Lately, my friends (online and local) and I have been talking about how many of these ‘new things’ of God have started out with noble attempts to ask legitimate questions?
However, the one common thread that my friends (online and local) and I have discovered (collectively and individually) is a very disturbing fact that leaves us with more questions than answers
How did they come up with this wrong answer?
How did they come to embrace an obvious apostate heresy?
We had noticed that the third ravers, the seeker-sensitives, the pentecostals / charismatics, Carlton Pearson, and emergents at one time asked a commonly interpreted question albeit worded differently?
Is there a better, more right, and/or more orthodox way of doing Christianity?
What really made me write this post was that I received an e-mail from a good online friend (one of three remaining from a Christian forum {F1} I once frequented until the ‘holy hatred’ came down from the ‘admin agenda army’ [some making money off of heresy] when I announced my shifting to a Reformed doctrine with emphasis on the Holy Spirit) who told me about the ‘final straw of apostasy’ that has taken place at another Christian forum {F2} that she knew I once frequented.
I went to the link that she sent to the “F1″ forum thread that documented what had taken place at forum “F2″. The link to the old forum ‘christianity forums’ had now been redirected to a new forum called ‘de-conversion’ with a new web page address.
How has this happened?
It all started when a young man made his way to a major ‘faith’ college in Tulsa, Oklahoma and eventually graduated from that university. Years had passed and an experience at a church around St. Louis drove the young man (and his wife) to start questioning the ‘god kind of faith’ taught by the major ‘faith’ college. This questioning eventually evolved into two separate web pages with one page dealing with the ‘faith movement’ and the other web page dealing with spiritual abuse issues.
The page dealing with the teachings of the ‘faith’ movement had a forum ‘F2′ where many people started questioning everything, telling their stories of spiritual abuse, and started talking about the dynamics behind spiritual abuse. Many who frequented that forum were trying to recover from their spiritual abuse and tried to find an ‘authentic Christianity’ to be a part of while others had ‘left the faith’ altogether exploring and slowly embracing the heresies of post-modernism and universalism.
The two different belief systems came to a clash to the point where another forum was created “F3″ specifically for the now practicing universalists and forum ‘F2″ was supposed to be dedicated to the discussion of Christianity.
Time progressed until one day, many people who were part of a ‘major revival’ that took place in a remote town in Missouri showed and told their stories about what really happened and how the leaders used Exodus 40
and Exodus 13 to justify and explain why the church was going to shut down in the remote Missouri town and move to ‘the big city’ hours away. At the same time, the public posting section of a major Charismatic magazine documented this in their forum until the thread ‘mysteriously disappeared. and full page ads appeared in their own magazine months later.
When the thread closed down at the major Charismatic magazine, the discussion shifted over to both “F2″ and “F3″ where the ‘cornfield revival’ became to be further exposed as another Christian magazine ran an expose article, the church used 9-11-01 to deem the storytellers as ’spiritual terrorists’, and the major Charismatic magazine broke the spiritual terrorist story to the point where the church eventually pulled the spiritual terrorist pages down.
Time passes by, the universalism message starts to permeate the “F2″ and “F3″ forums until many, in desiring to keep an orthodox faith, left the “F2″ and “F3″ forums over time and not kept up at what would happen over time.
It appears that over time, the apostasy grew more and more prevalent to where the old ‘Christianity forums’ had now become the ‘de-conversion’ forum. The founder can not tell you what he is now while his wife appears to be an feminism advocate. The ones who stayed follow a postmodernist mindset of ‘all roads lead to heaven’ with a humanistic mindset of ‘if it feels good, do it’ combined. Many of the ones who left went on to other web pages, forums, ministries and are leading very productive Christian lives (except for one angry and bitter woman who still frequently posts at “F1″ who views disagreement with her is bitterness within you when she is the angry and bitter one because someone has dared to question her or disagree with her).
They weren’t the only ones who asked the right question and came up with the wrong answer. The emergents, seeker-sensitives, third ravers, charismatics, word-faith, and others got the answer wrong in many ways. What started out as the question about a better way of doing “Faith” ended up giving an answer that appears to be sealing the eternal ‘fate’.
I was on another email discussion list whose topic was spirtitual abuse. It didn’t last long because the moderator was wise enough to see it was going in the wrong direction. Post after post was basically people trying to up one another with how bad the abuse was that they went through. Instead of driving people back to God, the list seemd to veer into “how bad so many churches are.” If the list continued I wonder if the conversation would have veered into, “Well, since churches are so bad maybe we better leave the church.” And then, would it have veered into what you described in your post? Maybe that is another form of what Spurgeon called “the downgrade?”
Interesting article. The psychology of it all is very baffling.
You are right about the question that was asked and how did they get to where they are. I saw it with the Toronto Blessing and am seeing it everyday with the emergents going down a bizarre path.