This coming summer in New Orleans the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America will hold another Youth Gathering. The last time this happened was in 2018 when 31,000 Lutheran teens were told to support transgenderism by an 11 year-old-boy who thinks he is a girl. Also, ELCA pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber led the teens in a kind of mock baptismal vow, saying “I renounce the lie that queerness is anything other than beauty.”
For 2024, the Teen Gathering theme will be “Created to Be”. “We are created to be free—to work for justice for all our siblings”. You will notice the ELCA now shies away from calling people “brothers and sisters” because that is too binary and excludes transgender people, so instead we get “siblings”. Teens are told to introduce themselves in this way, “Hi, my name is ________ and I use the pronouns __________.” Teens are told to “honor everyone by calling them by the name and pronouns they feel comfortable with…You might be surprised to learn that someone in your group has been longing to introduce themselves to you in this way!”
Sessions of the Teen Assembly will begin with a “Land acknowledgement”, stating that the Assembly is being held on land stolen from Native Americans.
A big theme of the Youth Gathering will be to teach teens to become “disruptive to injustice”. Teens are told to discuss “what injustices you have experienced” and are told “We are created to be disruptive, to work for justice for all our siblings”. Youth are taught “interrupting phrases” such as “We don’t say things like that here” to “help them disrupt an unjust situation”.
In a nod I believe to the LGBT movement, teens are told to “be authentic and bring our whole selves”. Then comes this strange statement: “Our host city, New Orleans, has always been its true, authentic self…. New Orleans was built to host and be a city where all God’s children come together.” I’m not sure how the ELCA knows this. Teens are asked in small groups “What would it mean for you if your congregation became a Reconciling in Christ congregation?” Reconciling in Christ is the movement that promotes all things LGBT in the ELCA. It is no secret how the ELCA wants to influence teens here.
Lastly, teens will be taught not to think of sin as “darkness” because this is racist. “One particularly harmful part of theology is associating sin with all things dark and black…(this creates) an implicit bias against things that are black…harmful intertwining of white supremacy and God’s love…”. Teens are asked “How does claiming the holiness of darkness reframe who God is for you?”
This, of course, is nonsense—most black Christians have no problem at all agreeing with the Scriptures, “God is light and in Him there is no darkness at all” (I John 1:5).
Perhaps the most tragic thing in all of this is there is no mention of evangelism and bringing lost friends to Christ. The head bishop of the ELCA has stated that she believes Hell is empty. So if everyone is going to heaven and we don’t need to instruct in evangelism, what will the ELCA do with its teens at a teen gathering? Teach them liberal politics and how to “interrupt injustice.” And of course, the injustice being done to babies in the womb is nowhere mentioned. The ELCA is a strong supporter of abortion rights and even pays for abortion with offering dollars in the ELCA healthcare plan. If you know an ELCA Lutheran, please urge them to keep their teens away from the ELCA
This article was written by pastor Tom Brock, reprinted in full with permission.
A prominent megachurch in New York City is being sued for “gender bias” and “sexism” after they turned down a woman’s bid to become the first female Senior Pastor in the church’s 215-year history.
Forty-seven people applied to fill the position at Abyssinian Baptist Church following the death of longtime senior Pastor Rev. Calvin Butts in 2022, including radical racialist Eboni Marshall Turman.
Turnman graduated from Union Theological Seminary in New York City, the most liberal seminary in the world (see endnotes), and was the only female applicant. She insists she was met with sexism and discrimination during the interview process. One of her complaints is that search committee chair Valeria Grant allegedly told her that Abyssinian would only hire a woman as its Senior Pastor ‘over my dead body,'”
Turman, who was one of the pastors at Abyssinian but has since left in light of her lawsuit, is suing for” lost wages, lost benefits, other economic damages, shame, humiliation, embarrassment, and mental distress”- in the form of unspecified monetary damages.
A church spokesperson released a statement regrading the suite, noting in part: While she and others were considered for the role because of their impressive backgrounds, she ultimately fell short of some key requirements for the role, where other finalist candidates prevailed and moved forward in the process.”
