Category Archives: Contemporary

Mark Driscoll’s approach to preaching

MARK DRISCOLL My FACEBOOK post of 13 August 2014

In early January 2009 a lady who had been given some preaching tapes of Pastor Mark Driscoll by a young relative contacted me. This lady, whilst acknowledging that there was some commendable content on the tapes, was nevertheless uneasy about some aspects of both the preaching style and content of Mark Driscoll and she wanted to know my views on him.

Mark Driscoll first came to my attention when I was researching and preparing my talk on what is loosely termed ‘The Emerging Church’. Unlike many of the perceived leaders of this grouping [people like Brian McLaren and Rob Bell] who are unwilling to stand up and proclaim ‘thus saith the Lord’, Mark Driscoll does defend and declare many of the crucial doctrines revealed in God’s Word so he has in the past classed himself as “swimming in the theologically conservative stream of the Emerging Church’.

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Comrade Barack Obama by Shaun Willcock

The election of Barack Obama to the White House is the greatest disaster for the United States of America in its entire history

Of course, the fawning millions who voted for him don’t believe that. Throughout his campaign they hung on his every word, and gazed on him adoringly as if he were a messiah. And as the truth dawned that he had won, millions of people, not only in America but even around the world, stood and openly wept. Marxists, liberals, New Agers, Muslims, sodomites, illegal immigrants, and the dumbed-down masses in general, all rejoiced in the streets. The only thing comparable to it was the election of Nelson Mandela as president of South Africa in 1994. Mandela himself gushed over Obama after he won, saying his victory was an inspiration to people all over the world. But just as the rainbow began to lose its sparkle very soon after Mandela came to power in the “rainbow nation”, so the glitter will fade from Obama’s victory. This latest “Marxist Messiah” will be no better than the one before him.

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Welcome to the Church of Ireland Diocese of Sodom and Gomorrah

In Luke 17 the Lord Jesus Christ outlined what conditions would be like just before He returns again to “judge the world in righteousness” [Acts 17:31]. He referred back to God’s earlier judgments by a worldwide flood and localised fire and brimstone and said, “as it was in the days of Noah so shall it be also in the days of the Son of Man. They did eat…until the flood came and destroyed them all. Also as it was in the days of Lot; they did eat…But the same day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven and destroyed them all. Even thus shall it be in THE DAY when the Son of Man is revealed” [Luke 17:26-30].

Conditions pertaining “in the days of Noah” are vividly described in Genesis 6:5 “And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth and that every imagination [purpose and desire] of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually”. As the saying goes, it does not take ‘rocket science’ to look at today’s world and to see and to read of the uncontrolled wickedness that pervades every continent on planet earth and to realise that the heart of mankind is today spewing forth those evils identified by the Lord Himself in Matthew 15:19 “out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies”.

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Joel Osteen and Rick Warren ‘The heretics are pastoring the church’

The subtitle of this article ‘The heretics are pastoring the church’ is really a parody on another well-known expression, namely ‘the lunatics are running the asylum’. Asylums were built to protect the general public from those who were mentally disturbed and so posed a threat to them but the public at large often think that those running such regimes, by their actions and attitudes, pose just as much, if not an even greater danger to the public they are supposed to be protecting.

God has ordained that His people gather themselves together in local churches and to such assemblies He gifts men who are skilled in “rightly dividing the word of truth” – this expression “rightly dividing the word of truth” according to Vine’s expository dictionary means “teaching Scripture accurately”.

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Willow Creek connection to the foul-mouthed ‘Jersey Boys’

In a recent email [1st November 2007] from the ministry of Lighthouse Trails they identified some results from a survey carried out by the leaders of the Willow Creek Community Church [Senior Pastor – Bill Hybels]. Herewith are some extracts from that email –

The headlines on a Townhall.com article this week certainly catch the attention…The article talks about a survey Willow Creek performed and the findings of the survey. Townhall columnist Bob Burney explains:

