Veteran pollster and researcher George Barna is reporting that less than 2% of parents with children under the age of 13 have a “biblical worldview,” according to his new book Raising Spiritual Champions: Nurturing Your Child’s Heart, Mind and Soul, with the overwhelming number of parents reporting a “hodge-podge mixture of competing and often conflicting worldviews.”
In particular, he singles out uncommitted church-going Christian parents who have no plans or will to catechize their children, resulting in a “catastrophic decline in biblical worldview in America”
Barna explains:
Most parents, even born-again parents, do not really think the spiritual component of their child’s life is a big deal — at least not as big a deal as doing well in school, sports, or relationships. And even if they are focused on building their child’s biblical worldview, very few parents today — only 2 percent — possess a biblical worldview. They can’t give what they don’t have — and this creates a gaping spiritual vacuum as today’s parents are raising their children.”
Among other findings from Barna, only 1% of 13-14 year kids have a biblical worldview, with Barna noting:
“A majority of the youngest teens (61%) either believe Jesus Christ sinned while He was on Earth or hold open the possibility He did. Not even half (45%) believe that God created the universe. And an overwhelming majority believe that there are no absolute, objective truths.”
Barna defines “biblical worldview” as “believing that absolute moral truth exists; the Bible is totally accurate in all of the principles it teaches; Satan is considered to be a real being or force, not merely symbolic; a person cannot earn their way into Heaven by trying to be good or do good works; Jesus Christ lived a sinless life on earth; and God is the all-knowing, all-powerful creator of the world who still rules the universe today.”
‘Christian’ recording artist Mylon LeFevre of the band ‘Mylon and Broken Heart’ passed away from cancer complications last week at 78.
Born in 1944, LeFevre grew up as a musician and wrote the song’ Without Him’ when he was in his teens, which Elvis Presley would record. He spent years touring and traveling the world, recording alongside legends like Eric Clapton, Elton John, and Billy Joel.
He became a ‘Christian’ in 1980, quitting secular rock and signing away all rights to his previous albums in order to get out of his contract.
He released a dozen Christian albums over the following decade, receiving a GMA Dove Award in 1987 for Rock Album of the Year for ‘Crack the Sky’, as well as a Grammy for best gospel album. The band broke up in the early 1990 and he would record for folks like Steven Curtis Chapman and Michael W. Smith, though he himself would only release one album in the last 30 years, ‘Bow Down’ in 2013.
In the last decades, he focused more on teaching and teaching as a traveling evangelist. He divorced his wife Frances and would later marry Christie, who ministers alongside him through Mylon LeFevre ministries.
By all indications, however, his discernment and theology were suspect and wretched. LeFevre was a long-time ministry partner of Kenneth Copeland, with his show ‘On the Road to Freedom’ featured on Copeland’s Victory channel.
He attends Copeland’s Eagle Mountain International Church (EMIC), sitting under the worst heresies and blasphemy for years.
LeFevre describes Copeland, who is unquestionably a ravaging wolf, prosperity pornographer, and arch-heretic, as his “mentor,” “friend,” “spiritual father” and “father in the faith” that he’s been in a “covenant relationship” with for over 30 years.
In fact, LeFevre preached at EMIC less than two months ago and has preached there nearly twenty times since 2005.
He even wrote and released music with Copeland.
While we make no judgements of whether LeFevre is in heaven or hell, and his wife is insisting the Lord will be telling him “well done good and faithful servant,” we have no reason to suppose this is true.
Church by the Glades in Coral Springs, FL, is the embodiment of instituting worldly entertainment in the pathetic hope of catching the attention of wayward goatlings and luring them into staying.
For their new sermon series ‘Trending,’ they performed a cover and dance routine of the song Nights by Swedish DJ Avicii (real name Tim Bergling.)
It’s an ironic choice, given that the song is about living life to the fullest – One day, you’ll leave this world behind. So live a life you will remember. My father told me when I was just a child These are the nights that never die.”- was given a tragic specter after Bergling killed himself in 2018 at the age of 28, decidedly not living life to the fullest.
Church-growth guru and Transformation Church pastor Tim Ross has revived the spirit of 2020, praising and extolling a guest on his show for regurgitating all the worst cliches of Critical Race Theology and anti-racism talking points.
The Dissenter has a good recap of what transpired between Ross and his guest.