The nineteenth 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.
For many, the last they heard from Rob Bell was in 2011. He had risen to prominence in the early 2000s, fueled by his popular NOOMA videos which kickstarted his mainstream fame, and later on with a series of books like Velvet Jesus, Sex God, and Jesus Wants To Save Christians. Imbued with a gift for speaking and a propensity to
write things
deep things
in this style
he gained a massive following before social media really took off. He founded Mars Hill Bible Church in 1999, and within two years it had grown to one of the biggest churches in America, averaging almost 10,000 each service and making him a sought-after speaker. He was a rockstar in Evangelical circles whose materials were a mainstay for mainline youth groups. Seen as a thought leader and a key player in the emergent church, it was believed that his influence would only grow.
He was also fodder for nascent discernment ministries who took some early potshots at him for aberrant theology. They would point to a throwaway line in Velvet Elvis where Rob Bell said that the virgin birth wasn’t that important, or the vagueness in which he spoke of the gospel and Jesus’ death on the cross, and hold these words up to scrutiny as proof he was unorthodox. Still, there was never enough to convince most people that he was dangerous. His words weren’t great, but they were no smoking gun for the masses to see. He was just too vague and a little too nebulous that his defenders cried foul, dismissed the critics, and nothing really stuck.
Then, at the height of his fame, he released a book in March of 2011 titled Love Wins, which served as a full-throated defense of Universalism. The book argued that in the end, all people are ultimately saved because God is love and “love wins.”
The release of this book finally served as a big flashing light to many who were either ignorant of Rob Bell’s beliefs or who had been wary of labeling him a heretic and continued to view him as a brother, being regarded as possibly a bit of provocateur, but our provocateur. They were able to explain away and needlessly give him the benefit of the doubt for many things he said, but this was one step too far. It made national news and was the talk of Christendom for weeks, prompting John Piper to infamously tweet “Farewell Rob Bell” as Rob was cast out of the kingdom.
To get an idea of the cultural impact this book wrought, In June 2011, Time Magazine named Rob Bell as one of the Top 100 most influential people in the world. Due to the book’s release, he became even more famous for a season, but it also had dire consequences at home.
A lot of his congregants supported him, but many did not. Before his book launch, Mars Hill had 10,000 attendees over two services on a Sunday morning. By the time he stepped down in September, six months after the book’s release and after months of hemorrhaging people, attendance had dropped 65% to less than 3500 people. His last day was January 8th, 2012, and after that, he vanished off the face of the earth.
For a while
But what has Rob Bell been doing since?
He moved his family out of Michigan and to the West Coast. Making his home in Los Angeles, he has kept busy within the entertainment industry, becoming more and more forceful in his heretical beliefs and spreading forth his profanation far and wide without the constraints of his local church to more or less keep him in line.
In 2013, he was interviewed by Oprah for her Super Soul Sunday television program about his new book What We Talk About When We Talk About God, which she recommended to her “Book of the Month” club. Bonding over similar spiritual beliefs, he went on the road with her in 2014 on The Life You Want tour, gaining even more exposure and speaking on vaguely spiritual things with a distinct new-age feel. He mentioned God on occasion, but nothing that resembled biblical Christianity, which would have been an affront to Orpah’s audience.
More to his degeneration, whereas before he stepped down from the pastorate he had been vague and coy on questions of biblical sexual ethics when asked by interviewers, Rob Bell came out openly in favor and acceptance of same-sex marriage in 2013. He spoke favorably of it during his 2014 book tour, “The Zimzum Of Love,” and likewise when appearing again with Oprah in 2015 during an interview, saying
“One of the oldest aches in the bones of humanity is loneliness. Loneliness is not good for the world. Whoever you are, gay or straight, it is totally normal, natural and healthy to want someone to go through life with. It’s central to our humanity. We want someone to go on the journey with.
I think culture is already there and the church will continue to be even more irrelevant when it quotes letters from 2,000 years ago as their best defense, when you have in front of you flesh-and-blood people who are your brothers and sisters, and aunts and uncles, and co-workers and neighbors, and they love each other and just want to go through life.”