Willow Creek has released the results of a multi-year study on the effectiveness of their programs and philosophy of ministry. The study’s findings are in a new book titled Reveal: Where Are You? co-authored by Cally Parkinson and Greg Hawkins, executive pastor of Willow Creek Community Church. Hybels himself called the findings “earth shaking,” “ground breaking” and “mind blowing.” And no wonder: it seems that the “experts” were wrong. The report reveals that most of what they have been doing for these many years and what they have taught millions of others to do is not producing solid disciples of Jesus Christ. Numbers yes, but not disciples. It gets worse. Hybels laments: “Some of the stuff that we have put millions of dollars into, thinking it would really help our people grow and develop spiritually, when the data actually came back it wasn’t helping people that much…”

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Email sent to David Cameron MP

Dear Mr Cameron,

I have just watched the Channel 5 news interview that you gave to John Suchet and in the course of it you declared that you were ‘a Christian’.

I must confess that this came as somewhat of a surprise to me for one particular reason. In a speech you declared your support for ‘the family’ but you did not restrict ‘the family’ to God’s ordained family standard of ‘one man and one woman’ but you broadened it to ‘man with man’ or ‘woman with woman’.

These latter 2 views of ‘the family’ are regarded by God as a sinful abomination as can be read in Romans chapter 1. The only sexual intimacy sanctioned by God is between a man and a woman who are married to each other as we read in Hebrews 13:4. Continue reading →

Make ‘MANDATE’ a ‘NO-DATE’ on 17th November 2007

Keeping up the flow of scripture-destroying ‘preachers’ lined up to visit Northern Ireland during 2007, the following link

http://www.emins.com/template.aspx?parent=220&pid=243&area=18&aNAme=&textsize=A

gives details of a return visit to Belfast by Erwin McManus, this time at the Odyssey Arena [cost £30.00] and this time under the auspices of ‘Evangelical Ministries’.

Last year he was a guest speaker at the CFC [Christian Fellowship Church] in Belfast and in advance of that visit I posted a warning on our website and this link will take you to that warning article –

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Joel Osteen coming to Belfast

The Belfast Odyssey arena currently has this advert on its ‘What’s on’ page – An Evening with Joel Osteen is a chance for you to be encouraged by one of America’s leading pastors. You will be able to celebrate God’s goodness through worship and praise music…, you’ll learn more about Joel’s ministry and family, and Joel will have an inspirational message from God’s Word. At the end of the event, Joel will proclaim a special blessing over everyone in attendance… You don’t have to be a Christian or a member of any particular church. The only requirement is a ticket. [Cost £11.50].

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WIKIPEDIA ‘Encyclopedia’ on Cecil & Creationism

Braehill Baptist meetings available to watch

I was recently informed by a Christian friend that there was an entry concerning myself on the ‘WIKIPEDIA Encyclopedia’ website. This particular website was in the news just last week in an article in the Daily Mail of 11 April 2007 under the heading ‘Minister tells pupils to use the website that makes up facts’. This is part of what that article said –

‘Teachers criticised the Education Secretary yesterday after he encouraged pupils to use a controversial Internet encyclopedia to research school work. Alan Johnston hailed WIKIPEDIA as a more appealing version of the revered Encyclopedia Britannica. Yet the unregulated site has been dogged by rows over inaccurate entries because anyone can enter or alter the information themselves’…Founded in 2001 in America, WIKIPEDIA has more than 1.6 million articles in English alone. Anyone can edit entries although WIKIPEDIA insists the sheer numbers of users ensures errors are swiftly corrected’.

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‘The Bible’ – What Alf McCreary didn’t write

In his Belfast Telegraph article of 14^th April 2007 entitled ‘The ultimate guidebook to the meaning of life’, the ‘Religion Correspondent’, Alf McCreary reflected on a Channel 4 TV documentary called ‘The Bible Revolution’.

There was a particular passage in the article that impacted forcibly upon me. What ‘impacted’ upon me was not what Mr McCreary actually wrote but rather what he did not write. Let me first quote what the passage as he wrote it said –

‘The Bible was available in England during the Middle Ages, but only in a Latin translation which the vast majority of worshippers did not understand. Indeed, the Church was so worried that people might read the Bible for themselves that anyone who campaigned for an English version was regarded as a dangerous heretic.

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