The Village Church Says the Gospel is an Agenda

*Editorial Note: Pulpit & Pen continues in unrepentant sin and enabling of the ongoing sin of Jordan Hall. While it is my understanding that P&P does not plan to take down the content I contributed, any role I can play in reducing their traffic until they repent, I will. Thus I migrate this article here.

It is always disturbing to find Christians who carry the name, label, or implication that they are Bible-believing, conservative, and doctrinally orthodox but who mess up in significant ways when given a visible platform. Obviously not all such mistakes approach the gravity of heresy, but truth-loving people should speak up to correct errors either way, if nothing else for the sake of those who might be led astray into perhaps even greater error once they have been badly influenced.

The Village Church’s blog features a recent attempt at an even-handed discussion of outreach to Muslim people in one’s local area, by one Sarah Long, a Ministry Assistant in Spiritual Formation at TVC’s Plano Campus. It would seem to be her first foray into blogging, but unfortunately while some of her insights are helpful, others are typical lackadaisical, sub-biblical, squishy evangelical advice toward how Christians are to attempt to reach the lost for Christ, thus matching the sub-biblical quality of TVC’s multi-campus ecclesiological organisation.

Particularly disturbing is the looming, though to be fair, unstated, spectre of the Insider Movement that is growing in popularity among the foreign missions community toward Muslims. The IM is a product of excessive grasping onto perceived common ground and accommodation of Islam, which leads to, among other things, the so-called Camel Method of evangelism, where the Christian leads a Muslim through the Qur’an to find truths about Jesus as the main preliminary form of discussing Jesus’ identity, telling converts to Christ from Islam that they should continue to perform the five times daily salat prayers in the mosque though praying to Jesus, or removing the phrase “Son of God” from New Testament translations. This is not to say TVC endorses the Insider Movement, but the thoughts by Mrs. Long definitely indicate these tendencies.
Particularly worrisome to me is the fact that Mrs. Long was invited to speak in a mosque. Why would a mosque invite someone to address them? Did they have no fear that she would testify boldly of the Gospel of Jesus, which makes exclusive claims that are incompatible with the claims of Islam? Were they justified in that confidence? Hopefully Mrs. Long defied those expectations, but the idea that she was invited to speak on “how He motivates me to stand against discrimination, hate crimes and oppression” remains problematic.

Why is it that a follower of Jesus stands against those things? Because Jesus is Lord! Further, Mrs. Long unfortunately seems to have ceded ground to modern political correctness in differentiating certain crimes as worse than others because they are from “hate”. It is certainly strange and unbiblical to imply that some crimes are motivated by hate whereas others are not.

Let me discuss two other serious problems in her offering. She recommends that upon visiting one’s local mosque, one should “(t)alk about Jesus, but carry no agenda. Human souls are not projects, and it takes time to build trust in any relationship.” While it is certainly true that souls are not projects, sharing the Gospel and calling people to eternal life and repentance of sin is not a business venture. It is the very mandate from the Lord Jesus Himself – Matthew 28:19-20 and Luke 24:45-49. The obvious implication is that having an “agenda” is a bad thing, but giving people the message that they need more desperately and urgently than any other message is not a bad agenda. It is the agenda of the Lord Jesus, of His apostles and prophets, which He Himself commanded as our main mission. Where did Jesus or His apostles or prophets take time to “build trust” before sharing the truth with anyone? Can anyone show me even one example thereof in the Scripture? Where did they command such a thing? Reading through the Scripture, one finds in fact the precise opposite – the command is urgent and the example is very one-sidedly in favor of urgent, direct, and precipitous proclamations of repentance and the kingdom of God.

Take for example Mark 1:14-15 –
“Now after John had been taken into custody, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel.'”

