Beware Gilderoy Lockhart

Have you read any books by the Christian versions of Gilderoy Lockhart? You Harry Potter fans will catch the reference. He was the teacher at the Hogwarts school who wrote books claiming experiences he had not actually had, and got teaching authority he had not really earned.

Jeff Dunn writes about the Christian versions of Lockhart at Internet Monk. He even names some names.

He's right. I suggest you read it.

The Litmus Test

"...So we come again to the question: Could the theology of the cross be the litmus test of genuine Christianity in our day? The corrupt and the counterfeit push aside the whole concept of cross bearing in favor of a joy without it. Fake Christianity offers the Christian an imitation of Christ’s glory in heaven, not of his humiliation on earth. The phony and the artificial church turns worship into a spiritual happy hour devoid of repentance, with cheap absolution, with no thought of taking God seriously in either the law or the gospel. And people love it. They still get to be their own god, their own bible, their own source of ultimate truth and salvation."

From "The Theology of the Cross" by Daniel M. Deutschlander

Hat Tip: JOLLYBLOGGER: The Litmus Test of Christianity Today

A Phony Revealed

This time I am not talking about Todd Bentley!

Zach Nielsen at the "Take Your Vitamin Z" Blog reported this week on Sad News from Australia

A few days ago I did a post about the new Hillsong recording. In passing I mentioned the song, "Healer". The short of it is that the author of the song has terminal cancer and then wrote this powerful song about God being his Healer.

Sadly, it turns out he was lying about the whole thing. 300,000 youtube hits later, with thousands of people inspired, it was all a fake. He does not have cancer.

We need to pray for this man and his real healing from some very serious sin issues in his life.

I was just listening to a White Horse Inn Podcast this morning and they reminded the listeners that our hope is not in a subjective experience tied to a mortal man, but to the historical and factual message of Jesus' death and resurrection that is unchanged in the face of man's subjective experiences.

I pray that the people who listen to the new Hillsong record and all those in Australia who have been impacted by this man's ministry will have put more hope in the historical facts of the gospel and not the personal experience produced by this man.

How sad that someone would think to do this, to commit such a fraud, just to get attention. How great is the hope for all of us that Jesus loves and saves sinners- or we would all be lost. How amazing that God can communicate truth through a phony - but if He can speak through Balaam's Ass (Numbers 22:28-31) then I guess He can speak through anybody.

Update: More details on the story at The Australian.

MySpace Prophesies?

From the Christian comedy/spoof site LarkNews.com comes this gem: "MySpace gives pastor ‘prophetic’ edge" It's a joke, but I almost wonder how close to reality this is in some places and ministries.

PEORIA, Ariz. — Last Sunday, pastor Irwin Alton, 62, preached against several specific sins during his sermon. Some people in the audience gasped with recognition.

"When he talked about skipping mid-week service to go to the lake, and buying a new boat when you haven’t tithed, I felt nailed to my pew," said one man. "It was like the Holy Spirit was speaking right to me."

But it wasn’t the Holy Spirit — it was the man’s own blog where he had posted photos of himself and his buddies on his new boat on a Wednesday evening.

Pastor Alton, who cultivates a reputation as a computer illiterate techno-phobe, is actually an avid reader of MySpace pages, blogs and personal websites of the people in his congregation. "I appear, shall we say, un-hip," he says. "Therein lies my advantage."

Though he publicly refers to the Worldwide Web as the "Worldwide Waste" and e-mail as "sin-mail," in his home office is a bank of computer screens with more than 170 bookmarked sites — personal web pages, blogs, Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, Flickr and more. Each week Alton surfs the sites for hours to find evidence of questionable behavior by people in his church. He jots offenses down and incorporates them into his Sunday sermons.

He even checks the blogs of friends of people in his church. That’s where he found photos of Emily Dotson, 31, at a local sports bar. During the service last week Alton paused mid-sermon to say, "Some of you have been visiting places you shouldn’t be seen in as a Christian, drinking establishments and the like." Emily was taken aback.

"He was speaking right to me," she says.

She came forward and repented for being at the sports bar, even though she’d been celebrating a girlfriend’s birthday.

"I knew I shouldn’t have lingered in that environment," Emily says. "I could have gone in, said hi and left."

When mentioning sinful behavior Alton sometimes intentionally gets small details wrong, or remains vague. "If I bat a thousand they might get suspicious," he says.

He never claims his messages are Holy Spirit-inspired, but many in the church believe they are.

"He’s right so often, it has to be God," says one man. "We all come to church because God is using Pastor Alton to address our particular situations. It’s phenomenal."

One family, the Bixbys, was tolerating their daughter’s college partying. Alton watched the girl’s MySpace for weeks before mentioning from the pulpit that "some parents need to get a lasso around their college-age children — and fast, before they do some real damage."

That week, the Bixbys called their daughter home to "re-establish patterns of good behavior." "We felt that if God was merciful enough to speak prophetically through our pastor like that, we should take action," says the father.

For his part, Alton has no problem not revealing his sources. "If they can’t make the connection between what I’m saying and what they’re putting on the Internet, then maybe God really is speaking to them," he says. "And they sure treat me with a lot more respect now."

Lark News is sort of a Christian copy of "The Onion." What makes their stuff so funny is that it is close enough to reality that you can almost recognize yourself and your church friends in so much of their material - to the point of "ouch!" I've never faked a prophecy, but the temptation to put on airs to look good in front of a congregation is a problem for anyone in church leadership. Ouch, indeed.