One Minister's View On The Erosion Of Society, Post 6.26.2015

 As he approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it and said, “If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace–but now it is hidden from your eyes. The days will come upon you when your enemies will build an embankment against you and encircle you and hem you in on every side.  They will dash you to the ground, you and the children within your walls. They will not leave one stone on another, because you did not recognize the time of God’s coming to you (Luke 19:41-44 NIV).

Our national turn embodied in the recent Supreme Court decision to establish same sex marriage unions has been one towards an ultimate deviance from God's order for human sexuality and the family has been towards inviting His judgment upon us.

That's not being hateful, nor intolerant, much less being something to make you sound politically correct .. but is upholding a fundamental design for life we now toss to the winds for our "happiness." Instead, a curtain of deception and confusion will smother us in the years to come. The only "forcing of morals and beliefs" I see here was when the Supreme Court's activist judges decided this was a civil right which is complete fantasy ..

It won't change my feelings about those who embrace this (I love all people regardless of their lifestyle choices) and will not refrain from befriending or helping anyone. I have known homosexuals in my workplaces and in my life and have never treated them with anything but respect and dignity, even though our lifestyle choices are so radically at odds.

At the same time, as a minister of the Gospel of Christ, I will not stay silent on what is right or wrong on this matter, no matter what our hellbound culture rises up to sanctify. While civil same sex unions may be what it lauds, those truly faithful to God's ordained standards for what marriage is are now going to be found only in the declarations and actions of the Christian church's voice itself.

As an expositor of that truth, I cannot but speak and proclaim what those are .. regardless what the consequences might be as a matter of my own conscience and what the Christian faith historically teaches us on how to live. I invite God's judgment upon me if I choose to ignore, downplay or ignore the implications of social pressures to compromise on this. I love His established truth too much to not stand up for it. For me to remain silent upon this would make me part of the vast fogbank of human depravity that I am expected to compromise to .. and after 31 years in the Christian ministry giving my life to live for truth, I am not going to contribute to that whatsoever. My love for the souls of the people all around me won't let me do that.

And being that the increasingly amoral church is the final place for which any kind of moral declaration in our society is ultimately appealed to, this will be the focus for a global campaign of feral demand for the Christian faith to capitulate to modern convenience and conviction on the LGBT agenda unlike anything it has seen in the 2 millenia it has existed. I am not surprised by such an assault when I realize this societal twisting is precisely what Jesus said we would expect in the last days and Matthew 24 continues to unfold prophetically in our culture.. as we continue to slouch toward divine judgment.

If that makes me in its eyes an intolerant hater, that's their POV. I categorically reject that. All who know me and persist in that kind of demonization to protect a morally bankrupt position they want to endorse have resorted to the only way they can legitimize it ... and speak volumes about how "tolerant" they are and how tragically compromised they are for judging someone they know to be a person who cares about all people as some kind of hatemongering Fred Phelps clone. You may unfriend me if you will, but it won't be my doing. You'll quit me but I'll keep loving you .. and won't stop upholding the truth.

God save America .. because she is about to get spanked. Mark what I say, in tears, sorrow and a sense of dread unlike any I've ever had before.

Jesus Christ is coming .. come quickly Lord and may faith truly still be on this earth when you do.

It's Official: Same Sex Marriage Is Legally Sanctioned & The Apostasy Ramps Up A Notch or Two

"If you are among the many Americans—of whatever sexual orientation—who favor expanding same-sex marriage, by all means celebrate today's decision. Celebrate the achievement of a desired goal," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote. "Celebrate the opportunity for a new expression of commitment to a partner. Celebrate the availability of new benefits. But do not celebrate the Constitution. It had nothing to do with it."

Same sex marriages just became the law during today's Supreme Court judicial activism and a supposed "civil right" that had previously been all but assured cultural adoption is now the new "normal" in America.

Do the math: which of the three couples above will perpetuate society, will give birth to children?  This no longer matters, says our culture when the demand for loving relationship at the cost of society itself at large is far more important.

June 26, 2015 will mark a significant day in American history, when the slouch to Gomorrah became a skip.