In a recently surfaced clip from one of his podcasts, Ross platformed a white woman who flagellates herself over her own insecurities as a white woman. Dr. Jenna Mountain, in conversation with Ross, eagerly proclaimed her commitment to “anti-racism,” a term replete with Marxist underpinnings. But to be clear, this virtue signaling is not a quest for truth but a frantic attempt to win favor with leftists who, let’s be brutally honest, will never fully embrace her simply because of her skin color.
The spirit of June 2020 is returning.
On pastor Tim Ross's massively popular podcast "The Basement," guest Dr. Jenna Mountain names white fragility, antiracism, even Ibram Kendi, all with unqualified endorsement.
"Pre-2020, I would have said I am not a racist. Post-2020, I now am practicing my antiracism. I do love Ibram Kendi's work. His book was life-changing for me." (1/3) pic.twitter.com/J2rEfzGfTc
After confessing her white fragility and white privilege, Ross jokes to Mountain: "Your black card is in the mail," then goes into an "I'm speechless" routine. (2/3) pic.twitter.com/nqk4Fabzsl
Dr. Mountain has willingly entangled herself in the treacherous web of identity politics, reducing complex social issues to mere virtue signaling. This is cultural Marxism at its core—a dogmatic allegiance to a skewed understanding of power dynamics and privilege, utterly dismissive of individual agency and merit.
She has become a slave to an “anti-racism” ideology that demands perpetual penance with no hope of redemption—a never-ending cycle of guilt and self-castigation. This is the antithesis of the biblical Gospel, which teaches that our identity is first and foremost in Christ, and that He has broken down the walls of hostility to make one new humanity (Ephesians 2:14-16).
Fostering Together is a ministry of North Point Community Church in Alpharetta, Georgia. Part of their Care Network overseen by pro-LGBTQ pastor Debbie Causey, the ministry is designed to encourage and support foster parents, providing resources for the foster parents to be successful in their endeavors and encouraging families to consider foster care in the first place.
Fostering Together offers orientations for anyone wanting to take on various roles, from cooking for the foster family on a monthly basis, providing transportation services, being a respite family who can babysit and give the foster family a break if needed, to becoming a foster parent yourself.
It’s a good work and something all churches should have.What’s not good about it is their list of recommended resources. Aside from having more professional resources, they also offer an extensive list of racial reconciliation resources “recommended by other foster and adoptive parents.”
The list reads like a who’s who of all the worst players within the Critical Race Theory realm. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibram X Kendi, Austin Channing Bown, Robin DiAngelo and Jennifer Harvey. If you wanted to be imbued with notions of white fragility, assertions that all white people are inherently racist, and propaganda regarding intersectionality, colorism, anti-racism, equity, racialized identity, reparations, white privilege, and identity politics, then you found the right spot.
To offer a counterpoint to just one book on this list, Tim Challies reviewed Robin DuAngelo’s White Fragility, concluding, “This is a bad book and one that is unlikely to serve Christians as we consider issues related to race, racism, and racial reconciliation…it is built upon the rotten foundation of identity politics…it redefines racism…it sets the trap of white fragility…and it prescribes the unhelpful solution of antiracism.”
The fourth album in this year’s series showing our brothers and sisters in Christ gathering for church service as faithful believers.
While going to church does not make one a believer, refusing to faithfully attend a local church should seriously call that faith into question. This is a glimpse of what the global church is up to, and will feature images in chronological order, week to week, of the men and women being obedient to the scriptures. As always, click pictures to enlarge them.
Former North Point Community Church Pastor Clay Scroggins, a protégé of the ever-deconstructing Andy Stanley, stepped down from North Point in 2021 to found his own leadership marketing company. During his long tenure at various North Point Ministry positions, Scroggins turned a blind eye to Stanley’s constant Bible-twisting practices and even did some of his own.
In his various roles, Scroggins took the liberty of parading sexual deviants in front of the church to tell their ‘stories,’ baptizing them as believers while refusing to acknowledge that these unregenerate individuals desperately needed a call to repentance. Since Scroggins left the church, North Point has come out of the closet as an affirming congregation that even wants to subject its children to gender confusion and sexual deviancy.
While continually deconstructing the fundamentals of the faith, Andy and his cobelligerents at North Point have also been busy pedaling false teaching and heresy in the form of “Sermon Kits” that are marketed to lazy pastors who believe that they are too busy to take time study the Bible and write their own sermons.
