Here is an article from Colorado Springs gazette.com discussing the return of Ted Haggard. It would appear that his previous email discussing his need for financial support and his plans to return to "the Ministry" was not approved by his…well…I don't know what they are…the article calls them the pastors overseeing his restoration…which of course is just the Christian way of saying "sponsor"…anyway Ted's sponsors did not approve of this email being sent out.  Here are some quotes from the article

Disgraced minister Ted Haggard’s e-mailed plea for money and his announced intention to return to religious work was “unacceptable” and “inappropriate,” according to a statement Wednesday by pastors overseeing his restoration.

The four pastor team of overseers said in the statement that Haggard must seek secular employment to support himself and his family.

Sounds like Ted might be a bit of a loose cannon…even with a four sponsor team he still is out running wild

Last week, Haggard, who moved to Phoenix after he was fired by the Colorado Springs megachurch, sent an e-mail to ABC affiliate KRDO about his plans to work in a faith-based halfway house known as the Dream Center. The Dream Center is run by Tommy Barnett, one of Haggard’s spiritual mentors and head of the 15,000-member Phoenix First Assembly of God, which Haggard now attends.

Haggard asked for two years of monthly support while he worked and lived in the Dream Center and he and his wife finished earning degrees at the University of Phoenix.

This is just my opinion, but I don't think anyone should let Ted near a halfway house…let alone let him work there. When you also have addictions it's not called "counseling" it's called "networking". Can you imagine how a counseling session with Ted would go?

Ted: So…you've got a drug addiction…and you've gotten so desperate that you started selling your self out as a male prostitute?

Patient: Uh…no…I'm not a male prostitute…and I’m not here for…

Ted: But you would consider selling yourself…if the price were right…wouldn't you?

Patient: No…That’s ridiculous…I would never…

Ted: Suppose I was to put $1000 dollars in your pocket right now…are you saying that you wouldn't let me…

Patient: What the hell is wrong with you, are you even a real doctor?

Ted: I need to see how strong you are, so this is just a test, but look…here are ten $100 dollar bills…now…very slowly, I'm going to need you to…

Patient: (Runs out of the room)

The good news is that Tommy and his Dream Center are a bit smarter than old Ted gave them credit for

The announcement came as a surprise to the overseers and the Dream Center.

According to the overseers’ statement:

“After their fact-finding was complete, they (overseers) informed Mr. Haggard that his plan and his communications about it were unacceptable. Mr. Haggard’s solicitation for personal support was inappropriate. It was never the intention of the Dream Center that Mr. Haggard would provide any counsel or other ministry. Mr. Haggard will not be moving in or working with the Dream Center. He will not be doing any ministry. He will be seeking secular employment to support himself and his family.”

Edge: Dream Center

Here's a fun little recap of a recent City Bible service in the Portland Mercury:

CITY BIBLE CHURCH

NE Portland

Reaching City Bible Church off I-205 via public transit and foot is hard. I end up climbing a vertiginous, slippery, and condom-strewn trail up the side of 612-foot-high Rocky Butte, clambering through blackberry vines in my black Donna Karan suit and shiny high-steppin' cowboy boots. I am the best dressed of 400 or so worshipers—healthy, happy-looking families, all—under the stucco dome at the center of the CBC's bluff-top campus, where greeters (but no signature gatherers) welcome guests, blasted by live synth-combo extended mixes of sheeny, contemporary hymns.

Pastor Frank Damazio pits this congregation against remote-linked Tigard and Vancouver congregations in a fundraising contest for CBC's summer camp, before delivering a sermon on divisiveness and a ritual overcoming of past wounds.

Afterward, I wander the huge lobby, snooping for campaign lit. I say I am up from LA and heard good things about CBC. "We try to go for the right mixture of the spirit and the word," a young woman tells me. My subterfuge mistaken for flirtation, she introduces me to an intense young pastor who I can tell knows immediately I am lying. Another awkward silence ensues, in which I sense that if I ask about gay marriage I will be shown the door.

By 1:30 pm, the last parishioners are leaving, and still no sign of a referendum campaign. But I leave impressed by CBC's good fellowship—the warmest welcomes are given to the sketchiest-looking—but wondering about what went unsaid in this church that lobbies against gay rights. GRANT COGSWELL

You gotta check out this website that promotes loving wife spanking.

It's called Christian Domestic Discipline.

A domestic discipline marriage is one in which one partner in the marriage is given authority over the other and has the means to back the authority, usually by spanking.

