Willow Creek and Brian McLaren: Serpent-Sensitive

Willow Creek Church pioneered the "seeker-sensitive" approach to what it calls Christianity. Brian McLaren (who is uncertain about almost every Christian doctrine except that "everything must change") was recently a featured speaker at Willow Creek. McLaren has accused believers who hold to the Second Coming of creating "violence and coercion."

But Willow Creek and McLaren are wrong. Professor Russell Moore of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary reasons correctly that their denials of the Christian faith will actually lead to MORE violence, not less:

"Even though McLaren claims to want world peace, his own view is actually the one that leads to violence, Moore said.

"When a Christian understands that he does not fight for his own honor, but that justice will be done by God, either through union with Christ and His cross or at the judgment itself, the Christian is freed then to trust God, not his sword or his gun or his fists or his tongue," he said. "It is McLaren's vision of a life that consists only of the justice achieved in this era that leads to violence and Darwinian struggle to see that a pound of flesh is exacted...If human beings do not expect a Messiah in the skies, they will expect to elect one or anoint one or biochemically engineer one. And, do not be deceived, such pseudo-Messiahs always eventually have a sword."

Amen! Professor Moore explains McLaren and Willow Creek are really "serpent-sensitive," not seeker-sensitive:

"When McLaren questions the existence of hell and the hope of the second coming, he is not a 'new kind of Christian.' Such things are neither new nor Christian.

"They are instead a repetition of the voice of a snake in a long-ago garden: 'Has God said?' and 'You shall not surely die.' It is tragic that one of the world's most renowned evangelical churches would highlight this kind of Serpent-sensitive worship."

Amen, and amen! Thank you, Dr. Moore, for so incisively and courageously exposing this heresy.


(HT: Slice of Laodicea)