Not all religion is good religion. Some religion is bad religion. How do we know which is which? How can we tell good religion from the bad? The test is fairly simple. God is love. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of love. If someone claims to speak by the Spirit but the spirit is not a Spirit of love then they are false prophets. John understood this and explains it very clearly in I John chapter 4 where he says:
Dear friends, let us continue to love one another, for love comes from God. Anyone who loves is born of God and knows God. But anyone who does not love does not know God -- for God is love. God showed how much he loved us by sending his only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through him. This is real love. It is not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins. Dear friends, since God loved us that much, we surely ought to love each other. No one has ever seen God. But if we love each other, God lives in us, and his love has been brought to full expression through us. And God has given us his Spirit as proof that we live in him and he in us. Furthermore, we have seen with our own eyes and now testify that the Father sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. All who proclaim that Jesus is the Son of God have God living in them, and they live in God. We know how much God loves us and we have put our trust in him. God is love, and all who live in love live in God and God lives in them. And as we live in God, our love grows more perfect. So we will not be afraid on the day of judgment, but we can face him with confidence because we are like Christ here in this world. Such love has no fear because perfect love expels all fear. If we are afraid, it is for fear of judgment, and this shows that his love has not been perfected in us. We love each other as a result of his loving us first. If someone says, "I love God," but hates a Christian brother or sister, that person is a liar; for if we don't love people we can see, how can we love God, whom we have not seen? And God himself has commanded that we must love not only him but our Christian brothers and sisters too. I John 4:7-21 (New Living Translation)In other words, the ultimate test of true religion is the love of God whose love we know because of the sacrifice of the son (I John 4:2-3). Since no one has ever seen God except in the lives of his followers, we must "live in love." If we have the Spirit of love in us we will love one another. Our actions will be governed by love and not by fear.
Unfortunately, there is a real reluctance among Christian leaders (including local pastors and priests) to take a strong stand against others in their "fraternity." We see this in the struggle the Catholic hierarchy has had in dealing with priests with known records of child sexual abuse. But it is not just the Catholic hierarchy that is unwilling to take a stand. Mainstream Protestant Christian leaders have also been timid and unwilling to repudiate false teachings. As a result, many false prophets fill the airwaves of radio and television with garbage in the name of Christ, subjecting Christ and Christianity to ridicule and mockery and almost no one challenges their claim that they speak by the Spirit. Many local pastors spew hate from their pulpits nearly every Sunday and nearly no one takes a stand against them.
If we are to have religious freedom we must allow others to believe things we are sure are wrong. So while I may be convinced that spewing hate from the pulpit is bad religion, the pastor who is convinced otherwise has a right to spew. However, Christians also have a responsibility to distance mainline Christianity from false teachings and fraudulent practices. So here goes.
If a missionary came back from working with a tribe in a foreign place and described these same bizzare behaviors, many Christians would take this as proof of demon possession, yet in Toronto crawling around on the floor and barking like a dog is taken as evidence of the Holy Spirit. This is no more a manifestation of the Holy Spirit than the tricks of a stage hypnotist.
How do we know it is a fraud? It seems Christian. The Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship talks about God's love, they have a "School of Ministry," they give lip service to Christ's second commandment, "love your neighbor as yourself."
The way we know the spirit is a fraud is by what it inspires people
to do. When people come out of these services, do they go home and seek
opportunities to serve? Are they inspired to commit more of their time
and resources to taking care of widows and orphans, do they seek opportunities
to minister to those who are suffering? Are they more likely to volunteer
for Habitat for Humanity or Hospice? Are they more likely to give time
to help unwed mothers? Do they seek to affiliate with local congregations
with strong records of service and ministry? No, what they do is spend
time and resources to get back to the high spiritual experience again.
It is like a drug addition and their idea of ministry, outreach, and evangelism
is to get others addicted to the same drug. This is a fraud.
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While some Pentecostal and Charismatic congregations have fallen into
this trap, many do a good job of walking this line. I know of one Charismatic
congregation with a fantastic community outreach program that recently
raised 6 million dollars to purchase an four-auditorium theater complex
in a shopping center. They converted the auditoriums to a chapel, arcades,
basketball courts, soda fountains and snack bars, to provide a safe, Christian
environment for the teenagers of the community. The facility is operated
by and supervised by adult church members on a volunteer basis and is crowded
with hundreds of teenagers whenever it is open. I recently had the opportunity
to join a group of men and women from this church who spent their Saturday
cleaning and painting the home of a single mom whose house caught fire
not long after her insurance had been cancelled. Clearly, this congregation
has not let being Pentecostal interfere with their dedication to service.
