Whirled Views with Dan Burrell

Last week, Bob Jones the Third caused quite a stir in the Carolinas, around the blogosphere and even in a few news outlets with his endorsement of former Massachussetts Governor, current Mormon and sometimes pro-lifer/anti-gay marriage candidate Mitt Romney for the Republican nomination for President.  I find it personally ironic, that a man who headed an institution who likes to criticize fellow believers for everything from their choice of orchestra instruments (percussion bad/brass good) to whom they would invite to their “Independent” and autonomous local church, would take such a blind leap of political pragmatism to endorse a man with the questionable conservative credentials as Mr. Romney.

In a recent editorial for EP News, Warren Smith reveals that when it comes to how Mitt invests his many millions of dollars, there is a certain consistency of expedience that mirrors his evolving political positions as well.  Here’s Mr. Smith’s article…

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Romney’s Money Not Where His Mouth Is

By Warren Cole Smith

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney has had trouble explaining his past views on abortion, pornography, and homosexuality to religious conservatives.  While he was governor of Massachusetts, a number of gay-friendly laws were enacted.  And his close ties to the Marriott Corporation - as a shareholder and board member - have brought criticism from Phil Burress with Citizens for Community Values.  Burress said, “The fact that Marriott hotel chain was dealing in the worst kind of hard core pornographic material and Mr. Romney was sitting on the board at the time is extremely disturbing.”

Rusty Leonard, president of Stewardship Partners, says Romney might have yet more explaining to do.  According to Leonard’s analysis of Romney’s financial disclosure statement, the Republican - who is aggressively courting “religious right” voters - owns stock in at least a dozen companies with active ties to abortion, pornography, and pornography.

“Romney’s financial holdings are much worse than the other presidential candidates,” Leonard said.  “That’s partly because he is far richer than the other candidates and has more holdings, but it’s also because he apparently uses no screening process whatsoever.”

Romney, whose Mormon faith forbids alcoholic beverages, owns brewers Boston Beer and Anheuser-Busch and distiller Brown Forman.  In a recent speech at Regent University, a Christian college, he called pornography “poison,” but he owns    companies - Real Networks, News Corp. and Time Warner - that distribute pornography.  “He calls himself pro-life,” Leonard said, “but he owns Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson, whose drugs are used to induce abortions.”  The Associated Press reported that his blind trust owns stock in Novo Nordisk, which is involved in embryonic stem-cell research. 

Leonard’s conclusion:  “I don’t know why anyone who calls himself pro-family or pro-life would be involved with these companies.”

The investment portfolios of presidential candidates have come under new scrutiny during this election cycle.  Some have been proactive.  Republican Sen. Sam Brownback, who has been outspoken about the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan, held a press conference to announce he was divesting his stock in companies that did business in Sudan.

“What Sen. Brownback did was commendable and should be an example to all the presidential candidates,” Leonard said. 

Leonard’s company, Stewardship Partners, invests in companies after closely examining them to ensure they are not involved with or funding activities that Christians would find objectionable.  He calls the approach Biblically Responsible Investing, or BRI.  His company manages about $250-million in assets and over the past five years his fund has outperformed the S&P 500.

“You don’t have to sacrifice returns to invest in a biblically responsible way,” Leonard said.  “That makes it all the more telling that Romney has chosen to ignore these considerations in his own investment portfolio.”

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Due to a variety of reasons, I have been way too busy to blog much lately. I hope to remedy that in the next few week, but for now let’s just say that life is pretty hectic (in a good way) with ministry opportunities, missions projects, leadership adjustments and life in general. I do want to share another editorial from my good friend, Warren Smith, of the Charlotte World. Take a few minutes and read his opinion he entitled “Body Count Evangelism“.

Body-Count Evangelism

By Warren Smith

COMMENTARY–Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church, in Lake Forest, Calif., and author of The Purpose Driven Life, which has sold 25-million copies, is perhaps the most famous evangelical pastor in America. He writes often about church growth, leadership, and related issues. Heres something Warren wrote for the Mar. 16, 2004, Leadership Journal:

“Three key responsibilities of every pastor are to discern where (and how) Gods Spirit is moving in our culture and time, prepare your congregation for that movement, and cooperate with it to reach people Jesus died for. I call it ’surfing spiritual waves’ in The Purpose Driven Church, and its the reason Saddleback has grown to 23,500 on weekends in 24 years. You dont criticize a wave; you just ride it as best you can. When Mel Gibson showed me his film, The Passion of The Christ, last year, Iknew a huge wavea spiritual tsunamiwould hit when the film debuted on February 25 [2004], and we began praying and preparing to surf it.”

