Post by Cindy on Jun 29, 2015 9:57:45 GMT -5
Jim Fletcher,
Lynne Hybels is a woman of vast influence in the evangelical world. She and her husband, Bill, founded Willow Creek Community Church in 1975; today the Willow Creek Association (9,000 member churches worldwide) is one of the most influential groups in Christendom. Willow Creek’s annual “Leadership Summit” often hosts speakers well outside of evangelicalism’s mainstream. Even a cursory examination of the Hybels’ worldview reveals a strong lean toward so-called “Progressive Christianity” (example: hosting speakers like Bill Clinton and Tony Campolo).
In the past few years, Lynne Hybels has become an activist for all sorts of causes, including the crisis in Congo, Christian persecution in the Middle East, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. . . .
Since the ‘70s, Lynne Hybels and her husband have been mentored by people sympathetic to the Palestinian Narrative, including Dr. Gilbert Bilezikian. In October 2008 she attended a conference in Amman, Jordan, led by Arab Christians from “Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq and the West Bank.”
Since that time, Lynne Hybels has been very active in promoting the so-called “Palestinian Narrative,” which points to Israel as an occupier of Arabs. The narrative is classic PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) propaganda, but Hybels’ networks allow her the luxury of promoting this worldview—couched in the language of “non-violent resistance”—which is also shared by Millennial influencers such as Donald Miller and Cameron Strang.
(Both Miller and Strang have accused Israel, in print, of virtual war-crimes, including the harvesting of organs from Palestinians, and outright murder of Palestinian women and children by the IDF. To date, Miller in particular offers no documentation for his allegations.)
At the leadership conference known as Catalyst Dallas, in the spring of 2014, conference organizers made available a booklet titled Known, in which various celebrity evangelical leaders pontificated on all sorts of topics. Hybels’ contribution is a highly revealing personal journey into mystical spirituality.
Two things stand out about Hybels’ worldview, based on the article (titled “Enough”): 1) her embrace of mysticism and shedding of biblical Christianity should be overwhelmingly alarming to evangelicals, and 2) because of her belief that she is helping her mystical god remake the world, one can now see why she applies leftist principles to solving the Arab-Israeli conflict.
In the past year or so, Hybels, along with friends like Todd Deatherage of the Telos Project, has been promoting a “Pro Peace, Pro Palestine, Pro Israel, Pro Jesus” mantra; the reasonable-sounding theme cloaks the anti-Israel themes that run through the network’s speeches, books, and curriculum—all of which reach a huge audience.
However, at the Justice Conference in Chicago in June, the co-founders of The Global Immersion Project, Jer Swigart and Jon Huckins, revealed that the “Pro, Pro, Pro” marketing copy was suggested by Palestinians in the West Bank who rightly understand that Americans are nowhere close to transitioning support from Israel to the Palestinian cause, and so it was suggested that a tolerant “peace” message wrapped in the “Pro, Pro, Pro” cloak would be much more appealing.
They are correct, of course. All totalitarians, especially in the last century, understand the power of manipulating language in order to fool the masses.
So we have two hot stories emerging from Hybels’ “Enough” article: her clear abandonment of biblical Christianity, in exchange for mysticism; and a peek into how this worldview has helped her become an activist for the Palestinians.
After all, in “Enough,” Hybels’ asserts:
“Now, it is often during quiet moments that I sense a truly divine call to action. This call to action is not about me striving to earn God’s favor, but rather about me joining God in his work of loving and remaking the world.”
In other words, she believes that when she hears from the mystical god who came to her in her silence, she is “doing God’s work,” so to speak.
In the world of modern spirituality that Lynne Hybels inhabits—and where she wields vast influence—she is combining humanistic reasoning (“the peace process is key to bridging the Arab-Israeli divide”) with mystical practices that will eventually draw her followers away from the God of the Bible and into the arms of a “Presence” that is neither benevolent nor forthcoming about his true nature.
“Enough” is chilling and should be carefully considered by every Bible-believing Christian, especially given the fact that Willow Creek’s church-growth/seeker-driven model dominates evangelicalism.
It doesn’t matter whether Lynne Hybels is sincere. The only thing that matters (after reading “Enough”) is the realization that this pied-piper path provides the very toxicity she allegedly abhors.
Keep a couple additional things in mind when you read “Enough”: 1) Hybels insists that God’s preferred language is silence, even though He has provided Scripture as the foundation of our faith and, 2) she turned her back on God well into her co-ministry with husband Bill. Do those who attend Willow Creek fully understand her descent into mysticism and her rejection of God, and do they understand that she abandoned her faith for a good portion of those ministry years? Did she make that “Known” in all that time?
