Who's Watching the Watchdogs?
I know that by recent Tom Wilson standards, this is a lightning fast return to the blogosphere, but something raised my ire today that I felt was blogworthy. For those who are new to this blog, I would like to say that I am not usually this strident in my tone. Please read my other posts and you will see that I am a loveable little teddy bear of a blogger. But this one comes from the gut, moreso than any of the others, some of which were posted just to satisfy the demands of certain blogophiles, who shall remain nameless.
So now that I have your curiosity piqued, as to what could possibly get the normally level-headed, calm demeanor of Tom Wilson somewhere north of comatose, just hang in there, and we will get to it. I spoke (wrote?) in my last post, Game's Locked, about some thoughts I had on the "emergent church". So I will start with a disclaimer that I feel I will need to cut and paste into every subsequent post on this topic, in that there is much in the emergent church (forgive me if I tire of putting quotes around it all the time, if you feel it is necessary, feel free to add them mentally), that I have concerns about. But my purpose here is not to bash the emergent church, but mainly to ask the question, what qualifies to be labeled as the "emergent church"? I think if you gathered a hundred different anti-emergent activists in a room and asked them to define the emergent church, you would get a hundred different answers, but mostly all summarized with the statement "they are not like me". It is almost getting to the point where if I drive a Chevy, then anyone who drives a Ford is "emergent". (I told you I was worked up).
So here is where I am coming from. I got a phone call at work today, wherein I was informed that someone had seen that the "Global Day of Prayer" (hereafter referred to as GDOP, and in which I participated down at Northrup Auditorium this past May 27th) is on a list of "movements" that the right-minded Christian community should be concerned about and/or wary of. The exact quote would be, "the Global Day of Prayer is going to be a conduit for interspirituality through mystical meditation, and the results will be spiritually disastrous for millions." The precise name of the website was not known to me at first, so I was free to Google on my own to see what I could see. My initial Google search turned up several "watchdog" sites with which I was not previously familiar, evidently the self-appointed guardians of Truth and Orthodoxy in this Information Age. While this was going on, I got a second phone call, wherein I was informed that the website was "Lighthouse something", which narrowed my search, and I found the following:
www.lighthousetrailsresearch.com
First a word about their tagline, "Exposing the Dangers of Contemplative Spirituality". What does this mean, that we are not supposed to think too long or too deeply about our spiritual nature? So anyway, once there, I searched for "Global Day of Prayer" and found what I was looking for. What follows is a list of the "sins" of the GDOP movement. And these are verbatim quotes, not my paraphrase:
ALERT: Global Day of Prayer - May 27, 2007
The next Global Day of Prayer will take place on May 27th. People from around the world from many different countries will participate. The event began in 2000 in South Africa. The website describes the event:
IMAGINE the emerging generation from all the nations of the globe praying on the high places on 27 May 2007, the Global Day of Prayer . . . Yes, can you imagine the effect when on this day people from 220 nations of the globe fill stadiums, community centres, city squares, churches and all kinds of buildings?
The growing movement is hoping to unite all "Christian traditions" as this excerpt from an article in London UK explains:
1. Note first the word "emerging", which immediately flags them as suspect, no matter what the rest says. But I would guess if you polled the attendees in Northrup Auditorium on that day, a good number would respond, "the emerging what?"
2. Note also that they are going to pray "on the high places" - conjuring up in Watchdog minds, I'm sure, images of Baal worship from the Old Testament. I can think of higher places than Northrup Auditorium and Dallas. And yes, some around the world gathered on mountaintops, but personally, I can't work myself up to call that blasphemy.
3. Next, note that this growing movement is (heaven forbid) hoping to unite all "Christian traditions". What is the objection here? Is it the intermingling of "different ethnicities", or the intermingling of "different expressions of the Christian faith" that they find so distasteful? So maybe in this case, it is true what they say, "One man's heaven is another man's hell"...
"After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, 10and crying out with a loud voice, "Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!"" - Rev. 7:9,10
Another excerpt...
