AGENTS OF BETRAYAL IN THE CHURCH
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational and research purposes:
This post was written by Thomas Littleton and has been reposted here with permission. The original can be found here.
AGENTS OF BETRAYAL: WILL EVANGELICAL INFLUENCE BE RUINED FROM WITHIN?
WHICH TRUSTED EVANGELICAL LEADERS HAVE SOLD OUT THE FLOCK AND WHY.
Note: This author is focused on the church and the serious infiltration of the remaining Biblical conservative denominations and groups. This article is a departure from that singular focus in light of the grave influence that political operatives like Russell Moore and Tim Keller are having. A redefining of the role of Christians in the culture including in politics and policy is underway. Motives and goals of the very people who condemn evangelicals for supporting the election of Donald Trump in 2016 or GOP candidates going forward have become more glaringly progressive and left than ever. Their perversion of the Gospel into social justice, contracting with grant funding and big business, inclusive, and affirming, open borders, weakening of pro-life and family values metrics are doing great harm to religious freedom, domestic and foreign missions and the Biblical worldview of our youth. These self-righteous efforts masked as a theological movement provide some of the greatest threats to the future of our churches and our children’s faith that we have known in our lifetime. These agents of BETRAYAL must be exposed and stopped.
US President Barack Obama (L) talks to Dr. Russell Moore, Southern Baptist Convention, Nashville, TN, and Suzii Paynter, Executive Coordinator, Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, Atlanta, GA, during a meeting with faith leaders in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, DC on April 15, 2014. AFP PHOTO/YURI GRIPAS (Photo credit should read YURI GRIPAS/AFP/Getty Images)
The Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberties Commission President Russell Moore, pictured on the right, is a primary operative in the evangelical betrayal and remains one of the more shameless infiltrators totally insulated from accountability.
GAME CHANGERS
A deeply divided climate remains in the American cultural and political landscape as we approach the horizon of the midterm elections. To the shock of many conservative voters, the leaders of the evangelical right have continued to live and work in the echo chamber they created by their “Never Trump” mantras during the 2016 Presidential season. Vocal leaders like Russell Moore and Albert Mohler of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) and high stakes global operator, Timothy Keller of the Presbyterian Church of America (PCA) and co-founder of progressive emergent movement among pastors called The Gospel Coalition, have proven to be well-endowed “agents of change” embedded deep within the conservative Christian right. Moore and Keller fill our headlines with progressive verbiage to shame and convict conservative Christian voters for Trump and other conservative candidates. The new gospel they pitch has progressive social justice equality replacing once solidified evangelical values like pro-life, pro-family and pro-America policy. Second tier players like Ed Stetzer who spent years at Lifeway Research and writing for TGC and Christianity Today along with a stable of authors with coordinated messages working with TGC under the directive of editors like Joe Carter and gay Priest Sam Allberry have primed the church for the dulling of Biblical clarity and conviction translating into salt and light in the public square. Collectively this group have overwhelmed most conversations and have further spread the leaven of leftist progressivism masked in a historic theological packaging. Sad to say trusted outlets like World Magazine have become more often echoes of Social Justice than alternative news outlets for Christians. One of the new arrivals on the scene in the SBC is Nate Collins of the Revoice organization /conference advocating for “LGBTQUI+ flourishing in historic Christian tradition” such as Southern Baptist and conservative Presbyterians churches. Unthinkable yet true – this is where the wave of false teaching by key leaders has brought to the conservative church today.
Meanwhile, the churches of the once reliably conservative SBC and PCA are being transformed through the compromise of such conservative seminary heads as Albert Mohler. Living on the reputation he garnered in 1993 as the new leader of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (flagship of the SBC) in Louisville KY, Mohler and others have filled their institutions with the false gospels of social justice calling for “Racial Reconciliation,” “Egalitarian Equality,” “Revoicing the Church on LGBTQUI+,” and “Immigration Reform.” Pro-Life is being watered down and broadened to include elder, refugee, and immigrant care.
BURNING DOWN THE EVANGELICAL HOUSE
A primary example of the change in motion is J D Greear, the Moore, Keller and Mohler disciple who now heads the SBC denomination. J.D. Greear is a mega-church pastor of Summit Church in Raleigh North Carolina. He is young, well-liked, and to the casual observer, appears to be the hope of a denomination. Yet Greear’s own church members did not even know their denominational identity and affiliations as he accepted the nomination for its presidency in early Summer 2018. Greear’s youthful appearance and hopeful demeanor actually hold an ominous and looming air of doom for the conservative movements reliant on the Christian base. Greear was trained in Mohler/Keller associate Danny Akin’s South Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary and has been steeped in their rhetoric of Social Justice, Progressive Politics, LGBTQUI+, and American Psychological Association-driven ideology. Greear’s landscape is awash in the Soros-funded pro-Muslim immigration work of the SBC’s revamped missions organizations and World Relief.