Further, do the celebrity pastors and ministry leaders across America, many of whom embrace the Hybels, have anything to say about her views, as set forth in “Enough”? Will any of them express alarm at this, at all?
Immediately below is a list of points Hybels makes in her article. Consider them carefully, and then read her article in its entirety below.
Jim Fletcher
Prophecy Matters
jim@prophecymatters.com
•She turned her back on God.
•She was content to have no god.
•Transitioned from the “god” of her childhood to the “God” of her adult life.
•Began reading books by mystics.
•Read pages and pages of Thomas Merton.
•Her former Christianity was about words and certainty.
•She was now put off by words. [Except words by mystics]
•Says her former Christianity was oppressive.
•“In Christianity, as I had known it, there were only words. Words that had become useless, and then even worse than useless. Toxic.”
•Quotes Thomas Keating: “Silence is God’s first language; words are always a poor translation.”
•Began to sense a Presence in the universe.
•The Presence: “It is the fundamental truth upon which I build my life.”
•She is convinced that silence is God’s preferred language.
•“Now, it is often during quiet moments that I sense a truly divine call to action. This call to action is not about me striving to earn God’s favor, but rather about me joining God in his work of loving and remaking the world.”
From Catalyst booklet, Known, Catalyst Dallas May 1-2 2014
“Enough,” by Lynne Hybels, pages 28-30
IN MY EARLY FORTIES I EXPERIENCED A CRISIS OF FAITH. The Christianity I’d grown up with was about being good and working hard and following the rules in order to placate an angry God. It was about being an athlete winning the prize and a solider [sic] advancing the work of the Kingdom, thereby avoiding hellfire and damnation. A sensitive little girl, I took it all to heart and did my best. But after nearly four decades of striving to earn God’s love, I was exhausted. God had become a burden I no longer had the energy to carry.
So I quietly turned my back on God. For quite some time, I was content to have no god, but eventually God’s absence began to feel like a void. Thus began my journey from the god of my childhood to a God expansive and untamed enough to embrace my adult life.
At first I sought counsel from spiritual leaders. What they offered—books on apologetics, scripture memory programs, methods of prayer—were fine, but not what I needed. Realizing I was on my own and that I learn best through books, I stood in the middle of a Borders bookstore and said (silently), “Okay, God, maybe you’re there, but I don’t know how to find you. If you’re interested in helping me, you might start by leading me to the right books.”
I don’t recall the first book I pulled off a shelf that day—something in the general “spiritual” category. But that book led to another book and another. Each new book held plenty of not-so-useful stuff, but always there was one page, one quote, one name that led me to another book or another author. Gradually, those books led me on a meandering journey into the realm of poets and mystics.
Something in the genre of poetry, in the language of wonder and mystery, drew me. And the writings of the mystics melted something in me that had long been frozen. I read the pages of St. John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Julian of Norwich, Thomas Merton—pages and pages by Thomas Merton—and even when I didn’t quite understand what I read, I knew it was true.
I didn’t realize at the time that I was slowly being drawn into silence.
My former Christianity had been very much about doing, about certainty, and about words. And yet here I was, exhausted from excessive doing, all my certainty swallowed up by doubt, and totally put off by words. I sensed a growing longing for God, but words terrified me. Words about God, faith, Christianity, even Jesus threatened to pull me back into the oppressive Christianity I had known before.
I longed for intimacy—in human relationship and in prayer. I wanted to be known and loved for more than how I performed. I wanted to lean into a space where it was okay to simply be. To slow down. To rest. And I wanted to feel deeply. To laugh heartily and weep freely. I wanted a more soulful life.
You know soul when you hear it in music. When something moves you deeply, you say it “touched my soul.” When a person probes gently into the secrets of our lives and helps us sink beneath our carefully crafted image, we say we connected at a soul level.
Alan Jones describes soul as “the metaphor for the meeting place between body and spirit.” It’s the part of us we can’t see mingled with what we can see, the totality of who we are. Soul is lively, passionate, colorful, deep, and beautiful. When we feed soul, we come to life and we give life to others. When we dishonor soul, we choke.
I think I had a crisis of faith because there was nothing soulful in the Christianity I had known. There was no place to rest, to simply be. There was nothing that awakened me, touched me, filled me, satisfied my desire for intimacy and connection. In Christianity, as I had known it, there were only words. Words that had become useless, and then even worse than useless. Toxic.
