I love hearing about parents who get uncomfortable with the radical passion their student lives out… Exposure of complacency?? Hmm?
A complacent parent would be one who wouldn’t care what kind of spiritual guidance his or her child was receiving at church.
If Cooper is producing “radical” life change, every engaged parent should be concerned and uncomfortable. A parent who really cares might be quite worried about pastors who train young people to be more loyal to a church or pastor than to their parents.
Cooper is building a generation of rebellious, uncorrectable kids. When a father counsels his child about proper Christian behavior, Cooper’s given the child permission to punch back and tell the dad he’s being spiritually complacent.
I don’t know how that would make you feel, but, for me, it wouldn’t be complacent.
One of the most personally threatening aspects of NewSpring’s ministry (and a very good reason why I would not be a member) is the way that leaders casually tear down parental authority. As some of you know, I first noticed it with their Parents Are Clueless marketing campaign, but Noble was at it again last weekend. Although I don’t usually watch his sermons, I watched for a couple of minutes after his scoreboard bit and saw this remarkable threat to the parents in his church.
Earlier in the service, it appears that quite a few teenagers who had returned from the church’s week-long youth camp had gone to the front of the auditorium, just near the stage, and had jumped up and down with their arms in the air while the band performed the songs.
Some of you parents, this is going to bother you, and you’re like, “That’s my kid down there, and my kid’s got their arms raised, and they’re jumping!”…
And some of you are like, “I’m going to have to go home and tell my teenager to calm down.”
And the reason you’re intimidated is because your teenager probably loves Jesus more than you. But if you’re a parent and that bothers you, …do you know how many parents in America would kill to have your problem? Like your biggest problem is your kid is passionately worshipping Jesus?
Ohhhhh!
You know, you could calm them down, and God could give you what you want, and that could be his judgment.
I would be very careful.
Let me ask some careful questions.
Is jumping really a good way to measure love? On the basis of a few minutes of jumping up and down, Noble tells parents that their kids love Jesus more than they. Who would have a better handle on that, do you think? A parent who lives with them all week, or a pastor who sees them as anonymous (bobbing) faces in a crowd? It’s safe to say that the kids know how to act at a concert better than their parents, but it’s foolish to be making judgments about spiritual maturity on such a basis.
Why is he usurping someone else’s authority? God tells parents, much more than he tells pastors, to bring up their children in the knowledge of the Lord. Look at the great command in Deuteronomy 6:6-7:
These words, which I am commanding you today, shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up.
In other words, parents are to teach God’s statutes to their children always and everywhere. (Note: whether jumping up and down is proper is not the issue here. The issue is who has the most authority to teach children how to worship God.)
Who risks the most judgment here? Perry Noble just took on the mantle of a prophet and pronounced God’s judgment on God’s people. The parents were merely obeying Ephesians 6:4.
Is how we worship so inconsequential? Noble mocks parents for thinking that how their children worship is worth worrying about. If God is most important in our lives, shouldn’t how we relate to him be the most important thing in our lives? If there’s a problem in how we relate to him, shouldn’t that be the most important problem in our lives?
Doesn’t this sow the seeds of spiritual rebellion? If a parent decided to risk God’s judgment and tried to teach his or her children about spiritual maturity, why would these kids listen? Their pastor has told them that they love Jesus more than their parents, and that their parents are out of God’s will in instructing them. “I don’t need to listen to you; you don’t really love Jesus!”
How does this conform to Malachi 4:6?
He will restore the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers, so that I will not come and smite the land with a curse.
A week or so ago, we were looking at Brad Cooper’s gun-assisted sermon on how worship is a weapon. Although we were rudely interrupted by the Gary Lamb news, a couple of things in his closing prayer warrant a few more bullet points.
In his exposition, he criticizes existing worship styles.
In our evangelical culture we have neutered worship, and we sing empty, superficial posturing.
Then he comes to the prayer:
God, I pray for this culture, that, Lord, we would recognize the potential we have as worshippers of you. That we don’t just sing songs to sing. That we don’t just sing songs because people have done it for hundreds of years. That we don’t just worship you because it’s a sacred cow that people just always constantly do. That it’s not boring, that it’s not weak. God, I ask and beg you for forgiveness for the fact that we have worshipped in a neutered manner in churches all over our world for years.
Now, some un-neutered questions:
What is sexual worship? If neutered worship is such a bad thing, what is its opposite? Does this explain Perry Noble’s interest in little blue pills? Is this why it’s a good thing to have condoms and sex magazines in church?
Is worship not sacred? We’ll be doing it constantly in heaven, so what’s wrong with starting now?
How can worship ever be boring? We’d only worry about that if worship was all about us, or if it was supposed to be something useful to us. You know, like a weapon.
How does God forgive you for someone else’s sin? Since Cooper obviously doesn’t engage in neutered worship, how is he in a position to ask forgiveness for someone else’s sin? (Leaving off the fact that he hasn’t explained why it is something we need to beg forgiveness for.) The effect, given that the repentance is not being offered on behalf of anyone in the room, is to announce how great and righteous his own worship is. It’s the kind of prayer that Pharisees specialized in. From Luke 18:11:
The Pharisee stood up and prayed about himself: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men-robbers, evildoers, adulterers-or even like this tax collector.’
Is Cooper more important than these kids’ parents? Of the many reasons I wouldn’t recommend NewSpring’s youth group, the most important one is the lack of respect it gives to parents. When Cooper asks forgiveness for the old ways of doing worship, he is quite clearly referring to worship that happens in other churches. The people in his audience are high schoolers, so if they have attended other sinfully worshipping churches, it would have been at the initiative of their parents, many of whom probably still attend those churches. Cooper is telling his kids that their parents have led them into sinful worship.
Cooper got the message about worship as a weapon wrong in the first place, but his self-righteous repentance for sins he doesn’t commit, though his congregation’s parents do, is as aggressive and destructive as the weapon he cradles.
This blog is mine alone and does not necessarily–or very often–represent the thinking or sentiments of anyone who disagrees with me, my wife, my employer, my friends, my family, my pastor, my brother, my church and, almost certainly, God. After I hit the Publish button, it doesn’t always even reflect my own thinking. It does seem to often reflect the thinking of Tommy F, Twit Conway and some guy in Minnesota, however.