Greear embraces the radical ideology espoused on LGBTQUI+ and the Evangelical church from Mark Yarhouse and the 2010 whitepaper Yarhouse promoted for TGC as a gold standard for “Christian Sexual Ethic. It is both Biblically baseless and APA compliant. Greear boasts that he “can no longer tell where Timothy Keller’s mind ends and his own begins.” There are many others like Greear coming into leadership in our denominations, proving that the decades-long push for change at the top of the SBC and PCA through organizations like Keller’s The Gospel Coalition has created a tinderbox of progressive politics soaked in 200 proof bootleg funding awaiting ignition. The conservative movement is about to be decimated from within.
SUFFERING A SETBACK
After the Trump victory over 16 primary rivals and Hillary to capture of the White House in 2016, Russell Moore and Tim Keller continue to efforts to undermine the conservative Christian base through article after article. Meanwhile, as they have ramped up the rhetoric, Moore/Keller have doubled down criticism of conservative voters to hopefully spark a sudden flash point among American conservatism. Young pastors and disciples of these agents of change appear to be theological conservatives but prove social liberals with no problem embracing the redefinition of marriage, pro-choice, legalizing drugs and think little of the American Dream, the Constitution, and national sovereignty. These relentless long-term efforts to undermine our foundations if successful, could mean the setback of Trump’s election may be a temporary one.
Examples of the relentless attacks of Russell Moore and Tim Keller aimed at Christian conservatives
Moore
Moore with World Magazine
Keller
THE ERLC &TGC NARRATIVE ON LGBTQUI+ BELIES THE DEPTH OF THEIR BETRAYAL LIKE NO OTHER ISSUE
Moore has a history of faking stories, such as claiming in 2000 that he was bullied, harassed and threatened by an unnamed missionary at a Cooperative (liberal) Baptist meeting while Moore was a reporter for the Baptist Press and finishing his Doctorate at Mohler’s SBTS. This occurred just prior to Moore’s ascent as a Mohler protégé’ and then on to head the ERLC in 2013. That same year the great SBC shift began in earnest to disown the old conservative branding and rewrite the narrative to favor every progressive agenda in the Social Justice victim narrative playbook. Readers may recall Moore’s now notorious Wall Street Journal interview in Oct 2013. Complete with messianic pose in his D.C. offices, Moore struck a new tone for Evangelicals and Baptists in particular, declaring the Culture War LOST and “we must change the tone and love our gay and lesbian neighbors.”
The recently scandalous and radical Revoice brand to push “Queer Culture, Queer Literature, and Queer Theory” into PCA/ SBC churches by 2018 was actually incubated at SBTS and promoted by ERLC fellows and Associates. By 2014, Mohler and Moore held their ERLC conference on “Homosexuality and the Future of Marriage” in which Mohler apologized for being wrong about Homosexual Orientation and began to toss Reparative Therapy and the call for Repentance out the Evangelical window and under the proverbial bus. Again, this was driven by the associations of these leaders with The Gospel Coalition and APA-compliant psychologist, Mark Yarhouse, to bring the Church into step with their secular LGBTQUI+ counseling narrative while promoting the normalization and acceptance of the Marriage, Sexuality, Gender revolution.
KELLER THE GLOBAL THIRD WAY POLITICIAN
Tim Keller has his own camp of change agents as well as his partnership through TGC to a broader camp of compromised Evangelical leaders. In 2012, Tim Keller went with two younger associates – Gabe Lyons of Q Ideas Forum (a progressive TED talks for Christians) and David Kinnaman who now runs Barna – on a visit to the Whitehouse where they met with then president Barack Obama. This meeting is outlined in their book “Good Faith…” where, under the pretext of concerns about religious freedom, this trio and another straggler or two offered to lead the Church into classic Leftist “Third Way” political compromise on the great cultural issues of our day. President Obama seemed little impressed with these self-appointed agents of change and even less came from their meeting. However what Keller and friends placed on the table is telling indeed. They assume and assert that Christians are a small minority in the US now and must operate with “Principled Pluralism” and Civility. We must go the Third Way path to assure the broader “human flourishing “and “thriving community” of which Keller is now an avid proponent. Keller is a globalist wearing a gospel mask who has shown little care for the theological roots of his PCA associations.