So I did the only thing I knew to do. I sat in silence with my spiritual longing. I sat in my little upstairs office at home and looked at the trees outside my window. I sat on a beach of Lake Michigan and looked at the waves rolling in, at the seagulls skimming the whitecaps, at the moon sending a silver streak across the water at night.
For me, silence became what the Celts would call a “thin place,” a place where the membrane that separates the seen world from the unseen world is particularly thin, where you can catch a glimpse of the other reality. I began to sense what Thomas Keating said: “Silence is God’s first language; words are always a poor translation.”
At first, sitting in silence felt like a waste of time. But without the physical or emotional energy to do otherwise, I sat. I did my best to let go of words and ideas—to refuse the temptation to prove myself through action—to just be. As I grew in my ability to lean into that silent space, an amazing thing happened. I sensed that I was not alone in the universe. There was a Presence there. And that Presence was benevolently disposed toward me.
What I felt in the presence of that Presence was that I was enough. Good enough. Devout enough. Important enough. Smart enough. Successful enough. And I felt that I was home. I had arrived. There was nothing more to search for, nowhere else to go. This place of Silent Presence was “the place.” The place my restless, wounded soul was looking for. This place is enough. I am enough.
Enough. Never before in my life had I felt like I was enough—and suddenly I was. That realization still amazes me the way it did when I first experienced it.
At the time, I didn’t call that Presence God, or try to analyze it. I just knew—beyond a shadow of doubt—that I was not alone, and that I was loved. It was an intuitive understanding that ran deeper than anything I’d ever known. It was grounded in something unshakable that remains unshakable to this day. It is the fundamental truth upon which I build my life.
Eventually, I began to call that Loving Presence God the Father. In Jesus, I found the Lover of my Soul, the Son whose sacrificial offering is what renders me enough. In the Holy Spirit, I found the Voice who affirms that fundamental truth inside me everyday. I’m still careful not to wrap too many words around the Triune God; careful not to shrink the mystery of God. I still favor silence, and am more and more convinced it is God’s preferred language.
Now, it is often during quiet moments that I sense a truly divine call to action. This call to action is not about me striving to earn God’s favor, but rather about me joining God in his work of loving and remaking the world. Striving to earn God’s love is exhausting and futile, but joining him in the work of his Kingdom is the energizing, hope-filled work we are created for.
I am thankful each day that I became desperate enough to turn my back on my childhood god, so I could be embraced by the God who came to me in the silence of my soul.
Lynne Hybels is a woman of vast influence in the evangelical world. She and her husband, Bill, founded Willow Creek Community Church in 1975; today the Willow Creek Association (9,000 member churches worldwide) is one of the most influential groups in Christendom. Willow Creek’s annual “Leadership Summit” often hosts speakers well outside of evangelicalism’s mainstream. Even a cursory examination of the Hybels’ worldview reveals a strong lean toward so-called “Progressive Christianity” (example: hosting speakers like Bill Clinton and Tony Campolo).
In the past few years, Lynne Hybels has become an activist for all sorts of causes, including the crisis in Congo, Christian persecution in the Middle East, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. . . .
Since the ‘70s, Lynne Hybels and her husband have been mentored by people sympathetic to the Palestinian Narrative, including Dr. Gilbert Bilezikian. In October 2008 she attended a conference in Amman, Jordan, led by Arab Christians from “Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq and the West Bank.”
Since that time, Lynne Hybels has been very active in promoting the so-called “Palestinian Narrative,” which points to Israel as an occupier of Arabs. The narrative is classic PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) propaganda, but Hybels’ networks allow her the luxury of promoting this worldview—couched in the language of “non-violent resistance”—which is also shared by Millennial influencers such as Donald Miller and Cameron Strang.
(Both Miller and Strang have accused Israel, in print, of virtual war-crimes, including the harvesting of organs from Palestinians, and outright murder of Palestinian women and children by the IDF. To date, Miller in particular offers no documentation for his allegations.)
At the leadership conference known as Catalyst Dallas, in the spring of 2014, conference organizers made available a booklet titled Known, in which various celebrity evangelical leaders pontificated on all sorts of topics. Hybels’ contribution is a highly revealing personal journey into mystical spirituality.
Two things stand out about Hybels’ worldview, based on the article (titled “Enough”): 1) her embrace of mysticism and shedding of biblical Christianity should be overwhelmingly alarming to evangelicals, and 2) because of her belief that she is helping her mystical god remake the world, one can now see why she applies leftist principles to solving the Arab-Israeli conflict.
In the past year or so, Hybels, along with friends like Todd Deatherage of the Telos Project, has been promoting a “Pro Peace, Pro Palestine, Pro Israel, Pro Jesus” mantra; the reasonable-sounding theme cloaks the anti-Israel themes that run through the network’s speeches, books, and curriculum—all of which reach a huge audience.
