Worship, evangelism, outreach, ministry in the name of Christ, these are concepts set aside quite widely these days and replaced by environmental consciousness and ‘being green’.  Ethics Daily reports that Churches are using Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth as a teaching tool.  Why?

Sure, Christians should be environmentalists.  And sure, they should be caretakers of God’s creation.  But emphasizing such things at the expense of core subjects is becoming more and more commonplace.  And I don’t like it.

Here’s what I believe: the Gospel is in and of itself sufficient to transform lives.  Once transformed, those lives begin to look for ways by which to please their redeemer, their rescuer.  In gratitude, they reach up to God in worship and out to their neighbors with spiritual and physical assistance.

To ‘put the cart before the horse’ and use some other message, means, or method to get folk involved in God is precisely backwards.  Mind you, I’m not suggesting that’s what the Gore-ians are doing- but the story cited above reminded me of how far we Protestants have drifted (ran) from our roots.

Consequently, having abandoned the Evangelical Center (in the sense that the word was used by the Reformers), some have replaced it with planetary stewardship, seeker sensitivity, emergent skulduggery, and other methods which are not so concerned with the Gospel as they are with humanity.

The Gospel is theocentric, as it begins and ends in God.  All of these other ’socializations’ of the Church are anthropocentric, having their beginning and end in ‘what’s best for man’.  As such, these socializations of the Gospel are damnable heresy and their practitioners heretics (in the original sense of the word- not in the sense that they should be taken out and sunk in the Limmat with a pair of cement boots.  Although….)