Posted on 12/31/2006 8:41:18 AM PST by Gamecock
The facade is beginning to peel back from the so-called ministry of Southern California Pastor Rick Warren, author of "The Purpose Driven Church" and "The Purpose Driven Life." Unfortunately, many among his ample flock have far too much invested in him, both emotionally and otherwise, to admit their mistakes and cut their losses.
Moreover, he certainly faces no possibility of in-depth scrutiny from the "mainstream media," as his brand of "Christianity" poses little or no threat to their liberal social agenda. Yet to the degree that anyone at all questions Warren as anything less than authentic, his response is thoroughly telling as to his true character, as well as the nature of his "ministry."
Joseph Farah, editor-in-chief of the Internet news site, "World Net Daily," opened a can of worms by calling Warren to account over his fawning praise of the terrorist stronghold of Syria. While there, Warren lauded the brutish dictatorship as "peaceful," claiming that the Islamist government does not officially sanction "extremism of any kind."
When confronted by Farah, an American of Middle Eastern decent who knows too well the history of horror and tragedy faced by persecuted Christians in that region of the world, Warren immediately denied ever making such statements.
Subsequently, Farah offered as evidence a "YouTube" video from Saddleback Church, where Warren is pastor, inarguably proving Farah's statement. So Warren's church simply pulled the video from circulation and continued the denial, being unaware that a copy of the video file had been downloaded and is still in circulation. Warren's follow-up to this inconvenient circumstance is perhaps most telling of all.
In a concurrent set of moves, Warren sent a seemingly conciliatory e-mail to Farah while distributing another to his "flock," in which he characterized Farah's pursuit of the incident as nothing less than "doing Satan's job for him." Throughout this sorry episode, Farah's only error has been to suggest that Warren's disturbing behavior represents some new departure from consistency.
In fact, Warren is actually being entirely consistent. Whether his audience might be Farah himself, Syrian despot Bashar Assad or the Saddleback congregation, Warren tells each exactly what he believes they want to hear.
This pattern is the essence of what Warren is and what has made him so "successful" from a worldly perspective.
For those among his congregation who sincerely want to know the truth, the evidence is ample. Unfortunately, it always has been available, and any present "confusion" merely results from past decisions to ignore that evidence.
For example, his letter to the congregation decrying the "attack" and making his defense by invoking Scripture is barely four paragraphs long. Yet in those four paragraphs, he employs three different "translations" of the Bible. Why, it must be asked, does he not trust any single translation to convey God's message to humanity?
Could it be that he has his own message and agenda to advance, and that he has found it very convenient to utilize different wordings of different passages, not because they better convey God's purpose, but rather his own?
It would be better to ask, could his motivation possibly be anything else?
As Farah has refused to let this indefensible situation simply drop, Warren has responded by taking it to another realm, making personal attacks against Farah in an interview with the magazine, "Christianity Today." But once again, by so doing, Warren succeeds in revealing much more about himself than about his adversary.
Warren, who has not to date been known as any sort of standard bearer for Christian principle in the political arena, decries Farah (whose societal and moral views fall unambiguously on the right) and his ideological allies as part of a wrongful "political" encroachment on the faith.
In contrast, Warren's forays into the political realm prove, not surprisingly, to be decidedly leftist. At a recent conference on the African AIDS epidemic, Warren invited the very liberal Senator Barak Obama (D-Ill.) as a keynote speaker. He justified the inclusion of Obama, who avidly supports abortion and same-sex "marriage," on the grounds that Obama offered a worldly solution to ostensibly curb the spread of the disease through condom usage.
The morally ambiguous message conveyed by the advocacy of condoms, along with their inherent unreliability, make them nothing less than iconic to the abortion industry, which fully understands how much new business they generate. In the face of such pragmatism, one has to wonder what will be next. Perhaps Warren's church will sponsor a "designated driver's ministry" at every bar in its locale.
Appalling though Obama's inclusion in the conference may be, it is nonetheless entirely consistent with Warren's behavior from the beginning.
Leading a megachurch in the culturally disintegrating landscape of Southern California, Warren certainly knows that his prospects of maximizing the "flock" will be greatly enhanced as long as he shows proper deference to the real religion of the area, "political correctness."
In this, his Christian populism movement has proven to be far more palatable to the God-hating secularists of the surrounding communities than such stodgy, old-fashioned and "intolerant" notions as "Thou Shalt Not." And the Warren influence has been predictable wherever it can be found.
If other churches that abide in the Warren philosophy, such as Chicago's gargantuan "Willow Creek," were to truly uphold Christian values among their enormous congregations, they would certainly be a constant "thorn in the side" of their surrounding populace, acculturated into the modernism as those communities certainly are. Yet an amazing degree of compatibility and congeniality exists between the Warren Church model and the social structures of Chicago and Southern California.
The tradeoff between true Christian principle and acceptability to the locals is apparently worth the spiritual sacrifice it entails, with expanding parking lots, increasingly lavish facilities and, of course, fuller collection plates bearing witness. Meanwhile, such churches offer ever less of a worthwhile and much-needed alternative to the ailing world around them.
