Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. (James 4:4, ESV)

Attacking The Church Now For Favor With The World?

Vice President of the Acts 29 Church Planting Network and lead pastor of The Journey, Darren Patrick wanted us to know that Lance Ford had tweeted some pithy “wisdom.” I’ll get to that in a minute; first however, Emerging Church luminary Andrew Jones tells us that a couple of years ago:

Darrin Patrick spoke at Covenant Theological Seminary and put together a little history of the emerging church in USA (or at least two groups within it – Emergent Village and Acts 29) and its really quite good and fair… (Online source)

Jones tells us Patrick “comes up with three streams,” which would be:

1. Emerging Conversational, concerned with theological revision and Missio Dei. Emergent Village, bloggers, bi-vocational pastors, Seminary students. (Includes Brian McLaren, Doug Pagitt, etc)
2. Emerging Attractional, concerned with revising methods of church and in particular, the large group worship. This includes two groups:
a) neo-reformed (Mark Driscoll, Patrick, etc) who preach expositionally, and
b) non-reformed, neo-seeker (Erwin McManus, Andy Stanley, John Burke) who preach topically .
Both groups are risktakers and creative.
3. Emerging Incarnational, concerned with structural revision within the church. Downplay large group worship and like house church. Alan Hirsch, Lance Ford, Bob Hyatt, Neil Cole, Johnathon Cambell. (Online source, emphasis his)

For our purposes here note under 3 the names Alan Hirsch and the aforementioned Lance Ford; among other things, they are co-founders of Christianity Today’s Shapevine and apparently they’re together working on a book. Today Patrick draws our attention to, at the time of this writing, Ford’s latest tweet:

Maybe the reason so many people like Jesus but not the church is too many “Christians” love church but don’t love Jesus (Online source)

Hmm; sounds very Dan Kimballesque, no. But something’s off; let’s see if I can fix it. Well, maybe the reason so many people like Jesus but not the church is quasi-reformed “church planters” have become so missional they’re creating a seeker-friendly Jesus because they love church but don’t love Jesus.

And, in addition, they retweet messages in order to win favor with unbelievers like Ford did here:

RT @alanhirsch: The dffrence btween Xians & Ghandi on the cross-Ghandi saw the cross as an act 2 B emulated … http://bit.ly/9Y0pnH (Online source)

That link goes to the Facebook page of his fellow Emerging Incarnational missiologist, Alan Hirsch. The entire quote from E. Stanley Jones follows below:

“The difference between Christians and Ghandi on the cross was, Ghandi saw the cross as an act to be emulated – whereas Christians embrace it as a theology to be believed. Ghandi did more with his half-truth than most believers do with their entire truth.” (Online source)

Certainly more reason why people would like that seeker-friendly missional Jesus. Really; every Christian only sees the Cross as a “theology?” None of us are living out our faith/belief in self-sacrificial dying to ourselves in emulation of our precious Savior Who died for wretches like us who have no righteousness of our own? Really; only these emerging missional church planters are the ones doing so?

That aside, here’s the truth: The difference between Christians and Ghandi on the cross is, we’ve actually come to it; and we’ve surrendered our lives to Christ Jesus. But unfortunately, Ghandi would remain a pagan in his sinful rebellion against God; you see, he rejected the real Jesus, and therefore, Ghandi died in his sin.

Scripture tells us that all Ghandi did, as noble as it certainly was on the human level, was as filthy rags to God, and Ghandi had no way to please Him (see—Isaiah 64:6; Romans 8:5-8). Shame on these men for lying to people about the horrible fate of Ghandi by putting that quote out like it was true.