CRN.Info and Analysis

Dear Mr. Corley,
I know that “open letters” are not the best way to communicate but despite my sending you a few connections via the “Expositor” webpage you have not responded to me. So I’ve decided to take the open approach. Now, you’ve already said that you won’t “get into a back-and-forth with them” so I’ll not ask for that. Although I find it interesting that you and CRN/Slice 2.0 ridicule Erwin McManus and others for not responding to you, you are certainly free to chose to live your life however you would like. I cannot stop you if you chose to openly live in hypocrisy.

Now, let’s get to your letter. I found it (and the subsequent show today) to be morally repugnant. Let’s just look at the post to start shall we? You said,

“One case in point is what I call the “mock site” guys. I will not call them or their “blogs” by name because I will not give them the satisfaction or the publicity, but these are folks that devote entire internet sites to analyzing people like me, Ken Silva, Steve Camp, Ingrid Schleuter and others.”

Now, why does that shock you? What makes CRN/Slice 2.0 so special that you can devote entire websites to analyzing people. For that matter what makes your radio program so special? Why is it that you can analyze people but if you are questioned those doing the questioning are “spoiled whining little child” who want to “take their ball and go home in a ‘your not the boss of me’ type attitude?”

You go on to say,

“The first time I actually visited one of these sites, my first thought was ‘do these folks have jobs?’.”

I’d like to answer that one for myself. Yes, I do have a job. In fact I have two jobs. I used to have three jobs (one of them was being a pastor). I also have a beautiful family, three small daughters and a fantastic wife. Yet, I am so appalled at your site, so scared for the Bride of Christ that I make sure I take time to point out your errors. I cannot help but analyze and refute the rantings of Ken Silva. Your consistent attacks on men of God cannot go unchallenged. If you used logic or actually backed your statement up (I suppose this applies more to Ken than you) it would be one thing but just attacking a man and not backing it up with anything other than links to one’s own page cannot be countenanced.

So then today on your radio show after being asked for what I imagine was more than a few times how your site was any different than that which you were deriding you stooped lower than low saying that your site is OK because you are “contending for the faith.” What arrogance! What absolute hogwash!
Your contention that you stand for the gospel and therefore any who might dare question you are somehow against Christ is so full of arrogance it defies explanation.
Sir, if you can’t see the hypocrisy in a man who has a radio show dedicated to questioning others deriding those who do the same to him then you are correct when you say, “there will be some who in spite of it all, will just simply refuse to believe and accept the Truth, even when it is clearly laid out before them.”
Mr. Corley there are many things I’d like to say to you but they would not honor God so I won’t say them.
I want to make this next part very clear. As long as men and women like you and your comrades continue to feast on the Bride of Christ in the name of Christ I will stand against you. I will call you out loudly and often. In the past, I have (and many contributors here) have pointed out Ken’s lack of logic and outright lies. You Sir, are a blight on person of Christ, and an embarrassment to the family that is the Church universal. In ruminating over your post and your radio show today I thought of some verses. I pray their meaning won’t be lost on you.

Proverbs 17:10 “A rebuke impresses a man of discernment
more than a hundred lashes a fool.”

Proverbs 9:7 “”Whoever corrects a mocker invites insult;
whoever rebukes a wicked man incurs abuse.”

Proverbs 9:8 “Do not rebuke a mocker or he will hate you;
rebuke a wise man and he will love you.”

Proverbs 19:25 “Flog a mocker, and the simple will learn prudence;
rebuke a discerning man, and he will gain knowledge.”
Mr. Corley I’ve stopped short of calling you Apostate although I myself have been called that by Ken because I exposed his lying to the world. I stopped short of a lot of things that my flesh wanted to say because of a story found in Luke, Chapter 9

 46An argument started among the disciples as to which of them would be the greatest. 47Jesus, knowing their thoughts, took a little child and had him stand beside him. 48Then he said to them, “Whoever welcomes this little child in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me. For he who is least among you all—he is the greatest.”

