As our routine has been further derailed by my son's injury, I decided on a recent rainy Sunday to revisit an Alliance (CMA) congregation near us that we attended over twenty years ago. I have stopped in on occasion over the years and to be blunt the decline has been remarkable in terms of numbers, content, and overall quality. My recent visit was particularly disappointing.
I could spend some time talking about the commotion during
prayer, or the rudeness of the congregation (roughly half of the 25 people
showed up late), but that's just par for the course when it comes to modern
American Evangelicalism and its general reflection of American culture.
The music situation has also degenerated. Last time I visited
they had a piano and acoustic guitar which while that's less than ideal, it was
better than what now exists. Apparently they have no musicians and so now they
broadcast lyrics with graphics and photos on the screen accompanied by not just
background music (as was the practice when this sort of thing became popular in
the 1990's) but the full musical and vocal accompaniment of a pop song. Basically
it's contemporary Christian music (CCM) being played with screen-decorated
shots of the lyrics. There's no song leader, so the pop singer on the audio
functions in that capacity and everyone (kind of) sings along. It was very
off-putting and rather spirit-quenching I would say but obviously some didn't
think so. There were raised hands accompanied by two teenage boys swaying to
the music and crashing into each other to the beat – a silliness their parents
willingly permitted. It was met with a smile and a 'what will they think of
next' shake of the head.
As music has largely replaced the sacraments in Evangelical
ecclesiology, the notion of returning to New Testament patterns of simplicity
and a capella singing is literally
unfathomable. Despite its almost total absence from the New Testament, the
music is the sine qua non of the
Evangelical church experience – almost a Mark of the Church one might say. How
depressed these small congregations must be (and how desperate) when they lose
the ability (due to numbers and finances) to put on a show. There's almost no
hope left for them once they cross that line.
And nowadays even the pop music isn't enough as more and more
congregations turn to light shows, fog machines, and the like. A man I know who
recently experienced a head injury and attends one of these Evangelical rock
concert seeker-type congregations had to quit going. The lights and strobes
were generating real pain and he had to leave. I found his account somewhat
ironic – or maybe poetic.
We had a "Children's Sermon" – which (despite its
already gimmicky nature) was even more ridiculous than normal as there were no
children there. The group of four that went forward seemed to be young
teenagers – or pubescent at the very least. The semi-comedic lesson was some
nonsense which involved looking into a mirror (which included them receiving yes,
hand-held mirrors) and understanding 'just who they were'.
The 'sermon' had to do with God's sheep hearing his voice and
so to my utter amazement we had to watch a three minute YouTube video of people
calling to sheep and failing – the sheep only responding in the end to the
Scandinavian shepherd's voice. The video including lots of comedy as did the
entire proceedings. I couldn't believe what I was sitting through.
I might have walked out this time but I was curious to see
where things would go and there was an older man in front of me that I knew
from all those years ago when we had attended. My son who was with me (not the
one who broke his back) could tell that the older gentleman was not into the
proceedings either.
The entire experience was pretty bad but there were a few
doctrinal points that stood out.
The first (I suppose) is in the grand scheme of things rather
minor. During one of several interactive portions of the meeting the pastor was
calling on congregants to tell the group something about God – something that
makes Him great. I guess it was basically an appeal to the so-called Attributes
of God, but it didn't go that direction. There was no mention of grace,
holiness, omniscience, or omnipotence. Instead as might be expected it was
things like 'He saved us' and that sort of thing. Not necessarily bad or inaccurate
statements, but it demonstrated a real paucity in terms of knowledge and
reflection – really an indictment of the pastor and his failures to teach the
group anything during his time there. The language was confused. 'He died for
us' was mentioned and other things along those lines. The Doctrine of God can
be confusing but there are basics that can be taught with regard to how we
speak and think. While Christ is certainly Jehovah and thus God, it is not
usually reckoned proper to speak of God dying or God dying for us. I realize
this is a conundrum and one can quickly get into trouble as one attempts to
navigate these notions and qualify such statements. I chalked it up to folk
that hadn't been taught much of anything and on a day to day basis you hear
this kind of confusion commonly expressed in prayer. Again, I blame the
leadership.
