Warnings to the Church

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The biblical job description of pastors and elders is twofold. First, they are to guard the flock from false teachers trying to invade the church from the outside and from false teachers rising up from within. (Acts 20:28-30) Second, church leaders are also to:

equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. (Ephesians 4:12-14)

It is not an easy job. People who say we need to get back to “first-century Christianity” may not realize that leading the early church was no picnic. It was a difficult job in the First Century, and in fact, nearly all of the New Testament, with the exception of Philemon, was written to refute false teaching and false prophets, as well as correct bad doctrine and bad behavior. As we read the opening pages of Revelation, we find these issues were still plaguing the church. In the early centuries of the church, the false teachings were spread by word of mouth and carried on handwritten parchments, on foot, or by sea. The Anti-Nicene Fathers continued refuting and correcting bad teaching, false teaching, etc., for centuries, and the battle continues today. The task of pastors and elders may even be more complicated today since the flock they are charged to protect has many varied and sundry resources to gain information – Christian bookstores, Television preachers, and word of mouth from other believers who have been swept up in a popular new teaching.

Some of these resources are good, of course, but they maybe conveying spiritual poison just as often. Many take for granted that celebrity pastors, Christian educational institutions, Christian publishing houses, magazines, periodicals, Christian television, and radio stations are “safe” and can be trusted. It is assumed that they certainly would be more biblically informed. Often, by the time the pastor and elders realize there is a problem with a particular false teaching in the church, quite a few in the congregation are already infected with false teaching and are passing it along. In other cases, pastors themselves, trusting the above sources, are infected and deceived themselves. When that happens, they may go on the defensive and attack anyone who exposes the unbiblical teachings and practices they have adopted. It is truly a full-time job watching out for twisted teachings coming into the church from supposedly Christian sources.

In the 1990s, quite a few churches were caught up in the devastating Satanic Ritual Abuse “hysteria,” based on popular “false memory syndrome” beliefs, which were extremely prevalent at the time. This phenomenon destroyed many innocent (often Christian) men and women who were condemned by people – often their own children – who were undergoing therapy to find the root of troubling issues in their lives. With the “help” of their counselor, often Christian Counselors (Minereth Meyer Christian clinics was one such counseling source) – they “recalled,” with the suggestive “help” of the therapists, having allegedly been sexually or even “satanically ritually abused” as a child by their own family members, fellow congregants, teachers and/or pastors and priests. Church basements were “recalled as having been used in these satanic rituals, some of which involved the sacrifice of babies. Many fathers (and some mothers) and others were imprisoned based on these completely false accusations, which could only be “recalled” with the “help” of suggestive therapists, who brought back memories to them that they could not at all “remember” without this “help.” Eventually, this Satanic Panic subsided as these therapists were finally recognized and called out as unwitting charlatans, thinking they were helping their patients while destroying myriads of individuals and families. But it would have been of vast help to the accused if the scriptures’ instruction of requiring witnesses or actual evidence (another form of witness) to an act over just “believing the victims.” We wrote an article about this awful perversion of justice, in the Summer/Fall 2001 MCOI Journal, posted on the blog in 2018 titled, “Beware the Rumor Weed.”

Megan Basham’s recent book, Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda, has caused quite a stir, and many celebrity leaders are not happy with her exposure. For example, she wrote:

North Carolina megachurch pastor J. D. Greear, while president of the Southern Baptist Convention, encouraged his congregation to minimize speaking about sexual sins like homosexuality, saying they should not “shout about what the Bible whispers about”—as if the destruction of Sodom and Paul’s description in Romans 1 of the progression of societal depravity were mere murmurs. ¹

It was claimed that the inclusion of this was unfair because Greear had changed his position. Megan pointed out, however, that he had changed his position two years after of pressure:

Though he reversed his position after two years of pushback²

The damage of downplaying and minimizing God’s word on something He has clearly spoken in the Old and New Testaments had already been done. There is no question that this minimization of homosexuality is something Greear taught, but some believe that his reversal should have prevented its inclusion. Was Greear unaware of God’s position on sexual immorality or was he downplaying it to appease those with an unbiblical agenda? We don’t know the answer to that question.

