Our loyal readers remember our series on the Prosperity Preachers just last month, and we intended to keep them informed should any “breaking news” occur.
Our loyal readers remember our series on the Prosperity Preachers just last month, and we intended to keep them informed should any “breaking news” occur.
We’ve added some new tools behind the scenes to fight the recent flood of SPAM. So for now comment moderation is off.
Since Dee and I began our investigation of the “New Calvinists”, we have become increasingly concerned that this hot new theological movement may have a very serious downside, namely, hero worship. We are becoming extremely familiar with the leaders of this movement because their names and faces seem to be everywhere on the internet, among other places. You likely know them, too. Let’s begin with the Fab Four of “Together for the Gospel” aka T4G – Al Mohler, Ligon Duncan, Mark Dever, and C.J. Mahaney, not to be confused with those whom we call the Fab Five (the Fort Lauderdale Five of the 1970s Shepherding Movement who were Bob Mumford, Derek Prince, Charles Simpson, Don Basham, and Ern Baxter).
“That is why the church, the whole body of Christians showing Him to one another, is so important. It is so easy to think that the church has a lot of different objects – education, buildings, missions, holding services…the Church exists for no other purpose but to draw men to Christ. to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became man for no other purpose. It is even doubtful, you know, whether the whole universe was created for any other purpose”. C.S. Lewis
“The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.” Mark Noll in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind
We are drowning in spam. We are moderating comments for a couple of days to see if that helps. Don’t worry. We will post all nonspam comments.
We are moderating comments for a short time because we are drowning in spam. Don’t worry. We will post all non spam comments just give us a couple of hours. Sorry about this.
Joshua Harris, C.J. Mahaney’s successor at Covenant Life Church in Gaithersburg, Maryland, has risen almost as fast in reformed circles as his mentor. Josh has learned how to play the SGM game well as he follows in C.J.’s footsteps. The first endorsement in Mahaney’s masterpiece Living the Cross Centered Life is written by Josh.
My counterpart recently wrote a fascinating article on the contributions that Sovereign Grace Ministries, along with its fearless apostle, Mahaney, have made to Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. This seminary is the flagship seminary of the Southern Baptist Convention. It is also home to one of C.J.’s best buddies, the very reformed president, Al Mohler. A number of past and present SGMers have commented that they couldn’t understand these donations. Their primary reasons for concern are:
As I mentioned in the post “How I Discovered Mahaney Mania”, I purchased C.J. Mahaney’s so-called masterpiece when it first came out in 2006. Had I read it back then, I probably would have concluded: well, at least the author focuses on the cross, which has been shunned by so many mainline churches. Then I would have put it away — out of sight, out of mind. However, that’s not what happened… Having acquired considerable knowledge about C.J. Mahaney, Sovereign Grace Ministries, and their connections to the “Reformed Big Dogs” over the past year and a half, I have a much different perspective on Mahaney’s book.
Deb’s Testimony
I began conducting internet research on Reformed Theology in the fall of 2008. I firmly believe I was driven by the Holy Spirit to discover everything I could about this movement which is rocking the very foundations of our churches and seminaries. It became a daily discipline for me, and I would often spend 7 to 8 hours a day conducting research on my computer when it would seem like only a few hours had passed. I’ll admit it – I was obsessed!