Many people have been asking me to have a direct list of signs of social justice cancer metastasizing within a church. This cancer starts with small matters and snowball until it finally destroys a church and its purpose: the good news that Jesus Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection absolved all sins.
The simple list is as follows. Any church which has one or more of these signs is on its way to a road of social justice replacing the gospel. If you have influence within your church, root these out and knock them down before they permeate and grow. If you do not have influence, leave immediately and ensure your family is safe from the inevitable wrath the social justice warrior will try to place on you.
Signs of Social Justice Cancer:
- Women Pastors
- Cherry Picking “Feel Good” Bible Passages
- Meaningless Corporate Slogans replacing actual mission statements
- A focus on race and racism
- An inability for leadership to have a dialogue with congregants
- A focus toward “online growth” rather than the local community
Women Pastors
Women pastors are expressly forbidden in the Bible in 1 Timothy 2:12, which states with a context of leadership and management of a church, “But I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but to remain quiet.”
In modern post-feminist world, this verse seems striking, and many churches ignore this verse, don’t let their congregants know the verse exists, or falsely claim that Timothy’s words were “just meant for the culture at the time.”
The problem is, the Bible never states anywhere it’s “just for the culture at the time.” It is the divine inspired Word of God, not to be added to nor detracted from. Willfully ignoring this verse means a church is willing to ignore certain passages in the Bible if it doesn’t fit their Narrative, which necessarily means they are not choosing God, but this world and something other than his Holy Word to guide them.
Which leads us to our second sign, cherry picking “feel good” Bible passages for sermons.
Cherry Picking Feel Good Bible Passages
You’ll notice most American protestant churches preach from the same few verses over and over. These are ones which simply talk about love, goodness, occasionally hitting “acceptable” sins like greed, but never speaking toward the disastrous sins much of our culture suffers from: abortion, homosexuality, fornication, adultery, or usury.
The idea comes from one pastor Tim Keller, who divides the gospel in his own system into three parts, the first he labels “the attractive gospel.” If you notice, Keller and his followers nearly always preach from this attractive gospel realm. They ignore the meatier substance of the Word where there are constant warnings by Christ and His Apostles that the way of Christian life is exceedingly difficult and will necessarily be one hated by the world.
Meaningless Corporate-Style Slogans Replacing Detailed Mission Statements
Secular corporations use slogans because they’re focused on branding. The idea is to get consumers hooked on a brief phrase (usually 6 words or less as any professional copywriter would tell you) to keep customers consuming product.
When a church falls to this world, their focus becomes on consuming product.
First, let’s give an example of a classical statement of belief which is useful and meaningful from a non-converged church:
“We believe that Jesus Christ is the eternal Son of God, who through His perfect life and sacrificial death atoned for the sins of all who will trust in Him, alone, for salvation. We believe that God is gracious and faithful to His people not simply as individuals but as families in successive generations according to His Covenant promises. We believe that the Holy Spirit indwells God’s people and gives them the strength and wisdom to trust Christ and follow Him. We believe that Jesus will return, bodily and visibly, to judge all mankind and to receive His people to Himself. We believe that all aspects of our lives are to be lived to the glory of God under the Lordship of Jesus Christ.”
The statement is long. You have to read and think about it. It requires work to process and live by, which will be true of anyone who converts to Christianity on their road to glorification.
When you replace beautiful, biblically inspired statements like this with quick slogans, you lose all substance and meaning. An easy one to notice is Nike’s “Just Do It.” It sounds good, feels good, but at the end of the day, is utterly meaningless. We remember it because it’s simple and catchy.
If a church goes to such a branding statement such as “Listen. Learn. Love.” They are switching to something feel good to dumb down the Gospel’s message to be inherently meaningless. Listen, Learn, Love to what? Just do what? These questions matter, and it’s why belief statements like the above are much more important to focus on than a quick branding slogan if one wants true congregants who are rooted in the Word of Christ and not just another social club.
A Focus On Race And Racism
Every major secular corporation and institution has been bombarding the world with messages of race, trying to get us to focus on this, which is at its core attempting to destroy white people and their culture and influence the 2020 election. When a church starts preaching on “white privilege” or “white fragility” or starts using buzzwords like “diversity” or “equality”, you know they’ve gone toward the snake-tongued messages of this world, and not the Bible.
The Bible instructs us all to not focus on race nor other divisions within the body of believers in Galatians 3:28, stating, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” It’s clear there is no place to preach racism from the pulpit.
Even the labeling of racism as a sin is an anti-Biblical teaching, as Christ our Lord preferred Jews over Greeks and stated such in Matthew 15:26, when he refused to perform a miracle for a woman on the basis she is Greek and now Jewish. Christ preferred a race in keeping with solidarity with his Jewish community first, and made a judgment based on it. Since Christ cannot by his nature sin, keeping community solidarity with one’s racial group is therefore not a sin.
We should, of course, remind everyone to act with the concepts of charity and love in mind when making such determinations.
An Inability For Pastoral Leadership To Have Scriptural Discussions With Congregants
The entire point of having pastors is to have an expert, an elder, who can lead and help guide and make determinations based on the Word of God. A wise leader would do well to speak with congregants who are deeply informed and rooted in the word and hone his own ability in apologetics and the preaching of the gospel. Especially in matters of disagreement, a leader takes and digests the thought processes and uses such to come to the true conclusion of God’s will within the church.
It’s very difficult to hold the entire Bible in mind, and as a community, we only grow in our faiths by diving deeper into the word, understanding the more difficult passages. A leader who is rooted in the Word does not hide from the Word and shun discussion. It means there’s other agendas at play—generally political—which the pastor views as more important than the study of the Truth.
Prioritizing Online Growth Rather Than Local Community
This is happening more and more with the COVID situation, as churches are restricted from the government from meeting. This was created intentionally as a matter of spiritual warfare as a wicked deception to separate God’s people, make us feel alone and set us into despair.
The whole nature of being online and immersed in social media is a disconnection of the people. It sets us apart, make life impersonal, destroys empathy, and gives us a sense of aloneness. It’s a total severance and separation of Christ’s Body and therefore from God, the literal definition of Hell. The Church focusing toward this arena is focusing toward the devil’s arena by nature, and no true ground can be gained for a body in such directions.
“Just as there are many parts to our bodies, so it is with Christ’s Body. We are all parts of it, and it takes every one of us to make it complete, for we each have different work to do. So we belong to each other, and each of us needs all the others,” Romans 12:4-5.
If we are disconnected, therefore we are severing parts of Christ’s Body. Watching a YouTube sermon online provides a false sense of connection, as the body is no more together in it than if they were at home on their couches watching a Netflix program. It’s anti-connection, detaching the branches from the vine and lending itself toward Narratives and a show being produced, which is what the world desires of the church as it renders the church no different than any other piece of content on the web.
Conclusion
These six signs of social justice convergence are all troubling even individually, but when they are brought together, they bring about complete wickedness, heresy, and sorcery within a church. One cannot attain the real message of the total and complete victory of Christ Jesus over this world and over death in this environment, which necessitates there is another motive other than bringing the Gospel when these signs are present. This motive under these conditions is invariably one of “social justice”, the political movement which is anti-Gospel and solely based on wordly popularity, in its nature. After all, social justice’s definitions change with the time, whereas God’s true justice is immutable as God is immutable. The Lord and his message do not change, so any preaching of change is suspect as being not of sound doctrine. God’s true justice is already defined, is rigid, and is not “fair nor equitable”. It is the rules of our Creator we have been designed to follow.
I forwarded this to my church leaders. Will be interesting to hear their response. Thanks Jon.