If you are fully convinced that people who die without Christ are headed for an eternity in Hell and that repentance and faith in Christ is the only rescue, how is it loving to withhold this soul-saving message for even an instant with someone you’re trying to befriend? Imagine that Mrs. Long withheld her Gospel proclamation for three years while she “built a relationship” with a Muslim woman, and that at the end of the three years, she finally told this woman about Jesus. Imagine this is what the woman has been waiting for, the Gospel resonates deeply within her soul, and she is converted on the spot. Imagine the woman then begins to read the Gospels and sees the way Jesus interacted with people He’d never met before. Imagine what her rebuke could very easily be toward Mrs. Long – “You knew about Jesus this whole time, you knew I needed Him more than anything else in the whole world and that I was blinded and lost in sin, and you never tried to free me from my chains? What kind of friend are you? How can you consistently claim to hold Jesus in first place in your life? Were you just faking it for three years, pretending to be my friend, not actually sharing with me who you are and what you love?”

And that’s the happiest ending. Imagine the perhaps dozens of lost people with whom Mrs. Long could have shared the Gospel but chose not to because she was “building a relationship” with them, and maybe those relationships didn’t work out or the lost people died before Mrs. Long thought it would be appropriate to fulfill the Great Commission toward them. Does she not share in the guilt of their eternal condemnation, for deliberately withholding the truth when she didn’t have to?

The second major problem here:

Follow the Spirit’s lead, not your agenda.

The Spirit has led, in His Word. What more leading does anyone need?

Far too easily in our limp-wristed churchianity, the “leading of the Spirit” is a baptised translation of “what you feel like doing”. Sharing the Gospel can be hard. It can lead to discomfort. It can lead to people rejecting you. It can cost you potential friendships that could have been founded on something other than Jesus and open and honest communication (which, otherwise stated, is a shallow and worthless relationship). In this sense, Mrs. Long’s article is misleading and actually negative, for her meaning is “talk about the lost person’s need for repentance if you feel like it”, but she couches it in such pious-sounding language that the reader can feel like they have a good excuse for ignoring the commands and urgency of the Scripture. Mrs. Long continues:

New relationships are not the place to debate in-depth theology.

So claims Mrs. Long. Perhaps someone should have told Jesus before He messed up His conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4.

Mrs. Long gives some good advice in the article that I don’t mean to minimise. By all means, mature Christians ought to take time to visit the local mosque and to read the Qur’an so as to lend credibility to their outreach to Muslim neighbors and friends. It’s definitely not as engrossing a read as the latest Koontz novel or something, but it’s much more useful. By all means, we must regularly reflect both inwardly and outwardly on the myriad failures of Western culture to demonstrate Jesus’ lordship, and we must be living out that repentance so that we may bear testimony of it to a watching and lost world. We must reach out in love to lost people. We must learn about cultural differences. Yes, all of that is true.

People need the Gospel. Do not deprive them of the light that is within you, even if someone on staff at one satellite campus of a big evangelical organisation tells you to hide your light under a bushel.

Matthew 5:13-16 –

You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt has become tasteless, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled under foot by men. You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden; nor does anyone light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven.

Take your light to the lost people. Tell them about Jesus. Don’t hide behind fear of being perceived of having an “agenda”. The Gospel is too pressing.

Carrie Prejean is an embarrassment, not a hero

Carrie Prejean has done apparently one halfway-good thing in her far too long stint in the limelight - she truthfully (and sort of correctly) answered a question in a beauty contest put to her by a moronic airhead who asked a question to which he didn't know the answer.

Apart from that, she's been one embarrassment after another, mostly to herself and also to the evanjellyfish community who has foolishly embraced her. I suppose I shouldn't be amazed at the depths to which American evanjellyfish will stoop to get their ears tickled. The ironic thing is that said tickling often comes at the hands of someone who knows exactly what to say to hit the right nerve. Given Prejean's evident intellectual limitations, I doubt she has been the calculating sort, maneuvering and finagling her way into evanjellyfish hearts everywhere; rather, she seems like a victim of this terribly sub-biblical thinking who has probably been manipulated by some clever agents into extending her public presence far, far beyond where she should have gone.
In this case, it should be obvious that saying "in my country, in my family I believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman" will get one into the good graces of the evanjellyfish community. Thing is, that community has a hard time letting go. The examples are numerous - The Shack, Billy Graham, Joel Osteen, Benny Hinn, Phillips Craig and Dean, TD Jakes, Ted Haggard, Jaci Velasquez, POD, Amy Grant...I could go on, and I have in the past. As long as someone uses the word "Jesus" in conversation and expresses commonly decent moral sensibilities, they've got the secret evanjellyfish handshake down pat, and you don't get kicked out.

