they deliver you up to be afflicted, and shall kill you: and ye shall be hated of all nations for my name’s sake. And then shall many be offended, and shall betray one another, and shall hate one another.

And many false prophets shall rise, and shall deceive many.

And because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold. But he that shall endure unto the end, the same shall be saved. And this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come.

I hope everyone had a wonderful, blessed and meaningful Christmas as well as trust in God for a happy New Year.

There. I've said it the way I would want to say it and not in the safely emasculated way that secularizing sentiment would have the holiday seasons observed ("Have a Happy Holiday!", cut and paste on every marketing campaign they could get it on, from Victoria's Secret to Captain Morgan, and show lots of people buying stuff). There is enough to say about our rotting culture right there but I trust many who read here get the point.

I am reassuming the helm on my blog here, after some time traveling and being with family, and in so doing, I do so with a lot of prayerful hope that 2010 will be a more fruitful year for our lives, ministry and one in which I personally seek my Lord afresh. Above all I want to be an overcomer. To each church Jesus sent word to in the book of Revelation (chapters 2-3), He indicated that only those who withstood all of the potent temptations and trials of this world and overcame them would gain the prize of eternal life. This is a battle, as the struggles of those churches indicate, that involves not only personal moral sanctity, responsible relationships with others in the church and the world, but head on conflict in the age old battle between truth and error, against spiritual deception.

Through it all, I want to be about the business of bringing healing to the broken hearted, proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ to those who need to hear it, and announcing deliverance to those bound by chains of darkness, sin and bad religion and philosophy. If that sounds like a tall order, it's only because you may be looking at it from a viewpoint that fails to see how God uses ordinary people to do the extraordinary, as they seek to obey His express will for their lives. The ministry of the Gospel, above all, is one that is based upon reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5:8), the bringing together of those separated from the gracious fellowship God offers to all through a renewed encounter with Jesus Christ (Matthew 11:28-29).

Joy and I, Bryan and Cheryl and Steve and Kathy have sought to do this in Spiritwatch Ministries for the past decade. We have all seen and beheld how the spiritual darkness Jesus warned us would come has claimed the lives of so many in the cults and culture of today. And each of us in our church outreaches and personal discernment ministries have done what we can to walk with Jesus so we can take a stand for the truth and then run to the battles where souls have stumbled as angels of light bearing false doctrine and practice blind them. God willing, we hope to continue to do so as time goes by.

In the next few days, we'll be backing up to punt .. I want to focus upon the ABC's of our ministerial ethos and examine just what the last days apostasy is a bit more. In this blog, I've been writing as if many who visit assume that they know what that is. I've responded to various news items that show signs of it all around us. But in the next day or two, I want to start addressing what the Bible says about this apostasy, and why the church today is increasingly a bigger player in it then ever before .. just as Jesus warned it would be.

Facing The Music: When The Church Has To Discern Itself

2009-12-18T10:13:00.008-05:00

The Lausanne Movement is a massive global effort of evangelicals who are dead serious about world evangelization with the Gospel of Jesus Christ who have been working together to reach the world for almost fifty years. It is a massive and global effort involving hundreds of Christian ministries seeking to motivate and spark renewed efforts in obeying Christ's commands to ensure that the "Gospel of the Kingdom will be preached throughout the whole world

They are preparing to have only their third congress in that time in Capetown, South Africa in 2010. Lausanne describes itself in the following:

Throughout its history, the Lausanne Movement has intentionally avoided building a large bureaucratic organization. Instead it strives to be a dynamic, catalytic force that propels a movement of like-minded missional Christians who pray, plan and work together on global evangelization.

Since 1974, dozens of Lausanne-related global, regional, and topical conferences have been convened all over the world. Global gatherings include the Consultation on World Evangelization (Pattaya 1980), Conference of Young Leaders (Singapore 1987), Lausanne II (Manila 1989), The Forum for World Evangelisation (Pattaya 2004) and The Younger Leaders Gathering (Malaysia 2006). Lausanne has also inspired a constellation of regional networks and topical conferences such as the Asia Lausanne Committee on Evangelism (ALCOE), Chinese Coordination Center for World Evangelisation (CCCOWE), three Nigerian congresses on world evangelization, and eight international consultations on Jewish evangelism.

The Lausanne Theology Working Group (LTWG) is right now working to prepare for the 2010 congress. Who is the LTWG? They are a steering committee of Christian leaders and theologians who work together before their meetings to hammer out the doctrinal issues that the congresses are meant to consider.

The Lausanne Theology Working Group (TWG) serves the whole Lausanne Movement by ensuring that its passion for mission strategy and activism is grounded in careful theological reflection, and by challenging evangelical theology to have biblical effectiveness for holistic mission in the spirit of the Lausanne Covenant. The TWG has a core steering committee drawn from around the world and convenes small annual international consultations and several regional ones. Currently the TWG is working with the leadership of Lausanne in preparation for Lausanne III, in Cape Town 2010, by engaging in careful theological examination of each phrase in the Lausanne motto, “The Whole Church taking the Whole Gospel to the Whole World.”

What is powerfully significant is that Lausanne's TWG found it important enough to have to grapple with the doctrines loved by so many in the Charismatic and Pentecostal worlds, the "prosperity gospel" and release a statement on it to help provide a framework for Lausanne 2010 to discuss it upon.

The importance they assign to it, however, isn't very encouraging to the passengers of the Full Gospel ship. The LTWG's statement can be found here in full. We lament at having to post this below.

We further recognize that there are some dimensions of prosperity teaching that have roots in the Bible, and we affirm such elements of truth below. We do not wish to be exclusively negative, and we recognize the appalling social realities within which this teaching flourishes and the measure of hope it holds out to desperate people. However, while acknowledging such positive features, it is our overall view that the teachings of those who most vigorously promote the 'prosperity gospel' are false and gravely distorting of the Bible, that their practice is often unethical and unChristlike, and that the impact on many churches is pastorally damaging, spiritually unhealthy, and not only offers no lasting hope, but may even deflect people from the message and means of eternal salvation. In such dimensions, it can be soberly described as a false gospel.

We call for further reflection on these matters within the Christian Church, and request the Lausanne movement to be willing to make a very clear statement rejecting the excesses of prosperity teaching as incompatible with evangelical biblical Christianity.

Read it and weep. Thanks to the American church, the Gospel of Christ is being daily perverted and twisted and then neatly packaged as the latest thing from heaven to vast populaces of Christians dwelling everywhere in both Africa and the world. A Christian missionary painfully recounts here how the prosperity gospel cancer is defiling the Body of Christ in Zambia

I highly doubt that men like Rod Parsley, Benny Hinn, Kenneth Copeland or Paul Crouch will give the LTWG the time of day though.

What Would Tommy Do? The Advance of Adventism At The Expense Of Truth

2009-12-16T16:48:00.016-05:00

As I've often said here, when the End Time Apostasy comes knocking at your door, truth is usually the first thing brushed aside by the eager gush of friendly, sincere crowds who want to come calling and "share." It's the first casualty in a cheerfully grim war of spiritual attrition in which heretics are no longer identified - they're welcomed as guests at the the table.

Last month, a Seventh Day Adventist publishing house announced the launch of a brand new study Bible using the New King James Version text. The SDA Church, in case you are unaware of it, was born out of the proselytizing efforts of its founder, the alleged "prophetess" Ellen G. White, whose legalism and exclusivism is legendary around the world. Rejecting both Roman Catholicism and Protestantism and assuming themselves to be the only true "remnant" of God's people on the earth (because of their adherence to a Saturday Sabbath and White's free reinterpretation of Jewish dietary laws as binding upon Christians today), the SDA Church's legalistic approach to the Christian faith well known, yet almost universally overlooked by the non discerning church today. The latitude given to White's skewed interpretation of Christianity borders is both illegitimate and unbiblical, and the unbelievable deference given to her teachings has led many of them to hail her as the "Spirit of Prophecy." For generations, hordes of SDA evangelists have endlessly conducted"Bible prophecy" seminars in efforts to raid members from established Christian churches, as well as penetrate the world with the gospel according to Ellen G. White. The strident and almost cultic exclusivism driving the SDA vision has left many a victim in its wake and far too many people who've honestly questioned and striven against its challenges to ignore the Biblical and logical answers to Adventist errors. What many of these same people are also unaware of is how the Watchtower Society is an offshoot of the SDA movement itself, abandoning the "prophetess" Ellen G. White's alleged prognosticatory power for that of "pastor" Charles Taze Russell, who was as obsessed with Biblical chronologies and Bible prophecy as she was.

So it was no surprise again, with what Jesus has said about these dark times in Matthew 24, that we'd eventually find a major Christian publishing house, no less then the venerable Thomas Nelson Publishing house, creating a study Bible for Seventh Day Adventists. In doing so, they created a brand new marketing tool that will enable them to penetrate more homes then ever with the legalistic deception of White's questionable doctrine and false prophecy. Creatively restated and recrafted for a new generation of Christians conditioned by a backslidden and media-dependent church to read Bible study notes to glean truth and not rely upon God's Word as taught by God's Spirit (John 14:26), it will fly:

Yes, the new Remnant Study Bible (NKJV) has all the study aids serious Bible students have come to expect from their study Bibles — but it goes way beyond that. Way beyond.

For the first time ever, the masterful commentary of E. G. White is now included alongside the Bible text! You’ll also find a complete array of other unique Bible study aids, such as a complete set of Chain Reference Bible Studies and detailed sections on prophetic symbols, the prophecies of Daniel, and the awe-inspiring sanctuary services.

Remnant Publications, the publishing house behind this project, makes abundantly clear where they are coming from, in that they are unashamedly advocating SDA doctrine. Thomas Nelson, says this about their allegedly Christian focus, sounding more like a greeting card company run by Joel Osteen or Kahlil Gibran :

At Thomas Nelson, we believe that we exist to inspire the world. We believe that the world desperately needs inspiration—the right kind of inspiration—and that we are a conduit for change.

To make this personal and memorable, we have reduced this to a slogan: “We inspire the world.” Here’s how we understand each phrase of this statement.

“We”

The pronoun “we” emphasizes our commitment to teamwork. We cannot accomplish God’s purpose for our company on our own. It takes more than a handful of star performers. It takes all of us, collectively working together, each employing our unique gifts, to fulfill our calling.

“Inspire”

According to the dictionary, “inspire” means

1. To affect or guide; 2. To fill with enlivening or exalting emotion; 3. To be the cause or source of; bring about.

All of these meanings are relevant to our purpose as a company:

First, we want our products—books, videos, and conferences—to affect people. We are not in the business of merely entertaining our audiences or “tickling their ears.” Instead, we want our products to have a positive impact on consumers. In addition, we live in a day when people are desperate for direction and advice. As a result, we want our products to provide practical guidance.

Second, we want our products to have a positive emotional impact. Emotions are not something to disparage or disregard. They can be the very thing that provide the impetus for action. Inspired emotions can lead to noble actions. We want to intentionally stimulate (though not manipulate) those kinds of emotions through the products we produce.

Third, we want our products to be a source of real change, both in individuals and in our larger culture. Looking back over our lives, most of us recognize that real change frequently came about as a result of the books we read, the conferences we attended, or both. These types of products provide an opportunity to affect deep and lasting change.

It is interesting to note that the word inspire originally came from the Greek work theopneustos. It literally means “God-breathed” (Theos, God, and pneo, to breathe). This is particularly fitting for our company, since we acknowledge that God is the ultimate Source of inspiration. We want our products to be a means by which God breathes new life into His world.

With that reverent coda, the publishers at Thomas Nelson no doubt want to impress upon us that their core mission - the creation of Christian literature that God uses to "breathe new life" into the world - is one which Christians should trust.

The problem is that Thomas Nelson betrays an obscene naivete, gross negligence, or immoral indifference when agreeing to this project - or is guilty of all three.

SDA doctrine is a distortion of Christian doctrine and has created untold amounts of unbiblical legalism that have plagued the SDA Church and all who have come under its orbit. It's fascinating to note that Mr. Nelson, who founded the company in London in 1798, was of sturdy Scottish Covenanter stock and that the Covenanters' had rejected the King of England as the head of the Christian Church there and steadfastly asserted that Jesus Christ alone stood in that authority. The Covenanters endured these "Killing Times" as a result, enduring persecution, civil strife and civil war that dragged on as a result of their unbending rejection of human authority over their faith. What would Tommy do if he was alive today to see the company he started to now being used to champion another agenda to exalt a purely human authority over the Christian faith? And what might that old Scottish Christian might think in a day in which that same kind of human authority, having no temporal power of state to back it, can easily litigate to shut the voices of dissent off?

What would Tommy do?

Did Christianity Cause The Crash?

2009-12-14T21:05:00.005-05:00

Don't laugh.

It probably didn't help as much as it should have.
In a allegedly "Christian" land whose financial foundations were supposedly engineered by a historically rigid and pious Protestant work ethic, the religion supposedly serving the Faith of our Fathers seems to show an awful lot of wear in these recessional days. Especially when the Prosperity Gospel is what's being preached from the pulpits of today.

Yes, you heard me and yes, you can give it some thought yourself by checking out this painfully honest and all too illuminating essay here. Frankly, I'm not just outraged, disturbed and angry. I'm just not surprised. Faking it til you make it has reached a whole new level of cultural delusion among the "children of light," which is why the "children of this world" still possess a level of wealth that is supposed to be possessed by confession of those same well-lit King's Kids.

What Would Jesus Buy? Just In Time For The Holidays!

2009-12-12T23:55:00.005-05:00

Well, it's Christmas time again. And while I hate to spit in anyone's figgy pudding, it must be firmly noted this Advent season that American is not a Christian nation and it increasingly becoming more profane and pagan by the day. On Black Friday and every Shopping Day since, millions of Americans are thinking more about Stuff then the Savior the Christmas season is to herald. I assure you, the only opening prayers at the gates of the Big Boxes uttered were that people got in and didn't get trampled to death by the hordes of materialistic people behind them.

