Response to Social Action Trends in Evangelical Missions

I've been meaning to link this article from The Master's Seminary for some time now. I feel it's a logical follow-up to the last post.

Today churches and missionaries are being told that to imitate the ministry of Jesus they must add social justice to their understanding of the church’s mission. As pastors and missions committees embrace the idea that social action and gospel proclamation are “two wings of the same bird,” the kind of work that they send their missionaries to do changes, and this has a negative effect on world missions. This article highlights those negative effects in an African context, offers historical, practical, and biblical critiques of the trend, and redirects the church’s attention to understanding and fulfilling the Great Commission in the way the apostles did in Acts and the Epistles...keep reading

A new form of Christianity

I saw this on a Facebook page (Glenn Christopherson)....

A new form of Christianity is rapidly taking shape in our world.

It's a "Christianity" which speaks long and loud about social justice and veers from mentioning God's justice.

It has turned it's back on the clear waters of God's Holy words to drink at the muddied wells of human philosophies, pseudo science and religious counterfeits.

It is proud of it's boasted achievements and seemingly ignorant of God's marvellous, perfect and eternal accomplishments.

This new form of "Christianity" is virulent and contagious infecting multitudes with it's new forms of worship. Worship that is rejected by the Living God.

It is strong on the supposed value of "faith traditions", but weak on the absolute need for faith in Christ.

It promotes the brotherhood of man, and neglects the sinfulness of man.

It falsely promises temporal pleasures while studiously ignoring the sure and certain promise of eternal bliss...for Christ's blood purchased brethren.

This false Church is impressed with the pomp of men and their religious systems and sneers at the simplicity of the ancient and true gospel.

It whimpers regularly in bored oratory about the love of God but never in awed reverence lifts up the majestic holiness of our Sovereign and Creator.

This new form of Christianity doesn't disturb men, it lulls them into a deadly sleep.

It doesn't convict men of eternal danger, it convinces them to carry on untroubled.

It doesn't open up eternal vistas it simply refocusses men's myopic gaze on the temporal.

This new form of Christianity has a new "Christ". An invented Christ; who is weak and ruled by tolerance rather than holiness. A messiah who accepts and even rejoices in our sin. An unnecessary Saviour dying on an unnecessary cross.

This new form of Christianity, insidiously spreading as yeast through the church world, doesn't worry the devil...in fact it is his creation...

On Paris & the BDS Movement

I'm not surprised. Any excuse for anti-Semitism will do.

Showing no empathy and spinning crazy theories, Israel’s fiercest critics show that it’s Jews, not the Jewish state, they despise...keep reading

This sums it up well:

"To those among us unfortunate enough to follow the BDS movement closely, such vitriol is no news. But cataclysmic events have a way of rattling people into sudden awakenings. And so here’s a simple suggestion: before you engage in conversation with critics of Israel, take a moment and check their digital footprint from the past week. If they’ve taken the time and the trouble to condemn these horrific murders without equivocation, if they sound genuinely remorseful, proceed. But if all they can muster are musty cliches or steely dogmas, if they can’t take a moment away from their politics to be ordinary, feeling humans, and if they can’t miss an opportunity to see even this tragedy as yet another proof of the exceptional nefariousness of the Israeli regime, then they’ve proven that the true object of their vitriol is not the Jewish state but the Jewish people."

Series on the Rapture

Note that Dr. Reluctant is doing a series on the rapture. Everything he writes is full of meat and well thought out. Here is an excerpt from the first installment which I appreciated:

In a sense, I don’t blame them [critics].  Books about prophecy from a pretrib perspective commonly come with covers sporting an eclipse (lunar or solar, either will do); sometimes a dragon or two.  Whole ministries exist to promulgate sometimes simplistic versions of Dispensational premillennialism, occasionally tainted with American exceptionalism.  When John Hagee writes about the “Four Blood Moons” we are not really surprised.  There is always a ready market for ‘signs of the times’ books and newspaper exegesis.  I distance myself from such things.  I distance myself a little even from those good men who can scarcely write an article about anything unless pretribulationism or pre-wrath or what-have-you has some space allotted to it.

2nd Installment HERE

Addendum:

On a personal note, I was raised Roman Catholic (amil-posttrib). As I got older I briefly attended a premil-posttrib church until I apostatized into the New Age. When God set me straight I defaulted to posttrib. Frankly, I was more interested in the premil-amil-preterist debates and the future of Israel than rapture timing. It was when a bunch of zealous "Fulfilled Prophecy" website buffs flocked over to the Omega Letter website to set the pretribbers right that I became hooked.

It's a little bit like Chess - I didn't like the game and was never interested until I actually started playing it. I did learn something from the process, though - pretribulationism is actually better than the criticism leveled against it. I discovered that its critics often struggle to answer hard questions aimed at their own systems. I also discovered that in many cases the underlying motivation for people like Barbara Rossing (The Rapture Exposed) isn't to expose the rapture. At the heart of much of the criticism aimed at dispensationalism and pretribulationism is the critics' animosity for Israel and "fundamentalism."

Historical Critique of Islam's Beginnings

Thought this was good.