What Good’s a Non-Watching Watchman?

I’m about to make myself unpopular. Again.  (Aint it fun?)

Evangelical and Fundamentalist Christians believe that the Bible is God’s inerrant word and the only source for our understanding of the Lord.  Actually, that used to pretty much define “Christian” altogether.

But lately, there have been a lot of people calling themselves Christians who find their “answers” in almost anywhere but the Bible.  The list of sources are dizzying and bewildering and are often people who either don’t believe in anything, or who believe in almost anything.  But whoever these sources are, they’re not Biblical Christians.  And the practices these folks are willing to introduce into the church would be familiar to any practitioner of Eastern religion.  It blew my mind the first time I saw a[n] (allegedly Christian) church host a yoga class.  I couldn’t believe that they didn’t know that yoga is a form of worship in Hinduism. 

Therefore, Yoga cannot be reduced to a mere form of psychophysical therapy. It aims to annihilate human psycho-mental life and anything that can define personhood. Yoga has always been considered a path toward transcendence, a way of rising above the world of illusion and reaching the Ultimate Reality. It was and will always be religious and this aspect has never been doubted in the East.  From the above article.

Or maybe they do and they don’t care.  That’s even sadder.

In an article posted on my home board, I read an account of a pastor who attended Brian McLaren’s Everything Must Change seminar at Northwest Nazarene University in Nampa, Idaho.  In the course of the article, Mr. Barger quotes McLaren:

“The church has been preoccupied with the question, ‘What happens to your soul after you die?’ As if the reason for Jesus coming can be summed up in, ‘Jesus is trying to help get more souls into heaven, as opposed to hell, after they die.’ I just think a fair reading of the Gospels blows that out of the water. I don’t think that the entire message and life of Jesus can be boiled down to that bottom line.” – Brian McLaren, from a July 2005 PBS special on the Emerging Church.

This opinion, and others like them, from McLaren and his ilk and other people as prominent as Rick Warren (yes, the guy on the news) are no secret.  They don’t try to hide what they think.  And anyone who follows this attitude is turning his or her back on a central tenet of Christianity.  Yes, we are to share what we have with others.  But the body only lasts 70 or so years.  There is a soul in that body who needs to know what will happen to them after death.  We fail in a major obligation to others if we do not share what Jesus said about eternal life with those around us.

You would think this would arouse the watchmen (and women) among us to rise up and alert others about this heresy.  But the leaders whose responsibility it is to speak out when error is heard are mostly silent.  I would be surprised to hear that there had, anywhere in this country last Sunday, been a sermon on the Emergent Church and the threat it poses and the error it represents.

What good does it do us to say we are watchmen when we watch the stranger and the thief and the robber (John 10:1-6) climb the wall of the sheepfold and kill and steal the flock while we are silent?  What will it take to wake up the sleeping?  Can it even be done?  Whether it can or not, we should be trying.