Both Andy Stanley and Clay Scroggins offer their sermon kits on the North Point website, where for a nominal fee of up to $295 the non-discerning pastor can acquire a seeker-sensitive non-offending sermon, the theological equivalent of goat feed that is all too common in churches within the orbit of North Point’s spiritual influence.
In a sign that theological drift continues in the American church and talking heads like Scroggins learned nothing from the ethical issues presented by the Docent Sermon plagiarism scandal of 2021, Clay and fellow faith and spirituality marketing guru Evan Chasteen are now hawking a two-hour online course on “how AI can revolutionize your sermon preparation and explore the hermeneutical ethics of leveraging AI for your sermon preparation.”
While the course description doesn’t indicate that participants should use AI to write their sermons word for word, it does suggest that ChatGPT will be an integral part of leveraging AI to write a sermon, as taught in their workshop.
Scroggin’s push to convince pastors to use ChatGPT comes when the AI assistant is hemorrhaging users. As the mania surrounding ChatGPT’s initial release recently cooled, users have begun to realize that the capabilities of AI are less than expected, and errors within the system are more common than one would expect from a computer. A pastor might reasonably use study software like Logos or Biblehub to consult a wide variety of resources that would be useful, using them to help personally exegete a passage of scripture before penning an outline and writing a sermon.
Scroggin’s course, however, seems to send pastors to the indiscriminate source material of ChatGPT, effectively creating a shortcut around the crucial steps of exegesis, Biblical discernment, and sermon outline formation. SermonPrep.AI boasts that the method can be used by sermon writers of any Christian Denomination, indicating that the resulting sermons likely lack theological precision.
The problem with this approach is that it leaves the pastor and his congregation at the mercy of a nonsensical Biblical Hermeneutic that cannot discern between the heresy of 20th-century German Critical Scholars, Word of Faith Prosperity Gospel, Secular philosophy, and the faithful work of men like R.C. Sproul. Scroggins boasts that each participant in the two-hour workshop will leave with four nearly complete sermon outlines.
For pastors who fear that AI will replace them, Scroggins offers the reassurance that while AI will compile all of the knowledge and concepts that are necessary to complete a sermon, pastors are still crucial in the process because they provide the “unique insights or voice” that make the sermon personalized for their congregation. ChatGPT will compile the scripture references and resources and write the outline so that each pastor or goat farmer can focus on putting that special sauce on the sermon that his goats crave.
While disappointing, the Sermonprep.AI workshop sheds light on where goat herders like Clay Scroggins and Andy Stanley get the fodder for their scripture-twisting homilies. The only greater fools than those who think AI programs like ChatGPT can replace careful study and exegesis are those lazy, unfaithful stewards of pulpits who squander their time during the week.
Instead of putting in the necessary hours of labor, they believe they can purchase a canned sermon from Scroggins, who himself may have used AI to write the sermon outlines.
The blind pastors from North Point Community Church are still leading the blind.
In June 2020, the Baltimore County Department of Permits fined Calvary Baptist Church in Dunfalk, MD, led by pastor Stacey Shiflett, $500 for their May 17th service. The government accused them of having “unsafe structures” for having more than ten parishioners in their building, even though they had a 600-seat auditorium. Stacey, in turn, publicly tore the edict up, declaring, “Newsflash: Pharaoh doesn’t get to dictate to God’s people how they worship their God!”
Though many people at the time offered to pay the fine, Shiflett refused all aid offers. The case against them was eventually dropped, but it wouldn’t have mattered if it hadn’t. When we reached out for comment, he told our reporter: “I told my church I would go to jail before we paid a fine. This is America” and that “bottom line, we determined never to shut our doors again. It violates our understanding of Scripture and is a flagrant violation of our First Amendment rights.”
The church, which presently runs 350 congregants in a Sunday morning service and had 150 qualified voting members during their evening service, passed a bylaw that said just that: receiving UNANIMOUS support from the entire church in a secret ballot, belying the church’s unity on the matter.
The amendment reads:
“We strongly believe in the biblical command to worship God together – in person. The word CHURCH means “a gathering of citizens called out from their homes into some public place, an assembly.” If there is no gathering together, there is no church.
We are blessed to be able to share our church services via livestream with our elderly shut-ins and missionaries around the world. However, we do not believe that a livestream or recorded church service is a biblical replacement for the command to assemble together.
