So this is relevance…
Paula White is a televangelist first introduced to evangelical celebrity by prosperity preacher T. D. Jakes. The St. Petersburg Times recently ran an expose of sorts of her ministry. She’s married to Randy White with whom she shares the pastorate at Without Walls in Tampa, FL.
On a recent Sunday at Without Walls, White preached from John 2, where Jesus turned water into wine at a wedding.
“Slap somebody right upside their weave and say ‘Get in the Flow,’ ” White told the audience, her voice rising as she introduced her sermon title. “Are you ready? Somebody say ‘Bring it on. Bring it on.’ ”
Tonya Jones was mesmerized.
“She speaks to me,” said Jones, 39, a Tampa homemaker. “I like the way she brings the message in a way that I can understand.”
And what exactly is the message?
White also has been dubbed a prosperity preacher, a proponent of the name-it and claim-it gospel, which purports that people can receive financial, emotional and spiritual blessings if they donate. That message and her penchant for designer clothing and flashy cars have added to the cacophony of criticism.
White drives a Mercedes-Benz and flies around the country in a private jet. She lives in a $2.1-million mansion on Tampa’s Bayshore Boulevard and has a Fifth Avenue condo in Trump Tower in New York City.
The ministries took in $39.9-million in 2006, according to an audit of Without Walls and Paula White Ministries released in June by an independent Clearwater accounting firm.
Seduced by Secularism in Pursuit of Souls
A must read Christian classic is Harry Blamires’ The Christian Mind: How Should a Christian Think?
A prime mark of the Christian mind is that it looks beyond this life to another one. It is supernaturally oriented, and brings to bear upon earthly considerations the fact of Heaven and the fact of Hell.
In this respect the religious view of life differs so fundamentally and comprehensively from the secular view of life that it seems scarely possible for the Christian to communicate intelligibly with the modern secularist. And indeed this is our most acute problem today. It seems virtually impossible to bridge the gap between ourselves and our unbelieving fellow-men so as to present to them, vividly and convincingly, the Christian view of the human situation.
The Christian mind sees human life and human history held in the hands of God. It sees the whole universe sustained by his power and love. It sees the natural order as dependent upon the supernatural order, time as contained within eternity. It sees this life as an inconclusive experience, preparing us for another; this world as a temporary place of refuge, not our true and final home.
But outside the sphere of Christian thinking there is a totally different view of things. Modern secular thought ignores the reality beyond this world. It treats this world as The Thing. Secularism, by its very nature, rooted in this world, accounting it the only sure basis of knowledge, the only reliable source of meaning and value. Secularism puts its trust in this life and makes earthly happiness and well-being its primary concern.
The modern rejection of Christianity, rooted as it is in a hard-boiled secularism, has at its heart a total failure to sense the dependence of man, the creaturliness of man. Its most basis presupposition, implicit in all its judgements, is that this which we experience directly with the senses constitutes the heart and totality of things. Hence the collision between the Christian faith and contemporary secular culture. For all teaching of Christian revelation deals with the breaking-in of the greater supernatural order upon our more limited finite world. That conception is at the heart of the doctrine of the Incarnation. It is at the heart of every claim to individual experience of God’s love and power. The Greater breaks in upon the Smaller. But if our world here is seen as the totality of things, or even as the dominant sphere of existence, then the notion of the Greater breaking in upon it cannot be entertained. If This World = All that Is, then there is no Greater-than-It to break in upon it. The idea of God can be entertained only if you have first thought of man as someone whom there could be Someone greater; only if you have first thought of the universe as something than which there could be Something more stable and important. Secularism is so rooted in this world that it does not allow for the existence of any other. Therefore whenever secularism encounters the Christian mind, either the Christian mind will momentarily shake that rootedness, or secularism will seduce the Christian mind to a temporary mode of converse which overlooks the supernatural.
Is there any doubt that today’s church is in “a mode of converse which overlooks the supernatural”? Rather than do the difficult and unpopular work of proclaiming biblical truth to the secular mind, and trusting the Holy Spirit to draw the unbeliever, today’s church has adopted the secular mind, not as a creed and not because they necessairly hold to a secular worldview, but as a sincere effort to relate to and reach secular unbelievers. The church has become double-minded, attempting to live in the world of the eternal and the world of the secular simultaneously. The church has not abandoned the gospel necessarily so much as it has added the secular like a welcoming front porch. The unbeliever is enticed by that which is familiar in the hopes that the foreign language and culture of the church will not be noticed so much. But in adding the secular porch, the gospel is denuded of its power to truly save.
The secular mind, with its focus on technique, pragmatism, buildings, cafes, and programming trumps the Christian mind with its focus on “the things which are not seen, which are eternal.” Unchurched Harry is drawn, not by the power of the Holy Spirit through a faithfully proclaimed Gospel to the Cross and repentance, but by the novelty of a church whose programming and premises resemble that of the local mall complete with all the amenities. The church succeeds in drawing the secular unbeliever to a secular church, providing no inducement for developing a mind focused on the world beyond this one. The end result is more secular believers whose attachments are more to this world than the one to come.
Newsweek and David Vitter’s Sin
Interesting, isn’t it, that when a family values Senator commits an indiscrestion against those values the media is quick to indict an entire movement. Take, for example, Newsweek’s Susannah Meadows questioning of Michael Cromartie of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Mr. Cromartie’s response to the Vitter scandal would certainly be a good guage of evangelical sentiment given he himself is a leader among evangelicals.
Ms. Meadows asked him, “As an evangelical, what is it like for you when yet another story breaks about a self-righteous, ‘family values’ Christian caught cheating on his wife with another woman or man?” and “What was the conversation like among evangelicals when the news broke about Vitter?” and “Is the movement (evangelicalism) damaged to the extent that people might leave the church?”
What’s wrong with this line of questioning, you ask? Ms. Meadows completely ignores the fact that David Vitter is not an evangelical. He’s a Roman Catholic.
Tony Snow writes about God’s grace and cancer
Tony Snow is the White House Press Secretary. He has cancer. He also knows that God has him.
I don’t know why I have cancer, and I don’t much care. It is what it is—a plain and indisputable fact. Yet even while staring into a mirror darkly, great and stunning truths begin to take shape. Our maladies define a central feature of our existence: We are fallen. We are imperfect. Our bodies give out.
But despite this—because of it—God offers the possibility of salvation and grace. We don’t know how the narrative of our lives will end, but we get to choose how to use the interval between now and the moment we meet our Creator face-to-face.
Christianity Today: Cancer’s Unexpected Blessings