We welcome our recent stream of visitors from two distinct areas: Dallas, Texas, and young people from throughout the British Commonwealth of Nations.

Our article, “The Modern Church: Blowing in the Wind” (Jan. 26, 2006), which provides a brief report on a church split in Dallas, has attracted about 30 readers to this blog from the Dallas area in the last 48 hours. We offer our greetings to the members of Valley View Christian Church and Cornerstone Christian Church. Rod and I pray for God’s best for both of your churches. I know enough about both churches to know that if anyone in the Dallas area is looking for a good Christ-honoring, Bible-believing church to attend, either church would be a good choice. (Here’s more information about Valley View. If anyone has a website address for Cornerstone, please send it).

Meanwhile, we also have been inundated lately with visitors from several foreign countries: Canada, Cyprus, India, Singapore, Sri Lanka, and the United Kingdom. Why in the world is this blog suddenly of such interest to people of those nations? Here’s the riddle wrapped around that enigma: Those visitors have all ended up here by plugging into search engines some combination of the phrase “hard to keep a secret.”

Google it for yourself. You will see that this blog comes up No. 1 in the world on the search engine list for that particular phrase. Those searches are hitting on an article we published about the completion of our first month online (“Hard to Keep a Secret These Days,” Jan. 23, 2006).

But why are people all over the world searching on the phrase “hard to keep a secret?” That’s a very good question which had me stumped for a few days. But I’ve cracked the code. The British Commonwealth of Nations, headed by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II herself, is composed of 53 nations that were formerly British territories. The six countries listed above are all Commonwealth nations. A little noodling around has led me to the discovery that the Queen sponsors an annual essay contest for people 18 years and younger. The contest has been going on for more than 100 years. The deadline for this year’s entries is March 1, just in time for Commonwealth Day on March 12. Contestants are divided into four age groups, and each group has a choice of five essay topics. Guess what one of the topics for 12- and 13-year-olds is? “How hard is it to keep a secret?”

So, to the boys and girls of the Commonwealth, welcome to our little blog. I have a granddaughter about your age who is very special to me. I’m sure each of you is special, too, and I wish you luck on your essays. The fact that you found me and I found you back certainly proves how hard secrets are to keep these days.

It’s a strange world. A girl in Battaramulla, Sri Lanka, doing research for her Commonwealth essay, finds her way via the World Wide Web to the blog of an attorney and a writer in Oklahoma, United States – 9,498 miles away. When those Oklahoma bloggers wonder why a Sri Lankan girl came calling, one of them takes a trip via Google to the office of the Queen of England, and learns on the Queen’s website about the essay that Battaramulla girl is writing. Just 15 years ago, the words website, Google and blog did not exist, and the World Wide Web had just been invented. I don’t know your name, young lady of Battaramulla, but I hope you win the contest.

There aren’t many secrets any more – whether for students in Sri Lanka, or bloggers in Oklahoma, or churches in Dallas. Perhaps it has always been true, but it has never been more true than it is now: the things we do and say have a ripple effect that can reach all the way around the world. That can be a good thing, or bad. Guess that depends on what we do and say.

Jesus said,

“No one after lighting a lamp covers it over with a container, or puts it under a bed, but he puts it on a lampstand, so that those who come in may see the light. For nothing is hidden that will not become evident, nor anything secret that will not be known and come to light.” (Luke 8:16-17).

Everything we do, as individuals and as churches, will eventually come to light. We are sometimes surprised or distressed when something becomes more public than we ever expected that it would. We have the very human thought, “What will people think?” But the much more pertinent question is: What does God think? There are no secrets from Him.

As individuals, we are entitled to some privacy. For churches, however, it is almost always a good thing to get things out in the open, subject to the scrutiny and feedback of others. What one church does ripples through to affect every other church in the body of Christ, as well as our collective witness to the world. No church or church leader has the right to ever forget that.

A Christian author says the catalyst behind the recent split of a Dallas mega-church was implementation of Rick Warren’s “40 Days of Purpose.” Cornerstone Christian Church of Dallas was started last year by a couple of hundred former members of Valley View Christian Church. James Sundquist, author of Who’s Driving the Purpose-Driven Church?, reports that the church is one of many that has experienced discord as a result of becoming “purpose-driven.”