To understand more of the vision of the Global Day of Prayer, we need only look to the organization's youth program. In that section of the GDOP website, there are instructions on how to "mobilize young people far and wide." Unfortunately, this includes Pete Greig's Red Moon Risingbook and the 24/7 Boiler Rooms. While Greig's book and ministry may, at first glance, appear to be a movement of Christian prayer, research shows that both the book and the movement are heavily influenced by contemplative spirituality, Catholicism, and New Age thought. And while youth around the world are taking shifts (to pray) in Greig's boiler rooms (prayer rooms), they may be getting into something entirely different than biblical prayer. Please see links below to some of our previous articles about 24/7 prayer rooms and Red Moon Rising. We think you will find what we say to be true, and if this is the case, the Global Day of Prayer is going to be a conduit for interspirituality through mystical meditation, and the results will be spiritually disastrous for millions.
Right now, 24/7 prayer rooms are being added all over the world, and each year more countries are joining the Global Day of Prayer. With the strong emphasis on meditation in both the prayer rooms and the global prayer event, we believe this warning is warranted and vital.
So in addition to the first grave concern, that Christians of different ethnicities and expressions of faith will rub elbows, the second is equally as grave - as the title of the movement suggests, they might actually pray, and they might pray long and they might pray hard! Embedded in here is their objection to the 24/7 prayer movement, for which there are separate articles. And note the specific concerns:
1. Contemplative spirituality - again, not sure what they mean by this. I'm not much for fancy book learnin' but I will give you my take. Contemplate - think deeply, consider. Spirituality - matters of the soul.
2. Catholicism! Again, I must offer a disclaimer similar to the Emergent disclaimer above. There is much in the Catholic church with which I disagree. Though as a youth in Sunday School I studied Catholicism as a cult, and I know where my sensibilities are supposed to lie, I cannot extrapolate that to say that Catholic Christians (an oxymoron to some) have nothing to offer. I went to college at the University of Minnesota Duluth, where I was heavily involved in Intervarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF), and literally across the street was the College of St. Scholastica, a private Catholic college, whose IVCF group consisted mainly, wonder of wonders, of Catholics, many of whom I got to know, and who loved the Lord and who wanted more than anything to introduce him to their fellow Catholics.
3. New Age - I will address this objection from the standpoint of my own experience. In the summer of 2004, we experienced forty days of 24/7 prayer in our church, and it was the most alive our church has been before or since. I myself, being a night person, took the midnight - 2am shift most nights, and yes, there were candles (a tool of the devil evidently - see letter quoted in my last post), and yes, I contemplated, and yes, I prayed, and yes, I read the Word (by candlelight!) and "Confessions" by Saint Augustine (talk about contemplative spirituality, better watch out for this guy), and even "Red Moon Rising" (by candlelight!), and they were precious and growing times for me. There was nothing New Age about it. So I guess I am having trouble "discerning", to use the buzzword, what part of deep, contemplative, private, on-my-face prayer to my Creator God that I am supposed to be afraid of.
I close with this, one of my favorite authors, Francis Schaeffer, and my #1 favorite book (to this point in my life), which I just finished re-reading for the second time and intend to read again, at least once a year. Perhaps I will write an extended treatise on this book in a future post. But it especially fits in this discussion, because he, Dr. Schaeffer, even deigned to use the new "S" word in the title - "True Spirituality". An extended excerpt - the illustraton of the chairs:
From the biblical view - the Judeo-Christian view - reality has two halves, like two halves of an orange. You do not have the whole orange unless you have both parts. One part is normally seen, and the other is normally unseen.
Do you see it? The supernatural is here. The supernatural is now. I think there is a tendency by some, "infiltrated by twentieth-century thinking", to label any talk of the "supernatural", and moreover any attempt to connect with the "supernatural" through prayer and meditation, as somehow "mystical" or "New Age". But I contend that it is not. True Spirituality, to quote Shaeffer again, "means living in the supernatural now - not only theoretically, but in practice."
Something to contemplate. Spiritually.
So now that I have your curiosity piqued, as to what could possibly get the normally level-headed, calm demeanor of Tom Wilson somewhere north of comatose, just hang in there, and we will get to it. I spoke (wrote?) in my last post, Game's Locked, about some thoughts I had on the "emergent church". So I will start with a disclaimer that I feel I will need to cut and paste into every subsequent post on this topic, in that there is much in the emergent church (forgive me if I tire of putting quotes around it all the time, if you feel it is necessary, feel free to add them mentally), that I have concerns about. But my purpose here is not to bash the emergent church, but mainly to ask the question, what qualifies to be labeled as the "emergent church"? I think if you gathered a hundred different anti-emergent activists in a room and asked them to define the emergent church, you would get a hundred different answers, but mostly all summarized with the statement "they are not like me". It is almost getting to the point where if I drive a Chevy, then anyone who drives a Ford is "emergent". (I told you I was worked up).