Ultimately, Warren gives conformist Christians, wearied from their ongoing battle with a world that is increasingly hostile to true Christian faith, an apparent "out" by offering a version that the modern world can find more acceptable while remaining in its present spiritual darkness.
Many among Warren's vast following have made the mistake, in light of his "purpose driven" ministering, of presuming, at the heart of the movement, a Christ-driven purpose. Yet as Warren's real character continues to be revealed, it is becoming apparent that members of that following are presuming too much.
(Christopher G. Adamo is a freelance writer and staff writer for the New Media Alliance. He lives in southeastern Wyoming and has been active in local and state politics for many years.)
Maryland is not much better (if any)!
But that is how the PD method is being taught and used.
It is ironic.
...because these same ones do not care about Warren's misrepresentations of the Scripture.
Mine was at least a typo.
How do we explain Warren's?
Y2K was a bust because computer chips do not measure dates. They measure the difference in time, usually since a certain date. So turning over a given mark in time means nothing to the chip. That's why nothing happened on Y2K. Y2K was simply another tick in time for the chips.
Software issues with Y2K could be duplicated in a lab setting so they weren't a problem.
Theoretically, the Y2K phenomena will occur when the time difference exceeds the size of the variable holding the data. But that will be on a machine by machine basis since they were all made at different times.
Yeah. That's why short repeat-the-lines chants, projected on the big screen, are SO much better than some looooon, BORING ol' book that's about a jillion pages long.
I'll take PRAYZE over "the begattitudes" ANY day! All that "doctrine" stuff is just plain boring -- and divisive, too!
C'mon, take yer shoes off, put yer heels up, have a Starbucks(tm), get a Holy Tattoo, a Spiritual Massage, and let's PAR-TAY!
And that is "it" from this whole interview...you did not like Clinton being included in in the list of born again Presidents? This is Rick Warren's crime? Warren says about 100 good and very true things in this interview and all you get is he included Clinton in the list of born again Presidents?
How damming for Warren! How petty of you!
You and I will agree that neither Clinton acts like a born again Christian. So what BC claimed to be born again. He lies easier than we breathe. And maybe Bill does believe he is born again and you know what maybe he is. That is God's call not mine or yours.
Give me [quote] just one valid heresy or unAmerican thing Warren says in this interview.
Joe you are revealing your heart here by what you write. Maybe stand back and read what you are saying...it is not pure, holy or loving...it is ugly and hateful.
There was a movie a few years back (a remake of an older movie), by the name of "The Invasion of The Body Snatchers"
It's strange there. I asked someone who years ago, was in my membership class, what she thought of the changes ... she said like you, I didn't like them ... as she is saying this her face is full of disdain, then she continues, but NOW, I love it! It's as though a light bulb went off. As I mention how uneasy I am about all this, it's as though someone turned off the light bulb and she got red faced, cut me off and hurriedly excused herself.It was weird. Another one who had been there as a Sunday School teacher hadn't bothered to become a member. They'd go to ad adult service then teach Sunday School. They'd been doing this for about 20 years. In the service they attended they were told that ONLY official members, would have access to financial statements. Non members would not have access to this. Boy, were they RIGHTFULLY offended. Last I heard they're still there ... .
If you've seen it, you're probably remembering it as you watch the Warrenization of America.
In that story, people were "taken over" (you've all heard the phrase "pod people") by "pods". They looked the same -- but they were no longer the same people (or for that matter, people, period!)
Once taken over, they began obeying the rules of the hive; the master plan was to keep placing pods where they'd be able to take over their victims ("outreach"!) (Put a pod under someone's bed, and when he falls asleep, he's taken over.)
Eventually, almost the whole world had been "podded". (It's HARD to stay awake all the time!) When a non-pod-person was spotted by one of "them", they'd stop what they were doing, point at him, and let out a loud squeal, as they began moving in on their target like white corpuscles homing in on a paramecium.
I think it's time for me to rent a copy of that film again...
[... How damming for Warren! How petty of you! ...]
As pathetic as this thread is, at least it's nice
to see that the rocks are hitting the right dogs.
Um, LOL!
Thanks for explaining things to me... but the thing is, you're wrong.
In an earlier "life" (burnout sux), I was a programmer -- and a writer, who wrote (books, magazine articles) about programming.
Your explanation is just so far off the mark that I don't know where to begin, other than to say that there are SO many potential "gotchas" when dealing with "date math" (and even NON-"math" date functions, such as buffer-overflow considerations, rollover/window framing, and so forth), that NO simplistic "one-size fits all" explanation is useful.
Trust me on this -- unremediated "rollover-unaware" software was fully capable of bringing this nation to its knees. The fact that it didn't (and please understand that there were plenty of nightmares that did happen, but were kept out of the news) is evidence that enough remediation was successfully completed to staunch the immediate effects of the problems (plural).
(BTW, you did notice that the stock market went south right after rollover, didn't you? There were a lot of accounting nightmares that took their toll -- silently, as far as the Happy Trusting Public was concerned).