A Christian Domestic Discipline marriage is set up according to Biblical standards; that is, the husband is the authority in the household.  He has the authority to spank his wife for punishment, but in real CDD marriages this is taken very seriously and usually happens only rarely.

And to really get you in the mood, here is a wife's desciption of her recent Discipline:

I'm not kidding, I felt my stomach drop when I saw my husband bring out a heavy belt.  It is one of those old ones that came with a silver buckle and had a name stamped on it.  He doesn't wear it much anymore because it is to heavy for style today.  I only got seven, which I have to admit I thought was lenient although I was howling the whole time.  I don't get a discipline often and it is amazing how quickly I forget how much it hurts–just a blinding pain.

Unbelievable! And kinda kinky.

(H/T - Sneth & The Merc)

“I believe The City Church in Seattle has a gift and ministry of giving to the body of Christ. We have been blessed with more than enough! But there are two reasons we have been blessed. One is that we ask every member of our church to tithe. Therefore the blessing of God and the open windows of heaven are always functioning among our people. There is no curse upon us. Secondly, we are blessed because our church keeps giving money away. Each year we give away over 20 percent of our church’s income.” Wendell Smith, Prosperity with a Purpose, The City Church, Kirkland, Washington, 2005, p. 214 

Wendell Smith's book is dangerous. Both solid biblical exegesis and balanced biblical theology are missing. Instead, Wendell devotes many pages to an overly-simplistic list of key words and verses that mention financial prosperity, e.g., "riches," "wealth," "silver," "gold," "gems," "firstfruits," "hundredfold," "lands," "luxury," "bankers," "thousand," "tithes," "money," etc. (pgs. 73-123). (Wendell’s friend, Frank Damazio, uses the same technique in Releasing Financial Provision, pgs. 331-378.) Using such lists, and the total numbers of their occurences in the Bible to prove a point without exegesis and theology is not only lazy but a wrong and immature use of Scripture. It would be similar to saying that Jesus is not interested in the Church since he only uses the word "church" (ekklesia) two times in the gospels (Mt. 16:18; 18:17). 

Wendell also lists out quotes in favor of wealth not only from Christian sources but also pagan ones e.g., Euripides and Aeschylus, Greek playwrights, Thucydides, the Greek aristocrat, and Confucius, the Chinese philosopher (pgs. 271-285). In response to the hard questions about Christians and wealth, it is noteworthy that Wendell addresses some of them, but his responses are too short and superficial (pgs. 261-270).  

The theme of book can be summed up in one phrase: more money, more ministry. In my view, the book is really Wendell’s personal testimony of how he has accumulated at The City Church, as one of Wendell’s relatives told me: “more money than he knows what to do with.” 

Is the wealth of The City Church, all due to the blessing of God? Not necessarily. The King County/Lake Washington area, where The City Church is located, is one of the wealthiest areas in the country. Bill Gates, the richest man in the world, lives on Lake Washington. In 2005, the median household income in King County was $58,370. Out of 3,141 counties or county equivalents in the nation, King County ranks as approx. the 105th richest county according to median household incomes (census.gov). 

Let’s do church income by the numbers: Pick a wealthy location to plant a church, require all of your church members to tithe, strongly encourage all of your members to give many, many offerings above the tithe, and Voila! Millions of dollars!  

In light of this fact, and not just “the blessing of God,” Wendell can tell in his book how more than once someone in his church wrote out a check for $1,000,000.  In light of this economic demographic, people have to realize, that just because a church’s income is in the multiplied millions, it does not necessarily mean that it is because they are preaching the “truth” about prosperity or because they are “obedient with the tithe so that the windows of heaven are opened” for them by God. 

Besides demographics, the other critical factor as Wendell himself admits as a reason for such wealth accumulation, is that Wendell asks (requires?!) all of their church members to tithe, as well as to give offerings above their tithe. Someone on this blog posted that Wendell does not allow any of the members of The City Church to counsel with anyone on church staff unless they are known to be a faithful tither. If true, can you imagine the kind of pressure and expectation that such an unbiblical practice places upon all of the members of The City Church to tithe?! If accurate, are we to deem such manipulative practices appropriate because they are producing such a large revenue stream? If only because they are producing "results," have we become pragmatists, worshipping at the altar of the “whatever-works” philosophy of John Dewey, rather than Christians following Jesus to the foot of the cross?  Do the "ends" of more ministry justify the "means" used to raising more money for it?  

