In an answer to the prayer of many, the last remaining missionaries and their children kidnapped in Haiti have been released, according to a brief and succinct statement from Christian Aid Ministries, writing:
Several months ago, the notorious 400 Mawozo gang took everyone, including children as young as 8 months old, and demanded a $1,000,000 ransom per person. Wilson Joseph, believed to be the leader of the gang, released a video that was uploaded on YouTube where he publicly vowed “I swear by thunder that if I don’t get what I’m asking for, I will put a bullet in the heads of these Americans.”
The kidnappers released 5 as of last week, and then the remaining yesterday.
It is not known at this time if they were released because their ransom was paid.
The pastor of one of the largest churches in America has announced that they have joined the #Metaverse, digitally recreating their church so that those who wish to attend church services and interact using virtual reality may do so, in a move that has major implications for the future of the church and the use of digital media within the space.
Craig Groeschel of Life.Church, (LC) an 85,000 member, seeker-sensitive, multi-site based in Oklahoma that has nearly 40 locations, made the announcement on Facebook, announcing that they had joined the metaverse and that anyone was free to join their space. Unsurprisingly, their pastor and lead visionary is an awful preacher and habitual scripture- twister, making it par for the course that he’d be on board for something like this. While LC is not the first church to join the metaverse, it is by a factor of 1000 the largest and most prominent.
In a nutshell, the Metaverse is an online virtual world that incorporates augmented reality (AR), persistent virtual worlds which exist in real-time even when you’re not playing them, videos, the use of Virtual Reality headsets and hardware, 3D holographic avatars, and other means of communication. Though still in its infancy, as it expands and develops, it will begin to offer a hyper-real alternative to the world for people to co-exist in. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg changed their parent company name to Meta, and you can see more about their vision for Internet and Social Media 2.0 here.
Can’t attend a concert? Put on your VR headset and you will be transported to the live event, where you can interact in real-time with other people attending. Want to visit a museum? Walk around in a completely replicated structure with other people likewise visiting.
Don’t want to or can’t attend church, perhaps because you’re leery of COVID-19? You and your family can put on your headsets and be taken to LC, where you are meeting a friend who is also attending. You can watch the sermon live, then the both of you can have fellowship while hanging out in the lobby talking about the sermon. You can walk over to the virtual basket and give your tithes- real currency that will be deducted from your online account and put into the church coffers, or you can walk over to the wall and read the pinned bulletin, perhaps about the next membership meeting you can likewise attend remotely.
The metaverse is more than live streaming an event via zoom, but rather it is an alternate reality and universe persistently existing in the background 24/7 where you can be anybody and do anything you want.
Right Now LC is using AltspaceVR, a well-known platform owned by Microsoft that is cartoony in nature but is the stepping stone for something more realistic. Given the superstar status Groeschel enjoys within broader evangelicalism, we fully expect many more churches to make similar announcements within the next year, to the point that in the next decade or two, almost every church will be on board and will have a space in the metaverse.
(The Majesty’s Men) I have been asked to provide an orderly account of the sermon plagiarism scandal involving Dr. Ed Litton, pastor of Redemption Church in Saraland, AL, and the current president of the Southern Baptist Convention. I published a guest article in July from Tobby E. Smith, pastor of Memorial Baptist Church in New Castle, IN. You can still find that article here. But I had yet to chronicle my own account of these events in which I have been involved.
The student handbook of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary defines plagiarism as “the use or theft of intellectual property without attribution, both a moral and educational transgression” (pg. 8). Of this transgression Dr. Litton has yet to repent, and Southern Baptists have done little to hold him accountable. Will Southern Baptist churches, seminaries, and other ministries obey the call to keep the counsel of God “unstained and free from reproach”?
The following account contains links to all sources, including videos that demonstrate Litton’s plagiarism of the sermons he stole. If you listen to the audio of this article, you will hear more broad examples of Litton’s plagiarism and the dishonest ways he has attempted to cover himself. I have also included trustworthy words from other teachers commenting on the matter.
As an aside, lest anyone say that I have a responsibility to contact Dr. Litton first, I attempted to open a dialogue with him privately on July 8. There were two witnesses to this engagement. Dr. Litton did not respond.
We’ve known for a long time that the ELCA denomination is all but comprised of lost souls and rebel goats, with a perfect summation of that very fact found in the blasphemous church services one of their congregations had on the weekend, courtesy of the thoroughly reprobate St. Luke’s Lutheran Church of Logan Square, where they advertised on Facebook:
“Worship this morning focuses on A DRESS REHEARSAL FOR JOY. Seminarian Aaron Musser preaches in drag, inviting us to reflect on a joy that overflows so abundantly, it can’t help but make itself known. Today we invite you to wear garments/accessories that make you feel 100%, like the best version of yourself!”
Aaron Musser recently received a scholarship to attend seminary as part of the ELCA Fund for Leaders, a program designed to ‘supports students of tremendous promise attending ELCA seminaries.’ During his acceptance video, Musser shared that he felt a calling to “innovate” within the church, and I guess we’re seeing the fruits of that labor.
