Demonstrating that he is completely unrepentant of his past sins, snake oil salesman and supreme heresy platformer Jim Bakker is claiming that his spectacular downfall in the 1980s and subsequent prison sentence was simply a matter of a nascent “cancel culture.”
They canceled me. Mainly it was the media, and the media got a Pulitzer Prize for putting me in prison. That’s what they do, they reward the enemies of the gospel. And the cancel culture, we had the largest ministry of its type in the world, Heritage USA, millions of people came there and it was millions being saved around the world, and they literally took it away, put it into bankruptcy. Said they were going to care for it, it was all lies, it a takeover plan, and it was done in front of the world.
That was what cancel culture is…the federal government produced video from my show video and edited it and put me in prison…they made me say things I didn’t say. They just put pieces together – thousands of pieces of my show – the government did it! Just like now, this is cancel culture!
For context, Bakker was famously indicted in 1980 on federal charges of mail and wire fraud and conspiring to defraud the public after he sold $1,000 “lifetime memberships” to tens of thousands of people. This was supposed to let them spend three nights a year, every year, in a luxury hotel he was building, but his sales far outstripped his capacity and he pocketed tens of millions of dollars, never being able to fulfill his promise. He was convicted in 1989 and sentenced to 45 years in prison but was ultimately released after 5.
It was also revealed that he had an affair with his secretary (she said she was raped) and paid her over $350,000 to cover it up. He had several more allegations of sexual impropriety against him, all the while being revealed that he was living a life of incredible excess and wealth.
In a recent Gospel Coalition podcast, author and contributor Rachel Gilson answers the question of whether Christians should use people’s personal pronouns, noting that this issue “is probably one of the most difficult to answer well in a space like this, and I mean like in a digital question and answer type space.”
We do not know what is difficult about it: the answer is simple.
No. No, we should not use them.
This is true of the more benign ones like he/she/them/etc., but also the grotesque world of “nounself-pronouns” and “neo-pronouns” where people identify as “xe/xem/xyr, moon/moonself, star/starself, bee/beeself, bun/bunself, and anything else under the sun.
However, the question is a bit more complicated for Gilson, who has been smuggling unbiblical perspectives on biblical sexuality into the church for years. She previously advocated (or at the very least, gave a tacit approval) that if one partner in a “gay marriage” becomes saved, then they should not necessarily divorce their same-sex “spouse,” because “God hates divorce,” but rather continue in the marriage and remain celibate.
She’s also expressed her belief that becoming saved and having a new heart has essentially zero effect on one’s sexual orientation, and that for all intents and purposes, sexual orientation is not something that is touched by the sanctifying process of the Holy Spirit. She believes that the number of gay people who get their sexuality redeemed by Christ and oriented towards the opposite sex is a fraction of a fraction of a percent, but that this reality is “ok” because her homosexuality is a “gift” to the church.
In her podcast answer, Gilson goes straight to the scriptures which talks about the weaker versus stronger brother, and says that if people do not wish to use these [ridiculous and made up] pronouns, that is their choice, but that “you have to recognize that when you are interacting with a transgender person your inability to use their preferred name or pronoun could actually be received as very offensive by them or deeply hurtful by them.”
In contrast, she explains the “stronger brother” position, which according to her warped theology is that “others of us have no problem at all using preferred names and pronouns. We’re like, “Yes! This is a way of showing love. I’m ready to do this.” And in that case, your conversation partner is probably easily going to feel loved and accepted by you.”
Once this compromise is made, calling a boy a girl or a girl a boy, or a boy “bunself” or a girl “fairyself,” Gilson explains that this grants you “access to the heart of your friend,” which then in turn lets you talk about spiritual things with them by getting those pronouns and lies “in.”
Sadly, Gilson has it completely backwards. It is not the weaker brother who refuses to call people by their preferred pronouns, but rather the stronger one who is not willing to compromise the truth of God’s reality and break the 9th commandment despite enormous pressure from the world and once formerly reputable Christian organizations like the Gospel Coalition telling them to do so.
[Editor’s note: If you aren’t familiar with Paul’s thoughts on this, you can look the up in Romans 14. In context, weaker brothers are the ones that make up rules that they try to make “religious” and impose on everybody else. Kind of like Rachel Gilson is doing.]