If even a fraction of the estimated 60 to 70 billion dollars of discretionary income people pump into the chimera's maw of Christmas shopping was diverted to clothe the homeless, improve a widow's shattered house, or feed hungry people, it might truly be more of a holiday season.

Instead, we lose ourselves in the minutiae of glittery cultural trapping and forget that for much of the rest of the world, where Christians live daily under threat of death or imprisonment in slave labor, Christmas is just a way to line their pockets from the wealth of the distracted West. The packaging becomes the Reason for the Season. Christ is the kid in the manger hidden behind the gaily wrapped Play Station, power tool or Mudd boots.

Merry Christmas.

Seriously Overdue Update Department

2009-12-11T05:12:00.004-05:00

I can't believe it's been that long since I've last blogged. Well, New Year's resolution # 5 .. blog more (resolutions 1-4 are private and will remain so).

One of my other ones is .. Reach out more .. Be even more available. You can email me direct at rafael (at) spiritwatch.org.

I've already been at it the past few months, which is why I haven't been blogging.

It's been an interesting year, between helping spiritually abused people, writing and updating the Spiritwatch article list - primarily in our Strange Fires section - and engaging in counseling sessions as well. It's been also an intriguing year keeping abreast of the rumblings in Remnant Fellowship and fielding media inquiries about them as well as withstanding yet another attempt by Gwen Shamblin and her sycophantic lieutenant Tedd Anger to litigate me into silence over their authoritarian ways (to no effect, we will continue to exercise our First Amendment rights). I haven't yet found Shamblin's lawyer trashing me on blogs yet, so maybe's he's busy buying printer toner or something.

We also were invited to help plan and execute a discernment conference for Spanish speaking Churches of God in South Carolina in Anderson. We laid a foundation for discernment using teaching on sound doctrine, critical thinking and a review of what spiritual deception is which we will build upon in our next trip there (hopefully sometime early next year) on cultism itself. We understand that aside from the LDS and JW heresies, the apostolic Oneness movement as well as assaults by the cultic La Luz Del Mundo movement have been a great problem for Spanish speaking Christians in the area. We want to be ready to address those.

I preached on cultism at our local church, the South Cleveland Church of God as well and hopefully will be preaching a lot more there and in other venues in the future. I wanted to post here on that but was so busy preparing for that and never got a chance. Hopefully, we will be returning soon there.

This next Sunday, December 20, I will be preaching a Christmas message at the Third Street Church of God in Fort Wayne, Indiana . If you're in the area, it would be a pleasure to see you there. Pastor Truman Smith and his wife are dear friends of ours, a mentor in the faith and someone whose ministry has been a great blessing to Fort Wayne for many years.

The Lord willing, we intend to be more visible and more involved here on the blog this next year and everywhere else we can. It's the last days. We need to keep pointing and working for the Way, the Truth and the Life (John 14:6) while we still can ..

agape

rafael

The Never Ending Story: Another Perspective On The Jonestown Tragedy

2009-11-06T19:06:00.006-05:00

There isn't much about the absolutely horrific tragedy at Jonestown that hasn't already been said. The deaths of over 900 people in an orgy of religiously stoked suicide and murder in the jungles of Guyana initiated at the demonically warped whim of a cult leader named Jim Jones on November 17, 1978 have long ago become a cautionary epic in our cultural mindset about how twisted human nature can be.

Allusions and references to the utterly mind shattering atrocity of the deeds of that dark day are now just another part of the lore and language we use to describe the indescribable power of spiritual deception. But no matter how familiar the horrors of death by cultism may ever seem to be, one thing that never ceases to profoundly arrest me .. or any other human being with a heart and soul .. is the power of the account of a personal testimony about it. It pulls away the blunted edge of the social cancer it describes and reveals how razor sharp it's foul appendages actually can be. The sting of the scorpion becomes once again a strike into naked, unshielded human flesh and spirit that cannot be defended against.

Such is this long forgotten account of one family's descent into the hell that Jim Jones' deviancy prepared for them. You will not easily be able to read this - but you will learn again how the Pied Pipers of our time dance to their tune.

News Flash" Most American Christians Are In Serious Confusion, Details At 11:00

2009-05-09T14:40:00.004-04:00

One of the more telling releases coming out of the Barna Group's research findings we've seen in a while is hardly surprising to the few discerning American Christians who still make it to their pews in their churches today. The announcement, depending on who you'd speak with, can be chilling to the core or no big deal or anything in between. After all, one man's lie is another one's truth, right? It's just another sign of how adrift the Body of Christ has become in a day and age in which truth has a shelf life and can be distorted at will to fit into one's biases without any regard to whether it is consistent with a stable connectiont to spiritual reality.

The Barna article title pulls no punches:

Most American Christians Do Not Believe that Satan or the Holy Spirit Exist

Click here to read the article.

Pray a bit harder for the increasingly backslidden church of today as it continues to slouch onward to Gomorrah and drift farther into the outer limits of apostasy.

And remember, there's a reason Jesus asked the question

"Nevertheless when the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?"

Mea Culpa Or Freudian Slip? We Report You Decide

2009-05-04T23:44:00.002-04:00

As seen in the newspaper of Brigham Young University, the Daily Universe, the day after the end of the annual General Conference held by the Church. As many of the 18,000 copies as could be found by the aghast BYU paper staff were pulled and pulped. Here's an LDS perspective on the affair ..

One wonders what happened to the BYU student, a young LDS lady, who allowed their spellchecker to do better discernment then her editorial staff did.

Gospel Tomahawks Not Needed

2009-04-25T21:45:00.007-04:00

Whew.

The Ligionier Ministries folks published a while back an exquisitely hard hitting yet painfully surgical dissection of that sadly mistaken mindset of the Christian who wants to cult bust at the expense of ministry to a cult member. It details the thoughts of a Christian minister who agonizedly came to recognize how well versed he was in the school of defending the faith in the manner of an assassin .. not an ambassador.

Ouch.

Click here for an article done so well, you won't know you need to feel for broken bones after reading it.

Discussions On Cults and Cult Mind Control in America

2009-04-11T08:47:00.008-04:00

From the movie we've previously discussed here, "Join Us", here is a clip of one of the deleted scenes that the filmmaker, Ondi Timoner, did not use in the DVD release of the film. It's a shame because it features some illuminating glimpses into the cult problem as well as cult mind control itself offered by those who deal with the problem every day.

Watch this excellent clip below:

Answering Some More Questions From Lee University's EVA 363 For 2009 3 of 3

2009-03-29T13:04:00.015-04:00

Mind Control (part 2 of 3 is here)

What are some methods used for mind control?

I have indicated in my paper on cult evangelism that many in the countercult community, including myself, have adopted Dr. Robert J. Lifton's model of thought reform that is identical to cultic mind control. I have found these observations to be the foundation in understanding the human equation of cultism no matter what shape it assumes. No matter what the theology or practice, it seems that any questionable group (religious or non religious) that seemed "cultic" always seems to follow these directions. In his seminal work drawn from the study of Korean War POW's, Lifton developed 8 criterion that describe what kinds of manipulative influences are marshalled by coercive social dynamics to compel changes of thought and therefore, behavior.

I've briefly described these 8 components of cultic mind control in this article on our website and how they are more readily recognized in cultic settings in another article here. If you really want to dig more into how this is understood - and debated - across a wide variety of academic, pastoral, research and psychological circles, check out this excellent Wiki article here. For the record, I contend that the Liftonian paradigm on thought reform is a compelling and inclusive perspective that provides a clarity of perspective and context other. The methodology is explained in them a little more generically and we'll get into a little of that here in our next questions:

Within the cult realm, does love reign? In other words, do the cult members feel like they are loved unconditionally by their leader and their community or is it more of a fear reigned environment?

Love is a powerful influence that is universally responded to no matter where you go. When it is seemingly found in cultic movements, it can be almost overwhelming in its manifestation and is used to great effect by cults to verify their legitimacy and truth. Sadly and tragically, however, the quality of "love" found in cultic movements is not unconditional but actually quite conditional in nature. This makes all the difference in the worst possible way.

There is a serious and profound difference between the type of conditional love that cults exhibit and the unconditional love which ideally should be manifest by healthy spirituality. It has been well said that the difference between conditional and unconditional love comes down to how it is expressed and experienced - conditional love says "I love you because ..." while unconditional love says "I love you. Period." Note well the contrast! Conditional love is bestowed when a requirement is met, when a task is completed, when a favor is earned, while unconditional love just simply bestows itself upon its object with no strings attached.

Remember that the spirituality/philosophy behind a cultic movement is based upon the fulfillment of legalistic religious busywork or disciplines - upon works and not faith in the grace bestowed by God. As expected, you will find an enormous emphasis on performance and perfectionism within cults that is then rigorously observed and publicly evaluated by cult leadership, with salvation and blessing on the line. Such a posture always engenders fear, apprehension and even paranoia in the lives of cult members. Fear of being found falling short, fear of not being fully in compliance with the moral codes of their group, fear of the world, fear of demons, fear of hell, and fear of the wrath of an angry God underlie the seemingly cheery environments of such groups.

In such a Cultworld, then, unconditional love never has a chance primarily because the human mimickry of conditional love completely dominates the heart and soul of the cult. It instead substitutes this horrible, twisted approximation of love which can be readily and promptly withheld without any conscience whatsoever by cults to induce their members to change their behavior. What a terrible, tragic state of affairs that cult members are told to settle for as the highest and newest of "revelations" around!

How exactly does mind control take place? Cults seem so conditioned to a works based gospel and are not often receptive to a traditional Gospel because of the spiritual and mental bondage they are in .. what is the best way to begin to try and attack and break that spiritual bondage?

Great questions and observations! Let's tackle what mind control is and how it works first of all.

Cult mind control is a manipulative and transforming process that occurs during the recruitment of some one into a cult. It is the control of behavior by the control of thought, a subtle strategy of social control used by cults to impose conformity of belief, thought and practice within their group in an incremental, gradually induced manner. It is an immersive experience which can and often does extend to the complete reordering of the person's view of himself, his past, even his identity, personal memories and priorities in life. When this takes place, profound personality and lifestyle changes can and do occur, all at the behest of the cult's leadership as necesssary for their personal growth and development. It is ethically an involuntary coercion that is imposed upon the cult member and is indeed a hideous mental and spiritual bondage that is disturbing and troubling to behold.

Cult mind control follows, as we have said, a gradual yet undeniably similar pattern, no matter the group's belief system or philosophy. Appeals to felt needs such as the desire for meaning, purpose and community are combined with what has come to be called "love bombing," the smothering of prospects with insincere attention to foster strong social ties to the group's direction and vision. What I've called "isolation through indoctrination" is the gradually intensified social activity, service and study aimed at isolating new members from their past belief system and identity and to create dependence upon the group. This includes the group's free usage of misinformation, implanted cult phobias that compel blind obedience to cult authority, their Scripture twisting and outright falsehoods.

With critical and independent thinking seen as sinful manifestations of demonic and carnal natures that must be shunned, the individual's faculties of free thought are effectively suspended and cultic mind control is inevitable. The cult's authoritarian leadership then makes their enchanted members completely subservient to the cult's demands and readily recast them to there respective places in cult hierarchy they are expected to assume.

So, you are absolutely correct when you state that cultists are "conditioned to a works based gospel," which is an objective statement of truth about their distorted understanding of the Christian Gospel of Jesus Christ. Whatever a cultic movement exalts as the ultimate truth concerning salvation or enlightenment, they will cite the performance of religious works as something the cultist must be constantly engaged in to prove their faith. The cultist must be involved in some kind of spiritual exercise or discipline in which she proves herself deserving of the graces of God that only her cult can bestow upon them. It's a never ending system of self-sanctifying, self-purifying doing that the cult member must commit to which. Faith in Christ alone for salvation is scorned as an easy-believism by cultists who are absorbed in their cult's treadmill of spiritual and social busywork through which they hope to make themselves worthy of God's love, grace and blessing. The freely given grace of God that saves by faith in Christ alone that is not of works, as Ephesians 2:8-9 definitively speaks of, is completely alien to the cultist.

Cult mind control, I believe, is a large part of the "blinding of the mind" referred to in 2 Corinthians 4:4 that is inspired by the "god of this world" that hides the truth of the Gospel of Christ from the cultist. It is one of the main reasons that Christian attempts to evangelize cults often don't have the impact we think they should. I would contend that Paul's usage of the term "god of this world" is a reference not to simply to demonic but warped human influence itself that exists only to control and dominate - note that in 2 Corinthians 4:2 he notes that true ministers are those who have "renounced the hidden things of dishonesty, not walking in craftiness, nor handling the word of God deceitfully." Paul was again emphasizing that demonic deception and human manipulation are social dynamics of long standing influence in our fallen world's religious circles and that Biblical truth is largely lost upon those who are prey to it.

As a Christian minister with years of observation of cultic wiles, I am willing to say that while the apostles may never have used the words "mind control" in their epistles to the churches of the New Testament, they certainly very clearly saw how spiritual manipulation that led to spiritual and mental bondage manifested itself (Romans 16:18, 1 Timothy 4:1-2, 2 Peter 2:1-3, Jude 14-16) within the context of spiritual fellowship sought by false teachers and false prophets of the unwary and undiscerning Christian. They sought to combat these false influences and restore those swayed by them, while describing in no uncertain terms how they viewed their aberrant behavior and practice.

