LTRP Note: After posting this article by C.H. Fisher, we received an e-mail from a father whose daughter attended the IF: Gathering. Please read the e-mail below plus our response:
To whom it may concern:
I want to state that I have been and I remain a supporter of your faithful exposing of false teachings and teachers. I respect your normal process of checking the facts prior to releasing articles. That is why I am surprised that you reposted the article about the “IF” conferences. This statement alone tells me that this article should never have been posted: “I confess that I didn’t watch any of the conferences, and do not intend to. There isn’t enough time to watch or read everything that is inundating Christianity. It is an overwhelming deluge. However, CT told me everything I need to know to advise every true Christian to avoid them.”
If the writer is trusting [Christianity Today] for information I have a problem right there. I haven’t trusted them for quite some time.
I was not at the conference and neither was the writer of this piece but my daughter was telling me how much she enjoyed some of the speakers she heard this past week at a video conference for women. Guess which one? Yup “IF.” Now I am not pitting her word against anyone except to say that I shared this article with her and her honest opinion was that there were strong misquotes and statements taken out of context. One example is the statement about what if God is real what then…. She said that the actual context was strong encouragement to live lives that reflect strong biblical values and even a warning to the group not to listen to gurus and other false teachers like Oprah.
I write this to you in love and again, I wasn’t there but one thing we all want to avoid is being proven to be crying wolf. Please check the facts and then by all means proceed in faith directing people to the Word of God, The Bible, for correction. Again I love and support what you do. I have purchased material and I will again just please make sure what you post is verifiable.
I continue to pray for you and for the power of God’s truth to change lives.
In Christ _________
OUR RESPONSE:
Hi _______
Thank you for sharing your concerns in your e-mail. ______, although the writer (C.H. Fisher) did not attend the conference, he was basing his article largely on what he knows of the women who were the speakers as well as other documentation. For instance, Ann Voskamp is a figure whom we identify with the emerging church. You can read about her in our article, “Ann Voskamp’s Best Selling Book One Thousand Gifts – A Collision of Inspiration and the New Spirituality.” In addition, IF:Gathering is definitely pushing Spiritual Formation, which is a sometimes subtle but always dangerous spirituality. And the conference is also promoting emerging figures such as Tony Campolo. I realize that your daughter may not have picked up on anything she felt was wrong, but to us, this just proves how these emerging speakers are good at what they do, which is to draw young women away from traditional Christianity and toward a whole new way of thinking. We believe this whole new way is going to hurt these young women, and sadly, most won’t know what is happening until they are heavily influenced.
______, if we go by your reasoning that because we didn’t attend the conference, we should not warn about it, then technically, we shouldn’t say anything about any conference we don’t attend. However, as we see it, a conference often leaves out the “really bad” stuff because that is the hook to get people to become attached to these speakers. Then with books, DVDs, social justice issues, and social media, they present their newfound protégés with the “deeper” information. You can see this on IF speaker Jen Hatmaker’s blog where she lays out the different steps planned for conference attendees after the conference is over (i.e., IF: Gathering, IF
Another example of why we feel the need to warn about this “movement” is Jen Hatmaker. In her book Interrupted: When Jesus Wrecks Your Comfortable Christianity (published by LifeWay) she quotes several emerging figures including Shane Claiborne (quoted over a dozen times) and Catholic priest Richard Rohr. Rohr is the founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation. If you want to see the kinds of things Rohr believes in, just peruse his website where you will currently find Rob Bell and Oprah. In addition, consider what we wrote about Rohr in a 2010 article:
Richard Rohr
Rohr’s spirituality would be in the same camp as someone like Episcopalian panentheist Matthew Fox (author of The Coming of the Cosmic Christ). Rohr wrote the foreword to a 2007 book called How Big is Your God? by Jesuit priest (from India) Paul Coutinho. In Coutinho’s book, he describes an interspiritual community where people of all religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity) worship the same God. For Rohr to write the foreword to such a book, he would have to agree with Coutinho’s views. On Rohr’s website, he currently has an article titled “Cosmic Christ.” One need not look too far into Rohr’s teachings and website to see he is indeed promoting the same Cosmic Christ as Matthew Fox – this is the “christ” whose being they say lives in every human-this of course would nullify the need for atonement by a savior.
So what young women attending IF are going to get is Hatmaker’s spiritual views, which according to her book, have been influenced by Richard Rohr and Shane Claiborne.
Shane Claiborne
Shane Claiborne is a disciple of Tony Campolo, a major figure in the emerging church. Claiborne’s book Irresistible Revolution has a foreword by liberal political activist and anti-Israel/Christian Palestinianism spokesperson Jim Wallis of SoJourners organization.
Jen Hatmaker is just one example of why this warning by C.H. Fisher needed to go out. We researched a number of the other women speakers at IF: Gathering after we received your e-mail and discovered that of the ones we have researched thus far, they all have emergent leanings to one degree or another.
We want to also say that C.H. Fisher was using Christianity Today as a source of information, not as an endorsement of CT. We, ourselves, often use secular or even emerging news sources to back up our stories. Neither LT or Fisher sees CT as a godly source of information. But as reporters, we gather our information from various sources to document our articles.
One last thing, we are not saying that these women speakers are not sincere in what they are doing. But we believe they are sincerely wrong.
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