In 2015, he started The Robcast, a podcast with over 350 episodes of occasionally spiritualish stuff that is still going to this day. (He might interview a rabbi one day and then talk to a celebrity about anxiety another day). He toured extensively all over the world- France, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, – visiting these countries and doing workshops, speaking at events, and teaching people how to be creative.
On top of devolving into a mass of liberal, progressive new-ageism, one of the most prominent targets and themes of all his projects is the idea that the Bible is “literary, but not literal.” To put it more bluntly, he regards the scriptures as bovine scatology.
He released a book in May 2017, “What Is the Bible?: How an Ancient Library of Poems, Letters, and Stories Can Transform the Way You Think and Feel About Everything to explain the scriptures to those confused by it. Gary Gilley does a great job of laying out several of Rob Bell’s theological convictions regarding the sacred texts:
“Probably the main message drawn from What Is the Bible? Is that the Bible is a thoroughly human book. It “is not a Christian book”; it “is a book about what it means to be human” (p. 4). It is not about Jesus and a narrow way to God (p. 16). Rather the Bible is a book produced purely by people sans any direct revelation from God (pp. 116-117, 188, 243-246, 266-267, 291, 295-296).
As a result, the Bible has all the problems, errors, contradictions, and wrong values that can be found in any human literature: “The Bible was written by people. People with perspectives, grounded in their cultures and times and places” (p. 243). Thus “God didn’t set up the sacrificial system. People did” (p. 244).
Further, in a 2017 interview with Lewis Howes, Rob Bell insisted that Jesus came to earth: “to wake us up and remind us of the shared humanity- the brother and sisterness of all of us.” On his belief of what the Bible is and how we should view it:
“The Bible has caused so much damage. In many ways it has often been an agent of dragging everything backwards, and it hasn’t participated in the ongoing evolution of humanity. It’s been a voice for primitive, outdated, violent, barbaric forces.”
At this point, much evidence suggests that he doesn’t even believe in a literal resurrection. Given that he has continued to twist the meaning of words, it’s hard to pin him down, but you get the impression that he doesn’t believe the literal resurrection of Jesus is a thing. He writes in his book:
“He’s alive? (Interesting that the people who were closest to Jesus and spent years with him don’t recognize him post-resurrection. Hmmm. The next time you hear someone insisting that it was an actual, literal resurrection, make sure you add that bodily must mean that he didn’t look like he looked before.)” What Is the Bible? (pp. 184-185).
In 2018, filmmaker Andrew Morgan released a film on the life and work of Rob Bell entitled “The Heretic.” The documentary goes behind the scenes of what he’s been up to and what it’s like to be him these past few years, filled with Rob Bell waxing eloquent on this piece of theology or that. It’s supposed to be about what he believes and the Christian faith, but there is scarcely anything faithful present. As the film winds down, Andrew asks Rob Bell what’s the ONE THING he wants people to know, and Rob says, instead of giving the gospel or speaking of the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus, “What the modern world does is cut you off from depth, from fullness. The truth is everything you are working and striving for, you already have. So often, we’re working, grasping, striving to feel worthy enough when the good news is waiting for you that ‘You are loved.’
In 2019, he continued touring and doing more workshops and speaking events, between 30-40 shows a year. That year, he went on his “Introduction to Joy” tour, which took him across America and overseas all throughout the UK. He’s been on Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday several times over the past few years, doling out Rob Bellisms to an eager audience. He also has a residency at The Largo- a comedy club in L.A., where he performs frequently. As to what those shows look like, a typical one might be, “I’ll talk on the soul and curiosity and risk and the power of framing language and a bit about something I saw at my cousin’s house.” Sounds scintillating.
In 2020 he toured with Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the book Eat Pray Love. Their workshop, which they continue to this day, cost almost 1200$. He made monthly appearances at The Largo and did his routine there, including a play he wrote. He had several two-day workshops lined up this summer under the “Something to Say” moniker, which is “about being creative and getting unstuck from your way of thinking at the low cost of 750$ a person.” He also wrote the book ‘Everything Is Spiritual: Finding Your Way in a Turbulent World,‘ which is part memoir,’ part riffing on his pet theologies while explaining how and why he deconstructed to them.