Unlike too many Christian churches, cults strongly advance direct connection between their pseudo-orthodoxy (their false teaching claiming to be "the truth") to their approved pseudo-orthopraxy (their false practices, which directly impact their lifestyle). In other words, they demand that their new recruit's actions should line up with what they've been taught and don't hesitate to make them rigorous tests of fellowship and even salvation. With such a complete authority of the group established over them, cult members are then relentlessly conditioned by their leadership to unquestioningly believe by faith the spiritual precepts and worldview their group advances as the ultimate truth: this is readily accomplished after the cult recruit makes their own personal commitment to resigning their spiritual direction, personal autonomy and critical thinking faculties to the group.

This is what the spiritual and mental bondage of cultic mind control looks like.

If you'd like to see some more visual examples, take a break and check out our short YouTube video here (aimed at cult members) and a longer one here (aimed at the general public) for some memorable illustration.

Cult mind control diametrically opposes Christian evangelistic witness to cult members. Scriptural mandates call upon Christians to "know how ye ought to answer every man," and beckon us to urge people to "come now, and let us reason together" (1 Peter 3:15 and Isaiah 1:18). Those whose ability to reason with you has been rechannelled toward contention for their own faith will easily pose perhaps one of the most difficult challenges for the Christian witness in the last days - especially if they turn out to be your grandmother, a friend from school, a business associate who wants to love you into his cult's kingdom, etc.

But fear thou not! We assure you that Bible not only tells to share the Gospel with all men - including cultists - but assures us of the victory! We've seen it happen. We see it happening. We know it will continue to happen!

Apostolic Christianity, empowered by the Holy Spirit and brimming with the Word of God and an understanding of the times has never failed to take on the onslaught of worldly wisdom against the Gospel and the Christ and defeat it by a walk of faith shown by works. None other than our Lord Jesus Himself ordains it - hear his charge to the Apostle Paul, the same one that a redeemed believer called to be a witness to the cults assuredly walks in

But rise, and stand upon thy feet: for I have appeared unto thee for this purpose, to make thee a minister and a witness both of these things which thou hast seen, and of those things in the which I will appear unto thee; Delivering thee from the people, and from the Gentiles, unto whom now I send thee, To open their eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins, and inheritance among them which are sanctified by faith that is in me.

Delivered from the world, the sanctified believer is to stand and walk out a life of service to God in Christ to declare His Gospel in such a way that it opens eyes and turns the blind to the light, even from very jaws of Satanic darkness itself.

We are, as DeGarmo and Key so well belted out years ago "destined to win"!

So what is the best way to begin to try and attack and break that spiritual bondage?

To counter cult mind control does indeed require a plan. Here are the basic steps:

First of all, remember that the degree of cult mind control bondage varies from person to person. This is a critical point to bear in mind, vitally important to understand. Cults, while having darkly powerful spirituality and manipulative socializing energizing them (2 Corinthians 11:4) are not all powerful spheres of influence whose demands are irresistible. The thought-stopping persuasions that hold captive an individual cult member's mind can take as many different forms as there are individual minds controlled by them - and no two are alike. What forms of cultic propaganda that can lock down cult member Smith's mind may merely trigger for fellow cult member Jones an outright questioning or even doubting of the cult's authority.

The false authority of the cult has to be challenged and shown to be fallible, contradictory and questionable in the heart and mind of the cultist and this can indeed be done, no matter how intense the mind control. For the human mind never fully completely shuts down: like an anti-virus program running in the background of a computer, the cultist's controlled faculty of reason is processing information quietly, often unconsciously. Part of that includes the challenges that they've encountered which their cultic conditioning cannot shake. In the same way dreaming often is a manifestation of personal trouble and need, the cultist's mind often entertains questions and doubts about their movement that they dare not ever allow their consciousness to become preoccupied with. They often can successfully cover this cognitive dissonance with a straight face and a deceptively placid exterior. It is this judging of a cult's book by it's cover that can seem so discouraging and even frightening - but it is a stone face with all the durability of paper in a windy rain, a personal facade that the Spirit of God will blow completely through.

For example, all Jehovah's Witnesses are kept in a more or less constant fear of an impending Armageddon (this phobia indoctrination is part of all cults' retention efforts to maintain control over their membership) but there really is no way that the Watchtower can force a completely uniform depth of conviction on their members.Therefore, many Witnesses don't fully believe or accept their organization's teachings on the end times for the simple reason that they're aware of past Watchtower false prophecies and doctrinal flip flops that explode their cult's myth of infallibly inspired authority. They grin and bear the apparent contradiction, even at their own personal cost, without any sign of the true inner challenge on the cult's authoritarian control over their mind that it actually makes.

There are many other points of differences that Witnesses can have with the Society that they don't consciously entertain due to the mind control indoctrination they've placed them under - they quickly rationalize it away. But there are many inopportune and troubling thoughts that are indeed present in their hearts and minds which, after intercessory prayer, are the greatest way one can level the playing field in any evangelistic encounter with them.

All of this is true for any and every cult that we are aware of. Natural human doubt can be used by a supernatural God's power to break the bondage of cult mind control - through the visitation of the Spirit of God into the situation.

It is this stubborn tendency for the cultist's mind to mull over unspeakable "random thoughts" is a faculty of human reason that I am convinced the Spirit of God powerfully uses to open the heart. No cultist's pre-cult past, identity, memories and ability to critically think is ever burnt out of existence completely. It will be, sadly, greater in depth with some (1 Timothy 4:2) but not all. This is truly where the grace of God is most powerfully at work in the lives of cultists, in the places we don't easily see .. but He is truly there, doing only what He can do (Romans 12:2)! The faculty of a cult member's human reason can be lulled into a fitful sleep but it is the erosion of the grip of cultic authority over it by it's own never ending introspection that His Spirit will and does use, and you can help facilitate this in a manner that apostolic example establishes (2 Timothy 2:23-26).

To this end, secondly, be familiar with how cultic systems of indoctrination and social control function. You will want a working knowledge of how cults keep people in their thrall based upon sound observation and established fact. Knowing the way in which cults orchestrate their interaction and influence is extremely important in learning about a cult's worldview as well as in anticipating counteractive dialogue with them aimed at evangelism. If you wish to effectively build the bridges to the heart and mind of a cultist, you must familiarize yourself with the culture he's come from - especially with those aspects of it that dominate their thought, choices and behavior.

Ex-member testimonials, books and personal observation are going to be the best first hand sources of information on this slippery reality. Websites, monographs, tracts and books that have this information abound and there simply is no shortage of information in these last days. You can find a good list of these here off our website. A casual Google search will also bring these up with one mouse click. These resources can also provide additional perspective that shows how and where cults will focus their efforts of recruitment, what populaces and audiences they target and how they go about doing so. Studying a cult's own glowing reports of its own progress (from the LDS Church's official newspapers to the Watchtower's own publications) also will help you glean further insight into how they function also.

As you study and research both cult and ex-cult materials, you will note that there are certain themes, terminology and expressions that they all share. which will help you become sensitized to the group-specific vocabulary they use to describe how they interact. This vocabulary is part of the language of mind control: it is a specific collection of unique lingo, buzz words and terms that convey dual meanings and is one of the 8 criterion Lifton described as "loaded language". Such words are used by a specific cult's membership among non-members and means one thing and yet is understood in an entirely different way within the group. These terminology differences can be theological and doctrinal or descriptive shorthand meant to define a situation, or alter and even stop critical thought altogether. Knowing what these terms are can also help you avoid any stumbling over the trigger words for their mind control dynamic which the cult's loaded language uses to short circuit dialogue, thus becoming very big obstacles to communication and understanding.

Knowledge of this has enormous implication for the Christian determined to bring a contextualized and intentional Christian witness for the Gospel. Familiarity with the language of a people group in world missions is a given: therefore, familiarity with the group-specific language of a cult group you want to see the Gospel proclaimed to is no less important.

Note: It can be and is routinely argued (by cults and their apologists) that ex-members are in the position to misrepresent and distort any objectivity one can have about understanding a cult. This can be true and there are many angry and hurt people with axes to grind and personal agendas afoot who can certainly mislead and misinform. Such people, however, can be identified by the tone and focus of their testimony and the fact that they exist doesn't invalidate the inestimable worth of the sharing that ex-members who function from a far more stable position can bring.

Ultimately, it's time spent with cult members - as well as with ex-members - which will help you become sensitized to the uniquely personal idiosyncracies of each group. There's nothing quite like hearing a Jehovah's Witness speak of "not running ahead of Mother" (not thinking or acting independently of the Watchtower's authority) and the Mormon advise you that you should first digest "milk before meat" (listen to their version of LDS "truth" that doesn't involve anything controversial, like asking them if they expect to be gods throughout eternity) to bring this point home. Be observers, listen and keep an objective and open mind on anything a cult member may tell you as you take mental/literal notes. You will not only get a grip on their doctrinal distinctives but how they respond when you raise the issue and what to expect if you bring up a Gospel presentation. This is undeniably a vital insight that is worth the pursuit.

For we must never forget to look on the fields. Certainly, we believe and must act upon the conviction that the Gospel of Christ must be preached and shared with cult members, too. But when witnessing to them, we simply have to bear in mind that in order for our sharing to be effective and for our witness to Christ's grace bear fruit that impacts and transforms, we have to understand who we labor among, to do as Christ commanded in John 4:35 and truly "look on the fields." In other words, we must come to truly understand the people we are trying to reach, not just personally but coming to know what they value, how they think, what they fear, how they hurt, what they hate, and what they love. We should stand ready to share how the Gospel speaks to those needs and not allow our evangelical shortsightedness (as well as pride) lull us into the belief that a memorized witnessing technique mastering a set of Bible verses and polished presentation alone will do the job. Life just isn't that cut and dried.

Believe you me, you'd better have this settled in your heart and mind long before a Mormon uncle or neighbor begins to grill you over how central their "burning of the bosom" is to their belief Joseph Smith was a prophet of God and how this settled the issue for them of the truth of the "restored Gospel" that the LDS Church now eagerly wants everyone to turn to.

Thirdly, plan lines of discussion that directly address the authority issue.

Cultists target spiritual seekers lost in the post-Christian wilderness and move on them wherever the opportunity arises in a predictible pattern. It is significant to note that first comes a seduction by false cult authority that occurs when the cult offers love, significance, meaning, purpose, mission, and the "answers" to life's questions as mediated only through their teaching, their leaders, their exclusive revelation (Book Of Mormon, Divine Principle, Weigh Down Workshop, the Urantia book, etc.). Once a recruit's attention is achieved, cults use an application of well qualified subjectivism (feelings) and objectivism (reason). The cultic authority compels prospects to entertain their truth claims (reason) and then to go to extraordinary lengths to validate them with positive experiences they stage (called "love bombing" by some, involving yet another Liftonian thought reform principle called "mystical manipulation") which then short-circuit more sober judgment and create emotional and social dependence upon the group for more of what is an intoxicating and pleasurable experience.

When this happens, the cult authority exalts their worldview, moving from the known to the unknown and urging recruits onward in their "search for truth." They relentlessly advance a total reformation, redefinition or wholesale abandonment of whatever pre-existing belief system they had to conform it to the cult's worldview. To accomplish this, pseudointellectualism is then applied by the cult's authority figures to reinforce their claims with hyper-rationale and slick argumentation: their false authority system anticipates and "answers" all questions to conclusively prove it's superiority over any other claim to authority. Such "new light" then is enjoined as the only truly righteous way to live and act. The seeming benign, yet ultimately bitter fruit of this high stakes ploy by cultic authority always results in the shutdown of independent thinking by the controlling dynamics just discussed, which results in full blown cultic mind control as well as unethical manipulation and coercion.

There is no one "Gordian Knot" to tackle that will deliver a cult member instantly from this kind of culturally impinged cult mind control. If there was, believe you me, we'd be using it. But certainly, the cult authority issue is a big one to grapple with when witnessing to cultists, and their mind control dynamics are the thorniest challenge to deal with.

Actual dialogue direction that addresses the mind control issue in a cultist should have two underlying goals:

1) it will encourage a cult member to engage in independent thought and re-assessment of a truth claim that foundational to the cult's authority, thus evoking legitimate doubt and a desire for further investigation. The discusson should be phrased in a way that lets the cult member "connect the dots" and draw their own inferences that will stimulate additional personal examination.

Example: When sharing with a cult member, ask questions and discuss how a completely different cult operates and engages in mind control. Make a time of sharing and questions like "did you hear about this? What do you think about it?" When talking with a Family member, tell them how the Sun Myung Moon started the Unification Church, how he depends on revelation from the spirit world for his inspiration, and how his organization uses front groups, retreats and days of indoctrination to break down the freedom of thought recruits with his dogma, leaving them no time to think and demanding instant and complete belief with their system. Go on and on as briefly as you can (hint: you can see why study of cult specifics is so important). What you've done is effectively and subversively penetrated the cult member's mind control defenses by side stepping them. You never mentioned their cult, you shared a fascinating story about something they've likely not quite heard of, and they will eventually start recognizing that their group's claims and operation aren't unique, because they've gone through the same general kind of process when they were recruited by their cult.

2) it will evoke within the member memories of what their pre-cult life and identity was like outside the cult that are positive, thus reconnecting them with the concept that truth and reality can and do exist outside the group. This serves to further undermine the radical redefinition of personality, identity and even memory that the cult authority forced upon them at the time of their recruitment, giving them an opportunity to unshackle their frozen faculty of independent thinking.

Example: During sharing with a cult member, it turns out that the person was at one time a very active church member who had been deeply involved in congregational life and community service and who at one seemed quite fulfilled in what they did. While this past life is usually going to be characterized by the cultist as an empty time of ignorance and darkness, gentle questioning can help encourage some momentary reflection on those positive aspects of their life that they lived. Try to help them remember when their pre-cult spirituality and self-determination made an uplifting difference in their lives and that of others. By seeking their personal expansion upon this past, the details and memories of how it affected them can profoundly stir them on several personal levels simultaneously, stimulating a keen awareness that their group's claims of being the only meaningful source for fulfillment are hardly unique, despite what they've been led to believe.