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Hitler used demagoguery to stir up and motivate his followers. Witchdoctors sometimes use fear to control people. But whenever cult leaders, preachers, evangelists, and religious leaders, use these techniques, Christians must protest strongly. Jim Jones used fear of the government to control his congregation. He taught his paranoid ideology so effectively that his followers were willing to commit suicide on his command when they thought the prophesied government takeover had come.
The news media are sometimes guilty of sensationalizing stories. Then unscrupulous religious leaders pick these stories up and use them for their own purposes. This leads to doomsday preaching that emphasizes the ills of society. It's bad enough that the media only report the bad news, but when Christians constantly hear the same stories repeated from the pulpit it is no wonder that they begin to lose faith in our institutions. Not long ago I sat through a sermon in which the pastor wanted to impress on the congregation the depth of depravity in our society. He dragged up incidents from the news from as far back as 20 years and presented them without referring to the fact that many of these incidents happened a long time ago. The sermon implied that the events had all happened recently and that things that were unheard of when he was a boy now happen nearly every day. That is a lie and a fraud. It is playing on people's fears to gain support and control.
Dr. James Kennedy frequently uses sensational headlines designed to scare Christians as part of his "ministry." Recently his website sported the following headlines: "Marriage is Under Attack," "Supreme Court Butchers Constitution," and "Nations Courts Enable Pedophile to Fantasize in City's Park." This type of misrepresentation and oversimplification of complex issues is designed to play on people's fears, not to motivate them to live more in the love of Christ but rather to motivate them to political action that will increase the power and position of a particular political group.
Tim LaHaye uses a scenario based on United Nations bashing in his doomsday/end times novels. These fictional works encourage belief in secret plots to form one world government with an evil antichrist dictator that will takeover the world and torture and kill and persecute Christians This is another example of playing on people's fears to motivate them to support a particular political position.
Many mainline Christians see the political agenda supported by these
groups as ill advised at best and extremely dangerous at worst. The unwavering
support of the conservatives in American politics for Israeli expansionism
has kept the United States from being an effective force for peace and
allowed an extremely unstable and dangerous world situation to develop
in the Middle East. In addition to support for Israel, some Christian conservatives
such as Jerry Falwell, Guy Dury, Franklin Graham, and Hal Lindsey foster
antagonism toward Arabs and Islam. If this has had any effect it is to
encourage Islamic terrorists and confirm in their mind the evil, satanic
nature of the United States. Mainline Christians are dismayed by how far
this political agenda is from the peace, tolerance and understanding we
find in the message of Christ and at the center of American democracy.
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Prophecy preachers will preach sermons and write books proclaiming that they have proof from God himself that some world leader is the antichrist and is on the very verge of ushering in doomsday and the end of the world. The week after that person dies, the same preachers will preach with as much certainty and Biblical proof as ever that someone else is the prophesied evildoer. They shift gears without using the clutch; with never so much as a "Sorry 'bout that," or "Oops, I guess I was wrong." They never admit they've made a mistake, they continue to preach as if the current sermon is what they've always preached.
When will Christians put their collective foot down and stop this nonsense.
The Bible is very clear, " . . . for ye know neither the day nor the hour wherein the Son of man cometh." (Matt 25:13). Trying to figure out how close we are to the end is a fraud. Not only that, it distracts Christians from the mission of the Church which is to live Christ into the world. Christianity is supposed to be a force for good in the world. Wherever Christ went, he made the world a better place. Wherever Christians have influence they should make the world a better place. But doomsday, end of the world, preachers lead Christians to apathy, hopelessness, and inactivity.
The other day Pat Robertson told his audience that there was no point in working for peace in the middle east because God had already ordained that the situation was going to continue to deteriorate until a world ending, cataclysmic war leads to the destruction of the world. God ordained that it is going to happen any day now and there is no point in trying to avoid disaster; there is no point in trying to avoid war; there is no point in trying to avoid the holocaust. Nothing we can do will make a difference. Peace talks and negotiations are a waste of time because the only hope is Jesus and the only thing that would have any impact on the Middle East situation would be if the Muslims would convert to Christianity.
Wait a minute Pat. That is a fraud. It is not Christian. It is not Biblical.
And the God that I believe in did not ordain hopelessness and destruction
for His creation. The Christ I know is the Christ of hope; the Christ of
peace; the Christ of love and understanding. Christ teaches us that if
we love, unselfishly, those who hate us, we can change hate into love.
We can change misunderstanding and intolerance to caring. We can, we must,
work as Christians to make this a better world. Christ does not want us
to abandon hope and just let the situation deteriorate until the world
destroys itself. That is bad religion.