The Mormons have used the same fund-raising techniques of the mandatory tithe and additional offerings for many years. They have accrued the same result: millions of dollars to build their many meeting houses (called “stakes”) and temples debt-free! Is the material prosperity of the Mormons a clear indication that God himself is “blessing” them and directly helping them to take their message of salvation by good works all around the world?  

My warning to those leaders and Christians who do not know the Bible very well and inwardly long for all of the benefits that wealth (mammon) can bring is not to look only upon the surface of lists of Bible words and verses along with the high-income numbers in The City Church and in other prosperity churches and try to follow suit. Dig deeper in the Word. 

I fear that too many Christians will forget the fact that king Solomon had all the wealth that The City Church has and much more, and it was not because he always walked with God or tithed but because he developed lucrative international commerce in his wealthy corner of the world, and, even more critically, because he raised the mandatory taxes on the people of Israel to benefit his own temple state.

There was an excellent article in the Portland Tribune last week about Sarah Modrall, a wonderful woman who has spent the past eight years working to help people on the streets. We talk a lot about the negative side of Christianity and constantly point out how it fails to meet any real needs in the world, so it's nice to get a chance to focus on someone who gets it right.

In my opinion, Sarah is a great example of how a Christian should live. She has sacrificed a ton, and she doesn't do it to "prosper financially", she doesn't do it for some level of fame, glory, or power…she does it because it is what Christ has called us to do. Here's a quote from the article:

Modrall's kindness, which was first distributed along with bags of homemade cookies, became a key ingredient in a charitable effort that now includes a well-staffed outreach center, partnerships with social service agencies and three Portland-area homes - including her own - that house street kids in transition.

What's surprising is just how unlikely a candidate she might seem for the role she's chosen. A pretty, Texas-born minister's daughter whose own children are grown, she wouldn't be out of place at the country club or relaxing at a vacation home somewhere.

But she found herself called to the rough, seemingly asocial youths who are an indelible part of the downtown landscape, the ones who inspire reactions ranging from pity to annoyance to outright fear.

Sarah is an inspiration to me.

A lot has been said lately on this blog about angry pastors. Why are there so many angry pastors today? I believe that one of the main reasons why some of the pastors in MFI-type churches have problems with anger is because of their own leadership philosophy. As Thinking Right asked: “…or could it be it’s just a philosophy of leadership…?” 

With their top-down, senior-pastor control, pastor-as-king approach to ministry, whenever a person gets in the way of helping them to accomplish their goals, pastor-kings naturally get angry. (Don’t all of us feel frustrated or even angry when others regularly upset our plans or goals?) 

I have observed that pastor-kings are extremely goal-centered and task-oriented. They are much more project-driven than they are people-persons. One senior pastor (whose name I won’t mention) gets so upset at the people in his congregation sometimes that, according to one report, his own staff has to keep him away from the people as much as they can. Another senior pastor (whose name I won’t mention either) got so angry at one of his trustees for questioning his borrowing money from the bank for the church’s building project that the trustee told me that he saw a very different person look out at him at that moment of anger – one very different from the kind of man the congregation normally saw.  

Generally speaking, pastor-servants do not have the tendency to get angry like pastor-kings because they have different ministry goals. Their goal is simply to love God's people and help to meet their spiritual needs. Pastor-kings, on the other hand, are driven by their ambitions. Their inner goal is to capture, brainwash, manipulate and use as many people as possible; to get as many “giving units” "under" them so that they can fulfill their ministry dreams and visions. Whether they meet the people's spiritual needs is really secondary. 

If anyone seriously doubts, esp. those close to or inside of the inner circle, or does not fit into "their vision" - which they falsely promote as "our vision" - they will simply put things into motion to make the doubter feel so uncomfortable that the doubter will leave the local church. In this way, pastor-kings try to eliminate their personal sources of anger rather than repenting of why they get so upset. 

James says, "For man's anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires" (James 1:20, NIV). Paul says, “Love is….not self-seeking, [it is] not easily angered…” (I Corinthians 13:5, NIV). I find it interesting that Paul connects “self-seeking” with being “easily angered.” 

What other run-ins have you (or others) had with pastors getting really angry? Why do you think that they got so upset?  How did their anger make you feel? 

Faithful reader (and City Business General Counsel), Locutus, sends in this link to a Christian video-sharing website called:

GOD TUBE!

And yes, it's as wonderful as you might imagine. Just try searching under the word "homeschool".

Read this story about Benny Hinn from TheStar.com. I've never been a big fan of his and this isn't helping.