Cornerstone’s pastor, Ron Key, who was formerly the senior minister of Valley View, had his 15 minutes of fame in October when President Bush nominated Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. Miers is Key’s long-time friend and attends his church, so many journalists contacted Key in an effort to ferret out Miers’ views on abortion and other issues. Many of those reports (like this one in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram) mentioned the church split.

I found those reports interesting not so much because of Miers as because of Key and Valley View. I am acquainted with Ron Key and have relatives and friends who have attended the Valley View church. Valley View is an “independent Christian church,” part of a loose-knit fellowship of several thousand non-denominational theologically conservative churches. Rod Heggy and I have both participated in the independent Christian churches all our lives. Valley View is well-known as one of the largest such churches in this part of the country, so its progress has been of interest to us. (More info about the Christian churches is available here and here).

Ron Key joined the Valley View staff in the early 1970s and served in several capacities before becoming the senior minister in 2001. However, in 2004, the church hired Dr. Barry McCarty as their “preaching minister,” while keeping Key on as “senior minister.” That unusual arrangement wasn’t likely to last long. Last year Key’s tenure at Valley View terminated, and Valley View experienced a split, resulting in the formation of Cornerstone Christian Church.

What the new church didn’t expect was that just as it was getting started, one of its members would be nominated to the Supreme Court, bringing the church – and the church split – more publicity than it may have wanted. Many of the news reports about Miers offered some details about the Valley View split, mostly echoing this account in the Dallas Morning News:

The Cornerstone group broke not because of politics or theology, but because of concern about how Valley View Christian was being run, including staff changes and changes in worship style aimed at attracting more young people.

THE PASTOR’S WIFE’S PUBLIC LETTER
The other day I thought about Ron Key and his new church and decided to search for any new reports about how Cornerstone is progressing. I can’t find a Cornerstone website, but I did come across this letter, reportedly written by the pastor’s wife, Kaycia Key, to Sundquist. In her letter Key lays much of the blame for the church split on implementation of the Purpose Driven model. Sundquist said he has Key’s permission to publish her letter online. Here are excerpts:

December 14, 2005 and January 9, 2006
Hi James,
Our newly founded church, Cornerstone, is doing very well, has such a sweet spirit. We have over 250 members and we are meeting in facilities provided by Dallas Christian College. …

I am so grateful to you for identifying [in Sundquist’s book] some of the causes of my fear and concern for the Lord’s church. … His [Warren’s] theology is definitely skewed. … Many who left Valley View Christian Church did so in great part because the leadership had developed an irrational and irrecoverable rupture in our common faith, belief and vision of Christ’s church after we studied and implemented the Purpose Drive Life by Rick Warren.

The church had been experiencing problems between the elders and the congregation and people were quietly (and some not so quietly) beginning to leave. When the elders brought in a new preaching minister people grew more unhappy and then after we did the Purpose Driven programs the rift developed into the rupture of faith and our vision for Christ’s church to the point of “re-visioning” even the foundational charter.

… The elders … asked Ron to resign … or be fired. Ron … [said] they would have to fire him. … Ron Key did not, as some may have thought (or been erroneously told) start a new church, but was asked to become the minister of the new church, once it was founded. Since then the church has grown to about 275-300, several of whom were refugees from other churches in the area who were also leaving because of many of the same issues with leadership that had developed in their respective congregations after Purpose Driven Programs. We are also now being able to share in love with more people about the perils of Warren’s programs. …
Kaycia Key

(More of the letter can be found here).

SPEAK UP OR KEEP QUIET?
Many believers feel uncomfortable when a Christian challenges a well-known Christian leader publicly. Perhaps one imagines that we should pull Rick Warren aside, maybe meet him for a coffee at Starbucks, to discuss our concerns. Unable to do that, some think perhaps we should just say nothing at all. Meanwhile, using mass media, Christian leaders are able to influence millions of believers and tens of thousands of churches all over the world. Modern Christians and churches especially seem eager to be carried along by every new wind that blows through the church. The anthem of the 21st-century Church could be “Blowing in the Wind.”

