Iron Sharpens Iron: Ken Silva: The Gurus of the Emergent Church: A Response to the Mysticism & Universalism of Shane Hipps & Rob Bell

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Ken Silva: The Gurus of the Emergent Church: A Response to the Mysticism & Universalism of Shane Hipps & Rob Bell

Ken Silva, pastor of Connecticut River Baptist Church & president of Apprising Ministries in Claremont, NH, will address the theme: "The Gurus of the Emergent Church: A Response to the Mysticism & Universalism of Shane Hipps & Rob Bell".

Apprising Ministries pointed out recently Shane Hipps Accepts Teaching Pastor Job With Rob Bell at Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, MI. For more background on MHBC’s new co-pastor alongside Rob Bell, who, as our guest today, Ken Silva, describes as "the Elvis of the egregiously ecumenical Emerging Church aka Emergent Church de-formation of the Christian faith—now morphing into Emergence Christianity", go to Shane Hipps.com.

Pastor Hipps preached two sermons, Fasting and Feasting and A Gentle Stillness in July of this year at MHBC, which he tells us was “the second week of a series” that they were doing “on spiritual practices.”

In that latter sermon, A Gentle Stillness, you’ll read as Hipps leads MHBC while they “practice some silence together.” Our guest Ken Silva was personally involved with meditation before he was regenerated and has been "studying this spiritually corrupt Contemplative Spirituality/Mysticism (CSM) ala Living Spiritual Teacher and Quaker mystic Richard Foster and his spiritual twin Dallas Willard for years now..." Ken literally has hundreds of books concerning CSM from virtually every religion and “silence” is mystic-speak for meditation in an altered state of consciousness, which is precisely what it is.

Hipps himself explains below this practice of silence is not simply being alone and not speaking, it is going within one’s self in a transcendental meditation-lite for the Christian aka Contemplative/Centering Prayer. The new co-teaching pastor at Mars Hill Bible Church confides that practicing meditation:

has become probably one of the most transformative thing that has opened me to God in ways that nothing else ever has…so I love this practice…[it's not] just about external silence,…[it's]about finding internal silence…

[This is] going within and practicing silence…it is the practice of releasing ourselves into the heart of God and connecting with the source of life… The point is not the twenty minutes…the point is how you begin to experience life the rest of the hours of the day.

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