Calvary Chapel Rejects Purpose Driven
and Emerging Spirituality
The following news alert is a follow-up to our recent Special Report on Calvary Chapel.
June 16, 2006 - Costa Mesa, CA: Last week at Calvary Chapel's annual pastor's conference, founder and Senior Pastor Chuck Smith announced that Calvary Chapel was rejecting various movements and practices that have been taking place within the Christian church at large as well as in some Calvary Chapel churches. According to a number of pastors who spoke with Lighthouse Trails this week, Smith asked that those Calvary Chapel pastors who were going in the direction of the emerging church would no longer call themselves Calvary Chapel churches.
This week a notice was placed on the Calvary Chapel Distribution website recalling Chuck Smith Sr's book, When Storms Come (which had been tampered with). The notice also stated: "The teaching and positions of Rick Warren have come into conflict with us at Calvary Chapel. Pastor Chuck has directed us to discontinue this product effective immediately."
Both Purpose Driven and the emerging church promote contemplative spirituality, which is a belief system that is contrary to biblical Christianity. Popular authors such as Richard Foster, Brian McLaren, Rick Warren, Henri Nouwen, Brennan Manning and many others teach contemplative spirituality (also known as spiritual formation)
http://www.lighthousetrailsresearch.com/recall.htm
Wow! What's wrong with contemplative spirituality? I've seen this getting ripped a lot lately and I'm not sure how it's heresy. Anyone understand this? I love Nouwen and Manning. Not sure exactly how McLaren or Warren fit in with contemplative spirituality however. That seems strange.
Thanks Chip for emailing this to me.
5 comments:
Here's a link to the letter in question, this happened awhile ago.
http://www3.calvarychapel.com/ccof2/parsontoparson.pdf
I love how they talk about the emergent movement like it's the Catholic church or one single movement.
While there are churches out there that are doing some things that are for lack of a better phrase "out there" I find this to be the small exception.
thanks Aaron, i had not seen that. very interesting.
I found it humorous after such a serious letter that they would end with something so silly like, "some say that the Emergent church has some good points, well so does a porcupine but you're better off to stay away" hahahaha, that's funny. Might have been a stronger letter if they hadn't said that! But yeah, it's basically doing what Carson did which is to take the worst of all Emergent churches and use that to represent the whole. Pretty unfair analysis.
Exactly.
Hey man. How are you? Thanks for this post. Interesting stuff. Remind me how we met each other again?
well, this condemnation comes straight from the lips of someone who has propogated the idea of the "moses model of leadership," wherein pastors have the final say on every topic and are almost completely unaccountable to the congregations they serve. you can sample the consequences of such a paradigm by reading this article from CT.
i love my pentecostal brothers and sisters, but i find their occasional tendency to revere their leaders and burden them with the "touch not the lord's annointed!" tag utterly ridiculous.
so, as per usual, i have no opinion on this matter.
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