Question: Is this the Wokest Acts 29 Church Around? Answer: Probably
After all, look at their church statement of faith.
There was a time (albeit brief) that being a church within the Acts 29 Network meant something. Founded by Mark Driscoll and then taken over by Matt Chandler in 2012, the evangelistic, church planting network was designed to exemplify a deep, deep biblicism, mostly on the back of its Calvinistic soteriology, which convinced many well-meaning folks that they can’t possibly be dangerous and that churches within the network couldn’t possibly have deep marring undercurrents.
After all, look at their church statement of faith. It’s a masterpiece of depth and substance, with the words ‘God’s sovereignty and ‘gospel’ and ‘penal substitution’ strewn about liberally.
Enter Park Church in Denver, Colorado. It’s a church body that is part of the Acts 29 Network and is absolutely drenched with wokeness and streaks of compromise.
Of chief interest is their Diversity & Racial Justice Resources, which explains that Park Church “has an opportunity to either lead us into unity or remain complicit in allowing systems of racial inequities to disproportionately harm our sisters and brothers of color” and that they’ve “spent the last three years intentionally breaking down such systems internally and have focused on building a more inclusive culture and church.
Here are some of the helpful resources they provide for their church members, to gain a better appreciation for what they’re trying to say:
James Cone’s book The Cross and the Lynching Tree:
Soong Chan Rah’s book The Next Evangelicalism (we covered him extensively in our woke World Cisions series. He’s the guy who claims every white man sees black men as pets or threats, and black women as jezebel’s or “mammy’s)
Pastor Eric Mason’s book ‘Woke Church‘ (Mason blamed ‘white foolishness’ for black people not being saved, said ‘whiteness has caused blindness of heart’. Oh, and this clip)
Pastor Eric Mason’s sermon Race, Justice, and the Church
Jemar Tisby’s book The Color of Compromise. (he literally works for Ibram X Kendi, and his organization is rife with pro-pro-abortion, pro LGBTQ people, including the VP of The Witness BBC)
Latasha Morrision’s book Be the Bridge
Latasha’s Morrison’s BTB101 booklet, which teaches the 4 W’s. White Supremacy
White Fragility, White Identity and White Privilege
Dr. John Perkins book One Blood.
In a 2020 sermon, lead pastor Gary McQuinn rifts on the typical talking points you’d find in these sort of antiracist/ racism sermons while including a bit about how puzzling and trippy suggestion that “the idea of inherited guilt from the sins of our forefathers is not an unbiblical idea.” He explains:
We can be corporately condemned… the sin of Achan in the book of Judges where Achan sins, and his whole family is condemned, because they find a corporate identity and relationship to their father. It’s a biblical concept.
So when people are..afraid of concepts like… ‘white guilt’, and you kind of think, like, ‘oh, how could I be, how can I experience guilt based on just the color of my skin?’ It’s like, well, it’s complicated. It’s complicated.
I get it. And there are questions and I’m hearing all the triggers and the emails start coming. But the idea of actually ‘inherited guilt from the sins of our forefathers’ is not an unbiblical idea. It’s a very biblical idea. So there’s culpability that we carry as we pick up the power structures, and we benefit from the injustices, and we experienced, the cultural idolatries and the cultural sins of the generations that came before us.
That’s just biblical. It’s not Marxist. It’s not socialist. It’s not. It’s just Biblical. And so as a people, you have to like pay attention, that there really is corporate responsibility. That doesn’t mean shame on you. That doesn’t mean forever and ever and ever- you’re just nasty guilty. It’s like no, God sent Jesus into the world to redeem and forgive and justify guilty people, good news for us. So we can be changed. We can admit our guilt, we can embrace and we can seek to do better and bring more restoration into the world.
h/t Woke Preacher TV for the vid.