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1Corinthians 16:2 Upon the first day of the week let every one of you lay by him in store, as God hath prospered him, that there be no gatherings when I come.
2Corinthians 9:7 Every man according as he purposeth in his heart, so let him give; not grudgingly, or of necessity: for God loveth a cheerful giver.
The following article concerns Willow Creek inviting Robert Morris from Gateway Church, Dallas, Texas to preach. The controversy is that some believe Morris preaches a prosperity Gospel. Willow Creek’s Tim Stevens however ‘…said Willow is spreading the word about God’s miraculous provision — not a prosperity gospel.’
Nevertheless, Robert Morris and his church are connected with Pentecostal preacher Jack Hayford https://www.tku.edu/about-tku/gateway-church/ and most prosperity preachers are within the Pentecostal movement.
Amos 3:3 asks ‘Can two walk together, except they be agreed?‘ Now Robert Morris and Pentecostal Jack Hayford seem to have a very close relationship as ‘Dr. Hayford serves as an apostolic elder of Gateway Church’. Hayford is associated with the Foursquare Pentecostal Church which encourages the speaking in tongues https://www.wayoflife.org/reports/beware_of_jack_hayford.html. Willow Creek must not have a problem with this either.
So, ‘Facing persistently lower giving, Willow Creek Community Church last Sunday invited Pastor Robert Morris, who some allege is a prosperity preacher, to deliver a guest sermon on tithing. The sermon contained a singular promise: Tithe for a year, and if you’re not satisfied, you’ll get your money back.
“Thousands and thousands” had seen their lives changed after starting to give 10% of their income regularly, Morris said. “I’ve done this with our church. I’ve told our church on multiple occasions, I’ve said to them, if you’ll try it for one year, if you are not fully satisfied at the end of that year, I’ll give you your money back. In 22 years of church no one’s ever asked for money (back).”
Morris is pastor of Gateway Church, once the largest congregation of the Association of Related Churches (ARC) in the United States. (It’s no longer listed in the ARC’s church finder.) He also is one of disgraced pastor Mark Driscoll’s staunchest supporters.
Morris was the first to replatform Driscoll after the Mars Hill debacle in 2014. And just last summer, Morris had Driscoll speak at an ARC preaching seminar at Gateway Church.
When asked about Morris’ money-back guarantee, Willow Creek Executive Pastor Tim Stevens said Willow is spreading the word about God’s miraculous provision — not a prosperity gospel.
Stevens confirmed that Willow Creek’s average weekly giving so far this year is 20% below the church’s already reduced budget. This year’s giving budget is about half the church’s revenue in 2019, when investigators said sexual misconduct allegations against Willow Creek’s founder Bill Hybels were credible. But he said giving so far this year is on par with last year’s weekly giving average.
Stevens told The Roys Report that the church budgets the same amount of revenue for every week—about $614,000 across seven campuses. However, he noted, “the reality is that a larger percentage of our giving happens at the end of the year.”
Critics, however, say that though Morris has a softer sell, he still preaches the same health and wealth gospel of prominent prosperity preachers like Kenneth Hagin. “Hagin had no problem telling you that God wanted him to be rich,” write Paul and Susan Dunk of KW Redeemer Church in Breslau, Ontario. “But Morris softens it and prefers blessed.”
They add that Morris’ teaching on tithing is more like “pagan votive offerings” than the voluntary giving encouraged in the New Testament. “If you needed health, wealth, crops, love, wisdom etc . . . you would go to the temple and give money to the corresponding gods of those blessings,” the Dunks write.
Theology professor and Pastor David Schrock likewise called Morris’s beliefs about material blessing a “misreading of Scripture” in a critical review of Morris’s book “The Blessed Life.”
“Instead of grounding God’s character and promises in the new covenant of Christ, Morris makes God a self-styled miracle-worker who promises supernatural power,” Schrock wrote.
Morris preached Sunday on “The Principle of First” as part of Willow Creek’s five-part sermon series “More Than Money.” The series coincides with a major giving campaign underway now at Willow Creek.
“This series aims to help people understand that money is not a financial issue, it’s a discipleship issue and a matter of the heart,” the series summary reads in part.
Morris’s money-back promise was mentioned only in an unlisted video recording of the 9 a.m. service. It’s absent from the sermon video published on Willow Creek’s website, which was apparently drawn from the “full service” recording of the 11:15 a.m. service.
In the 9 a.m. service, Willow Creek Pastor Dave Dummitt made the same promise as he held up a commitment card for the church’s current giving initiative.
Dummitt encouraged congregants to consider pledging to be “Christ-first givers”— the third of four giving options the church is asking congregants to commit to. Then he told the audience he’d “go ahead and be bold and say, if you do this for the year, and you are not fully satisfied, we’ll give the money back.”
“I like that challenge. It’s good,” Dummitt added.
