“Then the master told his servant, ‘Go out to the roads and country lanes and make them come in, so that my house will be full.’ ” (Luke 14:23)

Bullheaded And Arrogant

So often in this life truth really is stranger than fiction. A while back I mentioned Jerry of Faces Like Flint ministry who actually does street preaching himself every weekend in Louisville, KY using Ray Comfort’s The Way of the Master methodology. Jerry had sent me the link to Part One of his article on Rob Bell’s “Bullhorn Guy” where Bell takes to task those who do open air preaching as Jerry does. I published a short piece entitled Rob Bell: “Bullhorn Guy” Expose.

Just the other day I received the following unsolicited testimony from Marty, who is a brother pastor in John Ankerberg’s neck-o-the-woods, Chattanooga, TN who was out doing some evangelism out among the public when he was confronted by these “Bullhead Guys.” What will follow gives us a crystal clear glimpse of the kind of fruit which is being produced through the pseudo-Christian “ministries” of emerging Hollow Men like Rob Bell. For you see in trying to make their vague non-confrontational “postmodern” message palatable to this pagan culture the typical “convert” we end up seeing is one who claims to follow Jesus but clearly does not have the changed life and fruit to back up their phony claims.

Yet more reason that in the neo-liberal cult of the Emergent Church we see a fulfillment of people who have a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away (2 Timothy 3:5, KJV).

Pastor Ken,

I thought you might find this interesting. I pastor a small independent Baptist church of about seventeen including my wife and six children, just a little bigger than yours. This past weekend a couple of other preachers and I were preaching and passing tracts on a street corner in Chattanooga, TN. We were right up the street from a liquor store and there are about 30-40 bars and restaurant/bars within about 2 blocks.

The brother that was preaching was preaching on the danger and sin of alcohol and from 1 Corinthians chapter 5 about those that call themselves Christians, but are drunkards, fornicators, etc. Well, two guys came out of a bar across the street and walked over to where we were and immediately started heckling the preacher in the most arrogant and scornful attitude! These guys were rebuking the preacher on his preaching about sin. They said that we should be listening to people instead of talking so much and that love was the message we should be talking about.

These two guys were both professing Christians, one of whom said he was actually a church planter and the other was a member of a large Southern Baptist church in the area. The church member boasted that since he was in a rock band, he was in bars 300 nights a year and didn’t see any problem with this or with his profession of faith in Christ.

They confronted us and it was obvious that these two were astounded that we had the nerve to stand on a street corner and warn people to flee from the wrath to come. They told us that we shouldn’t “cheapen” the Gospel down to a piece of paper, referring to the Gospel tracts that we were handing out. They also told us that we shouldn’t be “yelling” about wrath and sin and judgment, and instead should be listening to people and building relationships with them.

To make a long story short, we dialogued (argued! Possibly in violation of Proverbs 26:4; but hopefully not Proverbs 26:5!) with these guys for about 30 minutes and as we broke contact, the church planter guy handed me a DVD…you guessed it: Rob Bell’s Nooma titled “Bullhorn.” After I watched the video, I could see that these two guys were parroting Bell almost exactly!

I told the guy flat out that Bell is a heretic. His enamored response was that Bell is a theologian and understands Greek and Hebrew. The implication being that we mere mortals weren’t capable of judging Bell’s fruit. I’m not opposed to education or study of the languages as long as it is done from a fundamental, Bible believing position, but we have set up a Nicolaitan clergy/laity dichotomy that doesn’t exist in the New Testament!

I tried to reason with the man who said he was in a rock band and asked if he had ever thought about 1 Thessalonians 5:22, “Abstain from all appearance of evil.” He really didn’t think that that applied to him, and asked what I thought was evil about what he was doing. He believed that God could use anything, and even claimed that he knew someone that had, in his words “come to God” through the vile rock band Creed. They tried to twist the Scripture about Jesus being the friend of publicans and sinners to justify what they were doing.

Meanwhile the pastor/church planter said that he thought God would even use the rotten paraphrase The Message. I realize that you and I may differ in the area of translations and versions, but I know we would both agree that The Message is a real perversion of Scripture. Actually Bell didn’t come into the conversation until near the end. When the pastor/church planter guy handed me the DVD he told me that if I would take time to watch it my ministry would be transformed by it.

Well it did change it but not in the way he intended it to. Up to that point I really hadn’t paid much attention to Rob Bell, or honestly, even to your articles on Bell. Since then I have read several of your articles dealing with Bell and have listened to a couple of sermons from the Mars Hill web site. I dedicated most of my past Sunday’s message to Bell’s heresies.

If you haven’t downloaded any of his messages, go to the Mars Hill site and download the 3 sermons from the series “Jesus Wants to Save Christians.” In a very subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) way, Bell denies the virgin birth, the new birth and a literal hell. Like most other false teachers pinning down what he is really trying to say truly is like trying to nail jell-o to a tree!

Anyway, I thought you might find this interesting. Thanks for your work in exposing Bell and the Emergent cult. I hope this helps.

A Brother Pastor