Busy with real life right now, but for some high entertainment:

http://datingdelilah.org/

Good times.

WhatHEsaid shared: “During the Forward Together campaign [at City Bible Church] some years ago, I felt uncomfortable with the program. I gave a CD of a sermon to Theo [Johnson] to listen to, as I wanted someone more mature to evaluate it…” 

Who was Theo Johnson? Theo Johnson attended East Hill Foursquare Church (a mega-church in Gresham, Oregon) for many years. He was there during the days of Jerry Cooke, the pastor who was known for sitting down casually on a stool to preach and before the recent retirement of senior pastor, Ted Roberts, author of, Pure Desire. 

Although a dentist by trade, Theo was a good counselor and blessed many people with his class called, “New Images.” Approx. 2 years before Theo passed on, I spoke with him over the phone about his long experience at East Hill Church. This is part of what Theo told me: 

Ted Roberts, the senior pastor of East Hill Church at the time, forbad anyone to use three specific words from the pulpit or the platform of the church. The forbidden words were: “sin,” “hell,” and “repentance.” If anyone would ever slip and use any of these words publicly, the pastor would have a talk with him/her in his office. 

When the pastor traveled for ministry out of town, Ted would allow Theo to preach. Kind of for the fun of it, Theo told me that he would purposely let one pr more of the pastor’s forbidden words slip out of my mouth just to see what would happen. Each time, his mentioning of one or more of the pastor’s forbidden words would get back to him after he returned home, and the pastor would call him into his office and confront him about it. 

This happened so many times, that finally, Theo had to resign his church staff position. He just could not see how a church could stay true to the gospel of Jesus Christ or the Bible without ever mentioning the words “sin,” “hell,” or “repentance” from the pulpit. 

P.S. Several years ago, Ted Roberts told a Saturday morning class of which I (DM) was a part that the church growth experts were recommending that in order to get more non-churched people to attend church on Sunday mornings, that pastors should cut out their worship services entirely. Ted told the class that he was unwilling to go that far. 

Ted Roberts has fairly recently turned the pastoring of East Hill Church over to his son-in-law, Jason Albelo, the son of the director of East Hill Adult Education, Gil Albelo. I do not know if Jason holds the same kind of platform philosophy that Ted held according to what Theo Johnson told me. 

One of the classes that I taught in Bible College was called Leadership. We offered Leadership I and Leadership II levels. It was normally only Juniors or Seniors who took the classes.  I team-taught this class with the academic dean of the school whose name was Bill (name changed). One day, Bill distributed a handout to the class that truly began to open my eyes. The handout said that everyone in a local church, including all of the staff and congregation (I’m not absolutely positive about the congregation being included), was to function in the “ministry of helps” and serving to minister to the senior pastor and his vision.

Since the NT mentions the ministry of helps in I Corinthians 12:28 and the gift of serving in I Peter 4:11, I believed that there were (and are) such gifts in the church. But, to hear Bill say that everyone in a church and on a church staff was to function in those gifts to help the senior pastor accomplish his vision began to be too much for me. This handout raised many questions in my mind. Among them were these two:

(1) What if there are believers in a local church or on a church staff that have other gifts besides the gifts of helps or serving? What are they to do with their gifts?

(2) How are the other spiritual gifts like the gift of teaching, prophecy or leadership suppose to function within the confines of a service of “helps” or “serving” directed to benefit the senior pastor? 

Young, docile, ambitious, uneducated, financially dependent, inexperienced, and insecure men (who are also in need of father figures) are the politically-safest kind of men for pastor-kings to promote in their kingdoms. (Why do you think so many corporations prefer in-house training?) 

The fattest carrot of all that pastor-kings offer to young men (or women) who feel a call to the ministry is ministry opportunity itself e.g., teaching a church class; sitting on the platform; preaching on Sunday night; traveling with the senior pastor; preaching in a sister church, team-teaching with one of the elders, etc. 

In the kingdom of the pastor-king, it is communicated in various ways that those who kiss the ring of the pastor-king obtain the big carrot - ministry opportunities; those who do not miss out on the same opportunities as well as promotions. (I declined becoming an elder in my home church more than once and it was clearly not appreciated.) 

Jesus said, "I am the door…" (application only) but in the kingdom of the pastor-king, it is the senior pastor who is the door to all ministry opportunities (of course, as "ministry" is narrowly defined and expressed in the confines of that pastor-king's kingdom). 

