It’s going to be an idolatrous pagan-palooza this December in Melbourne, Australia as the World Parliament of Religions, 2009 kicks off. What is your taste? What is your preference? You prefer Gyuto Monks and their elaborate headgear as they vibrate their way across the stage? You gott’em. Are you into the ululations of a combo choral/dance troop of Burkha-clad Muslims? Not a problem. You want to hear Carnatic sacred music by a Hare Krishna who, and I quote, “touches the hearts of his audiences, as Lord Krishna with his flute did the hearts of his gopies (female cowherd devotees)?” Get your tickets in advance to avoid the crush at the door. There’s also a Hindu option with a singer of this pedigree:

Bhai Kultar Singh, son of the late Bhai Sahib Avtar Singh Ji, grandson of Bhai Sahib Jwala Singh Ji, is the scion of one of the most distinguished lineages in the world, Gurmat Sangeet, reaching back to the times of the Gurus. Bhai Kultar Singh gave up a professional career to embrace the tradition of his forefathers, thus continuing the unbroken line of practitioners of Gurmat Sangeet, who have been serving the Panth for 12 generations.

It’s a religious smorgasbord of gargantuan proportions at the world’s biggest inter-spiritual event. The toxic spiritual soup at this event is a sign of things to come, as the “all paths lead to God” drumbeat grows louder.

“I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

–Jesus Christ, in John 14:6.

“Be not unequally yoked with unbelievers: for what fellowship have righteousness and iniquity? or what communion hath light with darkness? And what concord hath Christ with Belial? or what portion hath a believer with an unbeliever? And what agreement hath a temple of God with idols? for we are a temple of the living God; even as God said, I will dwell in them, and walk in them; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people. Wherefore Come ye out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, And touch no unclean thing; And I will receive you, And will be to you a Father, And ye shall be to Me sons and daughters saith the Lord Almighty.”

–II Corinthians 6:14-18

This piece is not from Lighthouse Trails Research or any other discernment ministry online. It’s from the Denver Post, and it confirms the sweeping influence of contemplative eastern spirituality on Christianity and Judaism.

Buddhist scholar Judith Simmer- Brown, a professor at Naropa, said Christian denominations are working hard to rediscover contemplative traditions as one way to combat people leaving their churches.

“They literally have rebuilt their Christian meditative forms,” Simmer- Brown said. “Some borrow heavily from Buddhism.”

Here’s another telling quote from the article.

“There is a definite trend and movement that will not be reversed,” said Ruben Habito, a laicized Jesuit priest, Zen master and professor of world religions at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “We are in a new spiritual age, an inter-religious age.”

So the next time you read some sneering emergent detractor online who is attempting to make our warnings about contemplative spirituality look like paranoid foolishness, check out what secular media is reporting. The push for interspirituality is real, and it is in opposition to the narrow way spoken of by Jesus Christ.

The following article is by Jan Markell from today’s Understanding the Times, the e-update of Olive Tree Ministries.

Few would disagree that Willow Creek Community Church has been one of the most influential churches in America over the last thirty years. The church and pastor have impacted every evangelical church in the country. A year ago Willow Creek’s Pastor Bill Hybels admitted that the “seeker-sensitive” approach he had helped spread across the country had not been very effective at Willow Creek. In one interview here, he states that the church will now target people at all levels of faith. Well, that was an admission many of us were pleased about. The obvious question was, what would the new approach be? One thing was obvious: His leadership summits have not changed one whit.

I have followed his annual leadership conferences. Guest speakers have always been problematic — such as Jimmy Carter, and this year is no exception. Would not a “leadership conference” be training people how to be Christian leaders in the ways of faith? Or to equip attendees to help other believers grow in their faith as a result of some the information presented at this event? Apparently not.

As this is written, the 2009 conference is assembling to hear from Tony Blair. What’s wrong with this picture? Blair is one of the chief players on the globalistic, one-world religion agenda. The Tony Blair Faith Foundation screams “unity” with every sentence, and not biblical unity. Blair states, “God’s Spirit moves through us and the world at a pace that can never be constricted by any one religious paradigm. Be very wary of people who think theirs is the only way.”

Members of his board include a Zen Buddhist, a Hindu from Minnesota, an Anglican, Rick Warren, a Rabbi, and others. A goal is to “heal the divisiveness in the world.” This feeds into the end-time ecumenical effort predicted in the Bible.

Just as troubling is the appearance of rock star Bono. His U2 band was blatantly Satanic. Thanks to Good Fight Ministries, you can go to this link and type in the word Bono or U2. Bono is seen holding an upside down cross and singing praises to Charles Manson with the song Helter Skelter. Did Bono have a conversion experience? If he did, he has not changed the name of his music affiliation, which remains U2 from the days of blatant Satanism.

