End Times and Current Events

General Category => New-Age => Topic started by: Mark on July 04, 2011, 06:06:09 am



Title: NEW AGE: Christian festivals!!!
Post by: Mark on July 04, 2011, 06:06:09 am
A broader church
Fun in the woods with gay, tattooed and generally liberal folk


AT LEAST 25 Christian music festivals are held each summer in America, but they have never catered for theological liberals. Until this year, that is, when the Wild Goose Festival—named after a Celtic symbol for the Holy Spirit—kicked off on June 23rd on 72 wooded acres in eastern North Carolina, not so far from the intellectual hub of Raleigh-Durham.

The idea, seven years in the making, was based on Britain’s Greenbelt Festival in Cheltenham, which draws 20,000 people a year. About 1,500 people came to the American version, which explicitly pitched its appeal to artists and musicians, nonconformists, post-Christians, non-Christians, disaffected evangelicals and a liberal evangelical subset known as the “emergent” church.

Instead of Bible studies, there were labyrinth walks. Instead of praise-and-worship music, there was hymn-singing in a beer garden and a bluegrass liturgy presided over by a tattooed female Lutheran minister. Visitors were greeted with buckets of water in which to baptise themselves, and tubs of mud to remind them that “dust thou art”. (In Britain, the mud is usually underfoot.) Lecture topics ranged from sex trafficking and social justice to authority in the church and interfaith relations. Visitors could learn from Tom Prasada-Rao, a singer, how to chant “Om” and “Hallelujah Hare Krishna”, or hear Paul Fromberg, a pastor from San Francisco, talking about his 2005 wedding to another man. “God is changing the church through the bodies of gay men,” Mr Fromberg told a packed session on human sexuality. Also under discussion was “religious multiple belonging”—in other words, belonging to a clutch of different faiths at once.

Several disillusioned evangelical leaders attended. One was Jay Bakker, son of Jim and Tammy Bakker of the defunct-Praise-the-Lord-TV-network fame, who gave meandering talks on growing up fundamentalist. Frank Schaeffer, who has made a career out of criticising his evangelical parents Francis and Edith Schaeffer, called the Bible “Bronze-Age mythology” and confessed he had a “conflicted ambivalence” about abortion.

“We’re a laboratory for justice, spirituality and art in the way of Jesus,” explained Gareth Higgins, the festival director and a peace activist from Belfast who has worked with Greenbelt and now lives in North Carolina. He and other organisers managed, miraculously, to recruit 150 musicians and speakers, none of whom charged for their services. They hope that the emergent cohort will rise from the ashes of an evangelicalism ruined by right-wing politics. As 78-year-old Phyllis Tickle, author of several books on emergent Christianity, put it, “We’re at the start of a 500-year upheaval in culture and the church.”

Most evangelicals do not view the emergents so kindly. The few conservatives at the festival privately complained that the panels were stacked with liberals and that issues dear to them, such as abortion, were neglected. Greenbelt has often met similar criticism in recent years.

Mainline Protestants, however, seemed delighted by the festival, and may well latch on to the emergents to shore up their shrinking numbers. Buoyed by their success, Wild Goose’s organisers are planning to repeat the festival next year in the same bucolic place.

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/delicious/gqlf/~3/NAtCe14LO2U/18898389


Title: Re: NEW AGE: Christian festivals!!!
Post by: Mark on July 04, 2011, 06:10:40 am
Several disillusioned evangelical leaders attended. One was Jay Bakker, son of Jim and Tammy Bakker of the defunct-Praise-the-Lord-TV-network fame, who gave meandering talks on growing up fundamentalist.

Here is a teaching Scott did back in 2006, it starts around the 30 min mark i think on Jim, Jay and Tammy Baker.

Concentration Camps in USA, Jay Bakker, the Golden Fleece, Hecate, the Crossroad Curse, Robert Johnson the Blues and Rock Music

http://www.contendingfortruth.com/?p=1197



Title: Re: NEW AGE: Christian festivals!!!
Post by: Mark on February 19, 2013, 07:23:24 am
Gay-Affirming Pastor Jay Bakker: “I Am Definitely Questioning the Atonement”



Self-labeled “evangelical punk preacher” Jay Bakker, son of televangelists Jim Bakker and the late Tammy Faye Bakker Messner, has released a new book that calls into question many of orthodox Christianity’s long-held beliefs.

According to the Christian Post (CP), which recently ran a rather lengthy article and interview with the 37-year-old pastor of Revolution Church NYC, Bakker’s new book will encourage “Christians to doubt, question and re-examine their beliefs and the Bible in pursuit of the ‘unknown God of limitless grace’ that [Bakker's] come to know through his own faith journey.” Faith, Doubt and Other Lines I’ve Crossed is, according to CP, “heavy on love and grace and selective in its assessment of Scripture.”