 49″Master,” said John, “we saw a man driving out demons in your name and we tried to stop him, because he is not one of us.”

 50″Do not stop him,” Jesus said, “for whoever is not against you is for you.”

I wonder what we can learn about this story in whole emergent/fundamentalist rift we find ourselves in.

I am going to pray three things for you Mr. Corley. I am going to pray that either

1. You will repent of attacking the Body of Christ
2. God will shut you down and your influence will be silenced
3. God will show me that I am wrong and you are right

Blessings!

Joe

Ken posted a critique of the critique that iMonk did on MacArthur’s The Truth War on apprising.org today.  iMonk makes a great point on the book.  The whole premise of the book is to basically defend what is true.  That there is a war going on against all that is truth and we need to step up as a community of faith and defend it.

However, MacArthur fails to meet with and personally investigate the ministries that he claims to be fighting against truth.  Anyone knows, both in the literary and scientific world, that the first step is together the facts.  You must have as reliable of sources as possible to get a grasp on what is really taking place.  So, if I was going to do a critique of The Disney Corporation, I would get in contact with as many Disney executives as possible to come up with the clearest picture possible.  To find the truth.

MacArthur does not do this.  He makes vague and generalized claims, occasionally throwing in a few antidotes, and then attaches people’s names to his work.  One of the men whom he has criticized, Erwin McManus, has a church within a short drive to investigate and interview.  That was not done. 

Ken’s rebuttal is this:

Did Brian McLaren, Tony Jones, Rob Bell, Dan Kimball or Erwin McManus personally sit down with anyone else remotely affiliated with each one of those like MacArthur who hold to the doctrines of grace before they began defecating upon them?

Last time I checked, these men did not write books that personally attacked MacArthur’s ministry.  I also find it interesting that Ken associated the doctrines of grace directly with John MacArthur.  That is, if you poop on the doctrines of grace (or defecate, at Ken so elegantly writes), you are actually attacking John MacArthur.  The logical conclusion would be that those who poop on the doctrines of grace attack the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Not a man.
 Lastly, I am still confused about what “doctrines of grace” Ken keeps referring to.  I am almost sure that all five of these men would subscribe to the scripture “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith and that not of yourselves.  It is the gift of God, not of works so that no man can boast.”  Maybe I am missing something here.
          

I have received alot of emails about this recent broadcast from the Mike Corley Show with Ken Silva. They basically ganged up on Erwin McManus and his recent talk at the National Religious Broadcasting Convention. I really am speechless on so many levels. Their logic behind their arguments is absolutely astounding. Ken Silva at several times begins yelling, and sounds almost psychotic (and I do not say that loosely).

After listening to this radio show I wonder if there really is any hope for these men. Not in the salvation sense, but in the sense that they will stop tearing down the body of Christ. My heart is so burdened for the churches out there that are speaking and sharing the truth in a postmodern world.

After listening to this, I am interested in your thoughts and ideas. For now I am interceding for the future of the Bride of Christ as it exists among wolves that would desire to see her diminished and ultimately destroyed.

I would like to say “good work” to the many people that contribute to this site.  We have been receiving alot of response on many of these discernment blogs.  This should only be seen as our voices being heard and at least processed in their minds.  Pray that it would now move within their hearts to stop tearing down the church and building up believers to find and grow in Christ.

Deborah has taken me to task for pulling a page out of the playbook I criticize, and she is correct.  This morning’s post on the research at CRN was highly sarcastic, self-referential and in generally poor taste.  As noted in my comment, I will not delete it in an attempt to cover my mistake, but I have closed comments on it, finishing it with my own apology in the comment thread.

A man of knowledge uses words with restraint, and a man of understanding is even-tempered.
Even a fool is thought wise if he keeps silent, and discerning if he holds his tongue. (Proverbs 17:27-28)

In this morning’s article, I played the part of a fool…  I guess this is a warning to myself, as well, to avoid becoming that which I detest.

Thank you, Deborah.

If it wasn’t already apparent to discerning and non-discerning readers, alike, there is very little research actually conducted at the “Christian Research Network”.  In fact, about a third of what gets passed off as research is little more than glorified gossip, at best.

