Progressive Christianity

Introduction

In this lesson we'll study Progressive Christianity from the viewpoint of Alisa Childers, who has been watching it for more than 10 years. Progressive Christianity is known by many names. By the average person it is usually more commonly known as Liberal Christianity. It is often known for ideas like "church for the unchurched" or "seeker sensitive church."

Alisa Childers' focus is on apologetics - defense of doctrine. She has many videos on what is wrong with Progressive Christianity and the danger it presents. She is less interested in why people have created Progressive Christianity or are drawn to it. Like many people, she thinks that all people are, more or less, the same. Therefore, when she does think about why people turn to Progressive Christianity, she looks for environmental reasons such as events in a person's life that motivate them. These might be "church hurt", "legalism", "personal moral flaws", and others.

The real reason is the person's worldview and worldviews are not the same. Progressive Christianity was created by liberals who found it difficult to accept many aspects of the Bible and God. Therefore what they created calls to other liberals who have the same problems.

Worldviews seem to exist from birth and they do not appear to ever change, though sometimes they can be suppressed or enhanced. Liberals in regular churches were required to suppress their natural views. Progressive Christianity encourages them to find the farthest extent of it.

The liberal worldview differs from the conservative worldview in two major ways. A liberal has:

• a love for change, and
• a hate for laws and rules

Those may be two sides of the same coin but the consequence is an inability to accept the idea of justice. They can't accept that justice can be deserved and just. Because they can't accept that there can be just reasons to cause suffering, they can only see just punishments as causing more injury to already injured people. All they can see is the suffering.

This liberal worldview naturally results in a church that has very large problems with basic beliefs of Christianity and with God. The most common complaints by liberals who turn away from God are:

• They can't accept a God who would order the killing of women and children
• They can't accept a God who would eternally torment people who don't believe
• They can't accept a God who allows evil and suffering to continue in the world

Very recently another Christian musician announced that he was an atheist. He gave one of the reasons above. An online pastor said how sad it was that no one had explained why that reason isn't valid. I'm sure he heard the reasons; he just couldn't accept anything based on justice as a reason. The suffering of others calls out to conservative Christians as well but we can understand that sometimes it is necessary to cause suffering, that sometimes it can even serve the good purpose of teaching.

When this rejection of the nature of God is coupled with the liberal worldview's strong desire for change, the result is a church where:

• The Bible contains the words of men about how they understood God
  • The Bible becomes a story about man's progressively better understanding of God
• Each person can reject or accept whatever parts of the Bible they want
• Each person can believe whatever they want
• They still call themselves a unity

In this video you'll come to understand this better.

Some parts of this video have been removed to give us more time to discuss it.

Alisa Childers: "Progressive Christianity is Dangerous"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQ6doQsSQLU&t=2785s