The Religion Factor--The Rick Warren-Barack Obama Scheme to Redefine Christianity

Rick Warren is a Southern Baptist minister who went to the Saddleback community in California 20 years ago or so to start a new congregation. This would not be a typical Baptist church, however. Warren's novel approach would be to build a fellowship of Christians based upon the local culture.

Demographical studies were undertaken that indicated the income level, interests, musical preferences, etc., of most of the residents of the Sattleback community. This information enabled Warren to devise a plan to attract people to his new kind of congregation based upon their preferences.

Thus, there would be no choir and no 'sanctuary.' Worshippers or 'seekers' as they were called, would be greeting to the music of a jazz band upon entering the premises, which more often than not would be a school building that the Warren team had rented. Warren would wear no vestments, no robe, no stole, or anything else that gave the impression that anything 'religious' would be occurring. Rather, he often preached in shorts and a t-shirt, and he encouraged 'seekers' to dress casual.
There would be no 'sermon' as such but a teaching session during which Warren would give a positive, inspirational didactic on topics of interest to most people in the Sattleback community, such as personal development and growth, child-rearing, finding meaning in a seemingly meaningless world, etc.

At the end of the sessions seekers were invited to a special meeting afterward, if they wanted more information about the topic at hand, or if they had questions about the new 'church.'

Thus, the Saddleback Community Church was born. By the way, Warren insisted that the term 'Baptist' not be used because in his demographical surveys he found that the word had a very negative connotation.

Today, the fast growing congregation is one of the largest in the world, and Warren has found himself considered to be one of the new 'stars' within the evangelical movement. He has appeared on CNN, Meet the Press, and Fox News. His latest book, 'The Purpose Driven Life' is one of the top selling books in history.

Recently Warren created quite a stir within the evangelical community by inviting U.S. Senator Barack Obama to Saddleback to participate in an AIDS conference. It seems many of the brethren were none too pleased that a liberal would be invited to speak before a group of predominately conservative Republicans.

Obama, apparently, was able to work his magic on the crowd as he does just about anywhere he goes.

But a deeper look will reveal a dangerous set of presumptions.

Barack Obama often speaks of the fact that he is a Christian. What he fails to say is that he is a very liberal one. His faith group is one of the most extremist leftwing organizations in the country...the United Church of Christ. Barack's point of view is that since Jesus taught us to care for the poor, then that means government must confiscate money from its citizens in order to care for other citizens. Thus, people like Obama, and organizations like the United Church of Christ, support every single program of confiscation and redistribution that has ever been proposed.

Yet nowhere did Jesus ever say that government should be involved in this.

The message of Jesus is that the compassion of individual Christians toward the poor and needy should lead them to voluntarily give of their abundance. This was NEVER mandated as a government program in any of the Gospels.

As Walter Williams recently stated, 'To reach inside my pockets voluntarily to help the needy is one of the most worthy endeavors with which one can be involved. But for government to reach into my pockets and TAKE my money to give to the needy is stealing and is to be condemned.'

Amen, brother!

The United Church of Christ is a participant in an endeavor called 'The Jesus Project,' which is the attempt of ultra-liberal theologians to essentially rewrite the New Testament. Their premise is that there is a mammoth gap between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith as presented in the New Testament. The Jesus of history, so these 'scholars' claim, was a political radical who sought to overthrow Roman rule within the Jewish colony and implement a system where the ultimate good is expressed in giving to the poor. The scholars then go through the New Testament and rate each supposed statement of Jesus according to the likelihood that Jesus actually stated those words attributed to Him.

Not surprisingly, the Jesus Project maintains that Jesus never said over three-fourths of the statements attributed to Him. The 'scholars' of the Jesus Project believe that only those statements in the New Testament that show a radical Jesus condemning the evil Roman imperialists and advocating for the poor are actually His statements. The rest were added later by a Church that wished to make the message of Jesus more palatable to the masses.

And this brings us back to Barack Obama and Rick Warren. Speculation has been spread far and wide as news pundits opine on a potential new liaison between evangelical Christians and Democrat liberals. There is no doubt that Obama is part of a movement that would redefine Christianity and the message of Jesus to advocate for a massive expansion of government social programs. The fact that Rick Warren would lend his name and the prestige of his church to such a travesty of Christianity is unconscionable.

It is not to be forgotten that Judas Iscariot was the one among the disciples who simply didn't get the message of Jesus. In paying no heed to Jesus' statement, 'My kingdom is not of this world,' Judas set his sights on the overthrow of the Roman government and the task of helping the poor. He even castigated Jesus for allowing a woman to anoint His head some expensive oil. Judas maintained it should have been sold and given to the poor. Jesus rebuked the misguided disciple and said, 'The poor will always be with you. But you will not always have Me with you.'

As it turned out, this very disciple turned against Jesus PRECISELY because the focus of the message of Jesus was NOT about political upheaval or social issues.

If the ultra-leftist, extremist view of Christianity presented by Barack Obama begins to take root within the evangelical world, we could well be on the brink of the worst schism in this nation's religious history. And Rick Warren may well come to attain the unintentional dubious honor of being the very one to help spearhead such a schism.

Obama's background should be closely scrutinized. Both his father and his grandfather were devout Muslims (by the way, his full legal name is Barack HUSSEIN Obama), and his mother was an avowed atheist. Many Obama watchers in Illinois claim that the Senator is actually a Muslim who has been running from his faith. Even if that turns out to be false, it cannot be denied that his brand of Christianity draws more from liberal secular progressivism than Christianity. This is a mindset that clearly imposes a modern interpretation on an ancient document, i.e., the Bible. True scholarship insists that it be the other way around.

My strong hunch is that the Christian rank and file will come to outright reject Barack Obama once they begin to look more closely at his actual views, statements, and record, as well as the extremist philosophical school of thought that led to them.