In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes. (Judges 17:6)

The Blind Leading The Blind

As spiritual blindness grows and a tsunami of apostasy approaches a large part of my task here at the online apologetics and discernment work Apprising Ministries is to cover, and document, issues within the visible church. So I’m doing what I can to warn you that evangelicalism made a horrible mistake when it embraced the sinfully ecumenical neo-liberal cult of the Emerging Church; the idea is, those with ears that hear and eyes that see can be prepared as these things begin popping up in their own evangelical denominations and local churches. 

This Emergent Church—now an upgraded EC 2.0—was always a veritable Trojan Horse full of heresy headed by, among others, the unholy Emergent Church trinity of apostates, Living Spiritual Teacher and EC guru Brian McLaren, universalist Emerging Church pastor Doug Pagitt, and his friend Tony Jones, the progressive “theologian in residence” at Solomon’s Porch. 

Part of their loathsome legacy is bringing into the mainstream a new postmodern form of “big tent” Progressive Christianity—a Liberalism 2.0—sometimes referred to by these rebels against the final authority of God’s Word as Emergence Christianity; and along with this postmodern rebellion has come demonic deconstructionists and irrational philosophers whose goal it is to even attack thought itself. 

In Doug Pagitt And The Emerging Church Gay Agenda I reiterated that online apologetics and discernment ministries tried to warn you the primary goal of the EC has been to attack the Protestant Reformation—specifically Sola Scriptura—but, unfortunately, the warnings went unheeded. As I pointed out before, this is the reason why God moved me to begin covering the issue of a growing acceptance within evangelicalism that the deviant and sinful lifestyle of having sexual relations with another of the same sex, i.e homosexuality, is a viable one for the regenerated Christian.  

And the EC is already making acceptance of this sin of sexual immorality for the Christian a prime hot-button issue within the church visible. I’ve brought to your attention that tip-of-the-spear for this area of attack upon proper biblical Christianity is gay-affirming “pastor” Jay Bakker of Revolution:NYC; who’s already joined the EC elete in the recent apostasia-palooza Big Tent Christianity: Being and Becoming the Church last month. 

The problem for Pagitt and his EC ilk is no one credible is pushing “hate” at the LGBT community. As a matter of fact, in Adele Sakler And Ken Silva you’ll see this in an email exchange I had with Adele Sakler aka Existential Punk, who happens to be a practicing lesbian “Christ-follower” heading up Queermergent, and identifies herself with the antinomian Outlaw Preachers (OPs) slithering up around Bakker.

However, these EC OPs may wish to know, as I told Adele, that it would be wise to be careful not to just assume that I’m some narrow-minded fundamentalist bigot who hates LGBT people; because I’m really not, and, I don’t.  Further, prior to being saved, I was a stand-up comic and professional musician living for years in Long Beach, and performing all around the Los Angeles area, so there really isn’t much I haven’t seen.

The fact is, I have many gay friends, one of which was my boss when I worked closely with him in a group home for people who are developmentally other enabled. And believe me, he was very out about his sexuality. In fact, we’d joke about it all the time; we got along great and I even visited with him, as well as his partner, at their home many times. In addtion, my own niece is also out concerning her homosexuality.

So you see, strictly on a personal level, one’s sexual orientation doesn’t matter to me at all. That understood, the Bible tells us with crystalline clarity that having sexual relations with another of the same sex i.e homosexuality is a deviant lifestyle of sexual immorality because, e.g. as I showed recently in Jesus Defines Marriage For Red Letter Christians, same-sex sexual relations will always remain outside of marriage. The problem for people like Pagitt, Sakler and Bakker, is they just don’t really believe what Jesus actually said.

If We Do Love LGBT People For Whom Christ Died Then We Will Tell Them The Truth

My point was pretty clear when I asked the question: But Do Emergence Christianity And Brian McLaren Really Love Gay People? When all their verbose rhetoric fades, the answer is a resounding no, they don’t. Now before I go on it’s important to point out that I am well aware of “the recent rash of homosexual-related teen suicides throughout the nation,” as my friend Linda Harvey recently pointed out in Is ‘gay’ agenda to blame for teen suicides? Harvey tells us:

In Minnesota, seven students committed suicide in recent months, three said to be involved in homosexuality. A college student at Rutgers jumped off the George Washington Bridge after his homosexual rendezvous was secretly filmed by his roommate and then broadcast over the Internet. The roommate and another student face criminal charges.

A 13-year-old in California and another in Texas killed themselves following student taunts about homosexuality. A 15-year-old in Indiana hanged himself over homosexual-related harassment. And now we hear that another young man, 19-year-old Rhode Island college student Raymond Chase, hanged himself. He, too, believed he was “gay.” (Online source)

Of course this is awful; and I know firsthand what it feels like, as well as what happens when someone commits suicide, because one of my younger brothers took his life in a grizzly way just this past summer. Leaving that aside, in Between the Boy and the Bridge — A Haunting Question Dr. Al Mohler gets to the heart of the matter as he brings out:

The homosexual community will argue that these [suicide victims] were oppressed by the fact that so many believe that homosexuality is sinful. They respond with calls for the acceptance and normalization of homosexuality. Their logic is easy to understand. If the stigma attached to homosexuality were to disappear, persons who are convinced that they are homosexual in sexual orientation, along with those who are confused, would be free from bullying, the threat of exposure, and injury to their parents and loved ones.