There are a few issues like this, and Os Guinness weighed in after these issues began to be raised:

“Some will quibble over details, but no one should miss the powerful warning in this book. We face a gathering storm, as Winston Churchill warned a century ago, but this time the enemy is inside as well as outside the gates. Every convinced and unashamed Evangelical should read, ponder, and pray over this important book.”—Os Guinness³

The problem of defending a favored preacher, teacher, or celebrity Christian is not new, certainly, but we first encountered this type of defensiveness in 1991. Dr. Murray J. Harris, a beloved professor of New Testament exegesis and theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois (TEDS) at the time, was teaching that Jesus was not physically resurrected but had a non-physical, non-corporeal body. The late Dr. Norman L. Geisler had addressed this heretical Jehovah’s Witness-like view with an eye toward repentance and restoration. Several ministries to Jehovah’s Witnesses, including Witness Inc., MCOI, and others, joined Dr. Geisler to address the issue. Dr. Harris’s defenders took a tactic similar to the one Basham is currently experiencing. We explained familiar practice in “Fraternity Over Orthodoxy”:

When we were addressing Murray J. Harris’s false teaching on the Resurrection, nearly all of the professors at Trinity College defended Harris, and many outside of the institution defended him as well. “He is a nice guy,” they said. “He is a faithful husband,” we were told. “He is a brilliant scholar on the original languages,” it was claimed. All of those things may have been true, but none of them addressed the problem at all. Unfortunately, nice men and women, faithful spouses, and brilliant scholars can slip into heresy the same as nasty guys, cheaters, and dim bulbs. Our focus did not encompass his personality or scholarship. We were solely concerned with his teaching that the Resurrection was not physical. He essentially took the same view on the Resurrection as the Jehovah’s Witnesses!

Although this was resolved after several years, with Harris changing his view, though not correcting his book, many pastors had already been influenced by his teachings and books, and the lack of biblical understanding on this central issue of the faith still lingers in churches.

At the turn of the Millennium, the Evangelical Theological Society (ETS) faced another doctrinal dilemma: could members hold to the view that God is not omniscient and hence does not know the future, a view known as “Open Theism?” In 2003, ETS essentially punted, and both rejected Open Theism and maintained members who held that view. I, Dr. Norman Geisler, and several others resigned. In my resignation letter, I enumerated the reasons for my resignation and suggested:

The irony here is that when theological terms cease to have stable meanings, Christianity not only becomes spiritually impotent but also academically suspect. ETS’s watering down of the meaning of “evangelical” is thus costly not only in spiritual but also intellectual terms, and thus is an ethical dilemma. It may be the case that the Evangelical Theological Society, in an effort to be honest with the public, should consider changing the organizational name to the Elastic Theological Society and thus avoid representing itself as an organization that continues to uphold a biblical worldview.

Again, the issue was not about the character of any individuals involved. We suspect they are all nice people, but these scholars tragically abandoned their very important post of safeguarding the faith from error.

More recently, MCOI resigned our Evangelical Press Association (EPA) membership. I really like the director, Lamar Keener, and we spoke several times each year about the seeming lack of biblical understanding among “journalists” in the EPA. In 2023, at Lamar’s suggestion, I presented “The Troubling Trend of False Teaching in the Church” and how evangelical journalists, press, and publishers contribute to the problem, making the work of the pastors and elders even more difficult. Most who attended my presentation were shocked; a handful agreed, but little has changed except that a further leftward drift from sound evangelical theology continues.

With the gradual abandonment of sound theology, biblical teaching, and solid commitment to the biblical faith on so many fronts, it is really no surprise that so many churches have embraced Wokeism, Critical Race Theory, the downplaying of sexual sin, and myriad other issues. The desire to be embraced by the world is demonstrated by Mark Galli, former editor-in-chief of Christianity Today:

For the longest time, a thrill went through the office when Christianity Today or evangelicalism in general was mentioned in a positive vein by The New York Times or The Atlantic or other such leading, mainstream publications. The feeling in the air was, “We made it. We’re respected” . . .⁴

George Barna’s American Worldview Inventory 2024 came out in August. Quoting Barna in “Report: Evangelicals ‘More Likely to be Shaped by Culture Than to Influence It’,” Sarah Holliday writes:

“Digging a little deeper, Barna specifically mentioned how “issues such as abortion, transgenderism, and so forth” are “where evangelicals really struggle to make the connection between biblical truth” and questions of identity, purpose, and Kingdom advancement.”

We are thankful for the sound shepherds who are standing firm for the faith, and we need to pray for them. They are swimming against the tide of evangelical leaders who are wittingly or unwittingly trading the truth of the Christian faith for a more popular leftist agenda. Ω

Warnings to the Church

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