Naturally, the church has all the hallmarks of devilish derangement syndrome, including a woman pastrix, LGBTQ approving theology, masking three-year-olds, etc, and everything else in between. . If there is a trope for lost little deconstructlettes, they’re all here in spades.
So with many other exhortations, John proclaimed the good news to the people, the gospel of the Lord. You may be seated. And I’d like to invite any children or people who would like to see a picture book that I will be showing on the iPad here. Anyone who’d like a closer view of that to come up and sit up and sit somewhere on here… I have an awesome story to share with you today. I’m really excited to share it with you.
I have a question first though. Have any of you ever seen a drag queen?
Kids: “No”
“No? This is everybody’s first time ever seeing a drag queen? Well hello. I am also a boy most of the time when I’m here, but today, I am beautiful today.
So the story that I want to share with you today is called Joy….Earlier in the service, I talked about joy, as liberation or as freedom to be who you want to be and do what you want to do. I don’t know about you. But when I was in school, I would feel a whoosh of joy every time they said “you can go to recess.”
“Or maybe you feel a whoosh of joy when I say “go back to your seats”. And in the Gospel today, John the Baptist says that Jesus is coming soon. And that Jesus will baptise with fire separating the grain and the chaff. Do you know what grain and chaff are?
A child talks about what grain. Should have just pointed at that thing.
…So it becomes food for you. And then it gives you life when you eat stuff, right? And so chaff is actually the stuff that we don’t use when we’re making bread and the stuff that if it’s in there just isn’t the way and isn’t eating the same life that you get when you eat bread.
Musser concludes that Jesus wants them to be joyful (defined as ‘ freedom to be who you want to be and do what you want to do’) and ends with a prayer by thanking God for the big feelings he gave the children and reiterating that God wants them to be joyful.
(Lifenews) All they did was meet together for worship in obedience to the Word of God. Then the government started fining them. Now, officials have shown up with a warrant and are interrogating their employees. The worst part of all is that the Supreme Court has twice ruled in favor of Calvary Chapel San Jose, yet still state and local governments are harassing them.
First it was California Governor Gavin Newsom (D), who clung to one of the nation’s strictest lockdowns far longer than science or prudence could justify. Eventually, the Supreme Court intervened to end what had been nearly a year-long ban on indoor worship. But while churches opened elsewhere in the state, officials in Santa Clara County declared “indoor gatherings of all kinds remain very risky.” Six justices curtly overruled the county’s worship ban, perhaps annoyed by the brazen way in which the county flaunted their earlier decision.
But the county still wants to extort their pound of flesh. They insist the church must pay $3.8 million in bogus fines because the church refused to comply with the unlawful worship bans. The county has also threatened the church’s mortgage holder and bank if those private companies don’t aid the county in retaliating against the church. They also demanded the church turn over the names of members, volunteers, and donors (which would expose them to everything from official government harassment to unofficial “doxing”), as well as “financial records to prove the church just opened ‘for the money,’” explained…
Pretty sure we’re introducing a new feature here at Protestia, which is a bi-monthly roundup of the worst of the worst so-called pastors and pastrixes from Tiktok and other social media hubs. These are a collation of lost souls fast on their way to receiving the greater judgment if they don’t repent of their sins and put their faith in Christ.
Each one is between 15 and 30 seconds, used to demonstrate the sheer insanity that is out there, but also where some of these conservative denominations are headed if they don’t take an uncompromising, bombastically hard line against even a hint of LGBTQ influence in the church.
Warning, LGBTQ Kissing at very end of these wretched one.
Christian financial expert Dave Ramsey is been sued by one of his employees for allegedly firing him on account of wearing a mask at work and wanting to work from home, a violation of his religious rights, according to a federal lawsuit launched this week.
The suit is being brought forward by Brad Amos, a Senior Video Editor hired in 2019 who was making $90,000 a year. Once the pandemic hit, he told his bosses that he wanted to work from home in order to protect his own health and that of his family, which he says was in accordance with his “religious beliefs.” His request was denied and he was ultimately terminated in July of 2020.
According to Amos, his six-year-old son has Coats disease, a rare disorder involving an over-abundance of blood vessels in the eye, and his wife is ‘predisposed to pneumonia’ and therefore he took measures to ensure their safety, all the while Ramsay was publicly berating anyone taking preventative measures in the office.
While Ramsay initially resisted his nearly 1000 staff members from working from home, he eventually relented with some of them, but Amos was not one of them, on account of his senior position and the company considering him an “essential employee.”
Further, the lawsuit repeatedly suggests that working for Ramsay Solutions is akin to joining a cult where everyone must bow down to Ramsay, creating an environment of personality that is “cult-like” and which eventually made it a hostile environment as he was bucking trends and not following the cultish culture by simply going along to get along.
A lawyer for Ramsay Solutions told RNS “Mr. Amos’ lawsuit has absolutely no merit. It appears its only goal is to smear Ramsey Solutions’ reputation and extort a large settlement. Ramsey Solutions is fully prepared to defend this lawsuit and prevail.”