So, ever since she did that one thing, she's been persecuted shamelessly by the left, and shame on them for their easily-documented and highly visible idiocy and moral blindness. Backlash against Hilton for his stupid question, to which he clearly only wanted one answer? Right, sure.
Prejean has since dang near made a whole career out of people talking bad about her on national media. I don't necessarily blame her for that as much as I blame the American consumer of media, both on the left and on the right in the evanjellyfish community, and to the latter I ask: Why keep taking her in? Why keep giving her a platform? Why invite her to speak at your conferences? Why react favorably when surveyed (as her publisher no doubt did before commissioning her book) as to whether you'd buy a book about her?

Where has she given any evidence of a biblical worldview besides saying "I believe marriage is heterosexual"? Is saying "in my country, in my family, I believe" an appropriate preface to expressing a biblical statement, that homosexuals and homosexual activity are under the judgment of God, that homosexuals are commanded to repent of all their sin, including homosexuality, and be saved by the only Savior, Jesus Christ? Nowhere that I've seen (though I admittedly don't follow Prejean's life very closely).

Further, let's not forget in which context her big "Here I stand" moment took place - in a beauty pageant, a soft porn meat market, where one wins because one has a hot bod and can strut about sensually in front of dozens of cameras. That's bad enough. But nnnnoooo, she couldn't stop there.
-She openly encourages other girls to expose their bodies and sexuality to endless ogling in future pageants. It's a noble calling, you know.
-Breast augmentation surgery. Sigh.
-Pornographic photos, taken before the pageant. Double sigh.
-A pornographic video, sent to a boyfriend. Dear God, does it never end?
"That was a mistake of youth, sent to my boyfriend with whom I was in love" she says of the vid. It was 5 years ago! When you were 17! You're only 22!!!! Youth? How about "Yes, I did that, and it was a horrible sin against my Lord Jesus Christ and against my future husband, not to mention the boyfriend to whom I sent it. I didn't love him at all; my sending him that vid brought him DOWN, not up. I led him into terrible impurity, and for that I am also deeply sorry"?
But at least she said it was a mistake!
Oh yes, thank God she did. All the young girls watching her can now know that:
1) you can make a sex vid for your boyfriend
2) whom you "love"
3) at the age of 17
4) and then apologise and make it all better, 5 years later when someone else finds out about it and makes it public, and still go on to sell books to "Christians" and no one will care.
Great example for my little girl.

Finally, she has the audacity to "write" a book about her life so far. To nearly-quote the Abbé Faria from The Count of Monte Cristo - your life, young woman, has been too short to contain anything of significance. I don't know why I'm surprised that her shame threshold is a long, long way off.

The central problem with her wide acceptance among evanjellyfish is that not once has she ever even expressed a basic understanding or history of her own interaction with the Law and the Gospel. Not once that I've seen or heard has she ever recounted her struggle with her guilt under the Law of God, being crushed and shattered under the weight of its impossible demands, or crying out to God to save her from her guilt under His Law. Jesus as only Savior? Jesus as Lord? Repentance? Trusting in Christ alone, being thankful for His forgiveness, purchased on the Cross? Nowhere to be found. Rather, she was raised that way. This is one of the most common evanjellyfish idolatries - this is how my parents raised me, and my parents are kind, good people.
No, your parents are not kind, good people, and neither are you. You are a filthy sinner, rebellious, an enemy of God, and you're either forgiven and saved in spite of yourself or you're not. If you are, one would rightly expect you'd talk about it occasionally, especially when you have the spotlight (unwisely) shone directly on you. As it is, I see no reason to think Prejean has any idea what it means to know and follow Jesus. Just like the majority of American evangelicals.

Here's hoping she does everyone a favor, and soon - retreat out of the limelight, permanently. Find a godly man (for someone as hot as you, that shouldn't be a problem), marry him BEFORE having sex with him, have children and lead a godly, quiet life. And change your last name when you get married.