The 2007 Cornerstone Festival will take place June 25th – 30th in Bushnell, Illinois. The festival promotes contemplative spirituality and the emerging church. Last year, we reported that World Vision and Wycliffe Bible Translators were two of the festival’s sponsors. In our report, we stated:
Cornerstone Festival (July 2006) offers a labyrinth, contemplative “prayer rhythms” and more.
On July 4th through 8th, Cornerstone Festival (a ministry of Jesus People USA) took place. Sponsors of the event included World Vision and Wycliffe Bible Translators. The event offered a prayer labyrinth and “contemplative journeys of prayer.” In addition, the festival offered an Imaginarium titled Days of the Dead. (Caution: Young children should not view this link.)
The festival also presented The Burning Bush Program, which offers labyrinths and “Mystical Art Soup … helping young people identify and develop their gifts in the arts.”
The question must be asked, what were World Vision and Wycliffe Bible Translators thinking when they agreed to sponsor this event? With seminars on Celtic Monasticism, Kierkegaard’s Relevance to the Contemporary Church, Martial Arts and Missions, and The Revolutionary Way of Christ: Toward a Postmodern Christology, it would be difficult to mistake this for anything other than a promotion for contemplative and emerging spiritualities with overtones in the occult.
While this year’s festival will still present features like Imaginarium (no children viewing please), The Burning Bush and many workshops and seminars on contemplative/emerging spiritualities (which are based on occultic philosophy), World Vision and Wycliffe do not appear to be sponsoring the event this year. On the Sponsors page, both organizations’ names are missing.
There have been growing concerns that World Vision is being influenced by contemplative/emerging leaders. A May 2006 article titled “World Vision Promotes Emerging Leader”, reported that World Vision’s Child View magazine carried a full page article by emerging church leader Brian McLaren. World Vision later responded with the following comments:
[R]egarding Brian McLaren’s column in the “Faith in Action” section of Childview. At World Vision, we recognize that the body of Christ includes all who follow Jesus and who seek God’s kingdom here on earth. As Christians, we may not all agree on the same doctrines. But let us strive for tolerance and inclusion as we work toward our common purpose of being the hands and feet of Jesus in a suffering world.
Unfortunately, this “inclusion” creates a serious problem for the Bible believing Christian because contemplative/emerging spiritualities ultimately are panentheistic (God in all) and occultic in nature.
According to archived web files, 2005 was the first year Cornerstone Festival website showed its sponsors1. The 2005 sponsor list included World Vision, Wycliffe, Zondervan publishers, Teen Mania, and Greenville College. The 2006 Sponsor list also included Zondervan, Teen Mania, and Greenville College (along with World Vision and Wycliffe). 2The 2007 list not only is missing World Vision and Wycliffe Bible Translators, it does not include Teen Mania and Zondervan either. However, Greenville College is still sponsoring the event. Added to this year’s list is Compassion International.
Greenville College has an emphasis on spiritual formation and offers courses such as COR102: Christian Thought & Life, which include Henri Nouwen, M. Scott Peck, Robert Webber (Ancient-Future worship), and Richard Foster as “possible text” material. A 2005 new materials list in the Greenville library shows titles by Brian McLaren, Eugene Peterson, and Michael Frost. With regard to Cornerstone Festival, a 2004 press release shows that Greenville’s decision to be a part of the festival had to do, at least in part, with the music.3 Greenville College is affiliated with the Free Methodist denomination.
We hope that Greenville College and Compassion International will reconsider their sponsorship toward Cornerstone Festival, which is a conduit for mystical spirituality.
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