Kenny Oliver, a friend of Apprising Ministries, asks a very important question concerning Emergent Church leader Tony Jones in a piece over at Thinker Up.

This question becomes all the more critical when you consider that men in the Emerging Church like Jones and his pastor Doug Pagitt—referred to as a “universalist” by John MacArthur—as well as others like Rob Bell and Dan Kimball are right now infiltrating your evangelical youth groups.

Oliver opens his piece by pointing out that:

The information in this article about Tony Jones (the US director of the Emergent Church and closely aligned with Brian McLaren) is bothersome, to think that Tony Jones may not be a true believer and yet is accepted by many in the church as though he were.

This is just an excerpt from a three part article on the Emergent Church by Richard Bennett. We should pray that Tony Jones really meets Jesus and repents from promoting forms of Eastern mysticism and Roman Catholic heresies. I do not know if he is born again or not, I can only go by what he says, writes, and teaches. It is very important to carefully understand what a person teaches before we automatically assume that they are part of the body of Christ. We need to test everything and test the teachings coming from the pulpits and books, even if the book is published by a “christian” publisher.

What most people don’t know is that, the Lord be praised, my friend Richard Bennett and I actually worked together on parts of those pieces about the Emerging Church, which Oliver references above. You can read the rest of this post by Kenny Oliver about Tony Jones of the Emergent Church here.