Transcript below, provided by WPC
I think the question of preferred pronouns…really can come down to a question of conscience. So if you’ve done a quiet time recently in the weak brother/strong brother passages of scripture, Paul has a category for the reality that some Christians are going to come to issues and fall in different spots. And one of the most important questions there is how are we going to relate to each other when we fall in different spots? So, on the one hand, some of us would feel incredibly compromised using a transgender person’s preferred name or pronouns, because it feels like we’re complicit in a lie. It feels like we’re breaking the ninth commandment, right?
Like we’re bearing false witness about a neighbor, and we need to take that really, really seriously. It is never safe to go to a place that your faith doesn’t allow you to go against your conscience. And if that is your position, you have to recognize that when you are interacting with a transgender person, your inability to use their preferred name or pronoun could actually be received as very offensive by them or deeply hurtful by them.
And so I would encourage people in that category to think, “Okay, well, my truth is clear. How can I communicate clearly the grace of Christ here? How can I go above and beyond to show love, knowing that my posture on pronouns is going to be tricky for the person I’m talking with?” Others of us have no problem at all using preferred names and pronouns. We’re like, “Yes! This is a way of showing love! I’m ready to do this.” And in that case, your conversation partner is probably easily going to feel loved and accepted by you.
So then I would challenge you, since you have access to the heart of your friend, what would it mean for you to use that access to have truthful conversations either about who Christ is, maybe, if you feel competent about the nature of the body, even just beginning conversations of if your friend has thought about how God relates to these questions in their lives. But no matter where we come down, I want us to be able to relate to each other with honor and respect, because the church has not had to answer these questions before, and we we need to have grace with each other, right? We know that God loves desperately the transgender people in our lives, and so we need to be thinking as a community: how can we expose them to the love that we have received ourselves?
The capitalism-hating, socialism-loving Vicar of the Roman Catholic Church has come up with a seven-year plan to greenify the world and heal “Mother Earth” on account of the “wounds that we cause by our predatory attitude, which makes us feel that we are masters of the planet and its resources,” in order to “inaugurate a lifestyle and a society that is finally eco-sustainable.”
In a video released by the Vatican, Francis explains that because humanity has been so abusive towards the earth, “we need a new ecological approach, that can transform our way of dwelling in the world, our styles of life, our relationship with the resources of the Earth and, in general, our way of looking at humanity and of living life.”
Doubling down on the theme of predation, he reiterates that we need to “care for our Mother Earth” and “overcome the temptation of selfishness that makes us predators of resources.”
For this reason, he’s launching a project called “Laudato si’ Action Platform.” It is a seven-year undertaking designed to see communities “totally sustainable, in the spirit of integral ecology.”
It is based on his own Laudato Si’s writing, which even has its own chaplet for faithful Catholics to pray over
And not just praise, but repentance too, where you can apologize to “Sister Water” or “Brother Air” for abusing them.
Like some grotesque morphing of Roman Catholicism, the New Apostolic Reformation’s Seven-Mountain Mandate, and the Democrats’ Green New Deal, Francis reveals that there are seven sectors of the church that need to be pulling together. These are “parishes and dioceses – schools and universities – hospitals – businesses and farms – organizations, groups and movements – religious institutes.”
In tandem with this announcement, Vatican Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development revealed the sustainability goals of the Laudato Si’ Action Platform, which include, according to the National Catholic Reporter:
Adopting renewable energy;
Achieving carbon neutrality;
Defending all life;
Solidarity with Indigenous peoples and vulnerable groups;
Adopting simpler lifestyles;
Fostering ecological education and spirituality;
Advocating for sustainable development;
Following ethical investment guidelines, including divestment from fossil fuels and other industries that harm the planet.
All this, so “mother Earth may be restored to her original beauty.’
Dr. Soong-Chan Rah, Professor, North Park Theological Seminary, is leading the way in demonstrating the extent that Critical Race Theory is spreading throughout World Vision. Parks is the moderator and one of the leaders of the May We Be One: Pastors pursuing Racial Justice course, whose 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.”
From remarks he made at a Black & Asian Christians United Against Racism conference on April 5th 2021 at the Apostolic Faith Church, and also reiterated in Session 9 of the course, Soong-Chan Rah explains that by default and intrinsically, white people view black people and Asians as either “pets” or “threats” and view Asian women as invisible or sexual jezebels.
For African-American communities, I’ve often described how the spiritual demonic power of white supremacy, the gaze of the dominant culture defines the black community, so that the rest of us have to play along.