When I read this passage, I was taken aback. The celebrity name dropping, the appeal to size as an indication of God’s blessing, the propagation of an extra-biblical theory (”spiritual waves”) as a sign of Gods working, the pre-emptive strike against critics these are heresies and logical fallacies pervasive in the evangelical church today, all rolled into a single paragraph.

Warren continues:

“We booked 47 theater screens for members to take their lost friends to. Kay [Warren, Ricks wife] and I personally invited over a thousand lost community leaders of Orange County to a VIP premiere showing, including every mayor, congressman, superintendent of schools, other community leaders, and four billionaires. The results? Over 600 unchurched community leaders attended our VIP showing; 892 friends of members were saved during the two-week sermon series. Over 600 new small groups were formed, and our average attendance increased by 3,000. That’s catching a wave!”

When I read this, I wondered: Even setting aside the theological and philosophical problems, how could these numbers possibly be true? There was something about them that just didnt make sense. So I turned to Outreach magazine, which each year publishes lists of the largest and fastest growing churches. The 2005 list (which covered the period about which Warren writes) had Saddlebacks weekly attendance at 23,194. The 2006 Outreach list had Saddleback at 20,595. Thats a drop of nearly 3000. And at least according to these numbers, which were reported to Outreach by the church itself at no time did Saddleback have the 23,500 that Warren asserted.

Outreach reports the largest churches and the fastest growing churches on adjacent pages in the magazine. So I flipped the page and discovered something even more puzzling. Even though Saddlebacks weekly attendance fell by 3000, it reported a gain of 1,149 for the year! How does a church that loses 3000 report a gain of over 1,000? Maybe they planted a new church. That’s an admirable thing, but even if true why should Saddleback be reporting the numbers of another church as its own?

In the Leadership Journal article, Warren also touted his churchs ability to attract young people, saying that the largest Gen-X church in America is Saddleback with over 20,000 names under 29 on our church roll. Again, how could a church with only 21,000 members have more than 20,000 under the age of 30? And even if that is true, is it a good thing to have so thoroughly shut out those over 30? How could such a congregation possibly represent the true community or koininia spoken of in the New Testament?

Some pastors are growing wise to these self-aggrandizing perversions of truth. Dan Burrell is the pastor of Northside Baptist Church in Charlotte, N.C. Burrell says he has grown disillusioned with the efforts of what I and others are calling the Christian-Industrial Complex to get him to participate in Body-Count Evangelism. Interestingly, the movie The Passion, which provided the context for Rick Warrens comments, provided the context for Burrells epiphany.

“I will admit that I got seduced with Mel Gibsons ‘The Passion of the Christ,’” Burrell writes. “I was convinced enough that it had evangelistic value that I bought out five screens at a local theatre before its public release and we invited scores of non-believers to join us in watching the movie and discussing it afterwards. I recall one ‘decision,’ but no conversions, after all the effort and I learned my lesson. From that point forward, Ive been pretty much immunized against ‘partnering’ with Hollywood. Upon further reflection, Ive reached the decision that pastors are actually being asked not to partner with, but to pimp for Hollywood.”

Burrell makes the important distinction between decisions and conversions. If that distinction seems a false one, consider this: The American Church Research Project reports that in 2000, only 18.7 percent of the U.S. population attended a Christian church on an average Sunday. Ten years earlier, in 1990, that percentage was 20.4. In other words, the percentage of churchgoers in America is going down, not up.

Of course, Warren is not alone in making outrageous claims. The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association claimed in its 2005 annual report that 3.2-million people had made decisions for Christ as a result of its ministries. Emergent church leaders, Willow Creekers, and others constantly propagate the claim that they are reaching unchurched people. Im not saying that some of them are not doing good work, but the most basic demographic analysis suggests strongly that many of their claims cannot possibly be true. Indeed, it reminds me of the one-liner going around during the church-roll padding scandal of the Southern Baptist Convention a few years ago: “There are more Southern Baptists than there are people.”

The Southern Baptists took steps to clean up their scandal. I can only hope that Rick Warren and other megachurch and parachurch ministries choose to exercise more care and integrity in the assessment of and reporting of their impact. Because the inescapable conclusion is this: the Body of Christ in America is not growing either numerically or spiritually. It is, relatively speaking, shrinking — burdened by crass commercialism, a lack of integrity, and the quest for power and glory of celebrity preachers. An all but inescapable second conclusion is this: the rest of us, if we do not speak out against the lies of those who practice body-count evangelism, are standing by just as Paul stood by when he guarded the cloaks of those who stoned Stephen. We, likewise, are guarding this cloak of falsehood subjecting the Body of Christ to a modern stoning of its own.
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Warren Smith is the publisher of The Charlotte World. He can be reached at warren.smith@thecharlotteworld.com