Remember 2 Timothy 2:23-26? It bears repeating here:

But foolish and unlearned questions avoid, knowing that they do gender strifes. And the servant of the Lord must not strive; but be gentle unto all men, apt to teach, patient, In meekness instructing those that oppose themselves; if God peradventure will give them repentance to the acknowledging of the truth

When witnessing to cultists who are caught up under cult mind control, Christians are to avoid being caught up in grappling with the questions that can come from anywhere but clearly go nowhere, that stir up trouble and not thought. In a humble spirit that offers light without being seen as preachy, Christians will view themselves as servants offering up strong medicine with all of the winsome appeal we can muster as God gives us the ability.

Fourth, be convinced this is a doable task and a winnable war. To remove these kinds of cultic coercive blinders which the "god of this world" has placed over the hearts and minds of those under cultic mind control, you have to incorporate this inner hope into a personal commitment to reach out and share the Gospel with cult members. Witnessing to cult members requires deliberate research, serious prayer and earnest effort. It's hard. It's spiritual warfare. It's taking on Satan's territory in the name of the One Who has defeated Him.

But you've seen testimonies of ex-cultists whose very presence plainly declares that they are trophies of God's grace - and that some witnessing, praying Christians were part of His plan to call them into the light. You are certainly going to be a part of that all .. walk worthily and above all in faith!

Perhaps you're beginning to see that evangelizing cultists is going to take more than running the Four Spiritual Laws by them and expecting them to fall down before you to repent. There are times that this CAN happen, but it's largely going to be the exceedingly rare exception rather than the rule, so hope for the best and plan for the worst as you make ready to witness to a cultist.

Does the person have to be in a weak state of mind in order to be part of mind control? What are some of the best pieces of literature you have come across specifically for counteracting cultic conversation and mind control techniques?

It is an understandable but erroneous assumption to believe that one's "weak-mindedness" makes them more susceptible to mind control. I will quote from my article on myths about cults that address this:

Myth #1 – People in cults are mindless fanatics.

Untrue. Virtually every member of every cultic group existing on in our world today began their entry into the group as generally balanced, thinking people who have great potential, skills and giftings they want to offer to a cause "larger than themselves." Cult members are both CEO's and dishwashers, white-collar and blue-collar, scientists as well as grade-school dropouts. While it is undeniably true that some of them have plunged into extremist forms of behavior, and that all labor under some form of cultic mind control that compels them onward into an apparently zealous activism or passion, all of them retain the capacity for critical thought (their ability to responsibly function in society proves this), but have been taught to suspend their faculties of independent and objective thought when focusing on their involvement with the group.

Myth #7 – Members of cults stay in them because they're weak and unable to cope with life.

The membership of cultic groups maintain their attachments to their groups for a variety of reason, but certainly NOT because they are too fragile and incapable of dealing with life outside it. Remember, these are people who are integrated into society who deal with life on the same level non-members do, albeit with their cultic worldview guiding and shaping their responses to it. It actually takes enormous amounts of personal courage and self-determination to remain committed to a group that often puts them at odds and even opposition to their own non-cult family members and friends. They stay because they are persuaded and conditioned to believe that there are no other meaningful alternative places to go outside the cultic fold. Most cult members have family, friends, business associates and other personal attachments with the group that they won't break from easily. But they also remain due to the systematically implanted misinformation, controlled behavior and blind trust in their group they've been taught to express – but not because they are weak and spineless.

One of the most helpful articles we've ever read on dialoguing with a cult member can be read by going here. Written by an ex-Jehovah's Witness, the article provides a list of outstanding questions you can use to share with cultists of all stripes, when properly rephrased for their situation, that will help them become aware of the kind of mental and spiritual bondages that their cults have put them in.

We've recommended those books authored by Robert J. Lifton, Steve Martin and Steven Hassan as great sources for understanding and dealing with cultic mind control and encourage you to obtain and study them.

After a conversion what is the most common thing that makes them return to the cult and how should we better disciple them?

There are many factors involved when a new convert to a cult feels compelled to return - please ensure you study this link's section entitled difficulties of former sect members.

If there is one thing that I have personally heard and witnessed over the years that seems to especially stands out most starkly, it would be the abject failure of the church to stand with and walk alongside the new convert in actual follow up. People rededicating their lives to Christ after having been in a cult usually return because the Church that He ordained should be His living extension fails to reach out, bear up their unique burden with them and teach them how to walk out the Christian life.

A cult member who has come to Christ also has engaged in an extraordinary act of personal self-evaluation with profound consequences for how they now are trying to live. The ex-cult member's time of transition from the Cultworld to the Kingdom of God is fraught with new perils, confusions, and fears that the Church has to simply address. For those leaving such immersive, totalist environments like cults, these kinds of struggles always come for Christian conversion doesn't wipe away consequences of cult involvement. After months or even years of being conformed to a cult's personality mold, getting clear of the cult's indoctrination and social mores won't happen overnight.

Sadly, churches love the "Kodak moment" and the thrill of seeing cultists embrace Christ and be baptized in their nice clean baptismals, but utterly fail to realize just how much critically acute the level of pastoral care and admonition they will need to stabilize spiritually. In short, they love the birth of the baby, but dont' seem to understand that such infants in the faith need to be clothed, fed, protected from rolling off their beds, and to have their diapers changed. It's when things get dirty and real effort is needed that Christian servants that sweat the nurturing load suddenly are found to be in short supply.

Equally tragic is the fact that this is a common failure of the church for all converts.

Implicit in the task of Christian discipleship is the plain fact that ongoing, interactive and personal fellowship and sharing underlies all truly transformative Christian formation. Christians simply have to rise up and be what the Bible says they should be - those who are called to not just preach but teach the Gospel to all nations, meaning that one stops and takes time to ensure that those who are taught understand and are enabled to practice it. That is what Christian discipleship requires and it gets walked out in real life when Christians start taking the time to listen to the needs, to pray with the strugglilng, to hear out the questions, to speak into the fears, to walk the fearful hours right along side the lives of new converts.

Ex-cultists who come to Christ will have many unique challenges themselves that should be directly tackled by those who care for them in the church. The outstanding book "Out Of The Cults Into The Church" is one of the few books available written from an explicit Christian perspective that addresses these issues. Another one entitled "Recovery From Churches That Abuse" can be viewed online here.

********

I hope that these three blog entries have been of help to you and may God use you mightily to pierce the darkness of the Cultworld where ever you go. Rest assured that He is desiring to use you in a great way to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised. Godspeed to you when the cultists whom God will now send your way come asking the questions that you now can answer so as to give to them the best hearing of the Gospel they've ever had.

Remember Four Final Things As You Witness As You Are Going ...

Thing 1 - Remember who you're going to represent - the Almighty Lord of All, Jesus Christ. Dress, act, speak and minister accordingly. You have authority and power - and you are to walk with the humility of a servant.

Thing 2 - Use your testimony - testify what Jesus means to YOU; how He has blessed you, how He speaks to you and walks with you and helps you day by day. No argument stands before a man with an experience

Thing 3 - Keep the faith - Smile, love, stay calm, rejoice when everything goes wrong (and sometimes it does). HE is in charge. This is His work. Look to Him and don't look at the situation. He makes the rough way smooth.

Thing 4 - Never allow discouragement to crush you or success to puff you up - God is in His heaven, and He knows our hearts and keeps the books.

Slouching Toward Gommorrah: Not Religious OR Spiritual, One Nation Under Gods

2009-03-25T07:25:00.012-04:00

Jesus said things would be spiritually dark when He started intimating when He would return.

He said nothing about a great end time revival, not some Christian utopia in which the Church was dominating everything. He said something quite different.

Read Matthew 24 and understand the times.

Then, click on this link to an eye opening USA Today article and decide if your theology needs a little adjustment.

It's just another sign of the end time apostasy. Have a nice day.

When Cults Go Looking To Shove In All The Wrong Places: The Watchtower & The Closing Of The Russian Nation

2009-03-17T01:13:00.003-04:00

We quoted this in full from the links, sent to us by good brother Paul .. the website links aren't working well at all, but Paul was able to get us the full text of the link immediately below.

13 March 2009 RUSSIA: NATIONWIDE STRIKE AT JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES

http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=1267


By Geraldine Fagan, Moscow Correspondent, Forum 18 News Service

In the space of just three weeks, Jehovah's Witness communities across
Russia have undergone 500 state check-ups. "That's a conservative estimate
- we're definitely talking the whole country," Yaroslav Sivulsky remarked
to Forum 18 News Service from the Jehovah's Witnesses' St Petersburg
headquarters on 10 March. "Our telephones here are red hot from people
calling to report incidents and ask why it's happening."

The nationwide sweep, ordered by First Assistant General Public
Prosecutor Aleksandr Bastrykin, is linked to an investigation into the
Jehovah'sWitnesses' St Petersburg headquarters, the Moscow Regional
Public Prosecutor's Office explains in its order for check-ups sent to
district subdivisions on 13 February.

Having failed to find grounds for prosecution since the St Petersburg
investigation began in 2004, the authorities are now "trawling" for
information to shut down the Jehovah's Witnesses' Russian headquarters
and over 400 dependent organisations, Sivulsky believes:
"Nothing else makes sense."

Jehovah's Witnesses' "missionary activity, social isolation, refusal to
perform military service, accept blood transfusions and other religiously
motivated restrictions required of members of this organisation
provoke a negative attitude towards its activity from the population
and traditional Russian confessions," the Moscow Regional Public
Prosecutor's Office order notes.

Forum 18 has also viewed similar recent instructions for urgent
check-ups on Jehovah's Witnesses issued by Sakhalin Regional,
Udmurtia's Sarapul Municipal and Khabarovsk's Industrial District
Public Prosecutor's Offices.

On 12 March Forum 18 asked the General Public Prosecutor's Office
by fax when and why Bastrykin's order was issued, as well as for a
copy of the document. A Press Department spokesperson promised a
reply on 13 March after 3pm Moscow time. However, no response
was received by the end of the working day. As of 13 March, the
website of the General Public Prosecutor's Office made no mention
of the order either.

"They are checking anything and everything that can be checked,"
Sivulsky told Forum 18. Moscow and Sakhalin Regional Public
Prosecutor's Offices recommend co-ordinated check-ups involving
the police, FSB security police and Justice Ministry departments
in their orders.

Education departments appear to be following a particular line of
investigation. A 9 February Mostovskoi (Krasnodar Region) District
Education Department letter to local head teachers requests
information by 5 March on "interference by religious - including
Jehovah's Witness - organisations in the teaching process at educational
institutions, enticement of minors into the activity of religious
organisations without the knowledge of parents or guardians, cases of
refusing blood transfusions or other treatment to minors, other
violations of pupils' rights by members of and participants in religious
organisations."

A 17 February letter from Kholmsk (Sakhalin Region) Municipal
Education Department asks head teachers to respond to three questions
by the following day: Does the Kholmsk Jehovah's Witness organisation
conduct activity in educational institutions? Do any teachers belong to
this organisation? What work is being done in institutions to prevent
employees from being drawn into this organisation?

An 18 February telegram from Stavropol Municipal Education
Department asks head teachers for information by the following day
on cases of "social isolation of followers of Jehovah's Witness teachings
and refusal to study in connection with any bans or restrictions by
this religious organisation." Also in Stavropol Region, a 17-year-old
Jehovah's Witness pupil in the town of Izobilny reports on 24
February that his teacher was asked to compile a report about him
for the local Education Department, including whether he has
suicidal tendencies.

None of the check-up orders refer to extremism, Sivulsky of the
Jehovah's Witnesses told Forum 18. Parallel attempts to prosecute
individual Jehovah's Witness communities for distribution of
allegedly extremist literature continue apace, however. Religious
literature from other confessions has also been accused of extremism.
Translations of the works of Turkish Islamic theologian Said Nursi
have been banned in Russia following such claims by the authorities.

(see F18News 29 May 2008
<http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=1136>)

On 25 February North Ossetia Public Prosecutor's Office filed suit
with the local Supreme Court for the liquidation of the republic's
four Jehovah's Witness organisations in Alagir, Beslan, Mozdok
and Vladikavkaz. As well as distribution of allegedly extremist
religious literature, the suit cites a number of grounds for the
organisations' closure, including Jehovah's Witnesses' allegedly
anti-constitutional refusal of blood transfusions and religious activity
outside the geographical location where they are registered. It also
notes that four Vladikavkaz Jehovah's Witnesses have refused to
perform alternative military service - in one case resulting in a
Soviet District Court sentence of 180 hours' forced labour - and that
the husband of a member of the Beslan organisation has filed for
divorce because she is a Jehovah's Witness.

A hearing at North Ossetia Supreme Court was slated for 12
March, but the Jehovah's Witnesses requested an alternative date
because their lawyers were already due to appear in a similar
extremism case in Salsk (Rostov-on-Don Region) on that day.

After participating in the 12 March Salsk hearing, New York-based
Jehovah's Witness lawyer James Andrik told Forum 18 that the
court is so far relying solely on the expert literary analysis of Jehovah's Witness
literature by Rostov Centre for Court Studies as evidence.

(see F18News 14 July 2008
<http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=1159>)

In a statement to Salsk Municipal Court, Andrik pointed out that in
the Soviet Union "thousands of Jehovah's Witnesses were imprisoned
or subject to other hardships and restrictions of their rights as a
result of their religious activity, literature, and beliefs." While
exonerated as victims of "unfounded repression" in 1996, however,
Russian government representatives are now "poised to repeat the
victimization of Jehovah's Witnesses," he maintains.