So that when the white male looks at the black male, the black male is either a pet or a threat.The black male is a pet because the white community wants you to entertain them, wants you to be their comedians that make them laugh, the musicians that make them dance, and the sports athletes that make them jump up and clap.
But they also see you, if you’re not the pet, you become the threat. You are the unidentified black male that commits every crime in our city. You are the individual that is seen as the unsafe person in our society. And even worse, if you are the pet that becomes the threat.
Hypothetically, it could be an athlete who takes a knee. That pet has become a threat. Hypothetically, it could be pastors who decide we’re not going to play the game anymore – we’re going to stand against injustice. You’ve gone from a pet to a threat.
And it is the same scenario that Asian-Americans often find ourselves in. The gaze of the white dominant culture looks at the Asian male and says: you are a pet or a threat.
…They are the Chinese virus. They are the Kung flu. And how easily and quickly it became for that pet to become a threat. And we’ve seen this on the gendered side, as well. Bell Hooks says that when the white male gazes upon the black female, he categorizes the black female in two ways: the Jezebel or the Mammy.
The Jezebel, that is, the sexualized fantasy of the dominant culture, and the mammy that takes care of you and gives you what you need. You see that same paradigm now play itself out in the Asian community, as well.
…because you are seeing the Asian women as disposable and invisible. The ones that pick up the towels after you. The ones that feed you. The ones that take care of you. That’s what you’ve seen, the Asian women. You have sexualized or you have made invisible the Asian-American woman. This is the reality of white supremacy.
This is what world vision is teaching thousands of pastors and tens of thousands of people each week. It is not an unknown program.
To give one example, Willow Creek, the multi-campus 20,000 member church founded by Bill Hybels, announced months ago that they were participating in World Vision’s May We Be One year-long conference “in an effort to help equip all our staff to better engage justice and racism from a biblical perspective.”
Sadly, we have only scratched the surface of how deep this all goes.
Ed Litton, Pastor of Redemption Church (Saraland, AL), and considered one of the more progressive candidates running for the presidency of the Southern Baptist Convention, claims to have complementarian creds and that women do not preach at his church, despite it being revealed in a series of recently unearthed videos that his wife has on occasion preached tag-team sermons with him.
This, of course, is a sneaky and unbecoming practice, where the pastor will let a woman preach but stands on stage with them in order to give her his “authoritative covering.” It is nothing but semantic word games and is no different than Adam standing by and watching Eve take of the forbidden fruit.
This is what Ed Litton has done.
During his questionnaire for the Council of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood’s Candidate forum, though he said that “The only ministry the Bible limits to God-called and qualified men is the office of pastor, which is rightly designated by the title of pastor and elder,” he also specifically said that women do not preach from his pulpit: a revelation that is patently untrue.
4. Recently, there have been some publicized instances of women serving as the Sunday morning preacher in Southern Baptist churches. Do you think the Bible allows for women to serve in this role? Explain.
I think that our pulpits should be places that reflect our view of pastors. At Redemption church, we do not have women preach. However, we intentionally promote the significant ways that women can and do serve.
Let me say that I understand that some pastors have a different approach to who can speak when the church gathers for corporate worship, even if that’s not my approach, I respect their right and responsibility to lead their church as God has called them to do so.
Redemption Church absolutely allows women to preach. His wife has preached alongside him, and him being there doesn’t make it ok.
Watching one’s wife publicly go before the body and sin by preaching is a critical failure of headship and leadership, shows why Litton cannot be trusted, and is absolutely disqualifying from leading the convention.
This time, in an article by Brett McCracken, he posits that the “biggest emerging fissure in Western culture is not necessarily between political left and right” but rather between those who are “fiercely committed to reality” and those who “elevate the narrative above reality.”
He goes on to lists some examples of some beliefs that do not have a “good faith commitment to reality” but rather are committed to an untrue narrative, noting that “no level of scientific consensus or statistics will cause them to rethink or at least complicate their narrative.”
“Nanny state” big-government overreach
Corrupt Big Pharma
Encroachments on personal liberty
Vaccines as government control
None of these things are happening, he argues. None of those things occurred in the last 15 months.
That’s all just a narrative and conspiracy theories, and by believing they have happened or will happen, these men and women are not living in the real world, but rather are merely “allowing their entrenched narratives and biases” to “take precedence over objective reality.”
