“Jim Palmer, a former evangelical pastor who once served in ministry at Willow Creek Community Church”
It’s a stretch to call Willow Creek a church.
“It’s a stretch to call Willow Creek a church.”
Really? Why’s that?
Yep, as soon as I saw Willow Creek, I immediately knew the source of his confusion and weakness. Willow Creek is obsessed with a corporate model of church expansion, and seems to want to merge an experience-based form of nominal Christianity with a variety of New Age practices. In other words, it’s typical of the “Emerging Church” heresy that has infected far too many evangelical churches the past number of years.
These “churches” also preach a hyper-grace distortion of the Gospel, and tend to stick to a very narrow selection of Bible passages that they distort to bolster their “don’t worry, be happy” approach. As far as I am concerned, any church that shies away from teaching large sections of the Bible because they think those might be “controversial”, or might alienate certain parishioners is not a church at all.
So when experience-chasing so-called Christians who have been fed a diet of false doctrine inevitably run into the harsh realities of a fallen world, it often leads to their disillusionment and falling away (though I’m not sure falling away would be the proper term if they had never know the real God in the first place). The whole “Emerging Church” mess is both incredibly sad and infuriating. I am so tired of seeing “training” courses and training literature that have virtually no biblical citations in them whatsoever, but instead read as if the CEO of New Age Inc. had written them.
There’s a simple solution: Submit yourself to God, realizing that Jesus made it very clear that this life would not be a bed of roses, but rather that we would face trials and tribulations and would be hated for His namesake. Then, attend a church that sticks to the true Gospel, that teaches the “whole counsel of God”, and that shuns hyper-emotionalism and unhealthy fascination with signs and wonders.
I can see how people brought up in certain “churches” would have a crisis of faith. Happy clappy, self-help doctrine will crumble very quickly.
I tend to doubt any “church” with “community” in its name is preaching sound doctrine.