The gayification, if that is a word that can be used, of culture - that is to say, the final efforts of the LGBT agenda to paint their lifestyle choice as a part of normative equality, has now pretty much claimed it's room at the table of the American way of life. No one in any institution anywhere can raise any objection and not be demonized in the ultimate intolerance. But that's the way it's been and has been a reality long coming. In light of the many years of legal tyranny and skullduggery to overturn state's rights to define what marriage is as well as the ongoing national accommodation of gay relationships and marital unions, this was a given self-fulfilling prophecy that was foretold years before the first 

And the Christian church supposedly is the last place where any objection to gay marriage can possibly yet be heard, except for the ultimately futile attempts by ultra conservative lawmakers to pass a constitutional amendment banning it.

But the tide of cultural apostasy is too advanced to stem now and as so goes the culture, in these last days of deepening darkness, so will go the church. The pressure on the church to sanctify gay marriage and lifestyle as a part of "progressive" Christian faith has just increased a hundred fold. When homosexual pastors "come out" and decide to militantly declare that "God has always honored our unions," then we can safely say that those who disagree will find themselves under the baleful glare of those who would demand they get with the gayme plan and be "Inclusive" and to stop being unwilling to have "deep discussion" about it, as local gay pastor Randy Duncan would assert.

The final moments of waning light are now fast fading .. and I'll let Larry Norman, despite his own checkered past, have the final say on where we are ..

The Strange Case Of Rachel Dolezal, Child Abuse And Outing In America

Human nature, the stuff through which moral depravity of every kind proceeds, is truly a maelstrom of contradiction, self-incrimination and just plain deceptive weirdness. And it always finds the most unbelievable ways to manifest. It is within the medium of warped human perspective and worldview that the apostacy of humanity keeps on trucking in.

If you would have asked me a few years ago if it was possible to see how the twistedness of a family under the influence of self-anointed scions of abusive fundamentalist child rearing could somehow take down an NAACP chapter leadership, I'd have been a bit baffled at trying to get my hands around that. But since we know that it's possible for an allegedly "Christian" diet group to become a mind controlling cult and command national media attention for it's "successes", I would have to regrettably agree since people are just so .. uh, funny.

And boy has it ever. The strange tale of the white civil rights activist Rachel Dolezal's bid to be accepted as a black woman and therefore head up the Spokane, Washington chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has all of the elements of the above, and apparently, so much more.

Her parents Larry and Ruthanne Dolezal and an adoptive brother mounted a media campaign to "out" her, that is to say, to expose her true identity as actually not quite Negroid. It would seem that they wanted "the truth told" about her Caucasian past and an apparent mental instability that deeply concerned them. This flies in the face of  her breezily self-assured conviction that she indeed is African American and that her family really aren't her family. This is symptomatic of a calculating and ruthlessly intentional effort to reject her racial reality and by default her own past itself.

Dolezal's personal life, in keeping with the script for outing as written by social media engineers, been spilled over all the internet to show the quirks of an apparently very complex persona. By her own testimony she is bisexual, a claimed victim of marital domestic abuse involving sex tapes and assault which a divorce court didn't buy, and a liberated woman who felt she needed to do a nude photo shoot in which she exposed a lot of apparently spray-tanned flesh. She also felt white activists and Latinos could not speak on racism involving blacks and gained another Kodak moment for herself by inciting violence among the protesters in the recent racial unrest in Baltimore. Being how her extracurricular activities concerning racial social justice seemed to be all good, not a lot of attention got drawn to her decidedly questionable activity - until her family seemingly wanted the truth told.

But in checking their own past and history, what looked like a time for clarity and resolution has gotten a lot murkier and far more darker (no pun intended) than what can be believed.

Why would an idealistic 37 year old woman launch herself into a campaign of self-serving deception for a supposedly greater good? What led her to so identify with a minority that she ditched her own personal history and past?  As the meme above suggests, something in her past personal experience turned her focus away from her own undeniable personal reality into a fantasy she thought was justifiable personal transformation so she could serve others. This well intended farce becomes a tragedy when that something well may have involve a family dynamic mediated by and influenced by a highly controversial and I might add pretty dangerously imbalanced Christian subculture which their family was conversant with and lived by.

