Perilous
Times and The Great Falling Away
Emerging Church Movement Promotes Pagan, New Age Wild Goose
Festival
By Anugrah Kumar | Christian Post Contributor
The Pagan, New Age Wild Goose Festival, an ongoing four-day New
Age revival camp in North Carolina featuring music, yoga, liberal
talk and embracing of gays and lesbians, is facing heat from
evangelicals who say it is aimed at selling gnostic beliefs to the
youth.
“Most Religious Left groups that advocated leftist policies in
past generations are now in severe decline, and their activists
are now targeting evangelical youth,” said Mark Tooley, president
of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, which works to
reaffirm the Apostolic church’s biblical and historical teachings.
The Wild Goose, a Celtic metaphor for New Age Spiritualism , is a
“festival of justice, spirituality, music and the arts” to
discover where justice and New Age spirituality intersect,
according to organizers, mostly from the Emerging Church Movement,
who inaugurated the event on Shakori Hills in North Carolina’s
Piedmont region Thursday.
But it is influenced by “gnostic beliefs that Christianity has
repeatedly rejected,” the head of the Washington, D.C.-based
institute said in a statement Friday. “Many ‘Wild Goose’ voices
flatter themselves with fanciful dreams of sophistication and
praise from secular elites. Their 1960s-style hoopla is supposedly
updated for the 21st century. But ultimately this featherless old
Wild Goose won’t fly.”
Modeled on a British Christian rock festival, Greenbelt, and
nearly 10 years in the making, The Pagan, New Age Wild Goose
Festival is an attempt to reinvent Christianity for the 21st
century under a bigger, wider, more inclusive New Age tent “to
establish the premier venue for 20-somethings who love God but
aren’t thrilled with Apostolic Christianity, particularly the
religious right,” Washington, D.C.-based Religion News Service
said.
Ken Silva, a Southern Baptist blogger from New Hampshire-based
Apprising Ministries, agrees with Tooley. “The wise Christian will
have nothing to do with these neo-Gnostic, New Age fools who’ve
unbuckled themselves from the Word of God and have embarked upon
their Wild Goose Chase of subjective experience,” he said on his
blog.
Those attending the conference are young tattooed evangelicals,
musicians with instruments slung over their shoulders, gay
Christians of all stripes and seasoned members of the Christian
Left, most carrying backpacks, water bottles and sleeping bags,
according to National Catholic Reporter.
The festival is open to all regardless of belief, ethnicity,
gender, sexuality, denomination or religious affiliation, say
members of the organizing committee, which includes: Mike King,
CEO of the Youthfront ministry and executive editor of Immerse: A
Journal of Faith, Life and Youth Ministry; Ian Cron, a speaker,
retreat leader, Episcopal priest and author; and Joy Wallis, first
women to be ordained as a priest in England.
Festival speakers include emergent Church leader Brian McLaren,
pacifist activist Shane Claiborne, and author Jay Bakker, the
pastor son of former televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. And
the musicians invited to perform at Wild Goose are mainstream
secular musicians who are Christian.
“Combining ‘justice’ issues with a vague ‘spirituality,’ the
festival is also showcasing ‘evangelical progressives’ like Tony
Campolo, a spiritual advisor to former President Bill Clinton
during his impeachment scandal, and Sojourners chief Jim Wallis,”
Tooley mentioned.
“In a melding of spirituality, music, story-telling and
fellowship, Wild Goose began with a request that those gathered
sprinkle water on each other as a form of baptismal renewal, and
smear mud on each other as a reminder that all come from dust and
to dust they shall return – and as a reminder that ‘we are all
connected to the earth, and we are connected to one another,’ Wild
Goose founder Gareth Higgins was quoted as saying.
Originating in the late 20th and early 21st century, the Emerging
Church Movement has invited criticism from mainstream Christians.
In "Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church," theologian D.A.
Carson says the movement, which arose as a protest against the
institutional church, modernism and seeker-sensitive churches,
comprises those who believe the modes of expressing the Gospel
should appeal to a postmodern mindset.
Many of the movement’s thinkers take a reductionistic view of
modernism, are dismissive of confessional Christianity, and are
reluctant to assert that Christianity is true and authoritative,
the Carson says.
While evangelicals say the attempt to revive the Emerging Church
Movement is doomed to yet another failure, Wild Goose proponents
think it is “unstoppable.”
“In the spirit of vibrant, category-defying Celtic Christianity,
we saw our desire embodied in the Celtic Church’s way of speaking
about the enigmatic Holy Spirit: The Wild Goose, who wanders where
she will. Who can tame her? No one. Far better it is to embark on
a Wild Goose Chase, and see the terrain of our faith be
transformed,” the organizers say on the festival’s website.