Day of Reckoning: Chuck Smith and Calvary Chapel Face an Uncertain Future
This is a very informative article from CT on the issues going on within Calvary Chapel. No denomination is perfect and although Calvary does not consider themselves a denomination - they are. This article goes fairly in-depth on their moral failings and leadership integrity issues. While I do not agree with a lot of their ministerial philosophies, or their stance on church polity, gifts, and church membership. I dislike even more a perpetuation of hypocritical Christians - especially at the higher levels in their leadership. The first two lines of the article are the epitome to me of Calvary, they aren't anything - pure vanilla.
Excerpt:
Talk to Calvary Chapel pastors about their theology, and they appear the epitome of evangelical balance and moderation: neither Calvinist nor Arminian, neither Pentecostal nor cessationist.
Talk to Calvary Chapel pastors about their vibrant network of 1,300 churches across the U.S., however, and they'll offer two radically different views. Most will call Calvary Chapel a mighty and ongoing work of a faithful God—and they will be right. But the other view expresses deep worry that lax moral standards among some key leaders will sink Calvary's ship. As one pastor said to Christianity Today, "The Titanic has hit the iceberg. But the music is still playing."
Click here for full article.
1 comment:
The Christianity Today article is highly, highly suspect. I am very intimately familiar with at least one of the things that Moll discusses in the article, which I comment on (http://mikescape.blogspot.com/2007/02/christianity-today-hack-journalism.html).
Given that Moll failed terribly in simple fact-checking on this one instance (which he devotes a few paragraphs to), I have absolutely zero confidence that the rest of his stuff was checked with any degree of accuracy.
Yes, Chuck Smith came out of Foursquare (to answer the previous poster).
No, Calvary Chapel isn't perfect... and yes, there are issues we're struggling with as we seek to refine our fellowship of churches - you can see the ongoing discussions at http://simplemindedpreacher.wordpress.com for some perspective on that.
But Moll was shamefully negligent in checking his facts, in at least the one instance I happen to be very familiar with, and his article really amounts to little more than hack journalism, in my admittedly very biased and unprofessional opinion.
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