Thousands of kilometres apart, municipal courts in Salsk and
Gorno-Altaisk (Altai Republic) both began determining whether
Jehovah's Witness literature is extremist on 19 January

(see F18News 16 January 2009
<http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=1241>).

The Gorno-Altaisk court has commissioned an expert literary
analysis by linguists at Kemerovo State University. Court expert
analyses of Jehovah's Witness literature in similar cases in
Rostov-on-Don and Yekaterinburg are still ongoing, Sivulsky told
Forum 18

(see F18News 14 July 2008
<http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=1159>).

Under the 2002 Extremism Law, even a low-level court may
rule literature extremist. It is then automatically added to the
Federal List of Extremist Materials and banned throughout Russia.
The List's 325 titles as of 13 March typically suggest extreme
nationalist or anti-Semitic content. Most theological entries
- the inclusion of which is also disputed - are Islamic

(see most recently F18News 16 January 2009
<http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=1241>).

While it succeeded in banning the Jehovah's Witnesses' Moscow
local religious organisation on other grounds in 2004, the Russian
capital's Golovinsky District Court failed to find it guilty of extremism

(see F18News 25 May 2004
<http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=327>).

Officials in dozens of cities across Russia moved to block Jehovah's
Witnesses' regional congresses last summer

(see F18News 22 July 2008
<http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=1161>).

For a personal commentary by Irina Budkina, editor of the
<http://www.samstar.ru> Old Believer website, about continuing
denial of equality to Russia's religious minorities, see
F18News 26 May 2005
<http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=570>.

For more background, see Forum 18's Russia religious
freedom survey at
<http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?article_id=1196>.

Reports on freedom of thought, conscience and belief in
Russia can be found at
<http://www.forum18.org/Archive.php?query=&religion=all&country=10>.

A printer-friendly map of Russia is available at
<http://www.nationalgeographic.com/xpeditions/atlas/index.html?Parent=europe&Rootmap=russi>.

© Forum 18 News Service. All rights reserved. ISSN 1504-2855

You may reproduce or quote this article provided that credit
is given to F18News http://www.forum18.org/

Answering Some More Questions From Lee University's EVA 363 For 2009 2 of 3

2009-03-08T20:59:00.008-04:00

Approaches (Part 1 can be read here)

How do cults recruit and how can we go about to prevent it?

Cults successfully recruit new members by appealing to their felt needs with a compelling presentation of truth claims that go unchallenged by objective examination. In short, the recruited, in seeking an "itch for their scratch", are people struggling with various issues and questions which the cult seems to provide all the answers for. Their astonishingly effective means of personal recruitment is based upon meeting those needs, thereby gaining significant means of leverage and control over them. And their recruitment is usually as successful as their group's ability to foster that instant sense of rapport and community with those they seek to convert.

This kind of cultic recruitment has been a major source for their success and even resurgence. The picture illustrates the fruit of their labor: you see here a Spiritwatch Ministry worker in 2001 seeking to provide a hapless Christian an informational flyer about the cultic Unification Church rally she was going to, thinking she was going to a Christian meeting. The UC is a cultic movement run by the antichrist called "Reverend" Sun Myung Moon and the Korean woman was a Unificationist (Moonie) who actually physically tried to snatch the flyers out of the hands of the largely minority believers being bused in for the meetings. They were being brought there by their unscrupulous and/or undiscerning Christian pastors who represented the Unification front group that organized these rallies as an interfaith agency's moral crusade. Draping itself with concern for the spiritual and moral decline of America, the Moon organization has long sought to establish a "common cause" with evangelical Christian minorities (which you can read about more here) and hundreds of minority pastors and church leaders across America have been duped, seduced or financially persuaded into becoming allies with their antichristian agenda. This was just one example in a string of spiritual duplicity that shows how cults will use any means they can to deceive their recruits.

Using discerned common spiritual and social values that the prospect and they seem to have in common, the cult member is then able to establish deeper connection with a recruit. From that point on, cult recruiters will also interact with them on purely interpersonal issues that most powerfully influence the seeker. Their payoff to the prospect - facilitated by the recruiter's personal contact - is a carefully controlled outpouring of positive regard bestowed by the collective group on them as they first attend their meetings and discussion groups that are aimed to impress upon them how valued and cared for they are: this is done in three ways (these were taken from our article on how cults recruit)

Immediate Importance - the prospect is affirmed to the extent that they are made to feel essential and important to the success of cause they are confronted with - since it is how those needs and their fulfillment will be met .

Instant Intimacy - the prospect is provided with a high degree of almost instantaneous caring and sharing with other group members who unhesitatingly make themselves available for the development of deep, close relationships ..

Interactive Introduction - the prospect is brought into (and caught up with) a community of people who have a vibrant social life totally centered around their collective involvement with the revelation or philosophy that the group holds is the "truth" that will save the world ..

Such recruitment, expressed in love, sweetened with acceptance and starry eyed recruiters avowing the divine/ultimate nature of their message and group, is probably one of the most powerful and compelling forces of charisma that cultic human nature can muster. It wins converts when those within the recruit's circle of friends and family, for any of a number of reasons, fail to respond with alternative perspectives that counter the cult's claim and love-bombing culture.

In some extremely rare cases, demonic compulsion may actually be involved, but most of the time, it's a purely human transaction between a person motivated by longing for positive change in their lives and a cult recruiter ready to lure them into transformative relationships they believe this change will come with.

So how do you counter such a thing?

Remember the words of Messala, from the old classic movie Ben Hur ..

"you ask how to fight an idea. Well, I'll tell you how... with another idea!"

Preventing cults from successfully recruiting unwary people can take two forms, one being proactive, one being reactive. The first involves a comprehensive strategy engaging cult awareness and educational initiatives advocated, funded and publicized by concerned Christian believers or non-religious individuals as part of ongoing service to their local communities. Using the media, advertising, public meetings and church educational systems, generic discussions of cultism can be held that can alert people to the dangers of cult recruitment, their vulnerability to it and provide resources for self-education and assistance, as well as channels for assistance to those who've been already affected by it. Such initiatives, unfortunately, have little to no priority whatsoever in most communities, a sad and tragic thing when you consider that other public service activities concerning the awareness of child abduction, domestic violence, debt reduction and identity theft issues seem far more attractive to the average member of the species of Joe. Q. Public.

The second arises when the friends and family of a prospective convert to some cultic ideology seek some kind of intervention to head off their involvement. It is the latter course, unfortunately, that becomes the encounter of choice for most people when cults shatter their world after the fact and is always the far more difficult direction to take. Entering into positive and fruitful discussion with people already being persuaded by a cult to make life-changing decisions and lifestyle choices that they've come to believe are necessary for personal transformation is perhaps one of the most difficult things you will ever seek to do. Cult awareness initiatives could have prevented it, but - as I've observed - they are virtually non-existent in society today.

Countering cult recruitment involves fighting the ideas of the cult being spun before a inquisitive seeker with another ones without actually fighting the idealist of the cult - even though, inevitably, one must realize that this is indeed a struggle for hearts and minds and conversation will get intense. The ideas and concepts being used to entice and seduce the recruit have to be respectfully identified, understood and directly challenged in the same way the cult introduced them. You will be engaging the heart and mind of the recruited with a line of equally cheery, confident and yet Holy Spirit-timed seasons of questioning and inquiry that accomplish this.

When doing personal work in this area with a recruit of a cult, there are several issues that have be simultaneously tackled by the countercult worker that have to be kept in mind. First, the whole attempt to counter cult recruitment must be viewed as process and not just an event. They must be willing and able to devote at least the same amount of personal time and effort in dialogue and relationship with the recruit that the cult has put in to entice them. Secondly, the positive regard, interest and concern shown in their prospect must be drawn from genuine concern - not out of some rush to crusade or "cult bust."

Learning how to ask open ended questions that objectively explore the truth claims made by the recruiter is the next vital step. The recruit's suspension of critical thought may have already started, which is only a few steps away from cult mind control and can easily result in their ability to divert concerns and appear "o.k." to those wanting to understand the draw of the cult upon them. These truth claims can range from common ones focusing on moral, philosophical and spiritual absolutes to more personally meaningful ones that engage an individual's unique questioning of his life and the world around him. Collection of documented information about the cult's deceptive representations about itself and the world around it, their bogus scientific claims, and "insider doctrines" the group hides from the public that reveal its true agenda are vital to providing objective truth about the cult's claims.

Another important dynamic to counter is the very appeal itself that cult recruiters use to draw prospects into investigation of their group. The recruit's attempt to find answers to their questions and to seek truth should and must be affirmed but it is the conclusions they are making that should be gently called into question with the documented research about their claims by concerned family, friends and countercult workers. They should be encouraged to remain open to self-study and examination of your evidences before committing to the kinds of radical lifestyle reordering the cult will ultimately demand of them.

This is at the core of countering a cult's "loving on" a new recruit, delivered in equally caring concern. The cult's appeal should be respectfully re-explored with alternate perspectives when they begin to entertain unbiblical, illogical and/or aberrant directions that will lead to religious abuse, coercion and unethical psychological manipulation. Since the cult recruiter uses gentle encouragement or even bold challenge to persuade them, countercult workers must not be any less forthright in bringing this to the attention of the prospect they seek to ensnare.

This is because timing is of the highest importance and often the one critical factor that too many family and friends of those being drawn into a cult fail to recognize. Generally, the longer a recruit has been interacting with the cult, especially when going to cult social gatherings are involved, the more and more deeper the social, spiritual and emotional ties are going to be rooted - and the more powerful the deceptive reasoning of "good words and fair speeches" that cult recruiters engage in to "deceive the hearts of the simple." (Romans 16:18). Assuming a loved one's interactions with a cult recruiter over time is a "phase they're going through" is a dangerous mistake. They should be calmly and carefully asked about their new friends and what they've been learning and their literature should be read and studied - and discerned.

It is best, of course, that all of this be done away from the influences of the cult recruiter who will do all they can to , but sometimes this isn't possible, and the new recruit with starry eyed enthusiasm, will bring you into a place where you're going to have to engage in dialogue the cult recruiter themselves. That then becomes an actual witnessing session that involves many of the same practices we've just discussed but takes a different direction, which we'll discuss shortly. Needless to say, the recruit will be listening very intently as you share with their new found friend and that this level of conversation will indeed be life changing.

How does one come across finding a cult? I don't know any cultists, where can I find them? What do you consider the best place or types of places to meet people in cults and what are the best places to try to build relationships and evangelize them?

It's not hard to find cults or cultists: they can be quite easily found. They are friends of friends, neighbors of your uncle, members of the company softball team, or your own grandchild. At times you may need to go to where they are, but don't be surprised if God's economy leads them into divine intersection with your own lives. Be ready for this - if you're serious about witnessing to cult members, be prepared for "coincidences" orchestrated by the Spirit. It will happen!

But don't be afraid to go to where cultists live their lives and try to practice their faith, either. Jesus said we are to go into "all the world," and that world is where the cultists go also. They deserve Spirit-led and discerning admonition that will reach their minds as well as their souls - and the best way to share this to best impact is through the building of intentionally sought and nutured relationships. They deserve our reaching out to them as we encounter them.

The settings where these relationships can be started with cult members are many and are where Christians should be nurturing them. That means meeting them on street corners when they distribute their magazines and tracts. That means going to their open houses and weekly study groups they advertise for those interested in hearing their perspectives. That means devoting time to spend it in their company. It means calling that toll free number and asking for a visit from a representative to visit your home. And it especially means taking the time out to have a lunch visit with a friend or co-worker who has something "special" to share with you in a far more informal and personal way, or lingering in an aisle in a bookstore or on a doorstep in engaging discussion.

These latter examples are usually the best opportunities in which building a personal relationship with a cultist can be best done. Relationships you build with a cultist will become the load bearing bridge over which the dialogue that explores their faith is best supported. In this vein, I'd say the "best" place you can hope to find yourself in relationship building with a cultist is if you can successfully get yourself alone them, especially if it can be done on a regular basis. Apart from their cult peers, it gives him/her the opportunity to be more authentic, less guarded, and more open to hearing you out. It also affords you time to directly address the cultic mind control they're likely laboring under with lines of inquiry that you can make more personal.

It is important to listen to them in order to gain and establish a relationship. At what point to we gain or regain conversation in order that there is a control of conversation while still maintaining a healthy respect for their belief but yet still trying to win them for Christ?

Anyone, including cult members, deserves to be shown respect in any conversation held with them. Truly meaningful communication of truth depends upon it. Conversation should be a two way street in which two people freely exchange ideas through questioning, answering, listening and challenging in a spirit of inquiry.

However, while cultists are people always ready for a good discussion, they don't let on that their chat is driven by the cult's missionary desire to make converts. Never forget this! As friendly, transparent and sincere as they may seem, the goal is always the same - they will see you as a sheep in need of their shepherd. This is a chilling effect on their ability to actually dialogue with you - it's also been seriously compromised as a result of the mind controlling indoctrination that they have been conditioned with which all but shuts down their ability to critically think through an issue you may raise. Questions raised and subjects tackled are quickly determined to be "safe" or "off-limits" to the cult member on the basis of what they've been taught. This is because the group usually has trained them to speak with outsiders as if they were all potential converts, as those in need of enlightenment, and therefore, who are wallowing in spiritual deficiency and ignorance. Their arguments and passion are going to be reserved for self-expression that serves the cult's agenda of winning them to their belief system.

This is the kind of personal connection, challenge and rapport that they want to establish with you so as to lead you into an amenable frame of mind that will more easily entertain their movement's propaganda. The scripted presentations, invitations and testimonial that laud the cult are meant to evoke in you a desire to explore the ways of such an upright group. They are seamlessly woven into the conversation and become an undeniably alluring song which cultism sings so sweetly and seductively as it calls to you to join their ranks and come to the light. If you allow the conversation's time to be dominated by their singing of the cult's praises, the kind of communication you are trying to foster simply will not occur - indeed, you'll end up find the going get frustrating and even confusing. You will walk away wondering what happened and the cultist more convinced then ever that they've found the truth.