When we become convicted that the “the latest new thing” seriously misses the mark of God’s Word, we are right to speak up. And when the Church Gurus disseminate their ideas through the mass media, the only effective way to discuss or disagree with them is also through the mass media. We should do so in love and with respect, but there is usually more cowardice than honor in remaining silent.

I am not a fan of The Purpose-Driven Church, which has played a pivotal role in turning church worship services into marketing events (see my previous post, “Is the American Church in Decline?”). I was disturbed by The Purpose-Driven Life, which, as many critics have pointed out, handled the Scriptures recklessly, with numerous out-of-context Scriptural quotations, often relying on loose paraphrases that distort the true meaning. I have never voiced those concerns before in any public way, but am prompted to do so now by the Dallas story.

In researching this article, I discovered that one of my favorite Bible teachers, John MacArthur, published a book last year that includes at least one chapter on the Purpose Driven movement. The book is Fool’s Gold, and I look forward to reading it. MacArthur’s modern classic on the seeker-sensitive movement is Ashamed of the Gospel, written in 1993, two years before Warren’s Purpose Driven Church was published. I heartily recommend Ashamed of the Gospel to all church leaders and anyone else concerned about the health of his or her local congregation.

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UPDATE (Jan. 31, 2006): Readers from the Dallas area, please see this special message just for you: “Every Secret Will Be Made Known.”
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UPDATE (Feb. 2, 2006): Rod Heggy has written a strongly worded opinion piece on church splits in general, and the Valley View Christian Church split in particular. Church splits are as old and nearly as common as church picnics, but rarely are they discussed as openly and as analytically as Rod has done here. See: “Growth by Fission: Anatomy of A Church Split.”
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UPDATE (Feb. 15, 2006): Dennis Slaughter, minister emeritus of Valley Vew Christian Church, has written a response to this article. See: “Dallas Minister Responds to Articles About Church Split.”

Terra Extraneus is one month old today. I believe Rod Heggy will agree that our first month of blogging has surpassed our expectations by every measure.

[Editor’s Note: Terra Extraneus was our first blog. In early 2007, we split Terra Extraneus into two blogs, creating Joshua One with about 150 faith- and ministry-related blogs originally published on TerraX. We have duplicated this TerraX post here, to memorialize or first days as Christian bloggers.]

Our original plan was to put TerraX out there but keep it our little secret while we spent the first month or two getting it to look they way we want it to, and building some content. We imagined that nobody would know about it until we took some intentional steps to promote traffic. However, Rod put up our first post, on the topic of intelligent design, and less than two hours after Terra Extraneus went public, we had our first visitor and our first comment. It’s been that way ever since.

So far we have done nothing to promote TerraX, but the world has somehow found out about us. We have had readers from Brazil, Canada, England, Ireland, Sweden, Finland, Australia, Japan, and China – and a majority of the 50 states. Someone from the Palestinian Territory read a post of mine in which I respond to Pat Robertson’s comments about Israel, and a couple of days later I received an invitation to participate in an online discussion group of Palestinian Christians. TerraX has given Rod and I instant access to people literally all over the world. Amazing.

During our first month, we have had 311 visitors. (Our tracking software counts a visit as any number of page views by the same visitor with no more than 30 minutes between page views. In other words, if you come to our site and stay for several hours, that’s one visit. If you leave our site and come back an hour later, that’s two visits). That computes to an average of 13 readers a day, almost 100 a week. Rod and I have posted a total of 47 articles, and 11 readers have posted comments in response.

One measure of success that the top hitters in the blogosphere watch is links — how many other websites and blogsites link back to something we have posted on our blog. That has happened one time, when a pastor in California referred the readers of his blog to our review of George Barna’s book, Revolution.

How have people found us? One way is through search engines. The single biggest draw has been our review of Barna’s book. That has brought dozens of people from all over the world to our site. Another significant draw have been searches on the movies we have reviewed or commented on. Regarding many visitors, we don’t have a clue what brought them our way.

