The Wokefication of World Vision: Mission’s Training Course Advocates Pagan Syncretism
World Vision’s online course designed to equip churches and pastors to understand “racial justice” is a hotbed of Critical Race Theory and unbiblical syncretism, infecting the organization and resulting in the wokefication of World Vision and a denial of some core tenets of the Christian Faith.
Discovered through their monthly “May We Be One: Pastors pursuing Racial Justice” course, we will be doing a 5-part series exposing the extent that CRT and pagan syncretism – the fusion of different systems of religious beliefs with Christianity – has compromised the mission of the famed NGO.
World Vision has been driving leftwards for a while now. Famously back in 2014, they changed their hiring practices to allow men and women in gay “marriage” to be hired and considered for employment, then quickly reversed course under the pressure and backlash, causing the late heretic Rachel Held Evans to weep in peevishly lament. Likewise in 2019, when Enemies within the church reported that the international branch of the evangelical organization had funneled money to the Islamic Relief Agency (ISRA), an organization with ties to terror groups, including al-Qaeda.
In the summer of 2020, in the wake of the death of George Floyd, World Vision announced they would be hosting a free one-year online course to educate on social justice and put on in partnership with “leaders who represent a diverse group of churches and our friendships with experts and some of the pioneers of this work.”
The organization currently has over 115,000 pastors, priests, deacons, and Christian faith leaders trained through the Word Vision program and suggests that because of their experience in equipping local churches, they believe that they are “positioned to act as a convener and host for this experience.”
Some of their stated goals are to have church leaders “be prepared to lead conversations about racism in America,” and to “engage with one another to dismantle racism and change the landscape of the church,” and comprises a series of sessions between guests and host.
The first few entries have been brought to us by @wokepreachertv, who also provided the snippet and transcript. In this case, from Session 7 of the course, Flaming progressive and ecotheist Randy Woodley explains that Christians missionaries sent to do the Lord’s work not only in some ways mistreated indigenous people, which is true, but also that the missionaries were wrong to tell the Native tribes to repent from their pagan spiritual and animistic ways, given that they were already loving God before they arrived.
One of the things we need to understand about the theology that was planted in this soil, if you will, by the early settlers is that they did not deem the Native people as having anything spiritually worthy of keeping.
…All the early charters that were sent from England over here…all said that they had a mission to, and they would say, like, “the savages,” or “the heathen,” things like that. So the assumption was already that God is not here, that God is only present with us, and so what we need to do, then, is teach them our religion and get rid of any sort of cultural baggage or spiritual beliefs. In fact, they would even say, even missionaries would often say that they follow the devil.
…As Native people heard this, they were already very spiritual. They were people who understood that God is powerful, that God is love. That they have personal experiences and even covenants with God. There were ceremonies based on those covenants, there were stories built around those. And in particular, we all have our covenant story of the land that was given to us so long ago.
It’s sort of like that verse in Acts 17:26-27 that says: From one man he created every ethnos or nation, so that they might reach out and find God. And so those places, God placed our different Native peoples in.
And yet the people who came saying, no, they are the ones that are believing in the real God, destroyed our relationship with those places by removing us, by taking away those stories, by taking away those songs and those ceremonies, and the very foundation of what it meant to follow God here already.
And so we were very close. And as my adopted [inaudible] mother used to say, when the missionaries came, we were very close to the message. We only didn’t understand how much God loved us because we didn’t know the story of Jesus.
But you look at Acts 17…Paul quotes Epimenides, one of the Greek philosophers’ poets. He knows their stuff, right? So this is not a lazy guy. This is a guy who understands the people he’s talking to and the worldview and their culture…And Paul just simply said, “Let me explain who this unknown god is.”
WPTV, adding some commentary, notes that in vv. 29-31, “Paul does not merely “explain” who God is but commands his audience to repent from the false beliefs they hold.
Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by human design and skill. In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead (Acts 17:31).