As one of my former pastors told me when I pressed him as to why he was hinting to me that I should quit my teaching position in his Bible College that I had successfully held for about nine years and go to another church: 

"If you will become more like us; I will open up more ministry doors for you; if you won't become more like us, then I won't open up anymore ministry doors for you." 

Young men expend too much time and energy - even compromising their personal convictions and swallowing their sincere questions and doubts - getting on the good side of their pastor-kings so that he will give them opportunities to “minister.” 

All these ambitious men really have to do, if they would just take a lesson from Jesus with the masses or John Wesley with the coal miners as they lined up to go work, etc. is open their front door and go preach to their neighbor or on the sidewalk or someplace there are needy people. 

Instead, the Yes Men of the pastor-king's court seek the honor and approval of men. They choose comfortable pulpits (with flowing water falls or rotating globes in the background), honorariums and choirs who will applaud their shallow, topical messages even though they lack originality and are filled with hackneyed clichés of the politically-correct traditions of their pastor-kings. 

One Sunday evening, I preached a controversial message in my home church; one to which I no longer hold. It was a sermon that supported Postmillennialism (the belief that all of the nations will gradually become Christianized before Jesus returns). Before the message, I playfully told the congregation that the pastor should feel free to correct me after I finished!

My comment was not appreciated. After I ended my message, instead of the pastor getting up to the pulpit and saying something like, “It sure is great that Christians don’t have to all believe the same thing on the End Times,” he tapped the elder who was sitting in front of him on the platform and asked him to dismiss the service; which he did very clumsily.   

The next morning, the pastor called me into his office. He told me that he was the only one in the church who defined doctrine and it was not going to be me! 

I asked him, "Why can Ern Baxter (now deceased) come into our church as a guest speaker and preach Postmillennialism from the pulpit and get away with it but I can't?" He said, "It's because Ern Baxter is not a member of this church; neither is he on staff here. What he says will be heard today and gone tomorrow. Anything Ern says that I choose not to re-emphasize, I just allow to fall through the cracks. In your case, however, since you are on church staff, it is an entirely different story.”

I see on the news that Texas authorities have raided the compound of a polygamist cult, removing the women and children. Evidently, last week one of the children called the police and claimed they were being sexually abused.  

As someone who has libertarian leanings, I think the government would do better just to leave polygamists alone. In my mind, Polygamy isn't any more immoral than a man who starts a family, divorces his wife, and then starts another family.

That said, in general there is tremendous abuse in these cults, and at some point the state has to step in and remove the children (mostly young females) who are being forced into marriages and sexually abused.

It is also a well known fact that there are many other such compounds scattered all throughout the Southwest. Jon Krakauer documents one such compound in Arizona, in his book Under the Banner of Heaven.

I guess I wonder why these compounds are allowed to exist. I understand the administrative nightmare of tearing apart families. But at some point aren't we just endorsing child abuse. We seem to permit these cults to exist as long as they function far from the rest of society and operate under the guise of religious freedoms.  

“Deliver Us From Evil” (DVD) tells the story of a former Catholic priest and pedophile, Oliver O’Grady. As a young boy, Oliver committed incest with his two brothers and his sister and was also molested by a Catholic priest. When he eventually became a Catholic priest himself, he became a rapist and child molester of both boys and girls. His youngest victim was 9 months old. His oldest victim was a mother of children with whom he had sex in order to get to sleep with her children. He would sleep over night on the weekends with trusting Catholic families and slip into the children’s bedrooms at night. He would threaten the children if they told. 

When his two bishops were told about this, they both generally ignored it. Instead of reporting Oliver to the authorities, both of them simply kept moving him to more remote parishes in California. Bishop Mahoney did not want to risk losing his upcoming appointment from Archbishop of Los Angeles to Cardinal in Rome. Personal ambition and protection of public image were higher values than the lives and souls of innocent children. 

After O’Grady was finally arrested, the Church’s lawyers came to him in his cell and offered him a lifetime annuity if he would not tell the authorities and  move to Ireland. To date, O’Grady is living in Dublin with a family, according to the documentary, were not informed by the Church ahead of time of Oliver’s criminal behavior in the United States. 

