The Errors of the Emergent Church (Emergent Church Errors) Part 1

Emergent Church Errors
By David Cox

What is the Emergent Church?

They believe that the old time religion just isn’t good enough. We need a new way of “doing church”.

The basic idea here is that the church should morph itself (emerge) as it moves through cultures and times. It declares as a fact that times have changed, and we are in a time in which the church that could have been fine for people in the early 1900s, just is out of sync with people of our day. That moment of modernism is gone. This transition into “post-modernism” is a change from the old and failing methods of old (i.e. that of cold, hard facts) have given away to the new (warm, fuzzy, subjectivity).

An “emergent seed” is one that is just breaking the ground. They want to identify themselves as the birth of real Christianity. This birth concept is important to get. They, the Emergent Church, is what real Christianity is (to them). Real Christianity hasn’t yet begun in the time period 1 A.D. through 2000 A.D. What the Apostles and all the church family from then to now have experienced was all wrong. Only now is the real church of God appearing, and it is appearing “in them”. They trash the real Bible, the real church, and the real salvation, fabricating something else, and making that their “real” thing.

It emphasizes experience over reason, subjectivity over objectivity, images and presentations over words, doctrines, and commands. This shift in ideas are determined (by this Emergent Church Movement) to necessary to engage the current culture.

28:41 mins.

I found this interview from Lamb and the Lion ministries being a tremendously helpful way to understand the Emergent Church. This movement is a saturating piece of Satan’s plan in the overthrow of all religions so that he can form into a one world religion.

The Emergent Church is a movement that seeks to approach evangelism from a non-biblical approach. The biblical way is to present man’s sin, which will be an offense to everyone that truly understands his position before God (condemned, going to hell, and waiting for the end of life). In reality, God’s character as seen in the primary concept of holiness is what the problem is here. God has certain character, and we act (from our sinful will) against that character which enflames God’s wrath against us.

From affirming man’s sin, we then show the love of God in sending Jesus to die on the cross for all mankind’s sins. Understanding this great and wonderful love should evoke a spiritual response in the individual of loving Christ, receiving Jesus in this capacity of being our Saviour, and then embracing his moral example as exemplified by his life. The key in understanding salvation is in this dynamic between our sin against God’s love and holiness (essentially God’s basic-most character).

What happens when you try to “go around” and enter by the back door into salvation? The emergent church philosophy does exactly this. They short change and strike man’s sinfulness out of the equation, and just preach God is love, (like the 60s hippy movement) and try to gain followers by meeting the physical needs of people. Surely they will line up to receive free physical things from anybody that gives, and people do. These churches have a tremendous growth rate.

But are these “followers” simply unsaved people seeking hand-outs or are they truly born again?

How the True Church of God works

In our presentation above, the true church begins with sin, and works against it. Both before salvation (in repentance) one has to confess and repent (abandon) their sins, and afterward within their Christian life do the same. The force of change within a Christian is because of sin, his Savior died, and that should cause anyone that truly loves Jesus to declare war on sin. He should abandon it, and live far from it, seeking to live the righteousness that the Bible and Jesus’ personal life represents.

From that point, sin is the enemy which we war against. In a biblical church, sin is regularly preached against. It is constantly fought in one way or another. This is wrong. That is right. Don’t do the wrong. Do the right.

How the Emergent Church works

The Emergent Church has taken the playbook of the Pentecostals and Charismatics, and now base everything on emotions. But this is not the correct emotion of “loving Jesus” but rather of how you feel. They wish to experience God as a teenager wants to experience going up and down on a roller coaster. Religion becomes a game, a carnival ride. What the individual in this error seeks is not to change to be like God, but to experience supernatural situations where God intervenes in his life. It is not to fix what is wrong, but a constant entertainment of problems and miracles. The emphasis is on the “feeling” of God.

Because logic often disturbs feelings and emotions, logic is thrown out of the window wholly. What is right (correct) is no longer what God has said, but what has the greater impact on the feelings. As a pastor said, they had a sign and put “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God” up. A lady called and said that was not right. God was not so mean to condemn everybody. “Right” in an emotions based mindset is what “feels right”, not what God has said. The Fundamental movement in general, and going way back, all people who truly sought God seeks to know what is right and wrong by examining God’s Word. Martin Luther “caught” that his church was wrong because they defined right and wrong without going to Scripture as their authority.

The Emergent Church uses the concept of a “seeker friendly church”. What exactly is that? Somebody with little interest in God (but some) comes to your church, and you do not want to offend him with anything “offensive”. This breaks with the biblical form as we have seen above, and in this, the Emergent Church soft peddles the sinfulness of man. Repentance is a hated concept in these churches because you can only repent when you are confronted with the fact that you are sinning against God’s will, and your will is just wrong. To “quit it, and get right with God” is not going to happen at these churches because BY DESIGN that is removed from all aspects of the Emergent Church. Any Emergent Church pastor that preaches against sin and seeks repentance and abandonment from his people is betraying his Emergent roots, and getting back to the Bible, and if he continues long in that, he will be cut off from the movement.

If it isn’t broke, don’t change it!

One of the key elements of the Emergent Church is to “fix” church, because they presume that it is broke. One of their key beliefs is that they attack EVERY WAY that a person could know God, and in each one of them, they say that one cannot be sure or know God. Although they peddle themselves as great enlightened Christians (as the Mystery Religions of Corinth did), yet they deny God and His Word, and every way that God can be assured in our hearts (causing faith). They call this postmodernism. Traditions like a service schedule, reverent calm hymns that have a basis in doctrine and very Scripture, etc. are all attacked as some how being a failure.

Whereas Satan in times past has tried to deliberately say God is wrong, the “postmodern” concept is that God’s time (the church) whether right or wrong, is over. We are now in a postmodern world, where the old concepts that Christians thought are no longer valid, they no longer work in our present world. Once you accept that nothing can be known with certainty from God, then your opinion is just as good as anybody else’s.

The point here is simply “we are past the Christian age” so now we have to have something else that really works! Why are we over the Christian age? In other words what even has happened, or where did God declare that our present Christian age is over? Is that in the Bible? When the present age is over, it is because Christ has returned in the Rapture, and there are no more Christians basically. This hasn’t happened, so why can you so confidently conclude that?

They have a very unified eschatology. They all reject out of hand that God will judge in wrath. They posit that God is pulling everybody in the future into a unity with him. This they say is going to happen, and is happening as all faiths merge into one. This movement is very much the cutting edge of Satan’s final work in the earth, and for Christian’s it is scary if we did not have the promise that God will protect us and keep us. The rapture nears. Glory Lord, and come quickly!

References

https://carm.org/what-emerging-church