Bearing in mind, then, that you will be approached with a sales pitch hidden in "sharing," you must purpose in both heart and mind that you have to keep some measure of control over the conversation within the common bonds of civility. To encourage openness to the cult member, as well as signal respect for his belief system, hearing them out is certainly necessary as well as polite but when seeking to continue fruitful discussion with a cult member, establishing boundaries for the flow of the discussion is of critical importance. If not carefully watched for, the cult member will go on to seek control over your time of interaction with an indoctrinating presence. Inevitably, then, after a season of listening to the cultist, you must seek to guide the conversations you have with cult members and keep the focus on the topics that you determine are going to be most helpful in addressing the truth claims and testimonial they will offer to you.

Remember that if you're going to be of any real help to the cult member, you are going to have studied up on what they believe and be familiar with why they believe it is true. Before you can share the Gospel of Christ with a cultist, you must be familiar with the false gospel of the cult he's trying to represent to you and then learn why the individual embraces its' truth claims. You should have some working knowledge about crucial terminology differences they have when using religious and non-religious language that can foster misunderstanding and even deception.
It is only during and after a careful hearing out of what a cultist shares that you'll start seeing where your discussion should proceed if you're determined to bring Christian witness in your personal response, witness to the Gospel of Christ as well as witness that helps lead them back from the blinding of the mind that the cult has inflicted them with so they might be free once more to make their own choices for truth and not merely become mechanized robots reciting a cultic creed (2 Corinthians 4:4).

So the usage of focusing questions that help turn the conversation back to the direction you feel it should go should be used. Just one good question added to your conversational flow can have this effect and get the cultist out of his pre-programmed response track and out of his comfort zone toward critical thought without his actually knowing it. Focusing questions asked in sincere intent should zero in on an issue the cult member is aware of but which encourages their interaction on a line of inquiry that draws them toward a real grappling with truth. The question can take any form attempting to address the cult mind control they labor under, their own misunderstanding of a historical event the cult makes much over, a reexamination of sound doctrine they've been taught is Satanically inspired, etc.

Discussing these and other issues can make an already long answer into a book. We'll suggest some resources shortly to read, and invite you to discuss these with us locally here in Cleveland. We're always available!

How do you get someone in a cult to be receptive to you, because most are secretive and closed off to their group or cult?

Show honest concern, curiosity, and openness to hearing them out. It's that simple. Everyone wants to feel that they are being heard, being heeded, being paid attention to. Inviting a hearing of the cult's beliefs and personal story is a dinner bell for them for which their reserve will fall. The important thing to keep in mind is that as you show this genuine concern that you don't become a sponge that uncritically accepts whatever you're told at face value. Be a very active listener who employs listening skills informed by information about cultism and the cult in general to hear them out as way of giving them their civil due and hearing them out - while simultaneously analyzing their dogma and protecting yourself with an objective inner viewpoint which should intentionally informs your understanding.

While the social isolation through indoctrination that we've mentioned which cults impose on their recruits as they consolidate their manipulative control over their members is a real problem, your willingness to seek to hear them out does wonders to bring those barriers down. The propaganda of the cult that had led them into insulating themselves from external perspectives and influences at the expense of their critical thought can be short circuited by the most simple of human responses - your honest body language that conveys to them that you are indeed listening and seeking to understand them where they are.

If you can successfully cultivate this kind of mindset and manner each time you want to share with a cultists, you are in an excellent position to bring to bear sensitive, relevant and yet uncompromising sharing of the Gospel with them.

In building a relationship with a cult member, how many times should you meet with them and how much time is safe in order that we maintain the relationship without risking our own faith? In discussing our faith to them and trying to breakdown the errors in their doctrine and theology, what is an appropriate way of correcting their doctrine in such a way that shows a spirit of humility and yet still one of Christ's authority? How do you keep yourself from getting into long debates? When do you know it's time to end the conversation?

Building any kind of relationship always takes time and effort. Connecting a member of the Cultworld with that of your own will require this kind of work. Whatever comes up, however, rest assured that every encounter can be a divine appointment in which you can deliver truth in the fashion we've just outlined. Each meeting can be a golden opportunity to plant not only the seeds of the Word of God but thistles of irrefutable doubt in their cult's worldview, belief system and relationships that will challenge the mind control and indoctrination they labor under. Such doors are those that I am convinced God desires the church to walk through, if they will but be willing to go. He can and will open them before us.

So therefore, if God grants you the opportunity to maintain ongoing contact with a cultist, try to meet with the cult member as often as you possibly can. If you can do so, we'd recommend keeping the dialogue limited to an hour or so on a regular weekly or biweekly basis and focused upon a specific topic or subject. These are efforts worthy of pursuit and should be understood as if they were long distance runs rather than sprints. Pacing the flow of discussion by limiting it's scope to specific and agreed upon issues at hand is going to be of crucial importance for yourself and your cult member friend.

You should be aware that how and what you will address in your dialogues will be determined by the kind of relationship you have. Is the cult member a friend, co-worker or even family member with whom there's a high probability that you'll be able to see them more or less on a regular basis? Is the cult member a Jehovah's Witness at a bus stop or an LDS missionary knocking on your door that you may not see again? Most of the time it's more likely that you will find that the kind of encounters with cultists you'll have will indeed be transitory, one-time visitations in which you're going to have only one opportunity to share with a cultist. But that's not always the case. Sometimes the cult member is a loved one who wandered away from the church into the open arms of a cult. You're going to usually be a lot more direct with a one time meeting then one in which your aunt is being recruited by a cult. If you're going to outright engage in evangelistic discussion, then a direct focus on the doctrines of salvation that the cult has indoctrinated them is going to be the best approach, aware that the cult mind control issue should be directly tackled. If you're going to be seeing them regularly, you can and should be more careful in choosing the direction of the sharing.

This is a vital point because those meetings should involve interaction that proceeds only at a pace you are comfortable with in which you are keenly aware of your own interpersonal limits as well as how you intend to tackle the discussion. Never forget the old Greek dictum "Know thyself" - that is to say, be fully aware of your personal boundaries in handling the levels of challenge that your dialogue will present to you. The question above very wisely and intuitively recognizes that witnessing to a cultist - as in any evangelistic encounter - can be a spiritually dangerous enterprise. Keep in mind that the cult member is quietly taking your measure also and is going to be doing what they can to convince and convert you over to their cause. Every moment of presence in a cultist's life is a moment in which deception and confusion is a real hazard that shouldn't be easily dismissed. The hazard can and should be countered by the working knowledge about the cult and its teachings as well as an understanding of the social dynamics behind the cult's appeal that gives you the objective point of view necessary to keep their claims in a balancd perspective.

There can be moments, however, in which the cultist's objections and questions linger when you cannot answer them. Don't worry. It's not at all wrong to admit that you don't have an answer to a question and to advise them you're going to be thinking about it and would like to get back with them on it. Walk away if you need to but don't fail to get some help in tackling the question with other mature believers and countercult ministries and workers. There always is an answer to a cultist's objections - and no matter how personal it may strike you or affecting, it is a challenge that can and must be directly addressed.

In this regard, then, proceed no faster in your sharing on concepts under discussion that you can safely follow. It is infinitely better to tackle one issue only in an encounter then jump from subject to subject willy-nilly with no sense of focus. This is why conversational control is so important. stay on the subject and only detour from it when it is absolutely necessary to do so (such as defining terms or explaining concepts vital to the subject at hand). Keep the initiative and direction of the discussion or you may find yourself being bombarded with a torrent of tangents that will waste your time addressing.

Long debates over truth claims are indeed the very things you want to avoid at all costs. Debates break out when both the countercult worker and the cultist are unwilling or unable to yield a point of contention that will rapidly escalate into a defensive battle where claims, Bible verses, counterclaims, tempers fly hot and fast - so fast that communication breaks down and things get unnecessarily personal and polarizing. Listen to the dry observation of the church father Tertullian about such a debate he encountered in his second century African community:

It happened very recently a dispute was held between a Christian and a Jewish proselyte. Alternately with contentious cable they each spun out the day until evening. By the opposing din, moreover, of some partisans of the individuals, truth began to be overcast by a sort of cloud.

Although this incident took place almost two millenia ago, as you can see, some things never change. Tertullian shrewdly observed that long drawn out argumentation in a group of Christians and false teachers of two opinions can easily lead to the obscuring of the most important point of all – the truth itself! When this happens, the situation has gotten out of hand and has to be reigned in.

Disagreement is inevitable in the dialogue you'll have with a cultist, but avoidance of full blown debate is a top priority. Avoid debates by refusing to argue a point that the cult member seems to want to keep dealing with, even after you've offered your opinions on it. They're trying to pull you off topic to a subject they want to keep pressing home with. Agree to disagree and politely move the conversation along. Offer to study the issue at a later date and keep the conversation guided in the direction you want it in.

At this point, you simply must let the fruit of the Spirit be seen in you (Gal. 5:22-23)! Cultists will indeed argue as forcefully for their religion with their manifold arguments and be quite trying as they disagree with you in an effort to refute your speech. Be calm and cheerful, and don't blow your top at stubbornness! They may reject your message, but they cannot escape the witness of a peaceful, longsuffering Christian. It should be remembered that D.L. Moody, the 19th century American evangelist, once said that of 100 people, one would read the Bible, and the other 99 would "read the Christian." What an indictment of the power of the moderate, Spirit-led temperament of the Christian countercult worker when dealing with what is certainly one of the most potentially toxic and defiling challenges to one's faith that you can face.

You should end the conversation with a cultist if:

1) the cult member shows that they've come to the point where they cannot entertain your conversation with anything else except baiting accusation aimed at inflammatory exchanges (Acts 6:9-13) ; in otherwords, they've just decided to dump on you to watch your reaction ..

2) by God's grace you've made a couple of good, sound observations that have led a cult member to recognize a truth claim they've never considered before so as to give them time to think about it(Acts 17:32) ; and

3) if you begin to feel overwhelmed by the questions the cult presents and feel that you can't keep track of the conversation.

How can you talk to a cultist about the Gospel when they are not a bit receptive to it and even against it? If they are not receptive at all and want nothing to do with you, do you give up?

Keep the counsel of our Lord comes to mind when encountering a cult member - or anyone else - who is intent on simply acting out their spiritually proud mockery of Christian truth. He commanded in Matthew 7:6 to his disciples that they were to "give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you." The offering of spiritual truth to those who would mock it is a pointless and fruitless exercise that only heaps further divine condemnation upon the mocker as they insult and blaspheme it (Romans 1:18-22).

The apostle Paul's mandate in Titus 3:10 is that "a man that is an heretick after the first and second admonition reject; knowing that he that is such is subverted, and sinneth, being condemned of himself." This suggests that the Christian countercult worker, in what may be a final exercise of God's grace being extended to them, should endeavor to supply to even the mocking cult member at least two exhortations to hear out the truth you've come to discuss with them. Beyond this, Paul says, we are to "reject" the person firmly. The Greek verb paraiteomai is an imperative one that can be translated as decline, shun, avoid, refuse, reject. It can't be any plainer then this ..

At this point, the Bible seems clear: we're called to be witnesses of the Gospel of Christ and not providers of holy doormats for false teachers like cultists to tread upon. We should take our apostolic authority as Christians and politely withdraw from further discussion with them, consigning them to God's judgment and rebuking them for their rejection of the truth. I've had LDS missionaries go so far as to take their Buster Browns off and shake the dust off of them in response when a conversation ended in this way, in their own arrogant mimickry of the apostolic anathemas seen in Mark 6:11 and Acts 13:51. Sadly, they bring the witness of judgment only upon their own heads since they have utterly failed to realize that you were the servant of God sent into their own lives by divine visitation (Job 10:12, Luke 19;22 and 1 Peter 2:12).

You have fulfilled your ministry by making the prayerful attempt to admonish them - if they reject you, they effectively reject the One who indeed sent you (Matthew 10:40). It is a sad and sobering thing to behold, but that's part of what it is to be a witness for Jesus Christ. We are simply obeying His commands by the power and leading of the Spirit of God and act accordingly to be His witnesses (Acts 1:8). The rest is between the cult member and God. Pray that God have mercy upon them and yet work to enlighten them and commend them to His convicting ministry (John 16:7-11).

How do you follow up on an encounter with a cult when they don't have a number, address, etc. and when would you ever see them again?
As I've shared, there will be occasions in which you're going to encounter an itinerant and traveling cult missionary who only wants to "hit and run," but with whom you've established contact. Be in the habit of carrying a personal calling card with your name, address, phone number and e-mail address before you leave. Calling cards still are a great way to provide a tangible source of contact with someone even in this day and age of digitized, cellular and Web based social networking. Encourage them to stay in touch with you. We have created and used small card printing runs using our computer and word processing programs, but we'd recommend using for more professional results the inexpensive and yet amazingly well done work you can find at Vistaprint.com.
How do you go about studying the different cults and witchcraft without being drawn to it yourself?

Since we need to have sufficient homework done before we try to evangelize to a cult what are some reading materials that you would consider essential to our success in evangelizing to cults? Are there books out there that give a Christian perspective on Jehovah's Witness and Mormon perspectives? I found that when placed in the middle of Salt Lake City surrounded by Mormon material I ended up feeling drowned in it and had an overwhelming confusion .. are there any books that highlight the Christian truths while walking through their beliefs?

