TCW Short Take #2: How is the prosperity movement influencing the Evangelical church?

How is it impacting the evangelical church? You have people from non-prosperity churches coming to your church thinking they're going to get healed and so forth. And how is the prosperity gospel movement, how is it pressuring the evangelical church today to not really push back against it because there's money to be made from donors and so forth who believe in this prosperity movement?

Yeah, that's a loaded question and I'm happy to try to address it from a couple of different angles. Let's talk the money first. There are a lot of evangelicals now, conservatives, who won't touch this issue or, and by not touch the issue, I mean or they won't call out somebody who's preaching it. And it's because bookstores have their books and it's because they go to certain conferences and they partner with some of these people. There is a ton of money to be made. And also, underneath the money being made, there's an audience to be won. If they don't play nice with these type of preachers, they can't tap into their audience.

The audience means money, the audience means book sales, the audience means popularity, notoriety, what have you, bigger churches. We also are in a tolerant age where tolerance has gone from. I had a great pastor friend, one of our guys here at the church just say this in a sermon he preached a couple weeks ago. He's talking about tolerance and he made a great point. He said tolerance used to be rejecting ideas but not people. It was tolerating the person but nobody would say you're intolerant for not tolerating their position.

You were allowed to disagree. And evangelicalism has come to this place where, I'm not trying to be rude when I say this David, but the only term I can think of is it's like a mushy middle. It's soft and it's lukewarm. And so I would call it the mushy middle of evangelicalism. It's the part of evangelicalism that refuses to take a hardline position. It refuses to call out what must be called out. It refuses to lose anything for Jesus' sake and his gospel's sake.

It tries to play the middle and we know when Jesus writes and speaks to the seven churches in the book of Revelation, what is one of the indictments? You've become lukewarm. You're neither hot nor cold and I'm going to spit you out. I would rather people go cold than stay lukewarm. I'd rather them swing over and say hey leave these guys alone. Let God judge. I agree with them.

Who are you Costi? I'd rather that than this middle road of well we don't really know and maybe some good things are happening and I don't really want to call it out. I'm going to stay in my lane. That's not God's will. So evangelicalism has been swooned by power, popularity, money and the image that comes when you project this sort of tolerance. So that's one and then two I think that there is a lack of biblical literacy and biblical teaching even in our own camp or our own conservative circles and so let's point the finger at ourselves for a moment. We have to do a better job ensuring that people are biblically literate and that they are growing in discipleship. They are being counseled and rooted in the church so that they don't go and get blown around by every wind of doctrine. You know Ephesians 4 we're to equip the saints for the work of service to the building up of the body of Christ. The result of all that Paul says to the church at Ephesus is that we will no longer be tossed to and fro. We stop being children spiritually. So I think you do have in our circles a lot of conservative evangelicals that think because they're a church member on the rolls that they're saved and because they go to church once in a while that they're good and that's not the case. We need to be living, giving, serving, loving, singing and growing and being sharpened in our faith.

You're either growing or dying. There's no middle ground going forward or going backwards. We hope you gained from this short take of the Christian worldview radio program. To hear the full program and further connect with this ministry, visit thechristianworldview.org. I'm David Wheaton.