SADDLEBACK "HATERS" TO HOLD MAJOR CONFERENCE

This is just in from Internet News headquarters, where our motto is: If it’s news; it’s news to us.

Dateline Anywhere USA; maybe even Your Town: This just in…the world’s gone mad.

Ok, that’s not so new; but rumor has it that quasi-Word Faith attractional prophet-pastor Steven Furtick is about to release a new video.

No one seems to think it’s a reworked cover of an old Chaka Khan song he’s going to call—I’m Every Preacher.

IN gives you an exclusive sneak peek at some of the prophet-pastor’s new lyrics:

I can cast a spell
With a vision you can’t tell
Mix a special word
Put fire inside of you
But anytime you feel
Danger or fear instantly I will appear, ’cause

I’m every preacher, it’s all in me
Anything you want preached, buddy
I’ll do it my own way
I’m every preacher, it’s all in me
I can read God’s thoughts right now
Every one from A to Z

And now with breaking semi-satire, IN reporter Jack Storm here with a whirlwind of a story around SBC megachurch pastor Rick Warren.

It seems to possibly involve Ken Silva of Apprising Ministries as well. In Saddleback-Haters to Hold Conference today we find out:

“You’re right, Rick,” say conference organizers: “We just don’t like you.”  Things are tough for Rick Warren.  These days,America’s pastor can’t seem to catch a break.  For years, a standing army of detractors has been on high alert, waiting to pounce on one doctrinal misstep after another, and prompting the Southern California mega-pastor to quip about “Saddleback-haters,” a term he’s used several times in responding to the recent Kingsway controversy.

Now a group has come forward to confirm that Warren is being neither hyperbolic nor paranoid in his reference to “Saddleback haters”:  They’re here. They’re angry. And next month, they’re meeting in Buffalo.  However, unlike some groups who oppose Warren purely out of doctrinal concern, the PASS organization —Pastors Against Saddleback Shenanigans—freely admits that its primary motivation is jealousy and personal animus toward America’s pastor.

“We simply don’t like him.  And we’re jealous of his success,” says PASS founder and coordinator E.F. Dorresh of Hamburg, New York, just a stone’s throw from Buffalo. “Like many of our co-religionists, we also think he’s watering down the gospel, cozying up to Muslims, introducing wacky concepts from Eastern spirituality, cavorting with New Agers (Mehmet Oz) and using as many different apostate Bible translations as necessary in order to get the job done. We predict it won’t be long before he stops doing that—not because of any reformatory impulse on his part, but because he will soon reach the point where he no longer feels the need to defend any of this garbage biblically.”

More than one thousand pastors, bloggers, and assorted troublemakers are expected to descend upon Buffalo for Saddlebash I, which will be held at the city’s brand new Ad Hominem Center, a $200 million hotel and conference facility located right on the water front, April 27-29. Says Dorresh, “This place is brand-spankin’-new, so it’s the perfect venue for giving Rick Warren a spankin’.”

PASS was founded as an amalgam of several autonomous clusters of Warren critics from various locations across the U.S. The key challenge in organizing anti-Saddleback sentiment wasn’t financial or doctrinal; rather it was coordination: there are simply so many Saddleback haters out there, the prospect of organizing them was daunting.

It still is, in fact. Controversy within the ranks of Warren detractors is not unusual, as they are a quarrelsome lot.    Even the choice of keynote speaker for the event presented a major hurdle. Ken Silva, of Apprising Minisitries, a discernment blogger who has taken on Warren in cyber space many times, would seem a natural choice. But Silva declined the organization’s request, noting that the PASSing interest in him was flattering.

“I don’t hate Rick Warren,” said the New Hampshire pastor, whose congregation, like Warren’s, was once affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. “I’ve heard he’s a great guy–very cordial.  I respect his intellect, and his interest in solving intractable world problems is admirable.  But I can’t stand by and let him twist the Gospel into something it isn’t.

“It’s not personal, though,” Silva said.  “Not at all. And that’s where, I think, I part company with many if not most in PASS and other I-hate-Saddleback groups.  They’re making us look bad, and playing right into Warren’s paranoid hands.”

Looking bad doesn’t seem to be a major concern for PASS however, as they are not lacking in sympathetic figures.

Perhaps the most interesting if not the most inspirational character in the vast constellation of Saddleback-haters is Eric Epp.  A psychiatric technician and bi-vocational pastor from Stockton,California, Epp is dramatizing his antipathy for Rick Warren by walking to the conference—a 2,600-mile hike.  “The Warren Walk” sounds inoccuous enough, evoking the genteel spectre of a theologically-orthodox Johnny Appleseed.   But E.F. Dorrish is quick to point out that Epp’s walkathon, in addition to mobilizing support for the Saddlebash Conference,  is also a barometer of anti-Saddleback sentiment in the hinterlands. “Everywhere he walks, townspeople come out go greet him. ‘We hate Rick Warren, too!’ they say.  ‘Go, Eric, go!’”

In some instances, Mr. Epp has been given the keys to the city by local officials… (Online source)

You can read this stupefying story in its entirety right here.

See also:

RICK WARREN SAYS NO KING’S WAY DOCUMENT AND NO SADDLEBACK “STAFF” INVOLVED

JAMES ROBISON AND RICK WARREN WORKING TO REVERSE THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION

JOHN PIPER, RICK WARREN & FOSTER-WILLARDISM