Stevens said Dummitt had offered something similar at his previous church, but his decision to challenge Willow Creek came spontaneously. Leadership decided the idea “needed some time to bake” so it wasn’t mentioned in the later service, Stevens said. However, the challenge is being developed now and could be formally announced as soon as this weekend.
Stevens denied that the money-back challenge constituted a “prosperity gospel” message.
“Any time that my wife and I have stretched in our giving, God has out-given us in return,” Stevens wrote in an email to The Roys Report. The old car lasted longer, he offered as an example, or the tax return was big enough to cover a surprise bill.
A giving commitment card distributed on Feb. 20, 2022 at Willow Creek Community Church (Courtesy Photo)
“God meets a need in some miraculous way that we didn’t see coming,” Stevens continued. “I think that was the intent of what our guest preacher was communicating, and what Dave was affirming. Willow does not, and never has, held a position that says God will make you rich if you commit your finances to the church.”
When asked about Morris’ longstanding support of Driscoll, Stevens wrote that Willow Creek tries “to shy away from ‘guilt by association’” when inviting guest speakers.
In addition to repeatedly platforming Driscoll, Morris was formerly an overseer at Driscoll’s new church, The Trinity Church. A spokesman for Morris previously told The Roys Report that Morris remains available if Driscoll’s church needs counsel.
Last August, Driscoll was featured alongside Morris as a speaker at a preaching seminar Gateway and Morris hosted.
Stevens pointed out Willow Creek has recently invited other speakers. Some of them could be considered controversial.
Good Ole Charles ‘Darwin proposed that evolutionary changes occur by a long series of small incremental changes over long periods of time. Six decades later Richard Goldschmidt proposed that evolution happened by sudden large changes resulting in new organisms with new structures and functions, which he called “hopeful monsters”. A group of evolutionary biologists at University of California Santa Barbara claim to have found an example of a sudden large change brought about by mutations in a single gene in a plant named Aquilegia coerulea, otherwise known as the Colorado Blue Columbine.
They noticed that approximately one quarter of the population of A. coerulea in central Colorado had flowers that lacked the distinctive nectar spurs seen in Columbine flowers. Instead, the flowers had an extra row of sepals. They studied the genetics of normal and spurless plants and found the change resulted from mutations to a gene named APETALA3-3. The mutations made the gene non-functional.
Hodges, a professor of Biology at UC Santa Barbara explained: “This finding shows that evolution can occur in a big jump if the right kind of gene is involved. When it’s broken, those instructions aren’t there anymore, and that causes it to develop into a completely different organ, a sepal.” He went on to comment: “We did not have a good example of a hopeful monster due to a single genetic change until now.”
The researchers wondered how the loss of function mutations survived in such a large proportion of the population, especially as the mutant flowers lacked nectar spurs. The plants are normally pollinated by moths that feed by inserting their proboscis into the spur, which positions the moth’s head in the right place to collect pollen. According to Scott Hodges, “To get that many of this mutant type really suggests that there’s selection favouring it somehow.” It turns out the mutant plants can be pollinated by bees so they could still reproduce, but the selection advantage that enabled them to survive and thrive was the fact that aphids and deer, which feed on Columbines, did not like the mutant plants as much as the normal plants.
References: ScienceDaily 16 February 2022; Current Biology 16 February 2022 doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.01.066
Editorial Comment: Richard Goldschmidt (1878-1958), who proposed the “hopeful monster” theory also recognised that some sudden large changes result in loss of function and he called these “hopeless monsters”. As the mutant columbines can survive, due to being disliked by aphids and deer, they not hopeless, but they are not hopeful either.
As the researchers admit, the change was caused by a gene being broken, i.e. a loss of genetic information. That is degeneration, not evolution. The plant has not gained a structure it did not have before. In fact, it has lost an important structure, the nectar spurs, which reduces its options for being pollinated. If moths with their long proboscises try to feed from the centre of the flower, rather than from the nectar spurs their heads are not close enough to collect any pollen.
The extra row of sepals is not a new structure, and the broken gene didn’t form them. The plant already had sepals. The extra row results from the loss of the signal to make petals muddling the complex sequence of genetic control that occurs during flower formation.