There are STILL "Y2K bugs" cropping up -- and they'll continue to crop up, with no warning. Far too much code was "remediated" by use of "windowing" techniques. And those "windows" are closing, one by one, as time goes on.
A lot of "fixed" code wasn't really fixed. It was just shoved to the back burner -- on a stove that tilts to the front.
And I don't even want to think about how many "remediators", having slapdashed in some "windowing" fixes, collected their fee, and got outta Dodge as quickly as they could, leaving no forwarding address :) and NO documentation on their "fixes". (When working under the gun, the first thing to be tossed overboard is documentaion OF the work. So, the "window" elapses, and *boom*, right back where we started (with whatever code is in question), only this time, it takes us by surprise.)
The ONLY "simple" explanation for "the problem", is that it was a conceptual bug. People "thought wrong", based on what seemed right to them -- without actually analyzing the situation.
Gee, sort of like how the Warrenites get deceived, come to think of it!
So, what WAS the conceptual error? It was bad common sense.
"Everyone knows" that seconds roll over, and minutes roll over, and hours roll over, and days roll over, and weeks roll over, and months roll over, so of course YEARS roll over too!
Great logic -- except for one thing. Years DON'T roll over!
Years are linear, not cyclical.
Because the calendar LOOKS "cyclical" to humans -- and because they are predisposed to think in those terms, since every other unit of time measurement below "the year" does roll over, well... it was an easy mistake to make. Real easy.
But hard to fix!
And, as I said, a lot didn't get fixed. We're going to be living with Y2K for a loooooong time, and there's no way of knowing when something really ugly is gonna pop up with zero warning.
Buffer size (or variable range issues -- not sure which you're talking about here) are NOT the whole story, not by far.
Theoretically, the Y2K phenomena will occur when the time difference exceeds the size of the variable holding the data. But that will be on a machine by machine basis since they were all made at different times.
The biggest problem is that people thought of years in terms of cyclical operations -- as if years "rolled over", when in reality, they don't.
But the biggest problem that was created as part of the "fix" -- which will contine to haunt us for years to come -- is the patch-job "remediation" in the form of "windowing" -- which maintains the false notion of years "rolling over", and only pushes the imaginary "rollover" a few years into the future.
And "the future" just keeps on happening!
Some code really WAS fixed. Years are no longer pretended to be cyclical. Intead, they are handled as linear, incrementing by one, once per year. No "rollover" involved at all. That code will be fairly stable. I say "fairly" because all code has bugs -- and they don't present themselves other than "by surprise", i.e., "in the field". (Otherwise, they'd have already been fixed!)
I was a Y2K programmer. I was working for a consultant firm at AT&T/Lucent during the build-up time. Chips were never replaced. Programs held on hard drives were replaced. We didn't go around using EPROM machines to reprogram all the chips to handle Y2K. Hardwarewise, Y2K was a joke. I don't know of a single example of a piece of hardware dying on Y2K. The power plants didn't go offline because of the rollover. The POS machines worked. The whole technology infrastructure was unaffected.
There were no "nightmares" kept out of the newspapers by the underground conspiracists. Nothing ugly is going to pop up suddenly. It's over. It was simply a time for people like you and I to make a lot of money.
Amen.
At best, the PD method is an ill-attempt to spread "carpet fresh" on the Gospel message to make it less death-smelly to those who are persihing in order to increase church numbers.At worst, it is an outright attack on the Gospel message and the church.
Either way...the impact is the same and it is no good.
It's the rehabilitation of the "old man", rather than the crucifixion of same.
In the Purpose-Driven-Gospel, the answer to Paul's cry of who shall deliver me from this body of death is Rick Warren! He'll lay three coats of Sherwin William's finest over that rotting corpse -- and strike up the band, and pass out the party favors while waiting for it to dry.
That whole "death and resurrection" thing is such a major league downer, dude. Gotta be upbeat if you want to attract and hold onto the Today Generation!
Market research is where it's at! MR, and "Creative Destruction", and feel-good party time FUN!
Don't try to "convert" them to conform to some outdated notion of "church" -- instead, tear down and rebuild "the church", so that it will be compatible with THEIR interests, desires, and practices.
Brother Rick does things... for the Better Good! Now what good person could argue with THAT???
It is ironic....because these same ones do not care about Warren's misrepresentations of the Scripture.
Mine was at least a typo.
How do we explain Warren's?
Oh, but you bitter, jealous, angry people... YOU do stuff to be divisive! To sow discord!
You may be right, but for the wrong reason, so it doesn't count at all. But Brother Rick, even if he's wrong, it's for the RIGHT reason. An besides, all this "right" and "wrong" stuff is divisive, and does not help to bring about unity.
So let's just drop it.
The main thing is that Brother Rick cares.
Now let's just shut up and stop sowing discord. Brother Rick cares. PERIOD!
*puke*
Indeed! It's too bad we won't be around for Y3K. ;-)
*chuckle*
*puke* indeed!
Whoa. THIS is scary...
Good thing you people are not judgemental!
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