His efforts are directed at social change and he, too, is trying to build a bridge to all faiths. Bono says, “Look, on the God thing, I have to be really careful because I’m not a very good advertisement. I don’t want you to sit there and say I’m a man of faith. I just read in one of St. Paul’s letters, where it describes all the fruits of the spirit, I realized I had none of them.”

He also states, “I stopped going to churches and got into a different religion. That’s what being a rock- -and-roll band is: Showbiz, shamanism, and music is worship.”

U2′S 2005 Vertigo tour promoted Bono’s New Age, all-faith agenda. The word ‘coexist’ appeared on a giant screen — the ‘c’ represented by the Islamic crescent, the ‘x’ by the Star of David, and the ‘t’ by the Christian cross. Then the big screen displayed the favorite mantra/lie of the Emergent/New Age Church, “Everything you know is wrong.” Bono led the audience in a chant, “Jesus, Jew, Mohammed — all true!”

How will attendees grow spiritually or grow in leadership skills from Bono?

Some other speakers at this supposed evangelical leadership conference going on this week include a gal who was the number one business thinker in 2008 according to the Wall Street Journal; Fortune Magazine’s “most powerful woman in business”; and a businesswoman who is a regular guest on the Oprah Winfrey program. You can find most of the speakers here.

How does this further the Kingdom of God today? If this were being put on by the National Council of Churches, I would get it! But Hybels is an evangelical icon even if it is the “evangelical Left.” And it would be proper to ask, why does evangelicalism even have a Left? It did not until 20 years ago. Will these speakers spur the attendees on to share their faith with greater zeal? And why is Hybels subjecting his people to some potential sheep-steeling from some of these characters? Probably because the ecumenical effort is big on his agenda as well. Yet tens of thousands of churches are connected to his network.

Pastor Bill Hybels should know better. Other evangelical leaders need to speak up and stop the potential slaughter of some sheep. The hour is too late to spend several days each summer listening to fools.

–Jan Markell, Olive Tree Ministries

For more information visit her Spiritual Deception page at the website.

Jan has an excellent radio program out of AM980 KKMS, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Saturday, 9 to 11 AM CST. For podcasting, check this link. All weekend programming goes up at her Web site at “Radio Archives” late Monday.

It’s come to our attention that New Age/New Light globalism is slithering further forward. Not only is the Global Country of World Peace putting up Peace Palaces around the Country, but is also building the Maharishi Central University in Kansas which will become its training center:

A new university is being established in the geographic center of the United States—in the Brahmasthan of America, in Kansas. This university, called Central University, will offer the curriculum of Total Knowledge, the unified field, which will have a unifying effect on the whole country…

Something called Maharishi Invincibility Center also informs us of its base in transcendental meditation:

Maharishi Invincibility Center Programs in Overland Park, Kansas

The Transcendental Meditation^® Program…is the world’s most effective, time-tested, and thoroughly researched program for the elimination of stress and the unfoldment of full human potential. This simple, remarkably easy and enjoyable technique requires just 20 minutes twice a day, yet it yields benefits in every area of life…

The Truthspeaker’s Weblog gives more information on Bill Hybel’s Leadership Summit that is about to kick off. Leadership can be a fine thing if the path leads to Jesus Christ. Bill Hybels and Tony Blair are leading people into an apostate world religion where doctrinal distinctives are divisive and the enemy of peace. Bill Hybels has no problem with that, and he is featuring gay rights champion Blair as the keynoter for his “summit.”

Here are some of the topics at the Leadership Summit. Where is Jesus Christ in all this?

Yet another way that undiscerning Christians (at best) are opeing themselves up to a very dangerous dance with the Devil.

“I had to write this book. I do not believe that the world can have true peace until the common universal principles have been firmly established. Today, I consider myself a Christian–yet also to a large extent a Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim–really a friend and fellow member of all true religions. Like a growing number of people, I see myself as a trans-religious seeker, an aspect of spirit who seeks and loves spiritual truth wherever it is found.”

–C. David Lundberg, author of What God Really Wants You to Know

From a press release about the book received today:

Here are just a few of the 33 key principles he has identified as common to all the religions of the world:

Life, with God, is Good. Life is good, joyful, meaningful, and positive – with God.
Love creates joyous living: We are to love and be loved.
We are responsible for all we create and for how we act and behave towards each other.
We are a part of God. We are sons and daughters of God.
Our destiny is to fulfill our divine potential.
There is only one god. We all have the same God.

USA Today reports that “mindfulness” meditation is now being used by school children and also in hospitals. The pagan religious practice, once limited to eastern religions, has gone mainstream in America.