Studying cults and the occult is an enterprise that involves dedicated search and acquisition of the individual culture behind the cult. To get an objective and balanced understanding of the unique claims and worldview they advocate, you have to become a student of the cult's publications and media that presents their doctrine and practice in a more or less systematic fashion. It's not just comparative theological research you're looking for alone: you are also learning the vocabulary, social concerns, passions and interests that the cult intends its' members to fellowship with. This is of enormous importance in developing a working knowledge of a cult's inner private life and how it relates it to their outer public image. These books, CD's, videos, websites, magazines, tracts, etc. will be the kinds of resources that the cult itself uses to indoctrinate members and are usually not readily available, although with effort, time and money, they can be obtained readily enough.

The building of a personal library of these publications should be a top priority for the study process of each cult. Much information on various groups can be downloaded off the internet that they have prepared themselves, including DVD's and CD's full of scans of such publications. However, finding this literature often requires specialized searches as diverse as online collectors to garage sales, from used book bins to library book sales. My wife Joy actually found the entire 26 volume set of the Mormon Church's Journal Of Discourses (an absolutely mind boggling find) in a couple of dusty boxes at a backwoods flea market. I found the first two volumes of the Children of God's Mo Letters (another equally amazing discovery that the books were never to be circulated outside the cult) at a used book store in an airport the last time I flew almost 8 years ago. It's amazing what you can find.

Another vital angle of study is to become a student of the literature and testimonials offered by ex-members of cult groups. Ex-members can be your guides, translators, and mentors when coming to grips with an understanding of how the cult they were involved with actually functions and what to expect when you deal with them. Every cult has a host of people who disassociated themselves or were disfellowshipped from the group for a variety of reasons and who have much objective insight in the group's teaching and practice that simply cannot be ignored. In our work with cults over the years, we've come to realize that - contrary to the warped views of some self-styled academics and Christian figures who castigate countercult work as biased and judgmental - the views of ex-members are quite compassionate, balanced and factually-based.

While there are also ex-cult members whose writings, persona and approach to their cult are seriously imbalanced and indicate anger and integrity issues they struggle with in their post-cult life, there are far more who have been instrumental in helping provide for countercult workers balanced presentations of information and insight that would not have been achievable any other way. You can find on our website the testimonies of many former members of Remnant Fellowship, for example, and a good friend of ours named Eric Kettunen left the LDS Church in the mid 1990's with his family and was among the first ex-Mormons to publish their testimonies through his website Recovery From Mormonism, which was devoted exclusively to providing the testimonies of other ex-LDS members. It routinely gets hundreds of thousands of visits each day. The testimonials of other people in other groups can be found in our Great Links page.

Become a student of the process of cult mind control itself. Cult mind control effectively shuts down how a cult member thinks and responds to your questioning to the point of altering personal identity so knowing how to tackle and deal with it simply demands that you also have a working knowledge of the thought reforming social dynamic that it actually is. The best books that detail how it works, how it can be recognized in cultic communal settings and how to tackle it are Steve Hassan's seminal "Combatting Cult Mind Control" and "Releasing The Bonds", Ronald Enroth's "Churches That Abuse" and Paul Martin's "Cult Proofing Your Kids". All of these books are available in either new or used forms on Amazon.com - the links above will help you get access to other sources for them. A Google video featuring a discussion by Hassan about how to deal with cultic mind control can be seen here. After studying it, a great way to see how cult mind control is applied

And become a student of the new generation of countercult books and resources that are now widely available. Such books, outside of a few books like the late and great Dr. Walter Martin's "Kingdom Of The Cults" simply didn't exist when I started to get involved in countercult work in the mid 1980's. Still, to quote the old newspaper editor, yes, Virginia, there ARE such books that compare cult doctrine and practice with Christian ones! They will need to share shelf space with your cult publications in your study and are absolutely essential ones to also help you navigate through the tangled reasoning and cunning misinformation that cult publications are laden with. We particularly recommend Ron Rhodes' excellent "Reasoning From The Scriptures" series written to refute LDS and Jehovah's Witness doctrine, as well as Bill McKeever's "Mormonism 101" and ex-Witness David Reed's outstanding series of books on the Watchtower and his seminal book on the mind controlling language of the cult. In our article on evangelizing cults, which you can download here as a PDF file, you will find a complete list of these and the other kinds of books you are asking about here.

And in the Great Links page on our website, you'll also find a mighty host of websites that provide countercult resources for research and study that simply cannot be ignored either. We particularily recommend the FactNet site and that of the International Cultic Studies Association
The Internet has revolutionized the way human beings communicate with one another and for that, we can truly thank God that we can now use this Net based blog to share all of this with you. You can even download to your MP3 players whole MP3 recordings of countercult teachings with just a few mouse clicks .. what a day we live in!

Finally, let's look at the excellent questions raised here on the seductiveness of cult dogma which should be squarely dealt with.

There is no denying that studying cult doctrine is not only difficult but can spiritually perilous. False, imbalanced and deceptive doctrine and practice has a lure all of its own because it is always mingled with elements of truth that fit into our own worldview and commend it to us. The presence of that which we can accept as true in false teaching makes it seem not only plausible and even Biblical. From a Christian perspective, people who are spiritually hungry but Biblically illiterate are prone to accepting a slickly polished and confidently delivered exposition of false doctrinal and practical teaching if 1) Scripture is cited heavily, 2) it seems to "hit us where we are" and 3) if it is presented in a way that leaves little to no room to test or question it. Reading false teaching and false doctrine will definitely become a challenge for those who study it if these any or all of these three trap doors unlatch beneath us as we examine it.

So the question can ultimately come down to how firm your grip is upon your own unresolved personal issues, for they can become the spiritual chink in your inner armor. Thinking that your grasp on sound and balanced doctrine is a sufficient hedge against cultic deception is a serious mistake. Underestimate this issue at your spiritual peril!

If you are grappling with unsettled problems and dissatisfactions with the church, deficiencies in your personal relationships, unfulfilled desires and frustrated idealism (and really, who doesn't?), then you must come to grips with the plain truth: you may unwittingly find yourself starting to second guess long established boundaries of discernment when you see how happy, centered and fulfilled a cultist seems to be in his cultic community. This is a subtlety of human nature we often don't like to admit ourselves, but it is perfectly natural to wonder how much greener the grass might be on the other side of the proverbial fence. Given the fact that cults can appear to be more "together" then the church itself, any personal knowledge of their manipulative and heretical nature of cultism can slowly cease to matter to you.

If this happens, you are entering exceedingly dangerous territory because you're cutting free the faculties of critical thought - only the convicting powerand grace of the Spirit of God can keep you at this point. When a deeply felt personal need becomes the self-motivation that entices you to re-examine the perspective again, your objectivity can easily become a casualty. This is the main reason why intelligent, sharp Christian people who "knew better" and should have been "smarter than that" now fill cult groups around the world - and why some countercult workers themselves can sometimes be recruited into the very Cultworld they had explored.

There's a reason why seasoned Christian countercult workers see their labor as the front lines of the real kinds of spiritual warfare that are waged today and you are perhaps now seeing that.

That is where, however, you have the edge on the seductiveness of false teaching. The Bible makes clear that spiritual warfare is not something to be done by the religious Lone Ranger but in the context of a shared struggle alongside fellowsoldiers in Christ - remember that Paul wrote to the Ephesian church as a group in his classic exhortation of Ephesians 6:10 and verse 18 to fight spiritual battles with the full armor of God. Keeping in mind our discussion on knowing your limits, you've already been tipped that there's an underlying imbalance to the approach of studying cults that has to be carefully watched for. The Body of Christ is still "the church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth" for a reason, as Paul wrote to Timothy in 1 Timothy 3:15 - we must hold fast to this apostolic truth.

Stay in touch with mature believers as you study, consider your limits and remember one simple principle: never stop asking questions of what ever cultic claim confronts you and seek the safety that counsel with fellow believers will bring (Proverbs 11:14). The media resources we've discussed will provide that for you as well, but there is nothing quite as stabilizing as frank discussion with countercult workers and mature believers. Seek their input as needed. Don't let the "canker" of false teaching become a toxin that poisons your walk with God - put it in its' place with sound study and discernment (2 Timothy 2:15-17).

As always, we stand ready to help in this regard. Stay in touch with us!

How is evangelism different between satanic cults and Christian cults?

I think you are asking for a discussion on the difference in evangelizing adherents to occultic movements and cults that assume a Christian and Bible-based identity (what some countercult researchers and organizations can call "Bible cults"). But this is a question I didn't understand.

If you're out there reading this and would like to clarify it, please feel free to email us at rafael at spiritwatch.org and do so!

What is the greatest testimony you have personally heard of when a cultist came to know Christ?

It's hard to know how you would call one redeemed ex-cultist's testimony greater than another, even though there are those that are sodden with ghastly and horrific subtexts that simply have to be heard to be believed. The amount of de-humanizing degradation and objectification that cults inflict their followers with is truly, profoundly stunning .. that any cultist somehow cherishes and nurtures a heart flame of faith to commit it once again to the unknown God they've been searching for in a cultic wilderness is perhaps the most touching, troubling and soul-shattering gesture of the human spirit you can ever see.

So much is made today about "deliverance" today in certain Christian circles that I wonder if the plain sense of the word as used in Scripture is being lost by the church. Personally, I believe that true Biblical deliverance is a glorious rescue that anyone - including any cultist - can cry out to God's mercy and receive. The cultist who turns to Christ truly is one Paul alludes to who is among the great multitude of believers who eternally should be "giving thanks unto the Father, which hath made us meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light: Who hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son: In whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins." (Colossians 1:12) Thanks be to God for His mercy that calls out from all the darkest places of human wickedness a people unto Himself ... may God make of you apostles to the Cultworld where such victories yet await the battles to win them as He would have them waged!

Here's a few testimonies you can read that certainly fill the bill: that of Dennis and Rauni Higley, Paul Blizard, Carolyn Poole, and Karen Pressley.
Have you personally had a relationship with a cult member and actually led them out of their cult to Christianity? if so, could please share that experience? I have my time with a gathering of ex-cultists who turned to Christ to thank for changing my life - it was my vicarious relationship with them that forever altered the course of my ministry.

It was at the Blue Mountain Christian Retreat, October 1993 when, after 2 days of worshipping with and talking to and hearing the testimonies of ex-Jehovah's Witnesses who turned to Christ, I knew God had led me into a world of desperate human need that the church doesn't even know really exists but which needs the Gospel as badly as any other mission field .. that being the sea of humanity deceived, traumatized and in bondage to false religion ..

I remember leaving the service that night, preached by an ex-Witness elder who'd come to Christ and became a Pentecostal minister, my head filled with the memories of the tears, the sorrows, the laughter, the hope and the despair of that group of two hundred people from all over the United States who gather there yearly. My heart and mind were completely blown away from what really, truly was that uncommonly amazing grace they'd found in the arms of the Savior and what to a man and woman they testified to.

It was a completely black, still autumn night with a cold starfield burning down above that hilltop resort. I listened to the wind sighing through the trees, felt the cold bite through my light jacket and realized I could not look at the world the same any longer. I know now that I was changing the direction of my ministry completely. I might never church plant nor pastor. But I barely knew then somehow that I'd turned a corner .. and today, I am now beginning to really get a grasp on that ..

I can't walk away from this. I remember the Macedonian Call ..

I can't stop taking the phone calls and talking to anxious people who've lost their loved ones to some cultic mind trap.

I can't stop from rising up to oppose the blasphemy and lies that cults generate to confuse and destroy.

I can't walk away from those who have called to us to help, fine choice brothers and sisters around the world who labor where no one else cares to go, especially when most of the church ignores the mission field that not only knocks at their door but slips in and then out of their church's revolving door

With preachers and ministries and well worn paths in church work extending everywhere else and with the memories of this and other instances in helping those ripped off by false religion and left for dead, I cannot walk away from this countercult work which few, if anyone else, really labors in to pursue pastoral work.

Our work continued fervently since that cold night on that Pennsylvanian mountain.

Since then, we have had many relationships with cult members as well as ex-members. We've actually had connections with Remnant Fellowship members who were still in the group but who requested dialogue with us. We also actually helped a family narrowly escape the mind controlling snare of Remnant Fellowship several years ago. They were related to some friends of ours here in Cleveland and we spent almost four to five hours working with them to reconsider their decision to affiliate with Remnant after leaving one of Remnant's summer camps in Franklin, Tennessee only 2 hours drive of here. That truly was a memorable evening.

Perhaps the video below will show one of the most personally fulfilling and satisfying kinds of ministry we've ever had in this regard in terms of helping some one out of a cult .. enjoy it!

Click here to go to the final post in this series of question/answers.

The Frog Swimming In The Kettle: The Paganization Of Zondervan And Intervarsity Press

2009-03-06T08:19:00.001-05:00

From Peter Jones' newsletter: while I don't agree with everything Mr. Jones has written, there's an awful lot of what his commentary on the paganizing of Christianity in the last days that cannot be dismissed: to wit .. his latest e-mail

My colleague, Mike Horton, has just published a book, Christless Christianity. I write, so to speak, from the belly of this beast, attending the National Pastors' Conference, sponsored by Zondervan and Intervarsity Press, which is taking place in San Diego, February 9-14, 2009. It is amazing to see how these once faithful publishers of evangelical orthodoxy are now consistently and deliberately launching a massive but subtle attack against the "Fundamentals" for which Evangelicalism stood courageously against liberalism in the past.

While I am struck by the sincerity of the brilliant public speakers (named below), who still have evangelical piety and passion, their openly-stated theology is turning large swathes of the evangelical church into various new forms of old-fashioned though very cool liberalism.

1. UNDERMINING OF SCRIPTURE: Brian McLaren is still widely featured here. He believes that the age of sola scriptura is over. Rob Bell, a plenary speakers, believes the Bible is a "human product...not the product of divine fiat" Little wonder Mr. Bell's former colleague at Mars Hill of Grandville, MI, Ron Golden, now Senior Vice President of World Relief, a ministry of the National Association of Evangelicals, in a seminar I attended, openly boasted, "Karl Barth is my theological mentor." Barth undermined the classical orthodox doctrine of Scripture. Is it surprising that in all the plenaries except one, there was no biblical exposition?

