50 Most Influential ... Christians?

I have long had problems with the broad definition of what makes an "evangelical". In the old understanding of the term, an evangelical was one who accepted the unique and final authority of scripture, and considered justification by grace alone through faith alone as the central tenets of belief. Most evangelicals took for granted the doctrines of the Nicene Creed even if that creed was not something emphasized in local church Christian Education or recited as part of the order of weekly service. Doctrinal statements restated the basic Trinitarian beliefs for most evangelicals.

But thirty years of experience in "evangelical" circles made me increasingly uncomfortable with the drift of the times. I had not read Mark Noll's "Scandal of the Evangelical Mind" or David Wells' "No Place for Truth", but I knew that theology had come to be considered the domain of scholars and largely irrelevant and unimportant for church life and particularly church growth.

The Church Report.com, which describes itself as "the online resource for Christian leaders, pastors and Para church executives" has published a list of the 50 most influential Christian leaders in America. This list only solidifies my belief that evangelicalism is drifting further and further from orthodoxy.



Several names appear on the list which, at the risk of being accused of being "divisive" raise concerns to me.

At the top of the list is TD Jakes, who has danced around the question of whether his theology resurrects the long settled heresy of modalism, where the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are not three distinct persons but three manifestations of one God.

At #2 is Joel Osteen, a smiling head of a huge church who generally refuses to speak anything "negative" from the pulpit, hence, sin and Hell are biblical concepts subtly excised from the biblical text.

At #6 - Paul Crouch, founder of the Trinity Broadcasting Network whose programs regularly promote the ideas of Word of Faith teachers who deny essentials of the Nicene Creed, recently denying the deity of Christ, saying that Jesus was a man on the earth who was reincarnated as the Divine Son when He was "born again" in hell.

Then at #7 - Joyce Meyer - one of several "word of faith" teachers on the list whose notion of Christ descending into Hell to suffer and be born again in order for salvation to be realized is commonplace among Word of Faith teachers.

Benny Hinn comes in at #30, the same faith healing media superstar who once said that God the father has a body, stands six-feet tall and lives on a planet and that the Trinity consists of father, son and spirit each having three parts - sort of a nine-i-ty rather than a trinity.

Two others are outside of the word of faith crowd, but troubling nonetheless. Leonard Sweet at #32 and Brian McLaren at #42 are two mavericks in the "emergent" movement whose embrace of postmodern philosophy seems to be turning orthodox belief into something not outright denied, but irrelevant.

Why should a list of names be troubling? Because if I read Romans 1 correctly there is a reason God gave certain cultures over to “depraved mind”. It is because they altered the image of God. When we, for any reason, have in our minds a wrong concept of who God is, the foundation of all else has been compromised. It is no accident that mainline denominations that accepted into leadership one or two generations ago those who denied the virgin birth, the resurrection and the deity of Christ are now denominations which are hemorrhaging membership after having embraced a tolerance of abortion and homosexuality and having introduced “God as Mother” madness into some “worship” services.

If evangelicalism cannot stand for the orthodoxy of two-thousand years of Church History, then its self-destruction is inevitable. And since evangelicalism is nothing more than a loose alliance of self-governing entities, there is virtually no chance mega church leaders like Jakes, Osteen, Hinn, Copeland, Meyers and others can be held accountable. They answer to no one – not even the “cloud of witnesses” and martyrs of two millennia of faith.

Can I state the obvious? That this list is not a list of 50 influential Christians, only a list of influential religious figures whose Christianity is assumed but is hardly certain, if the standard is the Canon of scripture and the Trinitarian formulation of Nicea.