Herescope is featuring Part 4 on Spiritual Excitements: The Sights, Sounds and Spectacles of Spurious Spirituality by Pastor Larry DeBruyn.

By ignoring the Word the Holy Spirit inspired (2 Peter 1:21), and those He has gifted to minister that Word (1 Corinthians 12:11, 28), the right-brain emphasis short circuits the whole process of Christian growth. In the journey to spiritual maturity, there can be no growing where there is no knowing (Romans 6:3, 6, 9, 11). To put it bluntly, spirituality stinks when it doesn’t think!

We received a press release today promoting a minister/lecturer who is making the media rounds claiming that you don’t have to die to find heaven, you need to find it here on earth. John Robinson’s message has the same themes as emergents who want all of us to stop watching for the return of the Lord Jesus Christ and instead, create heaven here on earth. Why is this crowd so insistent that heaven is not “up there?” It’s really the same spiritual idea the Wiccans use when they draw their “sacred circle” in the dirt and declare that all is one and one is all. To these rebels, we don’t need a vertical relationship with God where He is on His throne and we are his creation below. In this worldview, we are all ultimately god and we have no need of anything outside of ourselves.

Here is what Mr. Robinson is claiming. He is seeking media outlets to help him sell his new book and carry his message.

But before you watch this clip, remember the words of Jesus Christ Himself:

In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.
–John 14:2-3

Willow Creek Community Church and Bill Hybels will be honoring Tony Blair at its annual Leadership Summit in August. Tony Blair’s “Third Way” was a failure, and he left his country in shambles, but as this article points out, his one singing success was gay rights.

In April, Tony Blair had the audacity to lecture the pope on homosexuality, telling him to get the Catholic church up to speed on gay rights.

Bill Hybels doesn’t care where people are being led at his “Leadership Summits.” He’ll feature anyone who is an international celebrity, no matter that they are moral failures. Bill Clinton’s visit to Willow Creek comes to mind. That’s because Hybels long ago departed the faith once delivered to the saints in exchange for his own celebrity status and sense of importance.

Tony Blair is no example of biblical leadership. His new Faith Foundation is dedicated to interspirituality and the promotion of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals.

He added that the foundation would focus on the “Abrahamic faiths” of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, as well as Hinduism, Sikhism and Buddhism, and that it would help people of those faiths “discover what they share” and “help partner those within any of the faiths who stand up for peaceful co-existence and reject the extremist and divisive notion that faiths are in fundamental struggle against each other.”

This is what Bill Hybels is promoting at Willow Creek as leadership for Christians to follow. God help us.

There’s an interesting article about new dialogue between world religions in Canada’s National Post newspaper.

The Jeddah meeting agreed with Hans Kueng’s contention that there can be “No peace among nations without peace among the religions. No peace among the religions without dialogue among the religions. No dialogue among the religions without understanding of the foundations of the religions.” Two octogenarians — a Catholic priest and a Saudi King — are lighting a way that future generations must follow.

Apprising Ministries with some thoughts in this short post concerning a defining issue of the time in which we now find ourselves.

For those who wonder why it is the Emergent Church, now Emergence Christianity, labors so hard to broaden the narrow way with contemplative spirituality and why things e.g. like the Cross, repentance, sin, and regeneration, show up so little – often not at all – in this “new reformation” of Emergence, please make the time to read this article.

A short post concerning Quaker mystic Richard Foster and how his contemplative spirituality impacts today’s evangelicalism.

Caryl Matrisciana is the guest on Crosstalk today, talking about her new book Out of India: A True Story About the New Age Movement. As the co-founder and co-producer of Jeremiah Films for 23 years, Caryl contributed research and expertise to more than 55 documentaries and also served as the Creative and Marketing Director.  In 2002, she founded Caryl Productions, which produces cutting edge video journalism and information to help discern the times in which we live.

“Born and raised in India, Caryl Matrisciana was surrounded by a strange and mystical religion, seeing firsthand the effects Hinduism had on the people of that nation.  After leaving India as a young adult, she became involved in the counter-culture hippie movement, only to find that the elements of Hinduism and the New Age were very much the same.  Eventually, Caryl would discover that this same spirituality had entered not only the Western world, but th echristian church as well, unbeknownst to most people.

Out of India succinctly identifies the mystical religious roots behind Yoga, which is being practiced today by millions of people, many of whom are Christians.

This book shows the underlying beliefs of the New Spirituality and the move toward an interspiritual world “peace” brought through mystical practices.”

(From Lighthouse Trails Publishing)

You can listen live at our website at 2pm Central time or hear the archived show later.

