Social Gospel and postmodern heresy at a Christian and Missionary Alliance assembly

More Books and Things has a post about Erwin McManus being invited to address the biennial assembly of the Canadian Pacific District of the Christian and Missionary Alliance in Langley, British Columbia on May 19-21, 2009. My views on Mr. McManus’s book The Barbarian Way have already been posted. As a Christian and as a member of a C&MA church in the neighbouring province of Alberta, I was not only disturbed by the invitation to Mr. McManus, but also by what I saw when I clicked on links at the assembly website. Some examples are found below.

"Missional" and "transformation" are currently popular buzzwords in the emerging and dominionist camps. "Missional" is a particularly popular word with postmodernists. Like postmodernism itself, which denies that words have objective meanings, "missional" seems to mean (a la Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland) whatever its users want it to mean. As far as I can tell, "missional" is largely used as a code word for those of like mind to be able to identify one another. "Transformation" and its derivatives aren’t used in the sense of Romans 12:2 (...be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind...), but in the sense of transforming society and the world. These are 21st Century terms for the old 20th Century social gospel heresy of man bringing in the Kingdom of God on earth. For those who want to research these terms and topics further, I particularly recommend Lighthouse Trails Research Project; Herescope; and Kjos Ministries.

Sustainable… Missional…Church… Movement…
The 2009 District Conference
"Living Out - Bringing God's Kingdom into our Communities"

We believe in encouraging an environment that empowers the family of churches in the Canadian Pacific District to be a missional movement where God given dreams, visions and passions can be unleashed with life-transforming power.

About | Mission
Evangelism Life Zone

BIOMES : Environmental Transformational Plan

A 'biome' is a life zone, or a region, where special kinds of plants and animals live in a special climate. A biome is made up of unique environmental factors that sustain a particular type of organic life. The language of ecology can be used to express spiritual realities. For our context, biomes are spiritual life zones.

Our objective was to identify strategic life zones and creatively influence the environmental factors surrounding those life zones to stimulate missional transformation.

Just imagine an evangelistic environment where . . .
1. Believers in local churches are missionary to their core, engaging with their community to discover what people need and how they can meet those needs.
2. The local church is seen by the unchurched as a vital part of the health and hope of a community.
3. Each local church identifies its parish and uncovers opportunities to minister kindness and compassion to the marginalized and least reached.

"How about that!," as Mel Allen would say--"Biomes," "spiritual life zones," and "missional transformation" all thrown together. It reads like the bafflegab that the New Age Movement has been serving up for the last 25-30 years. "Biome" is a word I haven’t heard before, but I won’t be surprised to see it catch on in evangelical circles. Note too, that the word is lifted from its proper context of the physical environment and applied to the spiritual environment.

Take the word "church" out of the three points above and substitute "community social service organization" or some such phrase, and the meaning would be the same. The presence and direction of God isn’t necessary for these things to take place; man can accomplish this just by employing the proper paradigm, strategy, and research. It might be pointed out that the church in the book of Acts didn’t bother doing this kind of research. In Acts 11:27-30 we read that a prophet named Agabus came from Jerusalem to Antioch and predicted through the Holy Spirit that a severe famine would spread throughout the entire Roman world. The disciples there provided help for their fellow Christians in Judea, sending their gift by the hands of Barnabas and Paul. There’s no evidence that they let their community know of the coming famine, or provided for their "felt needs." This was when the church was under the leadership of the Apostles, men commissioned directly by the Lord Jesus Christ Himself.

Ministries | Global Ministries
Global Connecting for World Transformations

Our main purpose is to resource and network Churches, Missions Teams, and Missions Commitees and help in the building of a roadmap for the reinvention of church-based missions.

Ah yes, "reinvention." Why is it that in the new "paradigm shift" everything must change right now? It sounds like the old Hegelian dialectic at work: thesis + antithesis = synthesis. It helps the process along to bring in a lot of changes at once--you may be successful at neutralizing potential opposition by keeping people off balance in this way.

Ministries | Church Effectiveness | Church Conflict Assessment & Resolution

It is not enough to just work through a present conflict but we must help our churches develop a clear pathway to exercise biblical peace-making as part of their spiritual DNA.

An interesting and informative article on the term "spiritual DNA" and its connection with the New Apostolic Reformation has recently been posted at Deception Bytes.