Where are the people who live in light of the facts about reality more than their feelings about it? Where are those whose understanding of the world is shaped more by evidence and logic than by narratives and anger? Where these people exist, they’re the true radicals…”
The Southern Baptist Convention membership continues to plummet according to the Annual Church Profile (ACP) report, with the denomination suffering a record loss of nearly half a million members in 2020.
Though the loss of these congregants dips their total amount of members to 14 million, down from a peak of 16.3 million in 2006, it is in fact nowhere near an accurate number of real Southern Baptist members.
SBC membership rolls are notoriously inaccurate and inflated, with purging the rolls viewed as thoroughly distasteful and far too humbling a task for most. Realistically the SBC would be lucky to have even 5 million members that could be found on any given Sunday.
The report further notes that “Southern Baptist churches also experienced a decline in worship attendance in 2020. Average weekly worship attendance declined by 15.44% percent to 4.4 million in-person worshippers.”
This is a far more accurate baseline of how many members they actually have.
Scott McConnell, executive director of Lifeway Research, declares that COVID-19 and the mass church closures definitely had something to with the losses, noting that as Pastors reconnected with people after being shut down or online for so long, they “discovered some on their membership lists who moved away, joined another church, or no longer wanted to be a member.”
With bad news across the board, the only thing that did grow appears to have been “multisite congregations” who added 529 campuses.
Baptisms were also cut in half, from 235,748 in 2019 to 123,160 in 2020, with McConnel explaining that “socially distant behavior is helpful for containing a pandemic, but it hindered meeting new people, inviting people to church, and helping them take a step of obedience to be baptized,”
Continuing our series in the ways that World Vision has gone woke, we bring you Session Nine of their May We Be One curriculum. Moderated by Dr. Soong-Chan Rah and Rev. Sandra Maria Van Opstal on May 20, 2021, it featured Dr. Michelle Ami Reyes speaking on the Asian American Pacific Islander Experience and why Jesus was “code-switching.”
In this session, Van Opstal introduces her guest by explaining that she can teach us all the ways “in which we have participated and or not known how our country has participated in the pain of the Asian American community and in being complicit…with the things that have happened to them.”
This is after Dr. Soong-Chan Rah explained that white folk use their “white gaze” to view Asian people as either “threats” or “pets” and gave us the helpful diagram below:
She then introduces us to guest Dr. Michelle Reyes. She’s a speaker, author, activist, and the Vice President of the Asian American Christian Collaborative who has written for TGC and the ERLC. She’s all in on Critical Race Theory, writing in a blog post on her website:
White privilege relies on racialization, a system of values that says one group of people is superior to all others because of the color of their skin. This system has been weaponized to justify the cruel treatment of and discrimination toward non-white people throughout American history
….White privilege is both a cause and legacy of racism. It is a conscious act rooted in historic inequities, and it continues to reinforce systemic racism today. When it comes to racial trauma, displacement, the cruel treatment and discrimination of people of color, or the country’s history of slavery, we have to acknowledge the role of white privilege.
….But if we aren’t willing to sit with the weight of guilt when it comes to the sins of racism, we will never understand that we are the problem. Unless we acknowledge the existence of white privilege, we can’t understand our own complicity in it.
Each of us needs to do the hard work of examining our own biases and actions. We cannot separate the past from our present. They are interconnected. Repenting for the sins of historic slavery and its current iterations in our society is a necessary step in beginning to work toward a more equitable and just future, both inside and outside the church.
It is on this note that she tells thousands of pastors and tens of thousands of laymen listening in all about “code-switching,” explaining that Jesus and Paul did their own version of this in the first century.
All of us code-switch in different ways at different times. Sometimes it’s just about putting our best foot forward, like that the first time we go on a date with somebody, or we have a job interview or something like that. We’re trying to present ourselves in the best possible light. So the other person will like us, want to hang out with us, hire us, fill in the blank.
When it comes to minorities, when we talk about code-switching, this is that thought that pops into our brain, like ‘you’ve got this, just act white.’ It’s this way of saying, ‘I’m going to hide my own ethnicity, or my ethnic heritage, my cultural expressions. I’m gonna hide the way that I perhaps act at home so I can fit in within this majority of whitespace.’