When a family of two victims went to Rome along with Tom Doyle, a priest and canon law expert, to meet with the leaders of the Church, the Vatican guards barred their way. When the present Pope, Benedict XVI, was going to be indicted for charges of conspiracy and cover-up, as he was in charge of these kinds of situations before he was elected Pope, President Bush granted him amnesty from prosecution. 

Produced by Lionsgate Films and directed by Amy Berg, this documentary interviews victims, victims’ families, and shows actual footage of depositions of the perpetrators. It shows unmistakably that lies, deceptions, bribery and cover-ups are actively present today at every level in the Catholic Church - from its priests, bishops, archbishops, and cardinals even to the Pope himself. 

Note: I am also aware of two cover-up situations in my area that occurred in Protestant churches.  

"The Israelites were a religious people. Pilgrimages to Bethel, Gilgal, and Beer-sheba, the sacred precincts of Israel, were commonplace (Amos 4:4; 5:5). Freewill and thanksgiving offerings and tithes were performed regularly (4:4), and there were many religious assemblies and festivals (5:21–23). By all criteria, then, the Israelites assumed that they were performing the cultic and ritual requirements necessary to appease Yahweh. 

Furthermore, they considered their wealth and security as evidence that Yahweh was pleased. They assumed that their steadfast devotion to cultic ritual exempted them from the requirements of righteousness and social justice and from the consequences of wrongdoing. Through sacrifice they could guarantee divine favor and their own survival. The peace and prosperity the nation enjoyed must have, to many Israelites, validated their lives, values, and assumptions as the chosen people of God. 

Yet the people had turned the official view around and were reasoning in reverse: their prosperity proved that they were righteous. The distinction, while a fine one, is nevertheless important: the obligation of the covenant was to pursue righteousness and justice; prosperity would follow as a by-product of God’s pleasure. The pursuit of wealth rather than righteousness was an unacceptable short cut, and wholly abhorrent to Yahweh, according to the prophet. 

‘Amos’ severe judgment is a repudiation, not of the cult [worship system] itself, but of the cult as it was practiced in the eighth century B.C.E. …One’s conduct in the marketplace must always conform to one’s attitude in the holy place’ (King 1988: 89). 

And Israel’s did not. Amos decried the social injustice, the oppression of the poor, and the lack of any moral or ethical values on the part of the rich and powerful. According to Amos, the spokesman of Yahweh, Israel was a violent, oppressive, and exploitative society. The poor had to sell themselves into slavery to pay off trivial debts (2:6; 8:6). The rich falsified weights and measures (8:5) and traded dishonestly (8:6). Even the courts, the last bastion of hope for the poor, were corrupt. Judges were bribed to cheat the poor out of what little they had (2:7; 5:10, 12). In fact, Israel was no longer capable of acting with justice (3:10; cf. 5:7, 24; 6:12). Truth and honesty were now hated (5:10).” 

Source: Bruce E. Willoughby, Amos, the book of, The Anchor Bible Dictionary, vol. 1, pgs. 203-212 (for entire article)

The Phantom was a disfigured man. His face was ugly to behold. As a young boy, an older man physically abused the Phantom by putting him in a cage, hitting him with a stick and selling tickets to the public to come and see the boy with the bag over his head which covered his disfigured face, whom he advertised as “the devil’s child.” When the young boy kills his perpetrator and escapes his cage, he hides in the basement of the nearby opera house. There, in total isolation, shamed by his disfigurement, he lives alone in perpetual darkness and yet becomes a genius: an architect, inventor, magician, singer and composer. 

One day, he hears the lovely singing voice of Christine in the opera house above. He begins to obsess for her. When he learns that Christine’s beloved father is about to die, the Phantom takes advantage of Christine’s emotional vulnerability and pretends to be her father’s voice talking to her as she sits in the candle-lit room with stained glass window of an angel overhead. Christine believes that she hears the voice of her dying father telling her that after he is dead, he will send her an Angel of Music. 

When her father passes, the Phantom pretends to be the Angel of Music promised to her by her father. In her dreams as well as her waking hours, the Phantom never leaves Christine; he helps to develop her voice into a sound of matchless beauty. The Phantom believes that Christine owes him a commitment to marriage since he was the one who enhanced her gift of song as her unknown but real mentor of success. 

Enchanted by the Phantom’s musical abilities, she follows him one night into the depths of his world under the opera house. She discovers, however, that the Phantom’s love is one that is self-serving, possessive and even violent: He will destroy anyone and anything that will get in the way of him possessing Christine’s voice and form as his very own. He will have her - even against her own will! 

