Random Aberrations, Apostasies, and Heresies

At the end of every year I go back over all my old posts to determine their status.  If the information is obsolete, then the article is deleted.  With posts which include links to articles (as in all my “Random…” posts), I check every link to see if they are still good; paragraphs with dead links are deleted.  If too many links are gone, I just delete the entire article; however if some of the links are still good and have what I consider necessary information, I transfer the link to a post in my “Reference Blog.”  You can imagine how much time this takes!  I no longer have any article from 2007, which was my first year blogging, and I have, so far, finished my review up to February 2012. 

Well during this past few days working on the project I got to thinking about why my ministry began and what its focus should be.  As I have previous noted, my first apologetics efforts were trying to reach Mormons with the truth.  Later I began the same thing with Jehovah’s Witnesses.  As time went by I began teaching classes about the cults and how to reach the members of these groups with the truth; in other words I was equipping other Christians with the information they needed to defend their own faith and to plant seeds with cult members.

My ministry has always had three primary functions:  

Proclaiming Truth 

Equipping the Saints

Exposing False Teachings

Over the years my primary focus had been “equipping the saints” who would seek help with understanding cults, help dealing with cult members at their doors, and even general information about understanding Scripture. However, while reviewing my blog I got to thinking that it seems that my primary focus has become exposing false teachings.  While this is important, I think my primary focus should be equipping the saints.  Yes, equipping and exposing both include proclaiming truth, but the better equipped the saints are with the truth, the more readily they can discern the false teachings that come their way.

Part of the reason my thoughts drifted this way is that in so many of my “Random” posts the same teachers and/or groups kept coming up over and over again.  I thought, well we know by now that these are terrible teachers/groups, so anything more is just redundant.

Anyway, I decided to concentrate less on exposing the false teachings of these well-known people and groups, and concentrate more on equipping others with information to counter such false teachings.  Therefore, there will be fewer “RAAH” posts and they will be used to cover important issues or warnings about new false teachers, etc.  I also hope to post more thought-provoking quotes from solid teachers, more examinations of false teachings (such as getting busy on my review of New Age Bible Versions ), and addressing claims from unbelievers against Christians and how to respond, etc. This will most likely mean less frequent postings as more work is required to prepare such articles!  (Random collections of GOOD stuff will continue as much as I find stuff, because these are items for equipping!)

Now, let’s look at the latest collection of links — after all, I already did the work putting them together so I may as well clean out my collection before embarking on the new journey!

The continuing saga of Clayton Jennings.

Teachers of false spiritual warfare include normally sound Tony Evans.

Steven Furtick is a weapon of Satan — contrary to his claims.

Lou Engle, a leader in the New Apostolic Reformation, seems to think he’s the next Billy Graham.

For those who still think the Catholic teaching of “The Immaculate Conception” is about Jesus, Doug Evans has a good lesson for you.

I wonder what the Pope would say about this?  I think such pandering to Islam is atrocious.

Fred Butler continues his review of heretic Hugh Ross’ book, Navigating Genesis.

The poor state of what “Christians” believe; I wonder how many of these are really Catholics? I doubt if any of these people are truly born again.

Scientology is good example of how cults operate.

Hymns in the good old days.

Entertaining the goats at Bethel Redding, et al.

(The graphic at the beginning of this article was developed and provided to me by one of the followers of this blog.)