Furthermore, we do not recognize, nor will we comply with any outside edict, laws, mandate, restriction or regulation by an ecclesiastical body or government entity interfering with our biblical and First Amendment, Constitutional right to assemble and worship.
As a congregation, if forced to choose between the mandates of God or the mandates of man, we will choose to obey God. (Hebrews 10:25; Psalm 122:1; Acts 5:29; 1 Corinthians 16:2; Matthew 10:28; 1 Timothy 3:15; Acts 4:31; Acts 11:26)
Three months after Peter & Laura Toganivalu (Toggs), the Global Pastors of Hillsong Young & Free (and also Brian and Bobbie Houston’s daughter and son-in-law) announced their resignation from Hillsong church, the two have revealed that they’re starting up their own church that will decidedly NOT be affiliated with the infamous Australian money cult.
Reportedly, Laura and Peter left after being very dissatisfied with the handling and revelations of the Hillsong scandals over the last two years, despite benefitting from some of the generous wages Hillsong paid staffers. The couple were making nearly $320,000 a year from Hillsong, not including honorariums, speaking fees, and another salary from the Shiloh ministries, which some sources peg at another $250,000.
The two say they want to pioneer a church in Sydney, Australia, despite their motives for doing so likely being questioned and taken the wrong way. They describe their journey as if they ‘grew up in this incredible household (Hillsong)’ and now have just turned eighteen and are about to go out into the world and ‘spread our wings.’
Naturally, they spent a significant portion of the video lamenting that they’ll be ‘misunderstood’ and are asking Jesus for the courage to be “misunderstood” by folks who will ‘create their own narratives’ around this decision to launch a new church in the heart of Hillsong territory (and likely peel away hundreds of parishioners), comparing themselves to Jesus who was also ‘misunderstood.’
Arch-heretic Jesse Duplantis is known for his love of filthy lucre and declaring that the Lord’ flexes on him by ‘giving’ him a private jet. We wrote about him recently after he argued that if you don’t believe in the prosperity gospel as he does, one that has made him a multi-millionaire by savagely beating and twisting the scriptures for his gain for decades, then Jesus will tell you to “go to hell,” as you seemingly can’t handle all the riches that will be inlaid in heaven.
In his recent message at the 2023 Southwest Believer’s Convention, Duplantis explains that he spent half a billion dollars in a few short years ‘touching’ people for God, resulting from a casual conversation with the Trinity.
I thought I could save the world with $100 million dollars. So I went to the throne of God. He said, ‘what do you want Jesse?’ He didn’t ask me what I need. He’s never asked me what I need. He’s never said ‘what you need?’ Never. In my whole Christian life. He says ‘what do you want?’ I said, ‘Lord, I need $100 million dollars.’ I said ‘I can touch the world for $100 million dollars’ Whoo. He said, ‘done’. Gave me $100 million dollars.
Now, if you want to get Wall Street’s attention, you got to get to the $100 million. They ain’t thinking about anything else. You hit that $100 million mark, now you’re getting people’s attention. Well, I ran out of money. So I went back to the throne. I said, ‘Jesus?’ He said ‘you need another $100 million?’ I said, ‘yeah’. He gave me another $100 million. I thought, I’m ready, Jesus! Whoo!
Got back a year and a half later, I said (insert weird snorting sound). He said, ‘you need another $100 million?’ I said, ‘ yes sir.’ Gave it to me. He gave it. That’s $300 million. I was out of money in nine months on that one. I’m standing there. He just leaned over and said, ‘give him another $100 million.’
I went five times. That’s a half a billion dollars. Gave it to me.
By ‘gave him the money,’ he means that he manipulated and twisted scripture so naive (and not so naive) folks would give him their life savings and last mite, hoping to receive miracles, supernatural healing, and financial blessings in return. He continues:
Then I realized that ain’t enough money to touch the world. Apple has just been diagnosed as a $3 trillion company. $3 trillion, and they can’t touch the world, they can’t change the world. They just make phones. Now, for us to get America, if we want to get America’s attention, we got to knock out a $32 trillion debt.
…See, that’s what we need to do, because the whole world runs and spins on money. It’s an economic tool. So when you find vision, you find duties and opportunity.
Arch-heretic Jesse Duplantis says he's spent half a BILLION dollars in a few short years 'touching' people for Jesus, but it's not enough. See the story at https://t.co/zOpfFsiZG3pic.twitter.com/UkEB6SQxZ3
