In The Purpose Driven Church Rick Warren writes that Christians are obligated to remain faithful to the unchanging Word of God but also must minister in an ever-changing world.[1] To accomplish this Warren developed a structure and process for doing church which he claims will allow it to continually adapt and adjust to a continually […]
Rick Warren published The Purpose Driven Church in 1995. Preceding the title page were forty-one endorsements written by many well-known luminaries spanning both the evangelical and non-evangelical spectrums. These included pastors such as Adrian Rogers, Pastor of Bellevue Baptist Church, Memphis, Tennessee; Jack Hayford, Pastor of The Church On The Way, Van Nuys, California; Robert […]
Rick Warren is a fourth-generation preacher. His great-grandfather came to Christ in Charles Spurgeon’s church in England. Following training in Spurgeon’s college, Spurgeon sent him to America to become a circuit-riding preacher. Warren’s father was a lay-preacher who specialized in planting and (literally) building churches. Born in 1954, Warren spent most of his growing-up years […]
In his flattering 2005 biography of Rick Warren, George Mair identified the principal founders of the Church Growth movement: C. Donald McGavran, Gilbert Bilezikian, and Robert Schuller. The son of two missionaries, McGavran was born in India in 1897. While serving as a missionary to India, McGavran studied 145 churches between 1938 and 1955 to […]
Norman Vincent Peale and the Church Growth movement Norman Vincent Peale’s practical Christianity is often credited with being the forerunner of the of the modern Church Growth movement. The popularization of his philosophy and methods was left to a later generation. Peale’s philosophy and methods grew out of his wholehearted belief in the humanistic concept […]
Satan was a rebel against God’s crown and glory and a fallen creature before God created man. Matthew Henry wrote that Satan “…knew he could not destroy man but by debauching him. The game therefore which Satan had to play was to draw our first parents to sin, and so to separate them and their […]
There were three major voices that stoked the fires that led to the reemergence of American evangelicalism in the late 1940s and 1950s. Two were of the preaching-revivalist tradition and principally concerned with the eternal destination of their listeners: Baptist evangelist Billy Graham and Catholic Bishop Fulton Sheen. The third was Norman Vincent Peale. Although […]
Positive confession and prosperity gospel Since the middle of the twentieth century a great many Eastern religions and New Age practices and beliefs have been absorbed into Western society. Almost simultaneously, preaching and teaching that emphasizes health, prosperity, and happiness are available to all Christians have infiltrated many evangelical churches. These churches are usually found […]
The great contest between God and Satan is for the allegiance of men and women. At stake are their eternal relationships with God. Mankind is fallen and lives in a fallen world. In order to restore a right relationship with God and live eternally with Him, man must accept the atoning sacrifice made by God’s […]
In the 1920s the fundamentalists abandoned the culture to the modernists and humanist secularizers, and they also lost control of the large mainline churches in the 1930s. The mainline modernist Protestant establishment had won the war with the fundamentalists to be the church’s voice, but they were in the twilight years of their power to […]