Writes CP reporter Nicola Menzie:

    Although Bakker’s theology may cause some readers to bristle, his demands for a more biblically literate, compassionate and socially-conscious Christian Church certainly hold merit. As the preacher explained to The Christian Post this week, there is plenty that the Church has gotten right in terms of combating poverty and hunger, but he also insists Christians need to re-think the issues he believes much of the community has gotten wrong – especially when it comes to gays and lesbians. Source

Of course, that Jay Bakker is LGBTQ-affirming is no surprise to most Christians. Neither, then, does it shock that Bakker would seek to persuade believers to “doubt, question and re-examine their beliefs and the Bible.” Yet, Amy Spreeman of Stand Up for the Truth draws attention to a graver statement made by Bakker in this CP interview: Jay Bakker, perhaps unsurprisingly to some, appears to deny the atonement.

CP asked of Bakker:

    You mentioned deconstructing faith. You also seem to deconstruct the traditional Christian doctrine of the atonement, the belief that Jesus died for the world’s sins. In Faith, Doubt you write on page 58 that a God who asks us to love our enemies…”cannot also require some sort of ‘payment’ or ‘satisfaction’ or ‘substitution.’” Please clarify that. Source

To which Bakker replied:

    Yes, I am definitely questioning the atonement and trying to discover how we can see it in a different way. We’ve got this image of God who needs some sort of flesh, some sort of blood, that needs some sort of vengeance to pay for sin. My experience of a loving God who’s asked me to love my enemies – this isn’t a God that demands something before you are accepted. I think Jesus died because Jesus was inclusive. God is inclusive. I think that the idea of God somehow being separated from us was more man’s idea. Source

Commenting on this, Spreeman rightly notes that the atonement

    has long been a non-negotiable doctrine of Christianity. The shedding of the blood of the lamb of God for the sins of the world is a rather big deal. You can’t preach about repentance for sins and the hope of a risen Christ without that key element. Source

The doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement, which Bakker is “trying to discover…in a different way,” is made quite clear in Scripture. The idea that Christ died on the cross as the perfect sacrifice and substitute for sinners, bearing the punishment and wrath of God deserved by men, is vital not merely to faith, but to salvation. As the perfect, unblemished sacrifice (1 Pet. 1:18–19), Christ’s death became the full payment for the sins of those who would believe, satisfying the holy wrath, righteousness and justice of God.

Isaiah 53 not only predicts the suffering and death of Christ long before the incarnation, but it also points the reader to this idea of atonement (Isa. 53:5–6, 12). Numerous other scriptures clearly teach the necessity and reality of the atonement, only a sampling of which shall be offered here:

    the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. Rom. 3:22–26

    For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. 2 Cor. 5:21

    Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree”— Gal. 3:13

    he entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption. Heb. 9:12

The historic creeds and confessions of the church, which concisely teach those doctrines that are present in God’s Word, also affirm the penal substitutionary atonement. As one example, the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith reads:

    Christ, by His obedience and death, fully discharged the debt of all those who are justified, and by the sacrifice of himself through the blood of His cross, underwent instead of them the penalty due to them, so making a proper, real, and full satisfaction to God’s justice on their behalf. Yet because He was given by the Father for them, and because His obedience and satisfaction was accepted instead of theirs (and both freely, not because of anything in them), therefore they are justified entirely and solely by free grace, so that both the exact justice and the rich grace of God might be glorified in the justification of sinners.

    1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith, Chapter 11, Section 3

Jay Bakker says that he “still sees Christ as the messiah and the Son of God” and that he views Jesus as “the closest thing to God.” Of course, the Bible affirms that Jesus Christ is not merely the “closest thing to God,” but is God (John 1:1, 8:24, 58, 10:30–33). Continues Bakker:

    In order to deconstruct the atonement theory really [it] all comes from the message of Christ, and the message of love and grace and acceptance and loving your enemies and forgiving those who persecute you. Source

Sadly, by deconstructing the atonement, Bakker is eliminating the greatest expression of love ever offered.

    In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 1 John 4:9–10

As CP rightly notes, Bakker’s work likely will be “filed alongside the works of Peter Rollins, Rob Bell, Brian D. McLaren” and other leaders and voices of the emergent church. And as men such as this continue in their strivings to twist, distort and deconstruct the clear Word of God, those who have built upon the foundation of God’s Word nevertheless can stand firm, knowing that it shall never waver, despite the strongest efforts of its enemies (Matt. 5:18, 24:35; Luke 21:33; Mark 13:31).

http://christianresearchnetwork.org/2013/02/15/gay-affirming-pastor-jay-bakker-i-am-definitely-questioning-the-atonement/


Title: Re: NEW AGE: Christian festivals!!!
Post by: Psalm 51:17 on February 19, 2013, 10:22:26 am
Sometimes I wonder if these people are saved to begin with...

John 8:44  Ye are of your father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it.


Title: Re: NEW AGE: Christian festivals!!!
Post by: Kilika on February 19, 2013, 02:49:06 pm
"But there were false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them, and bring upon themselves swift destruction." 2 Peter 2:1 (KJB)