This is the third federal lawsuit that Ramsay Solutions is facing, along with the woman being sued for being fired over having premarital sex, they were sued in September by a former employee for allegedly firing her for coming out as a lesbian. In that case, Julie Anne Stamps says she told her supervisor that she divorcing her husband and going to come out about her sexuality, to which she was told to give her two weeks’ notice.
Tim Keller’s wife Kathy co-opted his Twitter feed a few days ago to clarify something the Presyubterian Minister wrote a few days ago. She relayed that while his post made it seem like his prognosis worsened from a form of pancreatic cancer to stage 4, and therefore took a step back, that he in fact has stage 4 pancreatic cancer since March of 2020, but has seen remarkable improvements since then.
This is great news and we continue to pray for his recovery, as stage IV is essentially regarded as incurable. The five-year survival rate is 1% with the vast majority of patients expected to live less than a year- usually around 6 months. The fact that Keller is going on 1.5 years is a mercy indeed, and we thank the Lord for it.
The Vatican has apologized for removing a link to a prominent pro-LGBTQ advocacy group from their website after a bunch of rainbow-stained outrage, restoring the URL and offering a ‘mea culpa’ that they ever removed it in the first place.
On the Vatican webpage under a ‘resources” page, there was a link to a webinar from New Ways Ministry, a controversial pro-LGBTQ organization that has spent the last 35 years fighting for gays, lesbians, and transgender folk to receive full acceptance into the church.
Their stated mission is to foster dialogue among groups and individuals, identify and combat personal and structural homophobia and transphobia, work for changes in attitudes and promote the acceptance of LGBTQ people as full and equal members of church and society.” Wiki notes that “They are a frequent partner Equally Blessed, a coalition of Catholics who support full LGBT equality, and the Global Network of Rainbow Catholics”
A cursory glance at their website shows how the depths of sinful theology they’ve descended into.
Someone at the Vatican removed it, they screamed bloody murder, and within days it was back. The Synod’s communications director, Thierry Bonaventura, apologized for the lapse and once the link to their treacherous teaching was restored, they accepted the apology, writing on their website:
New Ways Ministry warmly accepts the apology of Thierry Bonaventura, the Communications Manager of the General Secretariat of the Synod of Bishops, for removing from their website a link to our video encouraging LGBTQ people to participate in synod consultations. We thank him for recognizing the harm that such a slight would have caused LGBTQ people and the entire church.
and in another post
“New Ways Ministry has accepted the apology of a Vatican official who removed a link to New Ways Ministry’s webinar on synodality from the Synod office’s resources website last week. The link has since been restored.”
New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) queen Paula White demonstrated a further lack of biblical discernment and an increasing glut of demonic hand-holding when she got up on stage and gave a keynote address at the Cheongshim Peace World Center in partnership with PeacelinkTV, participating in an interfaith prayer ceremony alongside Budhists, Shintoists, Confucianists, and others.
The conference was founded by Dr. Hak Ja Han Moon, who is the widow of the Rev. Dr. Sun Myung Moon, co-founder of the Universal Peace Federation and the World Unification Church. She is a billionaire and regarded by many as the “Messiah” and the “True Parent to all mankind” whose goal is to unite all faiths in world peace and harmony.
Ie, they’re Moonies.
She and her husband founded the Moonies cult and the rally is a means to further spread the moonies’ message of anti-biblical, christ-hating syncretic ecumenism.
Paula White however has no issue with attending such an event or linking up with other false religious in prayer and joint supplication for this wicked religious figure.
Thank you. What a great joy and honor it is to be here today, giving honor to the distinguished faith leaders and to all those that are serving in capacity of religion and faith and making a tremendous difference. I am honored to participate in this historic interfaith prayer rally for the peaceful reunification of the Korean peninsula.
I want to take a moment and honor as well as encourage Mother Moon for her great work as a spiritual leader who loves the Lord and seeks to carry out and to comfort the heart of God in all the areas of conflict in the world.
She is truly a jewel from God. I thank you for not quitting or giving up Mother Moon, for the persecution and suffering has been intense. Because of your courage, tenacity and bold spirit that is cloaked in love for God and humanity, we are seeing revolutionary opportunity around the world for peace and unity as we are reminded in Matthew chapter 5 verse 9 ‘blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the sons of God.’
…Today as we bombard heaven, I know in all of my heart we will see God’s intention of restoration
Is that any way to be talking about a cult leader? One who makes Walter Martin’s Kingdom of the Cults due to it being dangerous, damnable, and directly antithetical to the gospel of Christ? A movement of nearly 2 million people that openly denies that Jesus is God and was born of a virgin, and yet wants to reunify Christians with other world religions?
For White who has been rubbing shoulders with NAR ne’er do wells for decades now and absorbing and parroting back tall tales, vision from God, prophetic utterance, and every wacky theology to come down the pike and from the mumbled mind of charismatic misfits, the fact that she cannot discern the difference between the orthodoxy of moonies and biblical Christianity should not surprise us at all.
