Once upon a time not so long ago, I worked for the Salvation Army. First of all, I am always astounded at the people who don’t realize the Salvation Army is a church/denomination. Hello! SALVATION Army!

At one point, my boss told me that the reason you’ll never see a Salvation Army church with a steeple on it is because they didn’t want to be associated with the kinds of churches where if you had a real problem/need you’d be told, “We’ll pray for you.” They wanted people to know that the Salvation Army is a place where your physical as well as your spiritual needs could be met.

I thank God for my time at THAT Salvation Army (not all of them are so good). The employees from the Captain down LOVED the people we served through the shelter and the various outreaches, and lives were changed because of it. I think it is the first time that I really experienced God’s love as a tangible thing. I once asked my boss if anyone kept record of people who were helped by the Salvation Army who later joined. He said, “Where do you think we get our membership from?”

At the time, once of my friends was all caught up in the Brownsville heresy Revival. I really infuriated her by saying I didn’t think God wanted us chasing thrills and chills, which is all Brownsville and most revivals are - thrills and chills. That real revival meant carrying out the work He gave us to do, and I wondered if the Salvation Army and churches like them hadn’t been quietly carrying out the most successful evangelical outreach of the last 100+ years. She didn’t speak to me for awhile after that.

Rich Mullins said:

Jesus said whatever you do to the least of these my brothers you’ve done it to me. And this is what I’ve come to think. That if I want to identify fully with Jesus Christ, who I claim to be my savior and Lord, the best way that I can do that is to identify with the poor. This I know will go against the teachings of all the popular evangelical preachers. But they’re just wrong. They’re not bad, they’re just wrong. Christianity is not about building an absolutely secure little niche in the world where you can live with your perfect little wife and your perfect little children in a beautiful little house where you have no gays or minority groups anywhere near you. Christianity is about learning to love like Jesus loved and Jesus loved the poor and Jesus loved the broken.

"You guys are all into that born again thing, which is great. We do need to be born again, since Jesus said that to a guy named Nicodemus. But if you tell me I have to be born again to enter the kingdom of God, I can tell you that you have to sell everything you have and give it to the poor, because Jesus said that to one guy too..... But I guess that's why God invented highlighters, so we can highlight the parts we like and ignore the rest."

Shane Clairborne said:

True, the cross is not always seeker sensitive. It is not comfortable. But it is the cornerstone of our faith, and I fear that when we remove the cross, we remove the central symbol of the nonviolence and grace of our Lover. If we remove the cross, we are in danger of promoting a very cheap grace. Perhaps it should make us uncomfortable. After all, it wasn't so comfy to get nailed there.

We can admire and worship Jesus without doign what he did. We can applaud what he preached and stood for without caring about the same things. We can adore his cross without taking up ours. I had come to see that the great tragedy in the church is not that rich Christians do not care about the poor but that rich Christians do not know the poor.

..... Jesus came not just to prepare us to die but to teach us how to live

End Times?

Sorry, I don't buy this End Times crap. I've come to regard it as spiritually dangerous besides. People spend all their time running around looking for proof we're living in the End Times. Instead of trying to work to make the world a better place they just accept that the world is going to hell in a handbasket because this is the End Times, and things are supposed to get bad at the end. Also, consider the Parable of the Ten Virgins (Matthew 25). Five of the Virgins didn't bring enough oil. Why? They thought the Bride Groom would be coming sooner than he was, so they didn't think needed it. You can compare this to the End Times crowd. They're so sure the end will be soon, that they're not prepared for the long haul. Seriously, remember college when we were all into the End Times stuff - did any of us think we'd still be here all these years later? Remember the first Gulf War, and everyone was sure this was some great sign of the end being at hand? Well, guess what? We're still here. I think some of the spiritual burn out and periods of falling away were caused by this End Times mentallity. We weren't prepared for the long haul, but thankfully God is good, and He didn't come back and shut us out while we were out of oil. If you go back and read Church History almost every generation was absolutely sure they were going to be the last generation. This may or may not be the End Times, but I think if we devote ourselves to doing the things we know He wants us to do - "Love your neighbor as yourself," "Love the Lord, your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength," "As you do it to the least of these...." and stay strong in studying Scripture, so we don't get fooled again (thanks to The Who) then we won't need to worry about if it's The End Times or not. They'll take care of themselves, and He'll take care of us.

Speaking of spiritually dangerous. This outright frightens me. Read Besides the glitz and overdone production of it offends my Menno-Quaker sensibilities. This is just an outright heresy:


As for the preaching, it was motivating and highly inspirational: the sermon’s title (sorry, I’m not kidding) was “Ten Kinds of People That God Can’t Help.” The main idea was that you should “invest” your time in positive happy friends, instead of making bad investments in friendships with hopeless, unhappy people:

“Why are you trying to help people like that when even God can’t help them?” The sermon’s best one-liner: “The Bible isn’t a book about God’s love for man; it’s a book about man’s love for God.”

Excuse me???? There are some people that God can't help? So, God isn't all powerful? And we're not supposed to concern ourselves with the least because they're not happy and positive? Jesus was just talking to hear His own voice in Matthew 25? He didn't really come to bring good news to the afflicted, bind up the brokenhearted, and proclaim freedom to the captives? I'm sorry, but it's time for Christians who really believe in the Bible to stand up and say, "This is a load of crap! You are a false shepherd preaching a false gospel! And at risk of sounding judgemental - you will go to hell for it."