A good review of that grotesque side of the Dolezal story is found here at our dear friend Cindy Kunsman's blog and specifically, a good overview of the fatal results that came about which involved the very influence the Dolezals came under, that of Christian teachers Michael and Debi Pearl can be read here and viewed in a 2013 CNN report here.

More twists and turns than what you'd find at a convention of Chubby Checker fans are likely ahead. It's enough for us to note once more the old but true saw how there is no right way to do the wrong thing: as Dolezal's ex-husband Kevin Moore, a supposedly devout Christian, well said ..

“Rachel, you may not believe in God but that does not mean that he does not exist,” he wrote to his ex-wife in an email that was included in court documents. “God has seen everything you have done and He continues to watch.”

After listening to Dolezal's windy dismissal of direct questions about her racial identity on the NBC video clip above, I don't know how much more of this I care to actually watch. It makes me want to throw up a little in my mouth.

But this Latino knows he's Latino and doesn't need monthly spray tans to prove it.  Here's a pic of me from 1986 after a summer of outdoor landscaping employment taking a break with lily white Sheila Walsh at Cornerstone 86 -- and as best as I know, she's still claiming to be white.

Perhaps it was simply coincidence that a reporter approached Rachel’s parents now, and perhaps if he hadn’t they still wouldn’t have said anything. But I have to say, the timing is concerning. Did Rachel’s parents out her as white simply because they care about the truth? Or were they also motivated bya  desire to discredit her so that they can, by association, discredit the victim she is supporting, and thereby protect their son from the sexual abuse charges that have been levied against him? Did Rachel act inexcusably in lying and deceiving people? Oh, hell yes. But elevating her parents heroes or truth-tellers while ignoring this troubling context is worrisome.
And perhaps that’s what’s bothering me about this story. Rachel’s parents have been paraded and lauded across the media, their words taken at face value, despite the fact that they have been (successfully) accused of abuse and despite the fact that they are defending their adult son against accusations of child sexual abuse. And as someone familiar with the dynamics of abuse, this makes me really uncomfortable.
- See more at: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2015/06/lets-talk-about-rachel-dolezals-parents.html#sthash.z3PP93tI.dpuf

Perhaps it was simply coincidence that a reporter approached Rachel’s parents now, and perhaps if he hadn’t they still wouldn’t have said anything. But I have to say, the timing is concerning. Did Rachel’s parents out her as white simply because they care about the truth? Or were they also motivated bya  desire to discredit her so that they can, by association, discredit the victim she is supporting, and thereby protect their son from the sexual abuse charges that have been levied against him? Did Rachel act inexcusably in lying and deceiving people? Oh, hell yes. But elevating her parents heroes or truth-tellers while ignoring this troubling context is worrisome.
And perhaps that’s what’s bothering me about this story. Rachel’s parents have been paraded and lauded across the media, their words taken at face value, despite the fact that they have been (successfully) accused of abuse and despite the fact that they are defending their adult son against accusations of child sexual abuse. And as someone familiar with the dynamics of abuse, this makes me really uncomfortable.
- See more at: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2015/06/lets-talk-about-rachel-dolezals-parents.html#sthash.z3PP93tI.dpuf

To This Day .. We Are Still In Need of A Savior

We are still living in the last days Jesus warned us about in Matthew 24. Make no mistake about that. The last days, as we have mentioned here on this blog, are the Biblically prophesied time in human history in which humanity's descent into self-destruction will steeply nosedive and figure prominently in the advance of the end of the world.

It's what we've shared for years what the apostacy is and how much further along toward judgment we know march.The corrupt nature of humanity that underscores our existence will be seduced and exploited by powerful figures and forces of delusion and deception, working hand in glove with our common human denominator of self-centered pursuit of life without submission to the Lordship of God in Christ. People in short, will live as they will live, by God and to hell with telling THEM how to live, they will live life freely as they please.