In 2015, he signed the Civilitas Group document advocating deep compromise with the LGBTQUI+ community, racial identity politics, immigration and other politicized social issues. Keller and other ministers including SBC leading globalist Rick Warren and three Christian Education institutions – Wheaton College, Biola University, and Fuller Seminary – all agreed to engage “The Civilitas Theory of Social Change” designed to sway the Evangelical Church, again toward “Third Way” politics and social engagement. The document asserts that “incivility is the greatest danger faced by society” ignoring the conservative understanding of threats like open borders, redefining marriage, undermining the Constitution, and globalism in general, pose to personal, religious, and economic freedoms. Civilitas was developed in part by two Ivy League sociology departments and the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, which boasts of its ideological and intellectual inspiration from the Frankfurt School. Keller’s work with the Civilitas Group reveals he still holds his longtime leanings toward Cultural Marxism.
Civilitas Document has been removed but can be found here. Frankfurt School Marxist roots are boasted of plainly by the contributing developers at UVAs IASC .
Keller is an agent of change in the conservative Presbyterian movement of D James Kennedy and Francis Schaeffer. His TGC message is in fact theologically Emergent (a mingled new age Christianity) cloaked in traditional Reformed Theology. TGC boast that it is a non-political gospel movement yet advocating for human flourishing for “the Common Good.” In other words, classic Christian Socialism’s false gospel. The new narrative is old school Cultural Marxism and is being shamelessly used to replace conservative values. Keller is also responsible for bringing the narrative of gay priest from the United Kingdom and the Church of England into TGC including Sam Allberry and Ed Shaw who now dare to introduce a “Church Inclusion Audit “ into both UK and US churches making demands to police private thoughts conversations, our pulpits and force the hiring of LGBTQUI+ staff members and even advocate the requirement of couples “sharing children “ with those of other backgrounds and lifestyles in the church. This horrendous movement is becoming a part of Tim Keller and his TGC heritage /legacy in and to the church who has trusted him and others like Russell Moore .
EAT THE YOUNG OF YOUR OPPOSTION
Keller’s organization and other associated media have flooded the airways with the one-sided narrative, but the greater point of entry is provided by the near saturation of our SEMINARIES. Reformed Theological Seminary, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Covenant Seminary, Beeson Divinity School (in this writer’s city) and many more – once considered steadfast conservative and Reformed institutions – are now deeply infiltrated by the 2013 introduction of a Social Justice / Anti -Poverty / Works Driven curriculum. The young hearts and minds of our present and future pastors are being leavened as they are moved into our pulpits to destroy our church’s influence as “salt and light” in culture, elections and policy. Albert Mohler, while less open about his affiliations with such ideology, its funding and compromise is, in fact, a more effective and dangerous agent of change because of his status as a trusted conservative theological leader for decades. Mohler engages his battle through his disciple Russell Moore who now seems to love his progressive lightening rod status in the SBC. These trusted men, Mohler / Moore / Keller and others like them privately devour our own young, sell out our collective future into a sterile and failed Christian Socialism where our children’s nation and lives and opportunity will bear little or no resemblance to our own.
WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
If we continue to entrust the future of our churches, children and politics to the present Evangelical machinery and its leaders…we are done .We must expel this alien social justice, neo-Marxist dogma from our seminaries before it devours our churches. The LGBTQUI+ activist have no place in the household of faith to redefine family, sexual norms and Christian Faith to fit their whims. If these things are not purged from the SBC PCA and conservative churches then they will turn evangelicalism into a leftist wilderness barren of the Gospel and life giving power. Religious Freedom, Personal Freedoms, the Constitution, and Life as we know it – are gone. Why sit we here until we die? Arise! and be heard in the company of the Lord’s host.
You can read more and find documentation in great detail of these issues in the articles below.
About the Evangelical Deep State and Social Justice Curriculum
On LGBTQUI+ Telling Compromise in the Church
Collapsing Conservative America ( provides more detail and documentation of the above article)
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SEE ALSO:
The Emergent Church's War on the Word
SEE: https://www.lighthousetrailsresearch.com/newsletters/2018/newsletter20181009.htm; republished below in full unedited for informational, educational and research purposes:
It was, of course, inevitable that the Emergent Church would begin to have babies that were even more unbiblical than itself. Andy Stanley is one of those spiritual offspring of a departure from biblical faith and adoption by experiential religious deception. In 2016, he told a group of pastors at the Southern Baptist Convention that they needed to get the spotlight off the Bible (August 2016 “Onward” conference). Now his spiritual "children" are following suit.