However, at the Justice Conference in Chicago in June, the co-founders of The Global Immersion Project, Jer Swigart and Jon Huckins, revealed that the “Pro, Pro, Pro” marketing copy was suggested by Palestinians in the West Bank who rightly understand that Americans are nowhere close to transitioning support from Israel to the Palestinian cause, and so it was suggested that a tolerant “peace” message wrapped in the “Pro, Pro, Pro” cloak would be much more appealing.
They are correct, of course. All totalitarians, especially in the last century, understand the power of manipulating language in order to fool the masses.
So we have two hot stories emerging from Hybels’ “Enough” article: her clear abandonment of biblical Christianity, in exchange for mysticism; and a peek into how this worldview has helped her become an activist for the Palestinians.
After all, in “Enough,” Hybels’ asserts:
“Now, it is often during quiet moments that I sense a truly divine call to action. This call to action is not about me striving to earn God’s favor, but rather about me joining God in his work of loving and remaking the world.”
In other words, she believes that when she hears from the mystical god who came to her in her silence, she is “doing God’s work,” so to speak.
In the world of modern spirituality that Lynne Hybels inhabits—and where she wields vast influence—she is combining humanistic reasoning (“the peace process is key to bridging the Arab-Israeli divide”) with mystical practices that will eventually draw her followers away from the God of the Bible and into the arms of a “Presence” that is neither benevolent nor forthcoming about his true nature.
“Enough” is chilling and should be carefully considered by every Bible-believing Christian, especially given the fact that Willow Creek’s church-growth/seeker-driven model dominates evangelicalism.
It doesn’t matter whether Lynne Hybels is sincere. The only thing that matters (after reading “Enough”) is the realization that this pied-piper path provides the very toxicity she allegedly abhors.
Keep a couple additional things in mind when you read “Enough”: 1) Hybels insists that God’s preferred language is silence, even though He has provided Scripture as the foundation of our faith and, 2) she turned her back on God well into her co-ministry with husband Bill. Do those who attend Willow Creek fully understand her descent into mysticism and her rejection of God, and do they understand that she abandoned her faith for a good portion of those ministry years? Did she make that “Known” in all that time?
Further, do the celebrity pastors and ministry leaders across America, many of whom embrace the Hybels, have anything to say about her views, as set forth in “Enough”? Will any of them express alarm at this, at all?
Immediately below is a list of points Hybels makes in her article. Consider them carefully, and then read her article in its entirety below.
Jim Fletcher
Prophecy Matters
jim@prophecymatters.com
•She turned her back on God.
•She was content to have no god.
•Transitioned from the “god” of her childhood to the “God” of her adult life.
•Began reading books by mystics.
•Read pages and pages of Thomas Merton.
•Her former Christianity was about words and certainty.
•She was now put off by words. [Except words by mystics]
•Says her former Christianity was oppressive.
•“In Christianity, as I had known it, there were only words. Words that had become useless, and then even worse than useless. Toxic.”
•Quotes Thomas Keating: “Silence is God’s first language; words are always a poor translation.”
•Began to sense a Presence in the universe.
•The Presence: “It is the fundamental truth upon which I build my life.”
•She is convinced that silence is God’s preferred language.
•“Now, it is often during quiet moments that I sense a truly divine call to action. This call to action is not about me striving to earn God’s favor, but rather about me joining God in his work of loving and remaking the world.”
From Catalyst booklet, Known, Catalyst Dallas May 1-2 2014
“Enough,” by Lynne Hybels, pages 28-30
IN MY EARLY FORTIES I EXPERIENCED A CRISIS OF FAITH. The Christianity I’d grown up with was about being good and working hard and following the rules in order to placate an angry God. It was about being an athlete winning the prize and a solider [sic] advancing the work of the Kingdom, thereby avoiding hellfire and damnation. A sensitive little girl, I took it all to heart and did my best. But after nearly four decades of striving to earn God’s love, I was exhausted. God had become a burden I no longer had the energy to carry.
So I quietly turned my back on God. For quite some time, I was content to have no god, but eventually God’s absence began to feel like a void. Thus began my journey from the god of my childhood to a God expansive and untamed enough to embrace my adult life.
At first I sought counsel from spiritual leaders. What they offered—books on apologetics, scripture memory programs, methods of prayer—were fine, but not what I needed. Realizing I was on my own and that I learn best through books, I stood in the middle of a Borders bookstore and said (silently), “Okay, God, maybe you’re there, but I don’t know how to find you. If you’re interested in helping me, you might start by leading me to the right books.”