And of course, as we've observed, this is what Jesus said would happen in the last days. Read it for yourself. It's not a mystery or the plot line for some cheesy bad flick about the Tribulation. It is a fact of life.

The moist poignant and saddening aspect of this life in the end times is how our children are universally seen as the final examples of innocence and purity we can still look to. To behold and cradle a sleeping infant or child's helpless and tiny little body and to look into their face betraying total absence of worry, woe or wrong, what parent or grandparent or family member does not then get inspired to strive and labor and fight to keep them as protected and insulated from the darkness of our fallen world as we can.

But as any parent of children knows, when the little ones grow, so does the wakening of their minds .. and wills. And the march toward corruption continues. This powerful video shows how the mundane and pervasive birth of evil in human nature has been our birthright since the fall of mankind .. and how it manifests in the most destructive of ways.

To know that children are capable of cruelty to the extent they are is still more proof of our continued need of a Savior. For us to live as we do with the evil speech we utter is proof that evil does indeed exist today.

Doing The Math On Caitlyn Jenner

When The Friend Becomes The Accuser: The Grotesquerie of Acts 29's Village Church Leadership

Acts 29 is the name of a network of churches that loftily assure us they are organized for the sake of the Gospel of Christ and to facilitate church planting (they used to be called denominations before it became too frustrating for evangelical church marketing gurus, but that's for another post another time). Acts 29's website describes it's intentionality this way:

Our focus is not simply on our own congregations, but on the work of God through the gospel of Jesus Christ, making his name famous to the ends of the earth. In the DNA of all Acts 29 churches should be a deep and driving desire to see churches planted across the world, all of which are  defined by theological clarity, cultural engagement and missional innovation.

Part of that church planting strategy is to partner with Christian world missions organizations to help facilitate overseas global missions growth. I understand that the churches in this denominational umbrella all retain their congregational autonomy and sovereignty as individual member churches partnering for a common good. There's certainly no quarrel with this kind of Christian diversity in unity.

However, one thing Acts 29's ad blurb on it's site wants to speedily distance itself from was the plain fact that it founded by the certifiably abusive and manipulative megachurch preacher Mark Driscoll who programmed an authoritarian totalism into the polity and culture of the movement. He was finally expelled from the group last year, yet it is clear that he left more bitter seek that even now still reaps a harvest of poisonous fruit.

Such is the pathetic example of an Acts 29 member church called The Village Church (TVC) in Dallas, Texas. One Matt Chandler is now the new leader of the Acts 29 movement and the head pastor at TVC.  But Driscoll's loathesome example of "grace and mercy" seems to have lingered there and has found fertile ground to grow. The proof is in the pudding of how TVC checked out of a responsible and compassionate response to the pain and horror of one of the missionaries they supported when she discovered her missionary husband had a serious addiction to child porn.

And what did TVC do? They effectively made the victim into a target for their punitive sanction. 

This going on in a church movement stylizing itself as the next New Thing of church growth, as the next chapter in Christian missionality (remember, there's only 28 chapters in the book of Acts and the plain implication here is that Acts 29 picks up where the apostles did .. Feh).


You can't make this stuff up: this abomination of spiritual abuse is apparently embedded in their culture by a membership contract and because the devastated woman didn't follow their prescribed process that downplayed the danger her pedophile husband posed to children on the mission field, they actually set her forth as a target .. for discipline!

It seems that covenants and lofty words are far more important than love or justice among this curious group of Calvinistic folk (I'm not surprised).  So it wasn't until the Internet became the Holy Spirit (with an outcry against TVC's legalism that includes downloadable files documenting the church's abuse of power and authority) that TVC woke up to smell the pizza. Chandler finally made official that they would no longer discipline her for being open about the brokenness of her marriage and sounded even appropriately contrite about their heavy handed attempts to silence her.

For more information on how to recognize this kind of slickly concealed abuse within abusive churches today, check this excellent article out. Reading the responses to it is almost as good as the article itself and shows just how far "grace" really has been warped into something destructive today in too many places where it should be flourishing.

But Jesus said it would be like this ... the love of many, as he said in Matthew 24 "will wax cold."

Yes Lord, yes Lord.