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Markus Borg discusses the Biblical approach to end times and the second coming as follows:
. . . the theme of a last judgment in the New Testament makes the point
that how we act within history does matter. Matthew does this in a particularly
arresting way with his parable of the sheep and goats. In Matthew's context,
it is a second coming parable: "When the Son of Man comes in his glory,
and all the angels with him, then he shall sit on the throne of his glory,
and all the nations will be gathered before him." What is striking is the
criterion by which the judgment is made: have you fed the hungry, welcomed
the stranger, clothed the naked, cared for the sick, visited the prisoners?
The point of the parable is clear: the most important ethical issue is,
"Have we lived compassionately?"
-- Borg, M.J. & Wright, N.T. (2000) The Meaning of Jesus: two visions.
Harper, San Francisco.
How we act in history does matter. As followers of the Great Physician we are obligated to work to heal our world.
When I was quite young I was involved with a congregation that spent
a year or more getting together every Sunday evening to study charts and
diagrams detailing the various dispensations of history and learning the
exact sequence of events which would occur at the time of the destruction
of the world and the second coming of Christ. They learned about the various
seals that would be opened and the events that would occur when each seal
was open. They learned about the various monsters and creatures that would
be involved. They looked at artists' conceptions of what these creatures
might look like. It was a fascinating study. Everyone was very excited.
They felt like they were being let in on great secrets. But that study
was a fraud. Most of the adults who participated in that study are now
dead. Even if the things they learned were 100% true, how did knowing that
the sixth bowl would be emptied on the Euphrates River improve their lives
or improve the lives of the people they encountered. Did this study make
them more compassionate? Did it make the world a better place? No, this
is bad religion. If this group of Christians had spent their Sunday evenings
working on a Habitat for Humanity house, they would have had the camaraderie,
the sense of community, the sense of unity, a far more effective outreach,
and would have made the world a better place to boot.
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All Christians must take a strong stand against these practices. We
must stand up and loudly shout to all who will listen that this is not
true Christianity and that true Christians will have nothing to do with
these practices. A crime is a crime whether a "Christian" commits it in
the name of Christ or not.
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Fundamentalist Muslims believe that a woman can go to heaven only through child bearing. Of course the Bible says the same thing in one of the passages used by the Southern Baptists to insist on the inferiority of women. I Timothy 2:11-15 (Christian Standard Bible) says, "A woman should learn in silence with full submission. I do not allow a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; instead, she is to be silent. For Adam was created first, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and transgressed. But she will be saved through childbearing, if they continue in faith, love, and holiness, with good sense." If literalism continues to grow among conservative evangelicals, I wonder how long until salvation through childbearing becomes part of their doctrine too. Teaching that God put passages such as this in the Bible is a fraud.
Mormon fundamentalists don't let girls go to school. Women are for sex and child bearing and don't need an education. This is a fraud
Recently, a number of women have written books and made the church lecture circuit telling other women how much better their lives are now that they have realized that Gods place for women is to live in submission to their husbands. These women argue that once they became obedient, their marriages improved, their relationships with their husbands improved, they now have inner peace and tranquility, the joy of Jesus, etc., etc. This is a fraud.
Every time I hear one of these speakers I am reminded of an earlier
situation. Just prior to the civil war the slave owners paraded out a number
of black men and women who plead with their audiences to not let them do
away with slavery. They argued that slavery was all they had ever known.
They wouldn't know what to do if they were freed. They wouldn't be able
to support their families. They didn't have any education. They didn't
have any training. There were no jobs for black people. The slave masters
were so good to them and took such good care of them. If they were freed
they would have no place to go and no place to live and the children would
starve. If nothing else, please don't free the slaves for the sake of the
children. Undoubtedly some of these individuals were sincere in their belief
that slavery was best for them. However, this was a fraud back then
and the arguments of the women advocating submission are a fraud today.
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Just as cruel are the religious leaders who tell gay teens and their parents that if they have enough faith, God will change their sexual preference. Someone has a moral problem here. It is the Christian leader who refuses to accept the scientific evidence concerning homosexuality because of some perverted interpretation of the Bible and as a result fosters prejudice and misunderstanding and interferes with the gay teen's adjustment and acceptance of who he or she is. This is as unconscionable as telling parents of a child with Down's syndrome that if they just have enough faith, the child can be healed.
Prayer is important. Faith works. Prayer and faith are vital sources of strength and support for families dealing with difficult adjustments. Prayer changes things, but frequently the thing that changes is our attitude toward the situation and not the situation itself. God doesn't promise to make the changes we request. God only promises to give us the needed strength, courage, and understanding to accept those who are different and love, encourage, and support them.
It is a fraud to teach that if Christians just have enough faith and
if they are in a right relationship with God then God will protect them
and their families from bad things happening to them. According to pastors
that preach this heresy, if you give enough money to the church, believe
hard enough, and have the Holy Spirit then there will be this bubble of
protection around you. You won't get in car wrecks and fender benders,
you won't lose your car keys, you won't get sick, etc. This is a fraud.