Terra Extraneus is still far from what we envision it becoming. If we had our way, TerraX would still be our little secret, in the pre-launch stage. But the world and the Internet haven’t cooperated with that plan, so we are hurrying to make many of the improvements we have in mind during the coming weeks.

If you are reading this, you are probably one of those 311 readers who came to visit during our first month. Thanks very much for taking an interest. From the start, Rod and I have imagined Terra Extraneus as a conversation — not just with each other, but with you. We welcome any suggestions you have.

If you are visiting TerraX for the first time, welcome to the conversation. It’s a strange world, but together, maybe we can make some sense out of it.

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UPDATE (Jan. 31, 2006): Visitors participating in the Commonwealth essay competition, please see this special message just for you: “Every Secret Will Be Made Known.”

This post is written in response to Terry Hull’s post, “Attack Abortion with Red Tape?” (01/21/06).
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Terry, I do not have to have the attitude of “attack abortion” in order to protect society. Society does not have to tolerate the deaths and injuries from improperly conducted abortions, improperly staffed abortion clinics, and inadequately certified and trained abortionists. These are facts any legislature can address under the police power of the state. Abortion is a group of medical procedures that should be carefully regulated to protect the patients.

An abortion clinic with inadequate insurance coverage and inadequate net capital is a menace. Adequate capital and adequate insurance should be made a licensure prerequisite. Abortion clinics should have to meet the same criteria as any hospital operating room rather than the standards of tattoo parlors. Abortion clinics’ staffing should be on a par with skilled nursing facilities rather than nursing homes, and on a par with the ER of any hospital.

Abortion, like pregnancy itself, is among the most dangerous things a young woman does, and society has a tremendous responsibility to carefully scrutinize the abortion industry to make certain these people are protected. We should do no less regulation for abortion patients than we do to protect hospital patients.

The regulatory attempts that you listed, Terry, are intellectually interesting, but do not address the technical types of regulation I am describing. We spend more time and money in this country on regulating financial advisors than we do abortionists. Because of the public’s focus on the abortion issue itself, the abortion infrastructure is flying below the radar, politically speaking, and should be the focus of just as much effort.

Finally, the abortion industry has more free rides than the tobacco industry once had with regard to taxation. Abortionists are not repaying the state for the aftermath of failed surgeries, psychological injury, and latent disability. While the medical services of the abortionist may not be different from other body invasive medical procedures for tax purposes, the abortion clinics themselves do not support the infracture supported by hospitals, for example, and thus the state is required to fund the gap.

My personal hope, that one day abortion will be regarded as the murder it truly is, may or may not be fulfilled in my lifetime. But, the tragic consequences of having an unregulated medical sub-industry can be immediately addressed. The abortion industry lobby has so far prevented these ugly secrets from being exposed. It would be less expensive and less litigious to deal with the problem than to ignore it while we spend decades attempting to garner support for constitutional changes and Article III judges (who are appointed for life).

Rod, your post, “Let’s Regulate, License, Tax, Credential Abortion,” is quite a provocative comment regarding abortion. The national debate mostly focuses on legalization v. prohibition. Maybe you are right that the real solution to the abortion holocaust is to throw a lot of red tape at it.

Of course, regulating abortion is nothing new. Laws are on the books limiting the terms of pregnancy during which abortion is legal; requiring a 24-hour waiting period; requiring parental notification for a minor seeking abortion; etc. Even Roe v. Wade only legalized abortion during the first two trimesters.

But hasn’t the court struck down abortion regulations that place an “undue burden” on a woman who is attempting to exercise her legal right to an abortion? Sounds like what you are proposing is exactly that: trying to eliminate or minimize abortion through burdensome legislation. Would the courts allow it?

Also, how can pro-life Christians get behind such a tactic, knowing that we are acquiescing to the suggestion that abortion is a legal right? Even if the result of your tactic is fewer abortions, can we with a clear conscience seek any other solution that prohibition?
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UPDATE (01/21/06): In response to the above post, Rod Heggy has written: “Wrong Attitude, Wrong Direction.”