Brian McLaren Wants the Minds of Your Children and Grandchildren

On May 7-10 2012, in Washington, DC, Brian McLaren will be a speaker at the Children, Youth, and a New Kind of Christianity event. He will be joining other emergent leaders – Tony Campolo, Shane Claiborne, Samir Selmanovic and other “progressives.” In the video below (a promotional for the event) McLaren tells viewers that they are holding the conference so they can figure out how to get their message into children’s curriculum. [GFM Note: One might/should wonder what “their message” is. That’s what this website attempts to uncover in order to keep the church body informed.] And, no doubt, they will do it. After all, virtually all of the large Christian publishers are now publishing emerging/contemplative material.

So look out dear Christian parent and grandparent. They are after the minds of your children and grandchildren. And they will find them – in the colleges, seminaries, Christian high schools, AWANA programs, youth groups, Focus on the Family’s Adventures in Odyssey, missionary societies, and in your churches.

Oh, and just in case you don’t think there is an underlying political agenda in this conference, please note that Barak Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr is also one of the speakers, not to mention Jim Wallis who is another political cheerleader for re-election of our present president.

Three years ago, we [Lighthouse Trails] wrote an article titled Brian McLaren’s Hope for the Future – The Minds of Your Grandchildren. In that article, we stated:

[I]n [Brian] McLaren’s book [Finding Our Way Again: The Return of the Ancient Practices] . . . he gives a detailed analysis of how the emerging church is God’s answer to a stifled, fearful Christian church. He explains that this merging church must infiltrate the “institutions that rejected it,” adding that “conservative Protestants have repeated their Catholic sibling’s earlier mistakes (referring to the Catholic church’s one time rejection of Galileo). Then he says: “But over time, what they reject will find or create safe space outside their borders and become a resource so that many if not most of the grandchildren of today’s fundamentalists will learn and grow and move on from the misguided battles of their forebears [biblical believers]” (p. 133). You see, McLaren and his emerging church fellows (Pagitt, Sweet, Warren, et.al) want to change the minds of our children and grandchildren.

Contributed by Lighthouse Trails Editors