And nowadays (I might add) there is even a strong modalist
tendency at work in some circles and so an attempt to differentiate could lead
to resistance.
I was actually more troubled about the talk surrounding why
Christ died for you and this is a refrain I now commonly encounter on
Evangelical radio. It's almost a strange variation or permutation of the
doctrines of election and Sovereign Grace. It's as if they're run through a
filter, the semi-Pelagian and psychological default that now dominates
Evangelicalism and American cultural intuition.
The gospel message of Christ dying for you when you don't
deserve it, and are in fact wholly unworthy of the grace of God, being apart
from Christ, an alienated object of wrath – is not understood. In fact it's
flipped on its head. Instead, it's because Christ died for you – therefore you
are special. You are valuable. God counted you important and worthy. In other
words it's the cultural-psychological attitudes surrounding self-esteem being
blended with evangelical language and the doctrine of Sovereignty and in fact
overshadowing and overcoming it.
The problem is this – that's not the gospel of the New
Testament. It is in fact a dangerous perversion that promotes pride instead of
humility, self-affirmation instead of mortification. And it fits perfectly in
the context of Evangelicalism's Cheap Grace gospel paradigm and its
presumption-based approach to assurance. It also dovetails nicely with the
strong feminist impulses that dominate Evangelicalism. The shame-faced quiet
and modest femininity of the New Testament is unknown or rejected with
prejudice. Piety is supposedly 'Spirit-led' self-assertion. You are a queen.
You are a princess – speak out, exert yourself, and exercise your authority.
This takes on an even uglier complexion when it's run through the filter of
Dominionism. With women it fosters feminism, with men it feeds pride and fuels
entitlement – and the evils these things produce.
I've been writing about this for some time, how the
prevalence of New Calvinism has forced many Evangelicals to (at least in part)
embrace some of the theological categories of that system and its lexicon and yet
in many cases it's clear they don't understand them in the least. Somehow grace
and election have been turned into tools of 'empowerment' and self-affirmation
– not a humbling truth that breaks all pride but one that is the occasion for
self-value and self-glorification. This goes along with all the language about
how guilt is transformed from being a Spirit-wrought sign of a healthy
conscience and brokenness seeking out Divine reconciliation, into something
harmful or 'believing lies about yourself'.
Guilt can of course become harmful and there are those that
can't get past it and need to wrestle with whether or not they are truly
submitting to what God says about grace and the forgiveness found in Christ's
death and resurrection and our union with Him. But for these folks, guilt is
viewed as something inhibiting you from reaching your full potential, a harmful
thing to your ego and psyche and thus something that needs to be eradicated –
not so you can humbly glory in God's grace but rather so that you can feel good
about yourself and have that swagger to your step.
To be blunt, I reckon it Satanic.
And then near the end of the message there was another
glaring error though I'm sure many would miss it. The sermon went off the rails
into a discussion about hearing God's voice and how this is necessary for
Christians. There was almost no Scripture. It was all stories and illustrations
– some of it was just plain bizarre.
He never clearly defined what he meant but it seemed to be
that the 'hearing' was in the form of Charismatic experience. At the end of the
message he had gone so far off down that path that his wife (who spoke quite
often and seemed rather eager to do so) felt compelled to intervene in his
sermon (from the front pew) and point out that the Spirit would never tell us to
do anything that was contrary to Scripture. He quickly assented to this,
realizing he had left out something important. It was (in the context of the
off-the-rails message) a good point, but I have a feeling the 'spirit' was
telling her to constantly run her mouth even while the Scriptures make it clear
that she shouldn't teach and it it's a shame for her to speak in the meeting.
You must be Spirit-led to be a Christian he argued. That's
all well and good but again it depends on what you mean by that. It's a
Biblical statement but it can be framed in very unbiblical terms.
Now he was sharp enough to know that most of the congregation
and many other professed Christians he would know have not experienced that
kind of listening to or walking with the Spirit (as understood
in Charismatic terms), and so he wouldn't want to say that those people aren't
actually Christians.
But then it got rather confusing when he decided to evoke
Romans 8 because it contradicted the erroneous point he was trying to make.