As one peruses this pothole in the information superhighway, he or she may be struck by the “balance” of three types of postings:

1. Reporting the Obvious: Articles documenting things that really don’t require all that much ‘discernment’ - Mormonism is a cult, the press hates Christians, the health & wealth gospel is a sham
2. Spiritual Encouragement: Always a good thing, though there’s a number of better places to go.
3. Gossip/Slander disguised as ‘Discernment’: Articles which either mock other Christians over tertiary doctrine or differences in taste/style, decry brothers as ‘heretics’ and ‘apostates’ based on opinions and isogesis, or - most often - which completely distort quotes from brothers in Christ and then slander them as if this were the sum total of their ministry.

Were the metatopic of CRN “Physical Science” instead of Christianity, this balance and “depth” of research would be something like this:

1. The Obvious: Water is wet, the sky is blue, things tend to break when dropped from great heights
2. Encouraging Words: Recycling tends to save natural resources; Don’t litter; Flowers are very pretty during the springtime
3. Near or Utter Falsehood: Cold fusion really works - you just don’t understand it correctly; Galileo was wrong about heliocentricity because he couldn’t see supernovae 6 billion light years away; There are tall people who live on the moon (oh, wait, that was actually taught by LDS founder, Joseph Smith!)

As it pertains to Category #3 and “Research”: At CRN, it has become fairly obvious that Dwayna has no connection to reality when it comes to research; that Chris (”the only cure for AIDS is death“) Perjak is all about sound and fury - lots of long seemingly-unrelated Biblical text with ‘unusual’ literalistic interpretations followed by general broad-brush invective; and that Ken Silva has never met a logical fallacy he didn’t embrace.

To wit - we ALL have our faults.  Among mine, blog-wise, is a chief overuse of sarcasm, verbosity, and beating dead horses.  However, I would never deem to teach people how not to be sarcastic, how to write concise articles, or how to allow a subject to just drop and to leave it alone.  An old boss of mine called this type of behavior “leading with your glass chin”.  Perhaps this is a lesson that could have been taken into account before choosing “research” as part of the title of your “ministry” (as tenuous a proposition as it is that CRN/Slice can actually be referred to as such).

When average Joes (all of us - not just Joe) like the writers here can so easily eviscerate what passes for “research” at CRN, one really must wonder what defines “research” over there.  In the immortal words of Inigo Montoya, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”  While even the best minds sometimes get pwned, it seems to be becoming a common occurance to directly disprove Slice claims with written or photographic evidence.

And so it was yesterday, when commenter ‘Matt’ provided photographic evidence (left) of Ken’s rush to slander Mark Driscoll over the name (”Red Hot Bash” New Years’ Eve celebration) as if it were some sexual slang or innuendo for church-sponsored sleaze.  Unfortunately for Ken, there’s an entire Flickr photoset to dispute his smear.  I wonder if there will be an apology made to Driscoll and Mars Hill (cue chirping crickets).

Perhaps it’s just time for CRN/Slice 2.0 to end the charade and update their URL to christiangossipnetwork.org - at least then there would be truth in advertising.

Ok, I don’t have much time but talk about misquoting!  Slice 2.0/CRN has an article up where they take a jab at one of their favorite whippping boys, Rick Warren. You can read their filth here. The thing is I think Warren’s right in that quote too–Jesus probably would be hanging out with people who had AIDS.

 I want to quote the ending of the article, I’m guess that they didn’t have this part of the article when Slice 2.0/CRN put it up.

 

“But the truth is, Easter is the greatest significant event in history, in fact, it split history into A.D. and B.C. Even people who don’t believe that Jesus Christ died and was resurrected for our sins use Easter as a reference point every single day of their life. When you write a date April 3rd, April 4th, 2007, you’re using this — what’s the focal point? It’s Easter, because God came to earth and split his try into A.D. and B.C., it’s the most significant event.”

You can read the whole article here. I’ll have to write more about this later.