2. THE ABSENCE OF CHRIST: Christ's atoning death was passed over in silence. A few examples:

--In the middle of a "worship service," Andy Crouch of IVP interviewed A.J. Jacobs, an editor at Esquire magazine, about his book, The Year of Living Biblically. Jacobs, a non-practicing Jew, lived for one year according to OT laws, letting his beard grow, wearing Kosher clothes and practicing Sabbath and the Ten Commandments. Crouch did not remind him that the New Testament was part of the Bible, nor that Jesus saw himself as the very center and goal of the Old Testament (Luke 24:27). Jacobs concluded, to applause, that he had become a "reverential agnostic."

--Christ is absent but "Jesus" is here, as the architect of a socio-economic revolution that he began while on earth that we must finish, with the help of all religionists and globalist socialists of good fait h. Shane Claibourne (30), who looked like a youthful throw-back from the Sixties, with tee shirt, very baggy slacks and very long hair constantly exhorted people to get serious about non-materialistic living. His model was Mother Theresa with whom he worked in India, but never once did he make any attempt to include the Gospel of saving grace as the motivation for Christian service. McLaren summed it up: "Jesus teaches a way of life rather than a set of beliefs."

Every video clip from World Vision and other ministries was exclusively about digging wells in Africa. Not a word was uttered about preaching the Gospel to Africans bound in pagan practices or Moslem darkness. We are losing our nerve and closing our mouths! Sooner or later, we will endorse all "valid" spiritualities, as do McLaren and Bell.

A GLOBALIST FUTURE

The other half of the very center of the Gospel-Jesus's physical resurrection-was also absent. A miraculous divine transformation of the physical universe really does not fit this new liberal social gospel of the kingdom, which comes incrementally through our works of social justice. Certainly, eschatology is not a "Left Behind" board game figuring out where we are," but when asked about the Early Church's expectation of the imminent final coming of Christ, McLaren rejected Christ's final coming out of hand, Ron Golden said it was an image of being open to the kingdom coming now, and New Testament scholar Scott McKnight spoke of New Testament eschatology as "metaphorical rhetoric."

This is pure liberalism gone wild, at an evangelical pastors' conference!

DE-PERSONALIZATION OF GOD

With all the emphasis on the earthly Jesus, on our human efforts to bring in the kingdom, and on "Human Flourishing," God as personal savior is vague, even absent. God was referred to in a large plenary session as "God revealing ‘godself,'" thus successfully avoiding any gender-specific language for God but successfully depersonalizing Him. The absence is filled by seeking God's "presence" through mysticism and so-called "spiritual disciplines," so widespread in impersonal pagan spirituality.

Both the bold-faced audacity but more, the naiveté of this project is quite stunning. There is no mention anywhere of the vastly superior pagan project, already well-developed, to construct a this-worldly socio-economic utopia, very similar to neo-evangelical's this-worldly "kingdom of God."

Will this "shovel-ready eschatology" of human justice be digging the church's own grave? Will the two meet one day, and then, as Jesus asked (Luke 18:8), "Will the Son of Man, when he comes, find faith on the earth?"

Christos Kurios: Christ is Lord

Peter Jones

Answering Some More Questions From Lee University's EVA 363 For 2009 1 of 3

2009-03-05T10:21:00.008-05:00

To the EVA 363 class of Lee University:

Thank you for the privilege of allowing me to share with you in your class last Tuesday. I think we spent most of the time on the issues of cultic culture and recruitment and barely brushed your excellent and thoughtful questions you submitted. I am afraid that my zeal for ensuring you understand those issues took our time there. I hope that the videos and discussion are helping you appreciate the fact that the Cultworld is indeed a culture of cultures and a world of worlds that are what Christians seeking to fulfill Christ's Great Commission must grapple with.

It is understanding this world that will make a great difference in how you approach it with Christian witness. For cult evangelism, as in any truly Biblical evangelistic strategy, involves more than just proclamation of the Gospel - it will require the building of relational bridges that will involve the pastoral, the prophetic, the apostolic and the teacher. In any given evangelistic moment in which you bear witness to the truth of the Gospel of Jesus, Christian truth itself will be challenged across the many settings of encounter you will come across as you go "into all the world." These challenges will come when people ask hard questions out of personal pain, cynical skepticism or out of their own philosophical and spiritual convictions, as well as out of the wiles of cultic recruitment techniques.

So you must be ready to become a student as well as servant of those who you hope to reach for Christ, to have prepared yourself to hear out their questions and have, as Peter said to "be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear" (KJV) In 1 Cor 9:22-25, Paul alludes to this as well when he compared becoming "all things to all men" in his personal evangelism to that of preparing for a footrace: "I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings. Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize. Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last; but we do it to get a crown that will last forever." (NIV)

I believe that your questions reflect a serious intent on your part to be engagers of the culture of the Cultworld, and it's my prayer that these answers will be of help to you .. Let me address these for you here and I will arrange to have a copy of this sent to Dr. Effler as well.

Your questions broke down into roughly three categories: you wanted to discuss

1. Research - specific information on the cult problem that quantifiable study has provided
2. Approaches - how to dialogue and deal with the unique problems cult evangelism presents
3. Mind Control - what it is and what it involves

You also asked some other miscellaneous questions and asked for testimony. I will try to be as brief as I can .. Your questions are in italicized bold font here and listed under the 3 categories:

Research

What percent of Americans operate in cults?

How many different cults exist in America?

These are excellent but exceedingly difficult questions to answer due to several variables.

First, one needs to define which of the innumerable social gatherings around us in our world should be identified as cultic. The old saying that "one man's religion is another's cult" is a rather cynical proverb that completely ignores the fact that cultism can and does involve movements that aren't typically viewed as cultic, from business associations to therapy groups to codependent relationships. These are cultic settings virtually invisible to independent observation, off of most people's social radar screens, but are no less spiritually toxic or dangerous.

Secondly, objective information is quite sketchy when it comes to numbering those groups that are popularly viewed as cultic movements. As we've said, cultism is a slippery social abberrance that defies easy definition. Estimates of how many questionable groups that are popularly called "cults" exist have ranged from 2000 to 5000, and are often unreliable due to the short life cycle of most of them. Many divide into splinter groups, become inactive, or regroup and become more or less aberrant.

Thirdly, outside of knowing the current population of the United States (about 305 million) and membership statistics that cultic groups themselves post, we are are limited to making estimates based upon guesswork and older data whose veracity can't be fully proven since their sources have long ago become outdated and inaccurate. For example, the LDS Church claims 8 million members in America (with a world wide total of 13 million) and the Watchtower Society (Jehovah's Witnesses) states they have 1 million with a global membership of 17 million. Taken at face value, we know that there are at least 9 million members between both of these groups in the U.S. alone. Other cultic groups like the Unification Church(Moonies), the Family (Children of God) and Remnant Fellowship are far more guarded in circulating statistical information about themselves - or are more likely given to issuing misleading or inflated figures.

Fourth, numbers don't tell the full story behind the fluid state of cult membership which can be very difficult to track. Cults typically gain as many members as they lose: the abusive nature of discipline within cults as well is largely responsible for this. The Watchtower Society at one time stated that they annually disfellowship 40,000 members from "Jehovah's organization." In 1994, the International Churches of Christ, whose membership was about 60,000 worldwide then, was reported to have lost 20,000 members that year alone for a variety of reasons - and from 2003-2007, the LDS Church's membership rolls lost on average about 55,000 each year. This kind of turnover in larger and more established cult groups is readily seen in smaller groups as well. In fact, the rise of innumerable and largely anonymous social gatherings that may number no more than a few dozen individuals at most is where cultism in the 21st century is going. With spiritual anarchy becoming more and more prevalent in the last days (2 Peter 2:10), small groups meeting in living rooms, conference centers and hotel banquet halls are where perhaps the greatest challenges to the Church will emerge.

And another important thing to keep in mind: cult members always impact scores of others around them who may never darken the door of the group (friends, family members, acquaintances, neighbors, co-workers, class members, etc.). That extended circle of influence easily can involve hundreds of thousands and even millions more.

With all of this in mind, I think the estimates we hear from a variety of authoritative sources about the extent of cult membership are very likely understating the problem. If we limit the working definition of what constitutes a cultic group as one that is authoritarian in leadership, heretical in doctrine and abusive in practice - the one most familiar to evangelical and secular perspectives - then all of the groups above certainly qualify as bona fide and abusive cults. Both the late Dr. Walter Martin and Dr. Margaret Singer, two world class authorities on cults for their generation, used the same criterion for their definitions of cultic movements and they stated that 20 million people were directly involved in cults back in the 1960's and 1980's. However, they didn't explain how they arrived at this figure, nor differentiate between the various sectarian divisions that constitute it - which have been estimated in the several of thousands by other researchers, estimates that may be quite conservative.

One thing is certain - the cult problem is real and cultic movements are indeed all around us, as American as Mom, apple pie and Chevrolet. Their spiritually and socially aberrant influences are undeniable realities in Western society today. And they are one of the greatest challenges to the Christian faith today and provide untold amounts of society destabilization that are threats to the social order. They may be Constitutionally protected in the United States, where religious tolerance and diversity has been at its best in Western civilization, but patience for them has grown quite thin in Europe and other parts of the world.

How many churches actually have a countercult ministry?

Not many and far too few. I personally do not know of any locally, although I'm not at all willing to say they don't exist. Spiritual discernment may be at all time low in the church, but there are still masses of Christians who still value it enough to pursue it through intentional response aimed at countering cultic influence. These are individuals who can be found among many Christian churches who create small ad hoc groups and ministries seeking to respond to the perceived challenges that the activities of cults or the occult have supplied - often at widely varying levels of knowledge and experience but with undeniable zeal and piety.

Some church-based ministries (click here and here to locate a couple of them) do exist across the nation, but few evangelical and mainline church leadership circles seem aware that a problem with cults even exist, let alone seek to take a proactive approach to their societal devastation within their own immediate reach. Some like the Southern Baptist Convention have established denominational offices seeking to equip their movement, as has the Church of God (Cleveland). Spiritwatch Ministries was launched as a Christian outreach of the Westmore Church of God in 1993 and was originally entitled the Tennessee Valley Bible Students Association, continuing the outreach even after its' formal connection with Westmore ceased in 2002.

More to follow: click here to go to the second part of three.

Truth Decay And The LDS Church: A BYU Professor Reaffirms The Shelf Life Of Integrity For His Students

2009-03-05T01:21:00.003-05:00

"We never provide meat when milk will do .. " In other words, says the good Dr. Robert Millet of Brigham Young University to the cream of the LDS Church's young minds, the truth isn't owed to anyone who doesn't ask the "right kind of questions."

You can't make this stuff up. This clip was removed from YouTube when BYU complained about its copyrighting ..

Here you can watch the entire clip here as a Windows stream. The entire exercise of arrogant refusal to engage in actual dialogue over the truth claims of Mormonism's secret history is symptomatic of the LDS Church's long standing commitment to deceit and double talk about its less than stellar past.

Millet's pathetic dodge here is just one of the more recent examples of academic spin doctoring that BYU routinely engages in to reinforce the Mormon mythos about it's history that it's cultic culture religiously reinforces at every possible opportunity: listen to what LDS apostle Boyd Packer once dictated to an LDS educator's symposium back in 1981:

You seminary teachers and some of you institute and BYU men will be teaching the history of the Church this school year. This is an unparalleled opportunity in the lives of your students to increase their faith and testimony of the divinity of this work. Your objective should be that they will see the hand of the Lord in every hour and every moment of the Church from its beginning till now. ...

Church history can be so interesting and so inspiring as to be a very powerful tool indeed for building faith. If not properly written or properly taught, it may be a faith destroyer. ... There is a temptation for the writer or the teacher of Church history to want to tell everything, whether it is worthy or faith promoting or not. ... Some things that are true are not very useful. ...

That historian or scholar who delights in pointing out the weaknesses and frailties of present or past leaders destroys faith. A destroyer of faith -- particularly one within the Church, and more particularly one who is employed specifically to build faith -- places himself in great spiritual jeopardy. He is serving the wrong master, and unless he repents, he will not be among the faithful in the eternities. ...

In the Church we are not neutral. We are one-sided. There is a war going on and we are engaged in it.

("The Mantle Is Far, Far Greater Than the Intellect" delivered at the Fifth Annual Church Educational System Religious Educators' Symposium, August 22, 1981, Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah.)

At least someone got something right. There is indeed a war going on. It's too bad that only the belligerent knows it and their prey doesn't have a clue.

A Little Bit More Conviction Redux: Some Old Research On Cults and Christian Mission

2009-03-03T22:11:00.001-05:00

A Church of God (Cleveland) pastor once asked me several years ago if he could tell me how our movement's missions effort compared to that of the Southern Baptist Convention's missionary work as well as that of the two most well known missionary-driven cults, namely the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Latter Day Saints.

I think this was about five or six years ago, and I don't think things have changed much since then. Using each of the official statistics of each group, I came up with the following findings, which make for some troubling reading .. and are oddly, not too surprising in light of the day and age we live in.

The Church of God (Cleveland) fielded 185 missionaries - read more about them here
The Southern Baptists sent forth 4834 of them in their own laudable mission effort
The LDS Church fielded a force of young Mormons numbering 65,000
The Jehovah's Witnesses engaged full-time "Pioneers" numbering 698,781

At a time in which churches have all but abandoned personal door to door Christian outreach, we find that cultic movements have no such qualms and are clearly reaping their own harvests.

What does this say about the Church's priorities? About a few words Jesus had with his disciples about preaching the Gospel in the whole world?