Christians face all the same troubles faced by non-Christians with a similar
lifestyle. They are no less likely to get sick, or hurt, or face calamity
than non-Christians with a similar lifestyle. That is not how God works.
That is not what Christianity is about. Christ gives us hope, courage,
and strength to deal with the things that happen to everybody. As it says
in the Bible, "For he causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good,
and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous." (Matt 5:45 CSB).
Christian farmers, on average, grow no better crops in their fields than
their non-Christian neighbors and their picnics are just as likely to get
rained out. The difference is the attitude of the Christian to a rained
out picnic.
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The TV preachers preach an empty gospel. You can't tell they are a fraud by what they say or by the way they preach. They are as devout as anybody. They are as committed as anyone. They are sincere. They use all the right words. Their doctrines are sound. They teach the same things our local pastors teach. They emphasize that they are trying to win people to Christ by telling them what Christ can do for them. They emphasize the joy, peace, and happiness in the Christian life. These are the same messages we get from our local pastors. And there is an 800 number you can call for "counseling," and an address where you can send your check so they can expand their ministry and reach even more people. It sounds like the gospel, it looks like the gospel, it feels like the gospel but it is empty inside. How can I say that is an empty gospel?
Christ lives!! Christ lives in his followers. You can't say you have met the President of the United States because you have seen him on TV. You can't say you have met Christ because you have seen one of his followers on TV either. Christ can do a lot for you but "his only hands are my hands, his only feet are my feet." If Christ is going to do something for you it will most likely be done by one of his followers coming to you in your time of need with solace, encouragement, or aid. Yes, there is joy, peace, and happiness in the Christian life, but it is the joy of service, the good feeling you get when you have genuinely and unselfishly given of yourself to help someone who is hurting.
The TV evangelists teach some kind of magic gospel. If you recite the correct magic incantation (called the sinners prayer -- repeat after me . . .), then suddenly all your problems will evaporate, you won't be stressed anymore, your marriage will be fixed, you will have inner peace and tranquility and great joy will flood into your life, etc. etc.
Sorry, it doesn't work that way. It sounds like the true gospel but it isn't. It is an empty promise and an empty gospel. (If you are saying, "I've been in a local congregation for many years and have never heard this before," then maybe your local pastor is preaching the same empty gospel as the TV evangelists. Evaluate your local church. Make changes as needed.)
Becoming a Christian involves an encounter with love. You are much more likely to encounter that love in a person than in a TV or radio broadcast or in a book or tract (although sometimes a person is set on a quest to find Christ by these means). And while encountering the love of Christ can be a very strong and pleasurable emotional experience producing a powerful sense of release, the inner tranquility, peace, joy, and happiness of the Christian life don't happen until you find a place of service. Billy Graham's crusades always began with an advance team moving into a city to mobilize the local congregations. Graham's first priority was always to assure that as many of those reached through the crusade as possible were integrated into local congregations as quickly as possible. That is why his ministry worked.
Show me where the persons who have been reached through mass evangelism are serving. Show me how much of the mass evangelists budget is being spent to alleviate human suffering. If the money is all being plowed back into building a bigger empire, to reach more potential donors with the same empty gospel, then it is a fraud. (If you are saying, that's really what my local congregation is doing, plowing all the receipts back into building bigger facilities for itself; if very little of the budget of your local church is being used to reach out to those who are hurting, then maybe change is needed.)
Wherever Christ went, he made the world a better place. Christians must
use their influence to make the world a better place as well.
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At this point, the offerings are not gifts given to the work of God but become investments. Some unscrupulous pastors encourage their followers to cash in their retirement, take out second mortgages on their homes, withdraw savings, cash CD's, and sell stocks and bonds to give "seed money" to the church; all with promise of great return. This is irresponsible, immoral, and definitely not Christian. There is no telling how many persons have been led to financial ruin in the name of Christ.
God promises to bless those who are cheerful givers but he doesn't promise to bless them financially. God expects his followers to pay the tithe and an offering. God does not promise to return the tithe to his followers with interest. That is completely crazy. Of course there are cases of persons who have given money to the church and then are subsequently blessed financially but most of the time, the blessings God pours out on givers are spiritual blessings.
Whenever, a pastor or Christian leader starts using the "seed money"
ruse to bilk his/her followers out of their money, Christians need to put
their collective foot down. We need to stop this nonsense. If Christians
cannot police themselves and stop this type of fraud, then eventually the
government will have to step in to stop it to protect our citizens and
then we will have lost much more than our reputation.
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Copyright © 2003 Steve Falkenberg