My good friend, Warren Smith, of the Charlotte World Newspaper and owner of Evangelical Press News, has written a great editorial I’d like to share with my readers. I’ve occasionally expressed my disdain for “Christian Schlock” like “Jesus is my Homeboy” gear and the latest fad-driven sermon series (ala “The DaVinci Code”). (For a hilarious website that pokes at this kind of stuff, go to www.purgatorio1.com.) Warren nails this trend with some thought-provoking observations inan editorial he recently released. Take a few minutes and read what he has to say…

The Christian-Industrial Complex

by Warren Smith

COMMENTARY–In his farewell address to the nation, Dwight Eisenhower gave a
speech that became famous because it used the expression Military Industrial
Complex. In it, Eisenhower warned of great danger if the military preparedness
of our nation came to be seen as a mere market for private industrial
interests. Eisenhower feared we would expand our military and the size of our
government for all the wrong reasons. Eisenhower viewed the relationship
between the military and industry as not merely symbiotic, but parasitic and
pathological.

I use this historical example so that it might be easier to see a similar
pathological relationship emerging between the Christian retail industry and the
Christian church, what I call the Christian-Industrial Complex.

Examples of the Christian-Industrial Complex are easy to see. The Women of
Faith conferences, for example, rake in more than $50-million per year and are
part of a for-profit, publicly traded company. The Christian retail industry
topped $4.5-billion last year. (A bit of context: $30 per month can support
many pastors in developing countries. That means that Americans spend enough
annually on “Jesus Junk” to support 250-thousand Third World pastors — for 50
years!)

Another example that played out last month is the controversy over the usage of
the greeting Merry Christmas instead of the greeting Happy Holidays.

Beginning in the 1990s, some conservative Christian groups have decided that the
use of the phrase Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas is a defeat of
Christian values by the forces of political correctness. These groups include
but are not limited to the Mississippi-based American Family Association and the
Alliance Defense Fund (ADF), a Christian legal aid group.

If you ask me, Christmas needs reforming, not defending. Indeed, the early
church did not celebrate Christmas largely because they rightly predicted it
would become what it has become, a materialistic bacchanal. In the 17th
century, the Puritans attempted to eliminate the observance of Christmas
altogether, believing it an unholy combination of the pagan and the popish,
and because it resulted in much public drunkenness. For these reasons, in some
New England towns, the observance of Christmas was actually prohibited by law.
Indeed, such was Americas relationship with Christmas that Congress regularly
met on December 25 until the 1850s.

Most historians attribute the rise in popularity of Christmas to Charles
Dickens, who was no advocate of biblical Christianity. The celebration of
Christmas was almost non-existent in America when Dickens already the best
known writer in the world — wrote A Christmas Carol, one of his most popular
stories. But Dickens wrote the story more out of an impulse toward social
reform than out of any desire to promote Christianity.

This forgotten history of Christmas makes the current defense of it seem almost
ridiculous. Its hard to imagine humble Mary and Joseph being at all
comfortable with what Christmas has become, let alone the carpenter from
Nazareth, whose only real fit of anger was displayed by the overturning of the
moneychangers in the temple. In fact, you could make a case that the Christian
response to the December 25 holiday would be to keep Jesus as far away from it
as possible!

So what possible purpose could be served by keeping Christ in Christmas when
Christmas is what it is? The answer is money. The Mississippi-based American
Family Association says it has sold more than 500,000 buttons and 125,000 bumper
stickers bearing the slogan Merry Christmas: It’s Worth Saying. The Alliance
Defense Fund said it sold about 20,000 Christmas packs. The packs, available
for a suggested $29 donation, include a three-page legal memo and two lapel
pins. You can do your own math on this one.

This story goes beyond the ridiculous to the surreal when you learn that the
groups also publish a naughty and nice list that identifies major retailers
that use the words Merry Christmas in their Christmas advertising as nice
and those that use Happy Holidays as naughty as if identifying Jesus with
the worst aspects of the seasons materialism is something to be celebrated.

Its no surprise that it also made these groups an easy target for its enemies.
Its just a fund-raising scam, said the Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of
Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. And its a scam in
the worst sense its fighting something that doesnt even exist.

I am no fan of Americans United, and normally Im on the same side as the AFA
and the ADF. But Barry Lynn got this one right. This is one more example of
the Christian-Industrial Complex at work. I do not want the politically correct
thought police telling me I must say Happy Holidays instead Merry Christmas.
But neither do I want the titans of the Christian-Industrial Complex telling me
I must send them money so they can fight battles that are either not worth
fighting, or that put us on the wrong side of the true Gospel message.

I pray that God would deliver us from both evils.

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Warren Smith is the publisher of The Charlotte World. He can be reached at
warren.smith@thecharlotteworld.com