You’ll never see as many ringleader mugshots of the emerging evangelical apostasy as you will on this page promoting the National Pastors Convention. February 10 is the start of  the annual Zondervan marketing blowout only thinly disguised as a gathering for pastors. In reality, it is Zondervan’s greatest opportunity to market its books and products and earn even more money. If they can get the pastors to take home their latest rubbish to their churches, the publisher’s clever pyromarketing strategy will be successful. The fact that Zondervan, owned by Harper Collins, is hosting spiritually aberrant speakers and leaders who have hijacked biblical Christianity bothers them not at all. There’s big money in spiritual error these days, and the tanned, blow-dried wonders who will take the stage in San Diego have a whole lot more to give.

Brian McLaren, who denies cardinal doctrine like the atonement of Christ, the existence of hell and the Second Coming of Christ, will tell pastors how to live out “Christianity” in their every day lives. (Apparently pastors are a bit vague on that these days.) In that what McLaren teaches is anything but Christianity, this will be something of an accomplishment.

Shane Claiborne will be bringing his dreadlocks as well as his leftist political positions to San Diego to extol the virtues of socialism and natural fibers.

Rob Bell, whose skin has apparently taken on a permanent greenish tinge, (too many shots of wheatgrass juice?) will be sporting the latest pair of utterly cool glasses as well as his New Age beliefs. So many pastors to convert to New Spirituality, so little time.

Bill Hybels, fresh from his latest permatan spraydown, comes to the National Pastors Convention with something of a False Teacher Emeritus status. After all, he was one of the first to re-invent evangelical Christianity into something completely alien to the Scriptures way back in the 1970’s. There is apparently still some financial juice to be squeezed from the Elder in Error before he retires to a life of golf.

Those are just three of the glitterati who will be hawking their teachings and products in San Diego. Each year at this convention, there are always more young seminary grads with stars in their eyes who dream of being the next Erwin McManus, Brian McLaren or Rob Bell. Thanks to the prostitutional ways of publishers like Zondervan, that next batch of apostate teachers is right around the corner!

Warren Smith has written a timely article for Lighthouse Trails that addresses the seducing spirit of our times. We were warned by our Savior about the false christs that would abound. That is certainly the case today.

Today it is very sad to see so many believers falling under the influence of the same spirit that influenced me when I was in the “new age.” This spirit says that it is a time for “breakthroughs” and for the fulfillment of our “destiny”; that there is something “new” and exciting in the wind. This teaching claims that we are in the midst of a great “transition” that will result in a “paradigm shift,” and that through “new revelation” and “personal experience” God is in the process of taking the church to a “new dimension” and to a whole “new level.” Many Christian leaders these days are so sure that what they are hearing and experiencing is from God, they are rarely testing the spirits, or even considering the possibility that they are being deceived.

Read the doctrinal statement at Glenview New Church, and meet the new spirituality in all its, uh, splendor. They call this “A New Christianity.”

The Church – The Lord’s universal church includes all people who live a good life according to their own religious beliefs. One teaching of the New Church says, “Every person is saved who acknowledges God and lives well.” The Lord makes sure that all people have the opportunity to learn these two most basic principles of religion, working through many churches in many nations. Yet He offers us much more than the “basics.” The New Church is where you will find specific teachings about what He asks of us and how He leads us.

I have news for them. This isn’t Christianity at all but an apostate counterfeit. If all religions lead to God and heaven, Jesus Christ could have saved Himself a lot of trouble by never coming to earth to be crucified. Everybody could have just gone Buddhist and embraced a fat little idol. Or they could have become Thetans with Scientology and watched for their mothership returning to earth. Or they could have become Muslims and blown themselves up to the greater glory of Allah. The possibilities are endless, but none of these paths lead to the one true God.That path is found by faith alone in the finished work of Jesus Christ on the cross. All else is error.

We’re going to see more and more of this foolishness posing as Christianity in the days to come, as the exlclusive message of Christ in the Gospel is rejected in favor of an “all paths lead to God” universalism. It’s being promulgated within evangelicalism now by emergents like Brian McLaren, Doug Pagitt and friends.

This little gem just dropped into my email. The New Spirituality occultists are on the march and they want you. The link in the quote below will take you to their online edition of the new magazine which you can page through by following the arrows at the top of the page. This is what Phyllis Tickle means when she talks about the Great Emergence. The emergent leaders’ role is to pull evangelicals into this, their ultimate goal for world spirituality.

From the scientific pursuit of singularity to the spiritual practice of yoga, ideas that once seemed futuristic and esoteric are creating a new global meta-culture of “early adapters.”

The self-selecting members of this emerging market defy conventional demography and are moving political, scientific, social and spiritual inquiry beyond the traditional borders that have typically divided us.

Enter EnlightenNext, a new magazine for evolutionaries who are taking reality by the reigns, and exploring the evolution of consciousness itself and the impact that will have on the human experience and the future of life on Earth.