Leaving aside the Pauline context of the carnal mind and flesh being contrasted
with the Spirit, he (to further his point) quoted verse 14:
For as many as are led
by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God
He followed the logic – not led by the Spirit of God, then
not a son of God. But because he defined led
by the Spirit as the audible or semi-audible Charismatic experience of
God's voice, then the implication would be that if you don't hear the voice – then you're not a son of God. He
wasn't willing to go there.
And so therefore he quickly repeated the verse with his qualification
or addition to the passage (in italics):
For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the mature sons of God.
Now that's quite different and alarm bells went off. Immediately
I thought of the theology surrounding the Second Work of Grace, or Higher
Life-type theologies which allow for two grades of Christians. According to
these schools of thought, there are those who are Christian but are carnal, not
fully living their lives for God and then there are those who are spiritual,
those who have by means of a second work of grace graduated or surrendered to a higher type of
Christian life. Under this model, one is regenerated and saved, but subsequent
to regeneration some Christians receive another renewal/transformation and as a
result attain a new level of spirituality or holiness. It's almost as if
sanctification becomes optional. Some are involved in the process, some
Christians are not – all categories alien to Scripture.
And worse, in the Wesleyan tradition some go further and
attain the hubris-ridden fiction of Perfection
or what is tantamount to full sanctification. While Perfectionism remained
within the Wesleyan tradition, this kind of two-tier Christianity (in its broad
strokes) continued and would eventually become mainstream in Evangelicalism
under the guise of the Carnal Christian teaching.
And while some Evangelicals and even Confessionalists wish to
divide the discussions of justification and sanctification and/or view
sanctification as something subordinate to the primary justification-message of
the gospel, this erroneous example demonstrates how they are in fact inseparable
and what happens when you do in fact treat them in isolation.
So in addition to a highly dubious understanding of being led
by the Spirit of God/hearing God's voice, he then assumed and imposed a
Holiness soteriological/sanctification paradigm upon the text of Romans forcing
him to change its meaning and add a qualifier (and thus a category) that's
nowhere to be found in that text. In other words he twisted the Scripture to
fit his erroneous theology. It was a confused mess but in some respects it does
typify the kind of confused Holiness-Evangelical hybrid (or mess) represented
by the Christian Missionary Alliance movement. In this case one might say it
seems to have gleaned from the worst of both worlds.
The Free Grace fundamentalist-Baptist types have a Cheap
Grace gospel that teaches a watered down understanding of faith, a mere
intellectual-emotional assent that largely tends to exclude repentance, that
then teaches a dangerous form of presumption in the place of assurance – the
doctrine of Once Saved Always Saved. This Decisional Regeneration seeks to
magnify God's grace but instead it cheapens it and gives false comfort to many
who have not actually understood the gospel.
In this case, in the broad spectrum of the Holiness tradition
(modified and operating within the Evangelical spectrum) we have something
different but the same. The Alliance (CMA) doesn't believe in Once Saved Always
Saved but by embracing the two-tier Christian system, they can easily allow for
a type of carnal Christianity. Scriptures that are meant to apply to all Christians
are instead narrowed and only apply to the higher order of Christians. The
'bar' as it were is much lower for those who are carnal or immature as the
preacher would have it. It's a softer and more latitudinarian two-tier system
than what is found in the rigid Holiness tradition.
To put it simply, that's not the gospel and such teachings
are in fact dangerous. We can disagree on the nature of assurance and the like
but in this case alien categories that have been deduced as the result of
philosophical and emotional commitments interacting with Scripture are leading
to theological innovation and the imposition of words and concepts – that at
the same time detract from the teachings of Scripture.
Let's just say I was happy to leave although I was greatly
burdened as the congregation and general tone of the meeting was already so
degraded and then to hear these kinds of errors was depressing. Their shepherd
is misleading them and in fact doing them harm.
It's hard to imagine that congregation surviving another ten
years. I'm afraid I won't weep when its doors are finally closed for the last
time because at this juncture I'm not sure I can say that it is actually
helping anyone and in fact is probably doing much more harm than good.