The Emergent Takeover of the Southern Baptist Church
Part I

By Ken Silva

Apprising Ministries

“Likewise every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.” [1]

Emerging From Bad Neo-Orthodox Roots

As I have been researching the origins and the theology of the emerging church movement from their own sources for over a year now a couple of important things have...well, emerged. First I have found this Emergent Church has so deeply penetrated the Southern Baptist Convention where I am pastor that I was led to begin a category SBC/Contemplative/Emergent at AM. Secondly, and simply: The emerging church “conversation” had a beginning through Leadership Network, with their Youth Leaders Network and what was called the Terra Nova project in the 90’s.

Dan Kimball, an Emergent Church Pastor who has been kind enough to dialogue with me off the record, was involved essentially from its very beginnings. Dan was also nice enough to send me the link to a post he’d written about “The origin of the term “Emerging Church” where he says, “I first heard the term “emerging church” around 1997 when Leadership Network was using it as their tagline which said ‘advance scouts for the emerging church’.” [2]

What you need to know is that the people who started this emerging church movement were all new evangelicals and neo-orthodox at best. And it is beyond question that contemplative spirituality, which flowered in the antibiblical monastic traditions of the apostate Church of Rome, was a core doctrine at the very inception of this “emerging church.” Some of the men who were there at the start were Kimball, Doug Pagitt, Andrew Jones, and Mark Driscoll.

In his book A Generous Orthodoxy Guru Brian McLaren tells us he was recruited almost at the start through his friend Doug Pagitt:

In the late 1990’s, I was invited to become part of Leadership Network’s Young Leader Networks (YLN), also briefly known as the Terra Nova Project. I was grandfathered in as the network’s “old guy,” having moved beyond 39 in 1996. In 2001, I met with Doug Pagitt to discuss our future plans, YLN having just been launched by leadership Network to continue on its own as an independent entity...

[Pagitt] is pastor of Solomon’s porch (www.solomonsporch.com) in Minneapolis, a former leader of YLN, and (then was) still well shy of 40. One of us–I can’t remember which (a sign of good collaboration or an aging memory, or both)–came up with a new name for the group emergent (www.emergentvillage.com). [3]

Pastor of Cedar Ridge Community Church then himself McLaren served as a “theologian’" to kind of oversee the younger guys and he would involve his friends UMC theologian Leonard Sweet, Living Spiritual Teacher Richard Foster and Dallas Willard, Foster’s longtime partner in teaching so-called Spiritual Formation. The Emergent-US group, whose National Coordinator is theologian Tony Jones, is by far the dominant force within what’s referred to as “the conversation.”

This Emergent Movement Is The New Cult Of Liberal Theology

While speaking at Westminster Theological Seminary on “What is the Emerging Church?” well known Emergent theologian Scot McKnight of Jesus Creed stated that in his opinion, “There is no such thing as the emerging ‘church.’ It is a movement or a conversation – which is Brian McLaren’s and Tony Jones’s favored term, and they after all are the leaders.” And while McKnight is correct when he says McLaren and Jones are leaders within this movement he is wrong when he says “there is no such thing as the emerging ‘church’.”

Emergent Church leader Dan Kimball, whom I mentioned earlier, just happens to be author of the book The Emerging Church: Vintage Christianity for New Generations. This work also features a running commentary throughout by Brian McLaren and another who has involvement with Leadership Network, SBC pastor and religious icon Rick Warren. In addition Warren himself is an advocate and practitioner of this heretical contemplative spirituality which in large part would lead to the Reformation.

Kimball now informs us why he became involved in “the emerging church”:

I personally thought it sounded cool and somewhat Indiana Jones-like saying you were "advanced scouts for the emerging church". Kind of like we were were explorers out there looking to the horizons to see what the Spirit of God was doing missionally in new forms of churches and ministries. Leadership Network also hosted several conferences which were focused on what at that time was called "Gen X" ministry in 1996 in Colorado Springs and another in 1997 at Mt. Hermon, CA. [4]

But no matter what you call it, this convoluted “conversation” is no longer “emerging” it is a fully Emergent neo-liberal cult complete with its own leaders and apostate approach to the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints. [5] And no matter how “diverse” this movement may be now, as you should be able to see, this Emergent tree comes from these original bad roots. And it is from this same bad tree that Rob Bell has sprouted as he is on record as saying McLaren’s book A New Kind of Christian was his “lifeboat.” By this he means it carried him away from the historic orthodox Christian faith he once taught very well.

In part two I’ll develop this further, for now in Erwin McManus: The Emergent Penetration into the Southern Baptist Convention I showed that while he is himself SBC and “lead pastor and cultural architect” of Mosaic, he is also clearly aligned with this Emergent Church. And it is here I must remind the fools within the leadership of the supposedly “Protestant” evangelical SBC who are now openly embracing this cult that Jesus most clearly says in our opening text:

“A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit.” [6]

By Ken Silva Click here for bio and archived articles