In 2021 he mostly stayed inside and offered writing courses and classes during COVID.
In 2022, he released the book What’s a Knucka?which is one of his plays published in book form. He also toured across the world advertising his Everything is Spiritual book and giving little talks on it.
In 2023, he released a sci-fi book called ‘Where’s To Park Your Spaceship’ about a man named Heen Gru-Bares “traveling from planet to planet collecting data and filing reports” until he meets Dill Tudd, which changes his life. This novel is quintessential Rob Bell, particularly in how it reads:
He also started to do more art, putting on a gallery of his creations:
In 2024, he’s kicking the year off hosting “2 Days in Ojai“. He explains this process, which costs $600:
You bring whatever question you have about what you’re creating, making, saying, working on, etc. and on the first day at 9am the first person sits across from me and tells me their question and then I ask you questions about your question and we go from there as you begin to see your next step…helping each other make a new world together.”
He also continues the Robcast, but as you can see, it’s a little strange:
As to Rob Bell’s trajectory and what the future has in store for him, we’re thankful his influence has waned and flamed out within the mainstream Christian church. He’s growing more and more emboldened, and we’re thankful that boldness has difficulty taking root in the lives of true believers, given he’s long been exposed for the God-hating, Christ-despising, Holy-Spirit blaspheming pagan that he is.
IHOPKC has announced that David Slicker, the International House of Prayer University president, has stepped down effective immediately and will also be withdrawn from the executive leadership team. The announcement was made late Wednesday evening in a press release:
“After seven years of faithful service, our dear brother in Christ, David Sliker, has decided to step down as President of IHOPU.
David is also stepping down from the IHOPKC’s Executive Leadership Team, effective immediately.
This was a mutual decision made in the best interest of the IHOPKC community and David’s family.
We honor David’s service and dedication. He is loved by the IHOPKC community and he remains in good standing with this spiritual family.
Additionally, the executive committee of IHOPKC’s Board of Directors, the ELT, and IHOPU’s leadership team all unanimously agreed to have Matt Candler appointed as the new President of IHOPU effective immediately. Matt and his leadership team will be communicating all the necessary information with the faculty and students in the coming days.”
Candler, the incoming President, helped start IHOPKC back in 1999. He is eductaor at IHOPKC, as well as Directors of Internships at the International House of Prayer.
Slicker’s resignation comes weeks after IHOPKC moved to permanently distance themselves from founder Mike Bickle, who engaged in at least one adulterous affair and faces multiple allegations of clergy sexual misconduct, and after IHOPKC Executive Director Stuart Greaves resigned.
(AP) Christ the Redeemer was lit up in a Pele shirt among Brazilian tributes to the soccer great on the first anniversary of his death on Friday. Pele died of colon cancer at age 82.
Christ the Redeemer had a projection of a Brazil shirt with Pelé’s name and number 10 and a message from Pope Francis. Pelé was a devout Catholic.
“Pelé, as Mr. Edson Arantes do Nascimento became globally known, was undoubtedly an athlete who showed in his life all positive traits of a sportsman,” the pontiff said in a letter as a local orchestra played. “The memory of ‘the King of Soccer’ remains indelible in the minds of many, and it stimulates new generations to seek in sport a means to strengthen the bonds of unity among us.”
Religious ceremonies were held at the… to continue reading click here.
This article was written by Mauricio Savarese and published at the AP
Months after it was announced that Grand Canyon University (GCU), the country’s largest Christian university, was being fined $37.7 million by the federal government for allegations that they misled students about the full costs of some of their programs, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has also announced they’re suing the 120,000-student school for “deception.”
According to a recent notice on their website, the FTC is suing GCU, Grand Canyon Education (GCE) and GCU president Brain Mueller for “deceiving prospective doctoral students about the cost and course requirements of its doctoral programs and about being a nonprofit” while also engaging in “deceptive and abusive telemarketing practices.”
