I saw it coming as a tsunami of darkness. It made me feel really out of place as I struggled to find my way through the pastoral ministry jungle. On the one hand, I knew by faith, beyond all doubt, what I had to do to serve Jesus Christ. I also knew it brought increasing alienation from the existing program.
I miss the fellowship. I miss the joy and excitement of seeing people set free by the truth. I don’t miss the lies and outright criminal fraud perpetrated by the conspirators in the church leadership. It’s nothing really new; it’s just a different paint job on the same old corruption. There will always be people who worship the church system instead of the God who called His people to be the church. They have no moral anchor above; they’ll do anything to protect the system. The system is their “divine calling,” not the gospel message. They’ll use the same terminology, but it isn’t too hard to see the different meaning they give it.
In order to protect the system, the organized church after Constantine’s day twisted the gospel message to appeal to the invading hordes of Germanic tribes. They rewrote the gospel, recasting it in terms of Germanic pagan mythology — it changed the character and personality of God from a Hebrew deity into a mishmash of many tribal heathen deities. The ancient Hebrew heart-led mysticism, at home in the Spirit Realm, was exchanged for the fearful spookiness of the unknown. Roman civil government fell under the crushing onslaught, but the official church hierarchy remained alive because of their moral compromise in the message.
So it is with much of the church leadership today: They compromise the message to appeal to the invading horde of heathens. Today it’s the metaphorical invasion of Social Justice Warrior mythology. Earlier in my life, it was the invading hordes of secular scholarship in something called “neo-orthodoxy.” What we have now is just the latest paint job on what I faced back then. It’s the same heathen mythology of vagina worship, but with new layers of disguise. It’s just the latest wave of that same Germanic pagan invasion.
And do I have to explain that it’s a false dichotomy to suggest that we must have vagina worship because the only alternative is phallic worship? Both are simply different faces of the same demon.
There’s a group of more traditionalist ministers trying to raise funds to produce a movie they claim will expose the SJW convergence in American churches: Enemies Within: The Church. It is presented as an exposé of this SJW convergence in several major institutions, to include the Southern Baptist Convention where I once tried to serve. This is the same crap that sees Beth Moore become a symbol to defend. For these false leaders, it’s better to contradict the Bible than to risk loosing the money and power inherent in the aging system.
Unfortunately, the people behind this movie are defending Western Civilization. They don’t understand that the West was born more from compromise between pagans than the greatness of the gospel. And this compromise of the Hebrew gospel message with the invading Germanic hordes was actually the second compromise the church leadership made. They had already become more Greco-Roman than Hebrew during the previous three centuries before the Fall of Rome. But while that transition was incomplete, the arrival of the invading tribes rushed the church leadership into the final tomb that buried the gospel. The birth of the West was no great thing; it was a sad burial rite for the gospel message of Jesus the Messiah. It’s an ornately decorated cenotaph for the heart-led way of faith.
Still, the movie may be worth watching when it comes out. The central figures behind the movie promise to reveal things long hidden. There have been numerous controversies in churches that, while duly reported in the mainstream press, are often caused by something totally different from what is reported. One predominately white church failed to approve a new pastor candidate, and all the reports say it’s because the new pastor was a black man married to a white woman. But the dissenting voices in alternative reports say this new guy was an SJW with questionable plans for ministry. And they also suggest that denominational leadership were involved in some kind of coup attempt in the church to force this man into the pulpit.
I’ve seen that kind of thing before. A church coup was the last straw that drove me out of mainstream ministry. I bounced off a few other options before sensing the call to the path outside the mainstream. While I sense prophetically that there will be a mass exodus from existing evangelical institutions in the near future, I’m not sure what the final end will be. Historically, non-government institutions tend to survive across the collapse of empires and civilizations, but I’m quite sure the size and influence of today’s mainstream churches will dwindle into insignificance as they are replaced by totally different kinds of church. Right now, that’s about as much as I can say.
And it’s enough for me to continue in the calling that now holds me. I suspect I’m just a place-holder for someone else, or maybe several people. That’s fine with me. I’m not a founder, just a guy who stumbled across something long buried and I’m trying help recover it. I’m sure there are others doing something similar. Forget my name, forget about calling it Radix Fidem, but please resurrect the ruins of what once stood so gracefully in this fallen world. What was once the scattered remnants of faith here and there in this individual, or that small group, should be restored as a family identity of faith. It’s our time.