Raul, a childhood sweet heart of Christine’s, enters her life and rekindles their long lost love. His love for Christine is pure, selfless and protecting of her from the destructive possessiveness of the Phantom. When Christine visits the grave of her dead father in order to seek his guidance about how he could have sent her such an Angel of Music that was so devilish and destructive, Raul cries out to her about the voice that she hears coming out of the red-lit tomb, “This is not the voice of your father!” 

At the crescendo of the movie, which takes place in the Phantom’s caverns under the opera house, the Phantom gives Christine a choice: either marry him and sing for him forever, or else he will murder Raul who he is ready to hang at the end of a rope, as he has killed all of his other victims.  

In a moment of insight into human nature and unconditional acceptance, Christine wades through the waters of the cavern toward the Phantom and sings to him,  

“Beautiful creature of darkness; what life have you known; you are not alone!”  

She then passionately embraces and kisses the Phantom as a woman who was deeply in love with him. By doing so, she shows him her unconditional acceptance of him as a man despite the shame of his facial disfigurement which she has personally witnessed several times. Christine’s love and acceptance break the Phantom’s heart, and he releases both Christine and Raul to leave his dwelling of darkness completely unscathed.  

The Phantom then tells them that he will accept his life of complete loneliness. As a sign of future hope, however, Christine comes back to the Phantom’s room and graciously returns to him the wedding ring that he had given to her (so that he might use it again someday for another woman after his transformation is complete?)

*   *   *  

In my view, The Phantom of the Opera can be seen as a Christian allegory of the two kinds of love available in the world today: the “love” of Evil and the love of God. The Phantom’s passion can symbolize the self-centered, over-controlling, possessive and destructive paramours of the Evil One. As he was clothed in black and red throughout the film, using deceptive words to “help” Christine’s singing career, so the Evil One attempts to seduce innocent Christians (symbolized by the name “Christine”) into selling their souls out to his own control because of how he may have appeared to have helped them along their career path of success. 

Are not all human beings “beautiful creatures of darkness,” i.e., sinners dearly loved by the heart of God? God’s “kiss” of unconditional love and acceptance through the cross of Jesus Christ, stands as a constant reminder of how he does not allow the ugly disfigurement of their souls to stop his divine passion toward them. Christ’s love melts the hardened heart and releases the sinner from the bondage of sin and darkness. As Raul went to any lengths – even to the point of self-sacrificing death – to save Christine, the woman he loved; so Jesus went to the cross to save the woman he loves, his beloved Church. Jesus causes the Evil One to flee from the lives of those who love him as they receive a Love that is not scared away by their soul’s imperfections but reaches out and meets them even at the point of their deepest and darkest shame. 

On March 21, 2008, the 700 Club aired an amazing story about how God's grace saved and restored the lives of John and Debbie Lowe. Debbie was a former stripper. The way that the 700 Club portrayed Debbie's former life concerned me. In my viewed, it raised the question: How "true-to-life" and explicit do Christian broadcasters need to be in order to communicate their message?  Here is what I emailed the 700 Club. What do you think?

As a regular viewer of the 700 Club and donor to Operation Blessing, I so appreciate how you use personal testimonies to share the gospel of Jesus Christ. When I viewed the segment that described Debbie Lowe's former life as a stripper, however, I felt very disappointed. In my view, it was not necessary to show a woman on a stage sensually dancing, stripping, throwing off her top, leaning over and offering her body to men who were lusting after her and coming on to John as a buxom, wanton prostitute.

I realize that you want to make your segments "realistic" but, in my opinion, this was too realistic. It was a stumbling block to me which Paul says Christians should avoid putting in front of their fellow believers (Romans 14:13). The segment could have been presented in a much more tasteful way by simply not showing as many dark behaviors.

In my view, everyone knows what strippers and prostitutes do. In the future, I hope that I do not see similar characterizations involving such unnecessary and sordid details. 

Respectfully Yours in Christ,

David

To view the John and Debbie Lowe story see:   CBN Media Center - Browse. Search. Watch. Share.

It's March Madness time, and I am spending all my free moments in front of the TV. So I won't be posting for awhile.

Please feel free to use this post as an open thread, or just to yell at joebib. (hahaha… just kidding!)