EvangelismRSA: Beware the Postmodernists Trying to Postmodernize Your Church!

Saturday, 14 October 2023

Beware the Postmodernists Trying to Postmodernize Your Church!

█ INTRODUCTION. Do you have the Trojan Horse of ‘postmodernism’ threatening your church? Are liberal-minded, often extreme, leftist postmodernists, trying to (through courts of law, litigation etc.) pressurise your Church to adjust your Church doctrine, creed and articles of faith in the name of ‘progress’? It could possibly, for instance, happen in various ways:

▶ Politically. This is where churches are being hijacked by political parties to accommodate politicians in their rabble rousing speeches during (political) electioneering campaigns. In Parliament (RSA), churches and evangelists are banned from reading and quoting the Bible and preaching the Gospel officially in the parliamentary precinct in terms of the ‘separation of church and secular state’ principle.
However, come electioneering time, politicians armed with all kinds of good sounding promises (some authentic, some not) will descend en masse on churches in a 'mad scramble on Africa' to get re-elected for another term, the ‘separation of church and state’ principle suddenly having evaporated like fog in the sun.

This should not be allowed by Evangelical churches, except where meeting halls are common property (public domain) type precincts to be anyway used by all and sundry at will. Spiritual leaders and pastors should do their utmost to keep politicians the heck out of bona fide Evangelical churches; what the other churches (including mainline 'state' churches) do is their prerogative and problem.

▶ Commercially. This is where entrepreneurs, businessmen and women (many of them dishonest ‘snake-oil’ salespeople) insinuate themselves into the leadership with promises of lucrative rewards, financial benefits, commissions and kickbacks for the congregation in exchange for them to be allowed to make presentations in churches to market their products in terms of the convenient ‘captured audience’ principle riding on the backs of ‘recommendations’ from their pastors.

Profligate pastors who allow this kind of commercial exploitation of gullible Church members should be given notice and dismissed on the condition that it is contractually provided for in the congregation’s ‘Conditions of Employment’ agreements for leaders; be fair, respect the country's labour legislation, protocols and principles.

▶ Philosophically. This is where all kinds of ‘motivational speakers’ etc. are being invited to speak to congregants from pulpits about topics alien to church doctrine (like lectures on the ‘positive benefits’ of Atheism, Agnosticism, Freethought, Humanism, Religious Syncretism etc.) with the 'noble' (suspect, nefarious) aim to help congregants ‘broaden their horizons’.
Ask yourself: Would the Apostle Paul have allowed King Herod or some pagan, Canaanite idol-worshipper to come and make speeches from his Church pulpits on the benefits of worshipping ‘Diana of Ephesus’?

Who anyway can offer broader horizons than those offered by Jesus Christ Himself through His Gospel of Salvation? Never dine with the devil in the name of 'progress'.

▶ Theologically. This is where the values of movements such as Jesus Seminar (USA), Nuwe Hervormers (RSA), CRT, the World Transformation Movement, Scientology, Evolution, Freemasonry, Spiritualism, New Age Freethought , Secular Humanism, Woke Theology, Critical Race Theory, etc. are being imported in terms of the phenomenon of religious syncretism into churches in the name of ‘tolerance’ and 'mutual understanding'.

It is fascinating how doctrines from cults like these are sometimes so amicably tolerated by wellmeaning but naive Christians while, at the same time, these same Christians, who had suddenly become 'enlightened', will, in their own churches, cast all kinds of aspersions on the persona, ministry, teachings and relevance of Jesus Christ for today's society.

█ THE WAY FORWARD. When, during the Middle Ages,. Christians from the Catholic Church began to revolt against their Church, they eventually, through protests by Reformation figures, developed into the Protestant Reformation movement, giving rise to the Inquisition and the widespread harassment and persecution of Protestants.

My forebears have, for instance, had to escape the Catholic persecution in the 18th century by fleeing from the picturesque village of Heimbach (Germany) to South Africa and, during the last 130 years or so when some Pentecostalist Christians became disenchanted with the traditional Reformed Movement and all hopes of change were dashed, it gave rise to the worldwide Pentecostal Movement, which in turn has led to the founding of the Charismatic Movement.
I would thus be unethical, inconsiderate and selfish for anyone from these ‘alternative, progressive, postmodernist movements’ to expect the traditional churches to conform to their ways of thinking and behaving and using courts of law to force them, against traditional Church doctrine, to ‘modernise’ in the name of ‘progress’.
The solution is for such ‘alternative’, ‘progressive’ movements would be to do the honourable thing and do what Protestants, Pentecostals and Charismatics have been doing successfully for centuries or decades, i.e., to stop harassing the established Churches trying to piggyback on their infrastructure and start their own movements, build their own Churches and write their own catechisms to accommodate their peculiar creeds; this would be the honourable thing for them to do.

✋