An extreme form extra sepals resulting from muddled genetic signalling occurs in flowers known as green roses. In these the flower bud can only make sepals, and it makes multiple rows of them resulting in a cluster of green sepals with no other flower parts. These are definitely “hopeless monsters” as they cannot reproduce themselves, but they survive because people like them and propagate them by grafting. Creation Research has several specimens in our collection of unusual plants.’https://creationfactfile.com/6475/hopeful-monster-flowers/
‘SCIENTISTS’ BALDERDASH BEATS GURUS: An international team of researchers have conducted a survey to see whether people have higher regard for statements made by scientists compared with spiritual leaders, even if the people don’t understand what has been stated. To do this they presented people with apparently erudite statements that were really nonsense generated by a computer algorithm that puts together modern-day buzzwords and technical terms into grammatically correct but meaningless sentences. The statements were neither overtly scientific or religious. The team surveyed 10,195 participants from 24 countries, asking them to rate how credible they found the statements. The sources of the statements were ascribed to either a person with a fictitious name and described as “a spiritual authority in world religions” or to someone else with a different fictitious name yet described as “a scientific authority in the field of particle physics”. Overall, the survey revealed people gave higher credibility rating to the “scientific authority” source than the “spiritual leader”, even by people who identified as being “religious”. The research team called this phenomenon the “Einstein effect” and summarised their results: “across all 24 countries and all levels of religiosity, scientists held greater authority than spiritual gurus”. They then concluded: “These findings suggest that irrespective of one’s religious worldview, across cultures science is a powerful and universal heuristic that signals the reliability of information”. References: Science Alert 13 February 2022; Nature Human Behaviour published online 7 February 2022, doi: 10.1038/s41562-021-01273-8.
ED. COM. This last statement may also sound like it came out of the balderdash producing algorithm, but it does make sense if you understand the term “heuristic” which means enabling someone to discover or learn something for themselves. Therefore, these researchers were claiming that people see science, and therefore the teachings of scientists, as the way to find the truth. It is interesting that even people who considered themselves religious put scientists above spiritual leaders. This has provably happened in the Christian church over the past century and a half, as the evolutionary words of Darwin, Lyell, Dawkins and Attenborough and their followers have been elevated above the Word of God on Six Day Creation, Noah’s Flood and other Biblical issues.
It pays to remember that when something is not true, it won’t ever be made true by being said by scientists, no matter how many university degrees they may have. To find the truth you need to go to the One who is the truth – The Lord Jesus Christ. He spoke the truth and backed up His words with actions that only the Creator could do.
Finally, don’t let anyone bluff you with ‘heuristic’ balderdash or big words. If something looks or sounds like balderdash it probably is, and being said by a scientific or religious authority will not change that. God’s Word uses plain language, meant for all to understand. If someone claiming to have scientific or religious authority tries to make it more complicated than it is, or change the plain meaning to suit current popular theories, don’t let them confuse you. If someone tries to bluff you with big words don’t be intimidated. Politely ask them to explain. If they can’t give you an answer in plain language, they probably don’t know what they are talking about.
We were recently called upon to deal with this issue when we were asked about a book by Ken Coulson, a Science PhD who proposed a new theory that to many appears to reconcile Darwin’s and Lyell’s theories with Genesis. The same author also made claims about dogs and evolution. For our response to both his claims see the questions: What do you think of the book ‘Creation Unfolding’ by Ken Coulson? Is it evolutionist? Answer here. Dogs have undergone many changes since people have been breeding them. Surely this is evolution? Answer here. Also see the item on dog genes in this newsletter below. Further questions related to the issue of scientific authority: A School Chaplain claims students lose faith unless we teach God used evolution. How do you reply? Answer here. Can you show me one error made by Richard Dawkins? Answer here.‘https://mailchi.mp/creationresearch.net/creation-research-email-update-23rd-february-2022?e=ce21bf0337
‘Welcome to a world where Chinese leaders are rewriting the Bible to suit communism and make Jesus a sinner like everybody else. Where Trudeau is reportedly behaving as a Communist dictator while Boris in England is removing every last restriction concerning Covid. What a crazy mixed up world where facts are so often FACT CHECKED by experts who portray truth as fiction and sell us lies as fact and persuade governments to punish any who expose their falsehoods. Down under we are looking at MASKS possibly being removed next week but who knows what else after that. Yet a little freedom is a step in the right direction and very much appreciated.
Beware Chinese Communist leaders – God’s Word warns of harsh downfall to any individual or nation who dares interfere with His Word – it’s the beginning of the end of what you do. Beware Trudeau when you treat people like your own pet ants, they will turn and bite, and Boris you could probably do with a little more discretion but you are heading in the right direction mate; and all you scientists who spend your life denying the obvious truth that “God created, that He alone is truth, and He did come to this earth as the sinless Christ to give us the only freedom that truly exists both now and for eternity”.’https://mailchi.mp/creationresearch.net/creation-research-email-update-23rd-february-2022?e=ce21bf0337
Unfortunately for America, it’s just what China and Russia wanted to hear.
Last week, the Army released a scathing assessment of Joe Biden’s actions when retreating from Afghanistan — an honest assessment of that deadly and disgraceful debacle. That was a straightforward and much-needed evaluation, which reflects well on the Army leadership’s critical thinking skills.
On the other hand, this week Army Secretary Christine Wormuth published her objectives for America’s Army. Intended to set resourcing goals and strategic direction for the Army’s uniformed leadership and all our Soldiers, I was expecting to read three things — the same three that any patriotic American (and Army senior uniformed leadership?) would be expecting from her.
Here’s what I was looking for:
As part of America’s joint military force, prepare the Army and our Soldiers to fight and win a war against any foe threatening or attacking…
whatyareckon 