And usually it’s not just about fitting in, it’s about trying to survive. It’s trying to not be made fun of, to not be shamed, to not be bullied verbally or physically. So there’s a lot of fear, and trauma that goes into code-switching, as well.
And so, as a caveat, and what I argue in that chapter of my book is that it’s important for historically disempowered minorities to understand that the Bible is not calling us to hide who we are, to be ashamed of who we are, to code-switch merely as a means for survival, and to sort of give in to the status quo.
She concludes by explaining that Jesus would code-switch in order to ensure that he doesn’t come across as “offensive” or so that people will be able to fully hear and receive his message.
But rather, I think we see in the life of Jesus, we see in the life of Paul, that they are able to code-switch. And by that, as I mentioned, they know that they are studiers of people.
They understand how people think, how people tick, theological difference, world differences, a worldview, even just sort of social norms, what’s appropriate, what’s inappropriate. When they step into a room or they step into a new town, they have those ideas at their forefront and say, ‘Okay, if I’m going to connect with this person, I need to shift in this way, or I need to adapt myself in this way so I don’t come across as offensive or that my message will be heard.‘
If you thought the initial 2020 SBC Pastor’s Conference lineup was bad, you haven’t seen anything yet. Jacob Johnson had the best succint take on it, and he put it this way:
This is worse than the initial 2020 SBC Pastor’s Conference Lineup; this is intentional deception and absurdly obvious in that this isn’t an intended solution, this is a backhand display of mocking conservative BF&M affirming Southern Baptist’s and a spiteful response from SBC Liberals/Elites to the EC’s action and position taken last year. This is a directly intended message.
Instead of a “pastor’s” conference, they change it a “SEND” conference; hosting (non-SBC) heretics, feminists, social justice warriors, and destructive forces against the biblical family / Godly ordered homes. A send conference presented by North American Mission Board (NAMB) / IMB — Kevin Ezell / Paul Chitwood.
SBC Executive Committee previously stated, regarding the 2020 Pastors Conference, that they rejected the conference and argued its participants and alignments to be: “sufficiently beyond the parameters of the faith and practice of Southern Baptists in accordance with The Baptist Faith and Message.”
Before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the cancellation of the 2020 SBC Annual Meeting, the 2020 Pastors’ Conference had drawn criticism and concern because not all speakers were Southern Baptists and scheduled performer Hosanna Wong, a spoken word artist, is also a teaching pastor at her non-Southern Baptist church. The SBC Executive Committee voted Feb. 18 to give the SBC pastors’ conference officers until Feb. 24 to make “amendments to its proposed program”
Following “prayerfully considered options” and “counsel” among SBC elites … it was decided for 2021, there would instead be a “Send” Conference— “NAMB president Kevin Ezell said NAMB would be “honored to produce a SEND event for the 2021 Pastors’ Conference in Nashville and to work with our friends at IMB to present it.”
This is worse than the 2020 Pastors Conf. Conflict and it’s more rebellious against the Gospel and a willful rejection of the BF&M 2000 than previously in 2020. This is a message SBC Elites/Progressives/Liberals are making [“SEND”(ing)] loud and clear.
If that isn’t messed up enough, the SBC’s International Mission Board (IMB)’s official Facebook page joined nine other people in ‘liking’ that status update, though given that this was a direct shot across the bow at them, their ‘like’ was nothing more than a grim, sardonic mockery.
Their purposeful ‘like is an affirmation that they saw the post, and they don’t care. Johnson believes it’s backhanded, and that “they will claim it was a slip-up and believed it to be promotion for the event— as someone familiar with how they operate, the social media (publishing) power they have… it was intentional. They are all PR Masters. (The “KY Boy Club” at work). They’re mocking us, conservative/confessional Baptists.”
We could not agree more. The fox that is Russell Moore may be out of the hen house, but there are more than enough predators left behind to frolic, feast, and cause some bedlam within the body.
The sixty-first album in an ongoing series documenting faithful churches gathering for Sunday service in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.
One year in, and we’re still doing this.
With some churches still not gathering in-person in these dark times and others being persecuted by the government for being open, even having the pastors arrested, these are the congregations who are meeting faithfully at the command of Scripture (Heb. 10:25).
These churches are preaching outside, are back in their buildings having in-person services, are having drive-through services, or are meeting in secret. Some with masks and social distancing, others without.
All are being safe. All are being obedient to the scriptures. All are loving their neighbors.