For the former, the FTC says that some of GCU’s doctoral programs advertise one price to finish, when in reality, 98% of students require additional “continuation courses” to complete, adding thousands of dollars to the cost of their program. They also say that “the defendants also used abusive telemarketing calls to try to boost enrollment at GC” and that “GCE advertised on websites and social media urging prospective students to submit their contact information on digital forms. GCE telemarketers then used the information to illegally contact people who have specifically requested not to be called, as well as people on the National Do Not Call Registry. GCE has also made illegal calls to numbers it purchased from lead generators.
Responding to the varied allegations, GCU claims they are being “unjustly targetted” by the government and that this is much ado about nothing.
“To be frank, the substance of these claims is so frivolous that they could have easily been resolved in a 10-minute phone call had the agencies chosen to do so. We would have disagreed with the agencies’ conclusions but believe a reasonable accommodation could have been reached in each case in a spirit of cooperation. Instead, the agencies have chosen to, quite literally, make a federal case out of what should be minor disagreements.”
Reformed University Fellowship founder Mark Lowery has passed away after a brief but aggressive bout with cancer. He was 78. The announcement was made by byfaithonline, the official web magazine of the Presbyterian Church in America. According to his obituary:
Born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi in 1945, Mark Lowrey came of age during the Vietnam era, and served one tour overseas in Saigon with the Army before returning home and enrolling at RTS in Jackson, graduating and becoming ordained in 1978. After only his first year of coursework, however, Lowrey was called by the PCA churches in his hometown to lead the campus fellowship at the University of Southern Mississippi. From this mustard seed of faith would eventually sprout a national network known as Reformed University Fellowship (RUF).
In the earliest days of the PCA, college ministry was not uniformly viewed as a crucial pillar of outreach for the young denomination: parachurch organizations such as InterVarsity Fellowship and Campus Crusade already occupied much of that sphere. Yet recognizing the need for sound biblical teaching on campus, Lowrey put forth a vision of ordained ministers whose primary concerns were the discipleship of believing students, the evangelism of seekers and skeptics, and the sustained spiritual care of covenant children. It was not enough to simply bring students to church, Lowrey believed: the church should seek the students out itself.
After a decade serving in his home state, Lowrey and his family moved to Atlanta in 1983, to PCA headquarters. From there Lowrey could better facilitate the growth of RUF, overseeing the training of new campus ministers and interns not just across the South but across the country. Lowrey describes this growth elsewhere in this volume; but worth noting here are four main factors: (1) establishing a firm financial footing for presbyteries to call new ministers, ensuring greater longevity at their posts; (2) a focus on training both men and women in ministry, raising up a generation of servant-leaders who could respond to the unique spiritual needs of different students; and (3) an ambitious national and international vision, inspired by Lowrey’s own overseas service; and (4) the harmonious integration of RUF with the other arms of the PCA, such as Mission to North America, under which it stood in the early days
…As a result the denominational curriculum of record, GCP serves over one thousand churches in the PCA and other denominations.
Lowrey is survived by his wife Priscilla and his two children.
Three months after former Kentucky county clerk Kim Davis was ordered to pay $100,000 after losing a discrimination lawsuit to the two gay men whose marriage license she famously refused to sign in 2015, U.S. District Judge David L. Bunning has ruled that she also must pay their legal fees, which total $260,000 and bring the amount owed to more than a third of a million dollars.
Davis was hit with the six-figure sum in September after a federal jury awarded David Ermold and David Moore $50,000 each. The two sued Davis for not giving them a state blessing to the sodomy nearly a decade ago, before the Supreme Court ruling on Obergefell v. Hodges, and the wholehearted adoption of gay ‘marriage’ became the bad law of the land.
Predictably, her refusal to sign garnered her no support from Russell Moore, then the ERLC head and scurrilously nuanced debutante, who was quick to chastise her for her decision and made it very clear that she should have resigned from her position rather than continue to faithfully execute the requirements of her office.
Liberty Counsel, who is representing Davis, called the fees “excessive” and plans to appeal both decisions.
