I am the LORD, and there is no other. I form light and create darkness, I make well-being and create calamity, I am the LORD, who does all these things. (Isaiah 45:6-7)

The Bible Shows That God Is Absolutely Sovereign

Anyone with even a modicum of spiritual discernment can see that there’s very rough spiritual sea dead ahead. The plethora of people-pleasing prophets telling you otherwise are lying to you; whether they know it  or not.

While funding allows, it remains part of my job here at Apprising Ministries to tell you this truth and to continue documenting the falling away of the evangelical community.

The sad fact is that the spiritual cesspool Fuller Theological Seminary has played a large roll in the rot advanced by the man-centered Church Growth Movement vomited out of it. The CGM has contributed mightily to the current dismal state of man-loving evanjellyfish.

You see, the warped and toxic fruit of e.g. PDL Pope Rick Warren and Rob Bell, the original rock star pastor of the neo-liberal cult slithering around in the Emerging Church, is a direct result of a lack of faith in the all-sufficiency of Holy Scripture. It is as I showed you in Inerrancy Of Scripture And Fuller Theological Seminary:

Perhaps the most notable institutional example of the drift from affirming the inerrancy of Scripture to affirming the infallibility of Scripture was Fuller Theological Seminary…

Through the years, [FTS continued] hiring and attracting faculty and trustees who did not uphold the doctrine of biblical inerrancy,… Harold O. J. Brown lamented Fuller’s disconcerting drift from orthodoxy to liberalism, following similar swings at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton seminaries.

It needs to be understood that the Emergent Church is itself a branch from the diseased CGM tree; and sadly, evangelical churches made the tragic mistake to embrace these vicious vipers in their younger sectors. This all has resulted in an evangelical rebellion against the absolute authority of God’s Word in the Bible.

Consider the following from the inerrant and infallible Word of God:

They are from the world; therefore they speak from the world, and the world listens to them. We are from God. Whoever knows God listens to us; whoever is not from God does not listen to us. By this we know the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error. (1 John 4:5-6)

As he is commenting upon those verses in his well-researched article Faulty Premises of the Church Growth Movement: Rick Warren, Robert Schuller, Donald McGavran, and C. Peter Wagner Mislead the Church Christian apologist Bob DeWaay uncovers where evangelicalism jumped the track:

If we compare what the Apostle John said with what a famous Church Growth advocate says, we encounter a problem. John says that the world will not listen to a true, unsullied Christian message. Rick Warren says that anybody can be won to Christ if we discover a message that will interest them through promising to meet their felt needs. These concepts are contradictory.

The Biblical idea is that we must speak God’s unchanging message of the gospel whether the world hates us or not: “If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you” (John 15:19).

The Church Growth idea is that we must study man (using the latest sociological, psychological, and anthropological insights) to determine how to create a church that will grow and a message that will be popular through appealing to a target audience. Someone is wrong here and I do not think it is the inspired Apostle John. (Online source)

DeWaay is dead-on-target. Here’s the heart of the matter: Modern advertising methods, which CGM pillars like Warren and Bill Hybels draw from, do work. In other words, Seeker Driven bait and switch tactics will serve to put people in seats. However, because God isn’t behind this methodology, we have stillborn believers.

Through these years we’re seeing scores of confused “Christ-followers,” so-called, believing their supposed “changed lives” are indications that they’re regenerated when they are not. Well guess what, many of them have gone on to become members of church leadership and some are even standing in their pulpits.

How else do you suppose we’d come to —  Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons (1 Timothy 4:1). These teachings of demons are now even being taught inside churches through deceitful spirits in the pastorate.

DeWaay will now bust another of the demonic CGM myths; their central tenet that supposedly a large church always equals God’s blessing of that organization:

Since the advent of the modern church growth movement which dates from the 1950’s, pastors and local churches have been under massive pressure to do something to facilitate church growth. The movement was founded primarily by two people, independently. Those people are Donald McGavran and Robert Schuller…

The movement has spawned some highly visible “successes” such as Willow Creek Church and Saddleback Church… Whatever else the Church Growth Movement has done, it has convinced the majority of church leaders that if their local organization is not growing, this is a sure sign they are “unhealthy” and failing…

Church Growth leaders believe it to be axiomatic that Christ wants His church to grow… [However t]he church consists of the “called out ones,” not those who enjoy having a religious experience with people who are just like themselves.

When God brings people to Himself through the gospel, He adds numbers to the church. In whatever local situation people exist, those who are added to the church gather for fellowship. True fellowship is not the gathering of religious consumers with similar “felt needs,” but it is fellowship around the person and work of Christ…

Without the blood atonement, there is no fellowship with God or with one another. The “church” that consists of people from a community who have similar needs and desires, who feel comfortable with each other for social reasons, and who have certain religious aspirations, is not a fellowship as described in 1John 1. It is something else.

I claim that faithful preaching of God’s Word is mandated even if it is rejected. I furthermore claim that when God has established a congregation that meets the Biblical definition of a local church, such a congregation should be cared for by godly leadership even if for some reason it is not growing. Why throw God’s people to the wolves because the prospects for gaining ministerial prestige are greater elsewhere because of demographic considerations?
(Online source)

No doubt Seeker Driven Prophet-Führers like Steven Furtick—maniacal for numbers—do think that they’re building God’s Kingdom; unfortunately the tragedy is, they are actually misleading to people. Sadly, they sit there in a church convinced that they’re saved because they may have improved some morally.

However, they remain on the path to hell. Now I don’t agree with everything A.W. Tozer taught, but he did have much insight concerning the visible church. What Tozer says below remains just as true today:

The task of the Church is twofold: to spread Christianity throughout the world and to make sure that the Christianity she spreads is the pure New Testament kind.

Christianity will always reproduce itself after its own kind. A worldly-minded, unspiritual church, when she crosses the ocean to give her witness to peoples of other tongues and other cultures, is sure to bring forth on other shores a Christianity much like her own.

The popular notion that the first obligation of the Church is to spread the Gospel to the uttermost parts of the earth is false. Her first obligation is to be spiritually worthy to spread it. Our Lord said, Go ye, but He also said, Tarry ye, and the tarrying had to come before the going.

Had the disciples gone forth as missionaries before the Day of Pentecost it would have been an overwhelming spiritual disaster, for they could have done no more than make converts after their own likeness, and this would have altered for the whole history of the Western world and had consequences throughout the ages to come.[1]

…he who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the Church…

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End notes:

[1] A.W. Tozer,  Of God and Men [Camp Hill: Christian Publications, 1995], 36,37.

See also:

SIGNS OF THE TIME

KNOW YOUR BIBLE

T.D. JAKES AND SUPPORT FOR APPRISING MINISTRIES