After the prayers, songs and preaching from the charismatic minister, Hinn tells the crowd he is getting a message from God that people in the audience are being cured, and he asks them to come to the stage. The Fifth Estate used hidden cameras to show staff screening audience members coming forward, ensuring none with obvious physical ailment get near Hinn.

"It's always somebody that has some kind of illness that can't be readily seen" that makes it to the stage, Justin Peters, a Baptist minister in Mississippi who studied Hinn, tells the CBC.

Hinn says the cures take place in the audience, not on stage, so no one still in a wheelchair is allowed on stage. God, he says, has obviously not cured these people.

"I won't let them up, because they haven't been healed," he says.

The CBC tracked down some of the people claimed to have been cured, only to find that they were either still sick, never had the condition they were supposedly cured of, or had died.

Speaking to the Star, Hinn says he is forced to rely on the word of those coming to his crusades to tell him they are cured.

"It's not my job to claim that they are healed. I have never done that," he says. "I'm not a doctor."

Anytime you put on a rock show (read: worship service) complete with loud music and flashing lights you will find someone who has had a touch from God…loud music, light shows, inspirational talk may give you the warm fuzzies, but it doesn't make the feelings real. Far too many people are suckers who can convince themselves of anything…of course maybe I'm just a pessimist.

Has anyone here been "touched" at a Benny Hinn Concert?

There is a great article in The Daily World today discussing Doug Cotton's return to the Harbor.

From the paper:

Doug Cotton, the former pastor of Christian Life Fellowship in Central Park, will help launch a Harbor branch of a huge Kirkland-based church next month.

It will be called Harbor City Church, with the first services scheduled for Sept. 30.

Using financial resources from The City Church, which has a regular weekly attendance of 7,000, according to Anderson, Cotton has leased the former Alexander Young Elementary School at the foot of Scammel Hill.

The Aberdeen School District is charging the church $3,000 a month, according to Tom Laufmann, finance director for the district. It’s an 11-month lease that starts in September and ends on July 31, 2008. The church will have an option to renew and it will pay all utilities.

I encourage you to read the whole article, it confirms a lot of what has been said in the comments of this blog.

I would also like to thank all our readers, because you were partly responsible for tipping off the reporter to Doug Cottons' return.

From the article:

The Daily World learned about Cotton’s affiliation with the new church through calls from readers and a blog entry at www.citybusinesschurch.org.

We also received an email from the reporter thanking us for the blog entry that led him to write this follow up story.

Well done, readers, well done.

I thought I would be able to cruise through the book of Matthew but I keep getting stuck; sorry this is taking so long. In this next section of Matthew Jesus talks about Oaths, Taking an Eye for and Eye, Loving your Enemies, and Giving to the Needy…lets see if I can make it through all of that:

Matt 5:33-37 Oaths - Same deal as before here. You have heard it was said…yada, yada, yada…but I say:

And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. Simply let your ‘Yes' be ‘Yes,' and your ‘No,' ‘No; anything beyond this comes from the evil one.(v36-37)

It's a great statement because its so true. We control nothing, God controls everything so let's not make any promises that we may not be able to keep. Also, I get the feeling that God is really into people keeping their words…

By the way, if you are ever in court and want to piss the judge off, refuse to "solemnly swear" when you take the stand…judges hate that.

Matt 5:38-42 An Eye for an Eye - This could be some of the most difficult scripture to follow. It's one we all know and learn in Sunday School, but when the time comes to apply it how many of us choose to ignore? And how seriously are we to take this?

If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. (v39)

What if they are absolutely kicking your ass? At what point should you try defending yourself?

Furthermore, the title of this paragraph (according to my NIV Study Bible) is An Eye for an Eye, but it really should be called An Eye for an Eye…pause (you know what a pause is)…NOT.

Matt 5:43-48 Love for Enemies - This follows rather closely to the whole Eye for an Eye bit and, imho, helps answer the question of what the New Testament example of Love is:

…Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you (v44)

Sounds good…not easy…but good.

He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous (v45)

The note in my Bible says here "God shows his love to people without distinction". Love does not mean callously pointing out sins to those who you see as beneath you; instead treat everyone with the same respect that you show your friends…God can still convict "your enemies" of their sins…without you making an ass out of the church. Again, IMSLTHO (slightly less than).

Matt 6:1-4 I love the next few verses on Giving to the Needy and fortunately they are rather simple.

Be careful not to do your ‘acts of righteousness' before men, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven. (v1)

Ok, now to sum up…Don't make any promises…Love your Enemies…Do good acts in secret…got it?