Sometimes, I just get a gut feeling about something before I know exactly what is wrong with it. Such has been my experience on a new newsfeed called, “Hello Christian” which sounds so spiritual but is basically clickbait with increasingly poisonous spiritual bait articles. I’ve commented on some, ignored others. But this recently, I received one of their e-mails with an article I just couldn’t let pass.
You see, the Bible means everything to me. I was taken out of the occult and the New Age at the very young age of 15 when I had already been studying – and had been brainwashed by – those worlds since I was about 8. One of the consistent features of those worlds was the denigration of or commonizing of the Bible as if it was man-made, as if it was just like any other religious book. It was a damnable lie, one that nearly sent me to an eternal hell.
So, when I came to Jesus, the first thing God had to do was to deliver me from that spiritual madness, that utter nonsense dispensed by demons who hated and despised every word of the holy Scriptures. And after that was done, I began to devour every single word of it like a man who was starving to death. It healed me. It delivered me. It restored my sanity.
And yes, I became one of “those guys.” God said it; I believe it; that settles it.
In fact, I almost quoted that very sturdy old phrase last week while speaking at a church and trying to tell people why the Jesus movement of the 1960s-1970s was so powerful. It was owed in part to a bunch of innocent hippie kids getting saved, picking up the Bible, and daring to say, “I believe every word of this book, and I am going to live it!” And thus, the Holy Spirit had a generation of people who would carry His Word to their generation in power and authority.
It’s been a slow, slick slide down Emergent Road since then, and now all the little compromises in the church, all the seeker-friendly doors we’ve opened to welcome the world and its ways into our midst, all the strange fires we have begun to place on God’s Holy altar are revealing themselves—becoming bolder all the time because no one is manning the outposts anymore. The watchmen are asleep, and the pastors have been seduced by worldly ways and promises of empires and prosperous ease in the name of ministry.
So, I suppose I was not terribly shocked to read in the article I received by John Pavlovitz an attack on the very phrase I just mentioned.
I want to reiterate one thing and clearly proclaim another before I go any further. I want to reemphasize that the denigrating, humanizing, and commonizing of the Scriptures has always been a favorite faith destroyer of the demonic world and every false religion. Whenever you hear people saying things like (and I have heard it for years, so Mr. Pavlovitz is not original) “You shouldn’t worship the Bible,” I point out that (1) I don’t, and that (2) God thinks so highly of His Word that He says He places His Word above all His Name (Psalm 138:2). I would guess if the Creator of all things places His own Word in such high regard, we probably shouldn’t spend our feeble and misled efforts trying to get others to “get the spotlight” off it.
Pavlovitz (a pastor and author) has entered the scene to write a vague, confusing article that is sure to reassure the emergent crowd that the Bible is something to be discussed, to be unsure of, and to be generally devalued lest we “worship it.” After all, Pavlovitz reminds us, the Bible is our “mysterious ancient text.” Pavlovitz appears to be the spiritual progeny of off-the-reservation apostate Rob Bell, who helped begin this “journey” by getting us to “have a conversation” about the “shared, ancient stories of our ancient ancestors.” (As if that negates its content somehow; you know, if we can kind of imagine a group of neanderthals sitting around a fire saying, “Ug, Grog, me think God real,” then we can interpret their ancient neanderthal-like writings through our more enlightened luciferian minds. Um . . . I meant learned minds.)
As to one of my favorite expressions, “God said it, I believe it, that settles it,” Pavlovitz says:
[I]t’s an odd little religious mantra [funny how phrases like “odd little” help devalue the claim of the statement] that perfectly captures the strange, often paradoxical relationship we modern Christians have with our mysterious ancient text.
Perhaps if Pavlovitz encountered the Jesus of the Word, His Word would not seem strange and often paradoxical. Disclaimer: I don’t understand it all. I likely never will in this life. I, however, would never attempt to denigrate the findings of nuclear physicists because they are “strange and paradoxical.”
“Many of us have made The Bible the central pillar of our faith,” Pavlovitz continues,” while not really knowing what it actually says. (especially not the earlier, weirder stuff.)”
He then goes on to say that we claim without question that it is "filled with the words 'from the very mouth of God,' and yet we can’t really be bothered to crack it open all that often (and then, definitely not the earlier, weirder stuff).
He continues:
We want it to be the clear, consistent, unquestioned, unfiltered voice of Truth in all matters, but to do that we often have to avoid, discard, or talk around a whole lot of it (absolutely, the earlier, weirder stuff).
