The Foursquare Church will be presenting a conference this December that leaves little room for doubt that the denomination is saying yes to contemplative and emerging spiritualities. The NextGen Summit 07, taking place in Anaheim, California on December 29-31, will feature speakers who are evangelists for contemplative/emerging spirituality. Some of these include Rick Warren, Erwin McManus, Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz), Jack Hayford, and Shaine Claiborne.
The conference is geared toward young people, and organizers hope it “encourages youth to focus on their relationship with Jesus Christ so that they are not: Slaves to sin; Orphans from God; Living in spiritual poverty.” 1 However, it is unfortunate that the young people attending are going to be exposed to belief systems that will possibly lead them into spiritual deception rather than spiritual nourishment, and the Jesus being presented may not be the biblical Jesus Christ at all. While the conference is marketed as a way to “help embrace orphans, stop human trafficking and fight poverty,” the ecumenical, interspiritual, and mystical means of doing this is a compromise of truth to the highest degree.
Tim Olson, one of the pastors involved with the conference, explains that he took his high school senior group through Shaine Claiborne’s book, The Irresistible Revolution (spent the entire year on the book). Claiborne is part of a movement called “The New Monastics” 2 and the Schools for Conversion, both of which are conduits for mysticism and interspirituality. 3 An exchange between Claiborne and Tony Campolo helps illustrate the nature behind this monastic vision of which Campolo says:
I think there are Muslim brothers and sisters who are willing to say, “You live up to the truth as you understand it. I will live up to the truth as I understand it, and we will leave it up to God on judgment day
The interview between the two also reveals the mystical nature and its importance in the new monasticism:
All of a sudden in the hour of suffering there is a commonality. And that’s where we meet. It’s in mystical spirituality and in communal mutuality that’s where we come together….
Perhaps one of the best things we can do is stop talking with our mouths and cross the chasm between us with our lives. Maybe we will even find a mystical union of the Spirit ….
In a mystical relationship with God, there is a coming together of people where theology is left behind and in this spirituality they found a commonality….
In other words if we are looking for common ground, can we find it in mystical spirituality, even if we cannot theologically agree, Can we pray together in such a way that we connect with a God that transcends our theological differences?
This “common ground” among all peoples and beliefs is the heart and soul of the emerging church and the contemplative prayer movement. It is also the heart and soul of Satan, who wishes to eradicate the gap between good and evil and thus be considered equal to God where he can say “I will be like the Most High [God]” (Isaiah 14). Roger Oakland addresses this:
The serpent’s temptation of Eve in the Garden of Eden, that we can be like God, remains with mankind to this very day. Satan’s plan is to lessen or eliminate (he hopes) the gap between himself and God. The following explanation puts it well:
It is important to understand that Satan is not simply trying to draw people to the dark side of a good versus evil conflict. Actually, he is trying to eradicate the gap between himself and God, between good and evil, altogether. When we understand this approach it helps us see why Thomas Merton said everyone is already united with God or why Jack Canfield said he felt God flowing through all things. All means all–nothing left out. Such reasoning implies that God has given His glory to all of creation; since Satan is part of creation, then he too shares in this glory, and thus is “like the Most High.”
When those in the emerging church try to persuade people that we need to bridge the gap between Christians (or Christ-followers as they put it) and non-Christians, they aren’t really talking about reaching out to the unsaved in order to share the Gospel with them. They are talking about coming to a consensus, a common ground. Leonard Sweetexplains:
The key to navigating postmodernity’s choppy, crazy waters is not to seek some balance or “safe middle ground,” but to ride the waves and bridge the opposites, especially where they converge in reconciliation and illumination.
It takes a little thinking to figure out what Sweet is saying by this statement, but when he talks about bridging the opposites, he’s referring to a chasm that exists between good and evil. This tension between the two is called dualism, and at the heart of occultism is the effort to eradicate it. If that gap could truly be closed, then Satan and God would be equal. The Bible clearly states this will never happen, but it also says that it is Satan’s desire (Isaiah 14)…
This misguided effort to unite all things, to give people the option of maintaining their own religious practices, suggesting they do not have to call themselves Christians is a slippery slope and an undoing of the Christian faith.