Of course, Christians committed to biblical truth will recognize this as a demand to lie to sinners about their sin. The church cannot change its understanding of the sinfulness of homosexual acts unless it willfully disobeys the Scripture and rejects the authority of the Bible to reveal the truth about sin and sinfulness.

In other words, the believing church cannot surrender to the demand that we disobey and reject biblical truth. That much is clear. We cannot lie to persons about the sinfulness of their sin, nor comfort them with falsehood about their moral accountability before God. The rush of the liberal churches and denominations to normalize homosexuality is now a hallmark of their disobedience to the Bible.

But this is not the end of the matter, and we know it. When gay activists accuse conservative Christians of homophobia, they are wrong. Our concern about the sinfulness of homosexuality is not rooted in fear, but in faithfulness to the Bible — and faithfulness means telling the truth. (Online source)

This backdrop brings me to So proud to be in community with these fine people last week at the blog of Doug Pagitt; he tells us that the video below “was made by some people” who are part of “my church Community,” which is the aforementioned spiritual blackhole in Minnesota Solomon’s Porch. Understandably pastor Pagitt tells us he is “so proud to be in community with them.” He then says: 

(Online source) 

Wading through the postmodern Wonderland of Humpty Dumpty language, “a Gay church”; that’s a new one on me, apparently he’s referring to something like the Metropolitan Community Churches or to GayChurch.org: An affirming gay Christian (GLBT) site dedicated to…“Building (ALL) the Body of Christ in Love!” No one that I know has called SP a “gay” church; however, both JoPa friends Tony Jones and Doug Pagitt are, themselves, gay-affirming. 

Essentially to be gay affirming means that one does not think that having sexual relations with a member of the same sex is always a sin; some go so far as to say it is never a sin, but generally in a Christian context those who are gay affirming accept homosexual practice that is within the context of a mutually affirming monagamous relationship. So now you know why the issue of gay marriage is so hotly contested, and so important, to guys like Andrew Marin. 

Pagitt next fills us in that:

 
(Online source) 

Now we’re off-roading into the double-speak of postmodernism; but I have the video transcribed, and those in the video are saying that practicing homosexuality is not a sin, a position Doug Pagitt himself agrees with. The link above concerning the “It Gets Better” takes us over to a short post that tells us about a gay man by the name of Dan Savage who’s recently begun “a new project.” The author of that piece then links to Savage; but here I’m not going to do so because of the vile language he uses.

As I close this out, for now, suffice to say he’s encouraging people to make videos to tell LGBT people that it gets better, and he then hosts them at his You Tube channel. The point here is Pagitt tells us we should “encourage young people who are Gay and Christian that their faith is legitimate.” But this depends upon whether they are having sexual relations with someone of the same sex; if so, they are in unrepentant sin, which then provides fruit which calls into question whether their faith is legitimate.

While it is true that some Christians do fall into sexual sin, they do not however, remain in sin because God will bring them out of it. At this point, the argument that’s almost immediately raised goes something like this: “Why single out this particular sin while ignoring the sins of injustice, pride, gluttony, and so on and so on and so on…” I covered this further in The Sin Of Homosexuality Is Different so here I’m simply going to say we must remind people that this is sin of a sexual nature, which immediately sets it apart from the other sin mentioned above. 

The way we know this for certain is because God actually tells us this Himself in 1 Corinthians 6:18 — Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. Note carefully how the Holy Spirit chose to set every other sin apart from sexual immorality, which itself includes all sexual relations outside of marriage—whether it be heterosexual or homosexual.

But we come to the core of the problem when Doug Pagitt opines that each of “the people in this video have struggled and felt the pain that comes with people telling them how to be Christian.” Did you catch the pouty postmodern spiritual thirteen-year-old temper tantrum: “Nuh-uh, nobody’s gonna tell me how to be a Christian; they aren’ t the boss of me. I’m not gonna believe the historic, orthodox Christian faith; and you can’t make me. I’m just going to believe whatever I wanna believe; so there.”

See also:

THE EMERGING CHURCH: “A QUEERING OF EVANGELICALISM”

HOMOPRESSION IS AT LEAST AS BAD AS HOMOPHOBIA  

JAY BAKKER REFLECTS THE SAD CONDITION OF THE VISIBLE CHURCH

OUTLAW PREACHERS KHAD YOUNG AND JAY BAKKER DON’T LOVE ENOUGH 

GAY CHRISTIAN RAY BOLTZ: “I DON’T BELIEVE GOD HATES ME ANYMORE”

ANNE RICE AND HOMOSEXUALITY

HOMOSEXUAL LOBBY DIVIDING THE VISIBLE CHURCH