I don’t recall the first book I pulled off a shelf that day—something in the general “spiritual” category. But that book led to another book and another. Each new book held plenty of not-so-useful stuff, but always there was one page, one quote, one name that led me to another book or another author. Gradually, those books led me on a meandering journey into the realm of poets and mystics.
Something in the genre of poetry, in the language of wonder and mystery, drew me. And the writings of the mystics melted something in me that had long been frozen. I read the pages of St. John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila, Julian of Norwich, Thomas Merton—pages and pages by Thomas Merton—and even when I didn’t quite understand what I read, I knew it was true.
I didn’t realize at the time that I was slowly being drawn into silence.
My former Christianity had been very much about doing, about certainty, and about words. And yet here I was, exhausted from excessive doing, all my certainty swallowed up by doubt, and totally put off by words. I sensed a growing longing for God, but words terrified me. Words about God, faith, Christianity, even Jesus threatened to pull me back into the oppressive Christianity I had known before.
I longed for intimacy—in human relationship and in prayer. I wanted to be known and loved for more than how I performed. I wanted to lean into a space where it was okay to simply be. To slow down. To rest. And I wanted to feel deeply. To laugh heartily and weep freely. I wanted a more soulful life.
You know soul when you hear it in music. When something moves you deeply, you say it “touched my soul.” When a person probes gently into the secrets of our lives and helps us sink beneath our carefully crafted image, we say we connected at a soul level.
Alan Jones describes soul as “the metaphor for the meeting place between body and spirit.” It’s the part of us we can’t see mingled with what we can see, the totality of who we are. Soul is lively, passionate, colorful, deep, and beautiful. When we feed soul, we come to life and we give life to others. When we dishonor soul, we choke.
I think I had a crisis of faith because there was nothing soulful in the Christianity I had known. There was no place to rest, to simply be. There was nothing that awakened me, touched me, filled me, satisfied my desire for intimacy and connection. In Christianity, as I had known it, there were only words. Words that had become useless, and then even worse than useless. Toxic.
So I did the only thing I knew to do. I sat in silence with my spiritual longing. I sat in my little upstairs office at home and looked at the trees outside my window. I sat on a beach of Lake Michigan and looked at the waves rolling in, at the seagulls skimming the whitecaps, at the moon sending a silver streak across the water at night.
For me, silence became what the Celts would call a “thin place,” a place where the membrane that separates the seen world from the unseen world is particularly thin, where you can catch a glimpse of the other reality. I began to sense what Thomas Keating said: “Silence is God’s first language; words are always a poor translation.”
At first, sitting in silence felt like a waste of time. But without the physical or emotional energy to do otherwise, I sat. I did my best to let go of words and ideas—to refuse the temptation to prove myself through action—to just be. As I grew in my ability to lean into that silent space, an amazing thing happened. I sensed that I was not alone in the universe. There was a Presence there. And that Presence was benevolently disposed toward me.
What I felt in the presence of that Presence was that I was enough. Good enough. Devout enough. Important enough. Smart enough. Successful enough. And I felt that I was home. I had arrived. There was nothing more to search for, nowhere else to go. This place of Silent Presence was “the place.” The place my restless, wounded soul was looking for. This place is enough. I am enough.
Enough. Never before in my life had I felt like I was enough—and suddenly I was. That realization still amazes me the way it did when I first experienced it.
At the time, I didn’t call that Presence God, or try to analyze it. I just knew—beyond a shadow of doubt—that I was not alone, and that I was loved. It was an intuitive understanding that ran deeper than anything I’d ever known. It was grounded in something unshakable that remains unshakable to this day. It is the fundamental truth upon which I build my life.
Eventually, I began to call that Loving Presence God the Father. In Jesus, I found the Lover of my Soul, the Son whose sacrificial offering is what renders me enough. In the Holy Spirit, I found the Voice who affirms that fundamental truth inside me everyday. I’m still careful not to wrap too many words around the Triune God; careful not to shrink the mystery of God. I still favor silence, and am more and more convinced it is God’s preferred language.
Now, it is often during quiet moments that I sense a truly divine call to action. This call to action is not about me striving to earn God’s favor, but rather about me joining God in his work of loving and remaking the world. Striving to earn God’s love is exhausting and futile, but joining him in the work of his Kingdom is the energizing, hope-filled work we are created for.
I am thankful each day that I became desperate enough to turn my back on my childhood god, so I could be embraced by the God who came to me in the silence of my soul.