At this point, I must say to Mr. Pavlovitz: Stop with the allusions to earlier weirder stuff that you use to sound cool and mysterious and like you know something we don’t because you are superior in your understanding and shouldn’t have to explain what you mean (similar to Leonard Sweet’s “more magnificent way”). The only mysterious thing here is what you are saying. And I have no interest to understand you because I know where you’re taking us, and I’ve been there and done that—
You insist that the Bible “is an incredibly complex library of writings, culled from thousands of years and multiple, very human writers.” Yet the Scriptures themselves tell us that “all scripture is given by inspiration of God [God-breathed] and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16) and that “knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost” (2 Peter 1:20-21). That doesn’t sound like it was merely, as you implied, a product of “very human writers.” It was so much more than that. Don’t you see, you have attempted to lower it to the level of your “very carnal understanding.”
“[F]inding the irreducible core and practical application of any given passage,” you insist, “is a monumental challenge.” To this I must respond with . . . Really? “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved.” How complex is that? I think Pavlovitz has missed the part about if you’re going to enter the Kingdom, you must be as a little child—not a seminary-trained mouthpiece for higher and lower criticism.
“Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” It’s simple, really.
What those like Pavlovitz are trying to do is convince people not to take the Bible that seriously because it’s too hard to understand. As I recall, that’s what Catholic priests have told their people, that they shouldn't read it because it’s just too mysterious and complex and only they can interpret it.
Pavlovitz says that rather than admit and wrestle with the obvious challenges we face in historical context writing style and author intent, too many of us simply hide behind some incendiary, line-drawing, black and white, all or nothing rhetoric. We either believe it or we don’t. Well, Mr. Pavlovitz, I am guilty as charged. Except it has nothing to do with writing style or author intent (there he goes again, ascribing human frailties to the Bible so we won’t take it that seriously.)
I’m sorry that the Bible is so vague to the emergents, but I would suggest it is they who are hiding behind the shadows of their own illusions that the Bible is vague, human written, and allows all the compromises that a book with no absolutes would afford someone.
Pavlovitz says that for “so many believers," the Bible has become a fourth addition to the Trinity, something to be blindly worshipped. This is absurd! I have been a believer for almost 50 years and have never met these many believers nor have I ever seen anyone “blindly worship” the Bible. Revere, love, count on, act on, stake their lives on, yes. But never worship. That’s just a silly and nonexistent scenario.
Pavlovitz also claims that for the earliest believers, it was simply essential reading material on the way to the Promised Land. Well, they had far more respect for the Torah than these emergents certainly do. Jesus quoted it constantly. And He didn’t say, “Let’s discuss this . . . . see what we think it might mean, see if we can come to some kind of consensus.” And as to His own words, He said, “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away” (Matthew 24:35).
Pavlovitz carefully preps his readers for the grand finale and the raison d’etre of his article by saying things like, “we don’t all agree on what it says or what it is and that’s okay” (spoken like a true Freudian 70s renaissance man – ‘I’m OK, you’re OK, and that’s OK!’) and, “[the Bible] is not, as we so often mischaracterize it, ‘the Word of God.’ Jesus is.” Um, yes, He is, but yes, IT is. READ.THE.BOOK. Specifically, Pavlovitz and other Word-rejecting Emergents might start with Psalm 119 which tells us exactly that. The Word of God is a lamp, is a light, etc. One can say Jesus is the Word but it is simply not biblical truth to say the Bible is not the Word of God, which is what Pavlovitz finally was bold enough to say. The Scriptures have always, and will always, testify to themselves.
It took Rob Bell hundreds of pages in Velvet Elvis to finally out with it. Pavlovitz came more quickly to the point in saying:
The Bible commands us not to add to the Scriptures but that doesn’t mean that God can’t. That’s what prayer often yields; not God reciting the ancient text verbatim but speaking anew to us.
So says every false prophet in history. I am glad for this: At least, Pavlovitz finally came out with it: The Bible is whatever you think it is, and whatever else you “hear” or “feel” is also God’s Word. And this is how a generation opens itself up to signs and lying wonders, and eventually, the one coming who will deceive the whole world.
I do not understand all of the Scriptures. And I do not think it is right that people argue over small differences to the point of almost violence. But the problem has never been with God or His Word but rather with our pride, our human flesh. The Word itself stands on its own.
I will say again without any hesitation: God said It, I believe it, that settles it.
To all the Pavlovitzes, Bells, Sweets, and Stanleys, I will reiterate: the Scriptures say of God, “Thou hast magnified Thy Word above all thy name.” That’s as clear as it gets. Take it or leave it. You either believe it, as you say, or you don’t.
In this last day of abounding lies, may God give us the discernment to reject such hell-forged theses as have been presented by these so-called “progressive,” New Spirituality, emerging Christians and to hold firmly to the truth of His Holy Word, whose AUTHOR is the object of our worship.
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