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About Jesus Steve Sweetman My Journey Through The Ecclesiastical Maze Part 14 Introduction
To Cults Have you ever noticed
that many of the apostolic letters in the New Testament were written in
response to false teaching and inappropriate behaviour.
Heresies and bad living have plagued the church since its
inception. The church is one
of the main fronts in the satanic terrorism directed towards the In the spring of 1971
some of us met together in a century old church building to plan a
“witnessing for Jesus event” at an upcoming rock festival.
We called these meetings the “SMOTS meetings”.
“SMOTS” stood for the “secret meeting of the saints”.
Well, the meetings weren’t really a secret. Being young, one of
our friends came up with the name in jest and it stuck. In our planning, we
invited Christian groups from all across The first group of these
people arrived in town from Something that really
impressed me about these people was their memorization of Scripture.
Verse after verse flowed endlessly from their lips.
I never heard anyone talk in Scripture like this before, so I
memorized close to 1900 verses in the next two years.
The main message these
guys preached was, “forsake all to follow Jesus”.
They quoted such Scriptures as, “if anyone would come after me,
he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me”. (Matthew
16:24 ) I soon learned that
“forsaking all” to these people meant to sell
everything you had, give the proceeds to them, and follow their
leadership and their teaching. I
told a couple of my friends who lived fifty miles away about them.
I spoke so highly of this group that one of these friends made up
his mind to join them before he even met them.
He stayed with this group for more than twenty years. You have to understand
our mentality back then. It
was a generation in search of something drastically different from our
parent’s generation. And
when it came to us young Christians, we wanted to see more of the
reality of Jesus outside the walls of a church building.
This group presented us with a dynamic that made a real
impression on us, a dynamic we didn’t see in the traditional church. Thus
you see another reason why the devil moves in on the church.
The first reason is because of the Holy Spirit’s work in the
church. The second reason is
because of the church’s failure to be what it should be.
The group pressured me to
leave home immediately and follow Jesus, which meant follow them.
I told them that I couldn’t because I had committed myself to
work at the David Burg was an
Evangelical youth leader in a mid-western As I said earlier, Moses
David and the Children of God promoted and taught the sharing of wives.
They also used sex as a so-called witnessing tool.
On the streets of our cities in 1971 young seductive women with a
tract entitled “Holy Holes” prostituted themselves as a means to
lead young men to Jesus, or should I say, lead young men to their cult.
Abuse of
authority isn’t relegated just to cults.
This has always been a problem throughout church history.
From the hierarchical system of old Catholicism, to present day
Evangelicalism, there have been leaders who lead with a heavy handed
authoritarianism that is not New Testament thinking.
And just let to you know, modern day Evangelicalism, although
most of them won’t admit to it, has its roots in Catholicism. When I
was growing up in the Evangelical church I remember Catholics being seen
as great sinners, straight from the pit of hell.
Our church did its best to disassociate itself from Catholics.
Little did they know or understand that their heritage went far
beyond John and Charles Wesley. It
went back to the Catholicism they so detested and rejected.
The “it’s my way or
you’re out of here” mentality has plagued
parts of the church throughout history and is still around today.
I’ve seen this first hand, and not just in cults, but in
Evangelical circles. It’s
not Biblical. It’s all
done in the name of “submission and authority”, two words that can
be found in the New Testament, but used in a much different way.
I’d like to comment more on “submission and authority”, and
I will briefly later, but it’s a topic for a whole book in itself.
I’ve done much studying and thinking on this matter, and all I
will say for now is what Jesus said on the subject.
He said, “the rulers of the Gentiles ‘lord it over’ them,
and their high officials exercise authority over them.
‘Not so with you’ …” (Matthew 20:24-25)
Here’s just one small
example of the “it’s my way or you’re out of here” mentality.
I was once part of a worship team where the pastor did not like
any kind of music other than contemporary praise music.
He mandated that only modern praise songs be sung in his church
meetings, and these songs had to be less than five years old. Nothing
else could be sung. We had
no choice in the matter. What he said went, or else we could look
elsewhere, as I was personally told. That’s an abuse of authority.
Besides, heavy-handed authority stifles all creativity from the
Holy Spirit. Here’s a more serious
example. In 1972 I was
engaged to be married to a girl in another city.
Her next door neighbour was the leader of a home church, a
border-line cult in my opinion. She
got to know the leader and attended his meetings.
She joined this group resulting in us splitting up.
During the process of our splitting, this leader gave a prophetic
word saying that she should get married to another man in the group, who
had just recently come out of a homosexual lifestyle.
They were married in a matter of weeks. This was not the
only prophetic marriage that came about in that group, all because of an
unhealthy allegiance to a
dominating leader. Concerning my music
example, and not being allowed to sing or play anything other than one
certain style of music, I often wondered what the poor old Christians in
the hills of Then there are the old
hymns. Some are great
theological treatises that have enduring content, well beyond a five
year limit. Jesus isn’t
into one kind of music. He wants us to worship Him in “spirit and
truth”, (John 4:23) no matter what instrument we play. I thank Jesus
for my banjo, my dobro, and my electric Fender Stratocaster, with its
distortion effect cranked up to full.
I tend to picture the screaming sounds of electric guitars
vibrating across the universe as they bounce from one
planet to another in the next life. So in the summer of 1971,
after Jesus did great things in our lives, the devil moved in and
attempted to destroy what Jesus had done, but with no success in my case
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