A minister to bless the Obamanation

From CBN.com:

Pro-life pastor Rick Warren will give the invocation at President-Elect Barack Obama’s inauguration. It makes a whole lot of sense. Even though Warren and Obama disagree on the life issue, they do see eye to eye on many social justice issues.

I'm not surprised. Warren is well meaning, I have no doubt of that, but his movement is ultimately not good for Christianity so the fact that he would have such poor judgment is simply par for the course.

Naturally elements of the hard left, in this case gay activists, are livid:

“Your invitation to Reverend Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at your inauguration is a genuine blow to LGBT Americans,” the president of Human Rights Campaign, Joe Solomonese, wrote Obama Wednesday. “[W]e feel a deep level of disrespect when one of architects and promoters of an anti-gay agenda is given the prominence and the pulpit of your historic nomination.”

Mr. Solomonese and his co-sodomites need to have a martini and relax. Rick Warren's movement will, in time and if it succeeds, lead to a watered down "Christianity" which will have no power to resist the gay agenda.

Warren is what could be termed a spiritual freeloader. He has been the beneficiary of a good Christian education but rather than transmitting that knowledge to a new generation of believers he has chosen to fill his pews (and collection plates) with large numbers of nominal "Christians" who are attracted by a variety of services and entertainments which have little or nothing to do with the transmission of the Gospel.

Because Warren does have that good grounding in Christian truth he knows that homosexual acts are sinful and that he should oppose granting homosexual unions the legal status of marriage. However by refusing to transmit the hard and unpopular elements of Christian teaching to his congregants he, and the copycat churches who follow his model, is creating a new generation of Christians who will lack the fundamental understanding of God's Word necessary to inspire them to mount a principled opposition to things like homosexual marriage, plural marriage, interspecies marriage and any other perversion that one might imagine.

The blind leading the blind

Nicole Russell has an essay on The American Thinker about Barack Obama's courting of evangelical Christians:

. . .Senator Barack Obama has begun courting the evangelical right, and some are already waltzing along in perfect time.

With his attendance at Rick Warren‘s church, Saddleback Valley Community, a mega-church in California for a large conference about AIDS, Obama has begun to align himself with an important base of voters to gain what conservatives lost this last year. Already lauded by some prominent evangelical publications for his outstanding "Christian faith" and a person Rick Warren called a "good friend" and a someone he'd like to work with on important issues, Obama is in perfect position, if he can keep the momentum, to use an unusual strategy for political gain.

I believe that Ms. Russell errs in an important point. While Rick Warren calls himself an evangelical and pastors a large church he does not speak for or represent the great majority of evangelicals.

Rich Warren is the inventor and chief proponent of the "seeker friendly" church movement. In a nutshell what this comprises is redesigning the "church experience" in such a way that it will be enjoyable to people who do not like church.

If this causes you to stop and picture what Carmen would look like if it were rewritten for people who prefer DMX to Bizet you have the gist of it.

Taken to its inevitable end this philosophy winds up breeding "churches" which have been described as "christian nightclubs".

The bottom line is that Rick Warren is no more an indication of what evangelicals think than Tony Campolo (you know Bill Clinton's theological enabler).

Rick Warren's association with Barack Obama will do nothing more than hasten Warren's slide into irrevelance. And it won't come a minute too soon.