So here is where I am coming from. I got a phone call at work today, wherein I was informed that someone had seen that the "Global Day of Prayer" (hereafter referred to as GDOP, and in which I participated down at Northrup Auditorium this past May 27th) is on a list of "movements" that the right-minded Christian community should be concerned about and/or wary of. The exact quote would be, "the Global Day of Prayer is going to be a conduit for interspirituality through mystical meditation, and the results will be spiritually disastrous for millions." The precise name of the website was not known to me at first, so I was free to Google on my own to see what I could see. My initial Google search turned up several "watchdog" sites with which I was not previously familiar, evidently the self-appointed guardians of Truth and Orthodoxy in this Information Age. While this was going on, I got a second phone call, wherein I was informed that the website was "Lighthouse something", which narrowed my search, and I found the following:
www.lighthousetrailsresearch.com
First a word about their tagline, "Exposing the Dangers of Contemplative Spirituality". What does this mean, that we are not supposed to think too long or too deeply about our spiritual nature? So anyway, once there, I searched for "Global Day of Prayer" and found what I was looking for. What follows is a list of the "sins" of the GDOP movement. And these are verbatim quotes, not my paraphrase:
ALERT: Global Day of Prayer - May 27, 2007
The next Global Day of Prayer will take place on May 27th. People from around the world from many different countries will participate. The event began in 2000 in South Africa. The website describes the event:
IMAGINE the emerging generation from all the nations of the globe praying on the high places on 27 May 2007, the Global Day of Prayer . . . Yes, can you imagine the effect when on this day people from 220 nations of the globe fill stadiums, community centres, city squares, churches and all kinds of buildings?
The growing movement is hoping to unite all "Christian traditions" as this excerpt from an article in London UK explains:
1. Note first the word "emerging", which immediately flags them as suspect, no matter what the rest says. But I would guess if you polled the attendees in Northrup Auditorium on that day, a good number would respond, "the emerging what?"
2. Note also that they are going to pray "on the high places" - conjuring up in Watchdog minds, I'm sure, images of Baal worship from the Old Testament. I can think of higher places than Northrup Auditorium and Dallas. And yes, some around the world gathered on mountaintops, but personally, I can't work myself up to call that blasphemy.
3. Next, note that this growing movement is (heaven forbid) hoping to unite all "Christian traditions". What is the objection here? Is it the intermingling of "different ethnicities", or the intermingling of "different expressions of the Christian faith" that they find so distasteful? So maybe in this case, it is true what they say, "One man's heaven is another man's hell"...
"After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, 10and crying out with a loud voice, "Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!"" - Rev. 7:9,10
Another excerpt...
To understand more of the vision of the Global Day of Prayer, we need only look to the organization's youth program. In that section of the GDOP website, there are instructions on how to "mobilize young people far and wide." Unfortunately, this includes Pete Greig's Red Moon Risingbook and the 24/7 Boiler Rooms. While Greig's book and ministry may, at first glance, appear to be a movement of Christian prayer, research shows that both the book and the movement are heavily influenced by contemplative spirituality, Catholicism, and New Age thought. And while youth around the world are taking shifts (to pray) in Greig's boiler rooms (prayer rooms), they may be getting into something entirely different than biblical prayer. Please see links below to some of our previous articles about 24/7 prayer rooms and Red Moon Rising. We think you will find what we say to be true, and if this is the case, the Global Day of Prayer is going to be a conduit for interspirituality through mystical meditation, and the results will be spiritually disastrous for millions.
Right now, 24/7 prayer rooms are being added all over the world, and each year more countries are joining the Global Day of Prayer. With the strong emphasis on meditation in both the prayer rooms and the global prayer event, we believe this warning is warranted and vital.