None of this surprising, as Woodley is thoroughly compromised. A writer for Sojourners and a signer of the Boston Declaration, this nonsense echoes his previous work and statements where he has claimed among other things that missionary work “doesn’t merely mean sharing a truth, it means to invite people into a shalom community,” and that “there is no place we can go where Jesus is not already present and active. Since Jesus is active everywhere, the first responsibility of mission among any culture is not to teach, speak or exert privilege but to discover what Jesus is already doing in that culture.”
He has further said that “God expects two conversions out of every missional encounter: 1) our conversion to the truths in their culture, and 2) their conversion to the truth we bring to the encounter” and that that “our humility as servants of Jesus should naturally lead us to first convert to the truths in their culture wherever we see Jesus is at work.”
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” … core tenants of the Christian Faith. ”
The word is “tenet,” not “tenant.”
For crying out loud, get somebody to proofread.
You’re presenting this as a publication, this isn’t some random Twitter comment.
Many natives were cannibals. That is a fact. And as far as world views and ‘globalization’, we will all become SLAVES to some oppressive ‘world order’. No thanks.
P.S. Team Biden Cheated
The fella’s teaching sounds a lot like the Catholic church did over the centuries, melding pagan practices into the church and calling it all Christianity. A practice that had nearly destroyed Christianity by the time the Reformers arrived to reawaken folks to what the Bible and Jesus our Savior was really about. We are living in the same sort of times as Lot lived in Sodom and Gomorrah. Looking at the state of man, the world, and the “church”, I think we are headed for some kind of ending similar to Lots if something like a great revival of the true Church or a reformation of it does not occur through God’s abundant grace.
We’re close to the final silencing of the public witness for Christ in the West, as per Rev 11. Alexander Hislop’s The Red Republic is the best book on the subject, even if he got the timing of it wrong.
I cancelled my monthly child support when I learned that WV sent money to terrorists. They didnt even care that I cancelled after 2 years.
This man is a good-sounding deceiver, whether unwitting or not I don’t know. He may well believe what he says and is not leading people astray intentionally – that is for God to judge. He may believe, sincerely, that God is pleased with him and that he is serving the cause of truth. I will leave his motives to God.
His teachings, however, are another matter. We are biblically commanded to evaluate what he teaches by the teaching of Scripture ( 1 John 4:1; 1 Thess 5:21-22: “Test everything. Hold on to the good.”). When he speaks of the murders and other evil things done to native peoples he is correct – such things were done and were and are sinful and wrong, biblically speaking. I do not defend or justify the sins of missionaries or anyone else. That part of what he says is valid. However, when he says the missionaries got it wrong when they said the spirituality of the native cultures was not pleasing to God he is the one in serious error, again biblically speaking. Such assertions may sound good to some today, but when you get down to the details you see many things about those native cultures that were blatantly evil. The way the native peoples made war on each other, and the brutal lives they lived in pre-colonial and colonial America are very well documented (see the account of one lady captured during King Philip’s war in the northeast USA for details – Mrs. Mary Rowlandson – “The Sovereignty and Goodness of God”). One need only remember that historical and archaeological research has irrefutably documented things like cannabilism among the pueblo dwellers in what is today the Southwestern states of the USA, or the massive scale of the human sacrifices in the Central American native cultures (Maya, Aztec, etc.). Pre-colonial America was a brutal place because the indigenous peoples lived that way. You cannot dress it up, based on the historical evidence we have today. To use his language to say it, God was not “there” in the way he means it before the missionaries and settlers arrived.
The better you know your bible the more you will discern this man’s errors. He is a false teacher. Deceivers are not new, and they have always alleged they teach the truth. The NT warns us about them in a number of places in very strong language: Acts 20: 28-31; 1 Cor. 6:9-10). He quotes Scripture selectively and out of context, to bolster his invalid argument (see the article above regarding his misuse of Acts 17:31, where the writer was spot on).
Be warned. Read your Bible, learn it, and test everything by it, and you will do well.