Samir Selmanovic was raised in a European Muslim home, then served as a Seventh Day Adventist pastor in the US. Today, he helps to develop the emerging church through his role in the Coordinating Group at Emergent Village and his leadership in Re-church Network. Selmanovic has some interesting and alarming views on Christianity. He states:
The emerging church movement has come to believe that the ultimate context of the spiritual aspirations of a follower of Jesus Christ is not Christianity but rather the kingdom of God…. to believe that God is limited to it [Christianity] would be an attempt to manage God. If one holds that Christ is confined to Christianity, one has chosen a god that is not sovereign. Soren Kierkegaard argued that the moment one decides to become a Christian, one is liable to idolatry.
On Selmanovic’s website, Faith House project, he presents an interfaith vision that will ” seek to bring progressive Jews, Christians, Muslims, and spiritual seekers of no faith to become an interfaith community for the good of the world. We have one world and one God.”
While Selmanovic says he includes Christians in this interspiritual dream for the world, he makes it clear that while they might be included, they are in no way beholders of an exclusive truth. He states:
Is our religion [Christianity] the only one that understands the true meaning of life? Or does God place his truth in others too? Well, God decides, and not us. The gospel is not our gospel, but the gospel of the kingdom of God, and what belongs to the kingdom of God cannot be hijacked by Christianity.
While it is true that God is the One who decides where He is going to place truth, He has already made that decision. And the answer to that is found in the Bible. When Selmanovic asks if Christianity is the only religion that understands the true meaning of life, the answer is yes. How can a Buddhist or a Hindu or a Muslim fully understand truth when their religions omit a Savior who died for their sins?
Though world religions may share some moral precepts (don’t lie, steal, etc), the core essence (redemption) of Christianity is radically different from all of them. Interspirituality may sound noble on the surface, but in actuality, Selmanovic and the other emerging church leaders are facilitating occultist Alice Bailey’s rejuvenation of the churches. In her rejuvenation, everyone remains diverse (staying in their own religion), yet united in perspective, with no one religion claiming a unique corner on the truth. In other words all religions lead to the same destination and emanate from the same source. And of course, Bailey believed that a “coming one” whom she called Christ would appear on the scene in order to lead united humanity into an era of global peace. However, you can be sure that if such a scenario were to take place as Bailey predicted, there would be no room for those who cling to biblical truth.
As is the case with so many emergent leaders, Selmanovic’s confusing language dances obscurely around his theology, whether he realizes it or not. Sadly, for those who are lost and who are trying to find the way, the emerging church movement offers confusion in place of clarity. It blurs if not obliterates the walls of distinction between good and evil, truth and falsehood, leaving people to stumble along a broken path, hoping to find light. In sharp contrast, Jesus commanded believers to stand out as beacon lights in this dark world, bearing the Word of God to a lost and dying generation. (for citations, see Faith Undone, pp. 18-188)
Critics of conferences like the NextGen Summit are often labeled hateful and divisive people who don’t care about the poor and suffering. But that is because most people do not understand the warnings in the Bible about a great deception in which Satan will deceive the whole world (Revelation 12:9). This deception will convince the world that rather than needing a Savior to atone for their sins and rather than calling Jesus Christ the one and only Lord, every human has divinity within (but just needs to realize it), and true atonement isn’t a Savior dying in our place but is rather a coming together of humanity in oneness to help the poor and suffering and to rid the world of war and pollution.
It is important to note that many of the speakers at the NextGen Summit promote contemplative (i.e., mysticism). Erwin McManus says that mysticism is the core of his own spirituality. Rick Warren has been steadily promoting both contemplative and emerging for years (see A Time of Departing), Jack Hayford is a proponent of Richard Foster’s work, and incidentally the Foursquare denomination has become increasingly influenced and infiltrated by contemplative spirituality. Mysticism is at the center of this emerging vision and new monasticism for the world. Why is that? Occultists and New Agers believe that mysticism is the commonality between all world religions. And it is in the mystical realm where all is one (they say) and all is God.
What young people today need most of all is a clear message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, so that He can become Lord of their lives, and they can then know real truth that will set them free and give them eternal life.
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