So in addition to the first grave concern, that Christians of different ethnicities and expressions of faith will rub elbows, the second is equally as grave - as the title of the movement suggests, they might actually pray, and they might pray long and they might pray hard! Embedded in here is their objection to the 24/7 prayer movement, for which there are separate articles. And note the specific concerns:
1. Contemplative spirituality - again, not sure what they mean by this. I'm not much for fancy book learnin' but I will give you my take. Contemplate - think deeply, consider. Spirituality - matters of the soul.
2. Catholicism! Again, I must offer a disclaimer similar to the Emergent disclaimer above. There is much in the Catholic church with which I disagree. Though as a youth in Sunday School I studied Catholicism as a cult, and I know where my sensibilities are supposed to lie, I cannot extrapolate that to say that Catholic Christians (an oxymoron to some) have nothing to offer. I went to college at the University of Minnesota Duluth, where I was heavily involved in Intervarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF), and literally across the street was the College of St. Scholastica, a private Catholic college, whose IVCF group consisted mainly, wonder of wonders, of Catholics, many of whom I got to know, and who loved the Lord and who wanted more than anything to introduce him to their fellow Catholics.
3. New Age - I will address this objection from the standpoint of my own experience. In the summer of 2004, we experienced forty days of 24/7 prayer in our church, and it was the most alive our church has been before or since. I myself, being a night person, took the midnight - 2am shift most nights, and yes, there were candles (a tool of the devil evidently - see letter quoted in my last post), and yes, I contemplated, and yes, I prayed, and yes, I read the Word (by candlelight!) and "Confessions" by Saint Augustine (talk about contemplative spirituality, better watch out for this guy), and even "Red Moon Rising" (by candlelight!), and they were precious and growing times for me. There was nothing New Age about it. So I guess I am having trouble "discerning", to use the buzzword, what part of deep, contemplative, private, on-my-face prayer to my Creator God that I am supposed to be afraid of.
I close with this, one of my favorite authors, Francis Schaeffer, and my #1 favorite book (to this point in my life), which I just finished re-reading for the second time and intend to read again, at least once a year. Perhaps I will write an extended treatise on this book in a future post. But it especially fits in this discussion, because he, Dr. Schaeffer, even deigned to use the new "S" word in the title - "True Spirituality". An extended excerpt - the illustraton of the chairs:
From the biblical view - the Judeo-Christian view - reality has two halves, like two halves of an orange. You do not have the whole orange unless you have both parts. One part is normally seen, and the other is normally unseen.
I would suggest that this may be illustrated by two chairs. The men who sit in these chairs look at the universe in two different ways. We are all sitting in one or the other of these chairs at every single moment of our lives. The first man sits in his chair and faces this total reality of the universe, the seen part and the normally unseen part, and consistently sees truth against this background. The Christian is a man who has said, "I sit in this chair." The unbeliever, however, is the man who sits in the other chair, intellectually. He sees only the natural part of the universe, and interprets truth against that background. Let us see that these two positions cannot both be true. One is true: one is false. If indeed there is only the natural portion of the universe, with a uniformity of natural causes in a closed system, then to sit in the other chair is to delude oneself. If, however, there are the two halves of reality, then to sit in the naturalist's chair is to be extremely naive and to misunderstand the universe completely. From the Christian viewpoint, no man has ever been so naive, nor so ignorant of the universe, as twentieth century man.
However, to be a true, Bible-believing Christian, we must understand that it is not enough simply to acknowledge that the universe has these two halves. The Christian life means living in the two halves of reality: the supernatural and the natural parts. I would suggest that it is perfectly possible for a Christian to be so infiltrated by twentieth-century thinking that he lives most of his life as though the supernatural were not there. Indeed, I would suggest that all of us do this to some extent. The supernatural does not touch the Christian only at new birth and then at his death, or at the second coming of Christ, leaving the believer on his own in a naturalistic world during all the time in between. Nothing could be further from the biblical view. Being a biblical Christian means living in the supernatural now - not only theoretically, but in practice.
Do you see it? The supernatural is here. The supernatural is now. I think there is a tendency by some, "infiltrated by twentieth-century thinking", to label any talk of the "supernatural", and moreover any attempt to connect with the "supernatural" through prayer and meditation, as somehow "mystical" or "New Age". But I contend that it is not. True Spirituality, to quote Shaeffer again, "means living in the supernatural now - not only theoretically, but in practice."
Something to contemplate. Spiritually.
posted by wilsonte | 1:11 AM
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