23 September 2023
Recent offline chatter with some readers has provoked some not so fond memories.
How many of you are familiar with the term "Big Eva"? It refers to this elite club of leadership among evangelicals. It's actually a market, of sorts. The way to get the big money is to make sure you go along with this club. It constitutes an unofficial hierarchy of big names to whom pastors and writers must maintain loyalty or risk exclusion. You want your books published by the right publishers? You want lucrative job offers from parachurch organizations or bigger churches? Don't poke at the bigshots.
Naturally, that means said pastors and authors must de-emphasize loyalty to their denomination and their constituents.
Here's the problem with all this: Big Eva is worldly and activist. Lately, they have all gone woke to some degree. The leadership keep using words like seeking relevance, and regaining what they consider a loss of influence with the world at large. They honestly believe this is mandated by the gospel message. It's the new Big Eva orthodoxy.
At the other end of the same spectrum is the Latter Rain movement. That's roughly equivalent to the neo-pentecostals or Charismatics. Now, while Big Eva is almost uniformly Dispensationalist, the majority of the Latter Rain folks are not, and they trend toward amillennialism. I'm sure you are familiar with their basic tenets -- that God is raising up a new generation of prophets and apostles, with the attending New Testament miracles, and all manner of spiritual gifts. You'll hear mention of "Joel's Army" as a name for a whole herd of miracle-working folks, waiting for the right moment to be revealed. There is a soft orthodoxy among these folks, but the one unifying tenet is the assertion you do not have the Holy Spirit unless you speak in tongues.
This is another big club that controls where the money goes. If you've been among these people, you know how it all rests solely on religious enthusiasm, mostly pure emotion. There's nothing wrong with emotional response, but there's something very wrong with being unable to walk in faith without it. About the only thing they get right is that they don't care much about whether the secular world takes them seriously.
Then again, that has changed some lately. There is a new class of entrepreneurial "churches" that are more like entertainment franchises. There will be some charismatic CEO (senior pastor) who runs the whole thing top-down, using multimedia shows of music that mixes secular with religious tunes. The latter is very much a new style of stuff and every single church has a worship band. Choirs don't exist any more. These new churches blend some teachings from both Big Eva and Latter Rain.
The whole point is purely psychological manipulation of a large audience. It's a religion of the head with lots of shallow enthusiasm. While the leadership asserts this is all about the Holy Spirit, the whole thing is pure secular psychology. And at that, it's just the shallow self-help stuff. You realize quickly that it's just secularism with a religious paint job. It's the same thing that previously brought us Purpose Driven, Seeker Sensitive, emergent church (don't capitalize it!), etc.
It's the same old crap: buildings, budgets and bodies. Build a worldly empire. Never mind what they claim they want; that's the obvious goal of what they actually did and still do today.
Whatever happened to the Covenant? That word has also been hijacked to mean something quite different from a commitment to walking within the boundaries of God's camp.
Comments
DarkMirror
All lot of the entertainment franchise gatherings (I guess we could call them "churches" in a loose sense) do it very poorly, too, from my experience. The enthusiasm doesn't feel right. I suppose that's better than getting suckered into it by practitioners that can actually pull it off.
This document is public domain; spread the message.