Brannon Howse: February 17, 2010

Update on Jim Wallis speaking at Prestonwood Baptist Church.

After the broadcast and distribution of our national radio program and e-mail alert, we received an e-mail from a representative of the Senior Pastor saying that Rev. Jim Wallis would not be speaking at the March 9, 2010, church function. That is good news. However, we are receiving e-mails from people that have called the church and they report to us that they are being given information that causes them to think that Mr. Wallis was never booked to speak at the church. Thus, they are e-mailing us asking if we had our facts wrong. The church needs to be 100% forthright on this issue. We have all the printed pages from their church website about Wallis speaking on March 9th. The information has since been pulled from their site which is a good thing. But we have all our facts documented.

We have asked the church to be 100% transparent in acknowledging that Wallis was booked to speak at the church and has now been uninvited as they claim in their own e-mails to us. The church needs to put out a statement that is a strong rebuke of what Wallis stands for so we can post it on our site and read it on our national radio program. That is if they indeed do disagree with the worldview of Jim Wallis. People are asking if the church cancelled him because of the controversy or because they really do not agree with Jim Wallis. Why will the Senior Pastor not put out a statement that in no uncertain terms denounces the Social Justice, Emergent Church, socialist worldview of Wallis and his friends? Such a statement would put this issue to rest and be an encouragement to hundreds of thousands of people and thousands of pastors.

Topic: One of the largest Southern Baptist Churches in America has invited the Rev. Jim Wallis to speak at a church function on March 9, 2010. This is extremely shocking because Prestonwood has a long history of being a solid, Bible teaching church. Brannon has warned for several years that the teachings of the Emergent Church and their Social Justice worldview is infiltrating even the best of churches, seminaries, and Christian colleges. Let this be a warning to every pastor, elder, deacon, Sunday school teacher, and church member that we must be ever vigilant to keep this heresy out of our institutions. We must hire staff that have a solid Biblical worldview as well as have discernment and are well read and informed. Dr. David Noebel of Summit Ministries wrote an article on our website in March of 2009, that revealed the following facts about the Rev. Jim Wallis.

Jim Wallis has had relationships with the communist Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador. Second, his "Witness for Peace" was an attempt to defend the Nicaraguan Sandinistas! Wallis, together with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright (Obama's former pastor of 20 years) "rallied support for the communist Nicaraguan regime and protested actions by the United States which supported the anti-communist Contra rebels" (Family World News, February 2009, p. 7). Third, Wallis and his Sojourners community of fellow-travelers believe Fidel Castro's Cuba, Hugo Chavez's Venezuela, Daniel Ortega's Nicaragua, and the other revolutionary forces "restructuring socialist societies" are the Communist paradises the United States needs to emulate in order to establish "social justice." Writing in the November 1983 issue of Sojourners, Jacob Laksin notes, "Jim Wallis and Jim Rice drafted what would become the charter of leftist activists committed to the proliferation of Communist revolutions in Central America" (Laksin, "Sojourners: History, Activities and Agendas" in Discoverthenetworks.org., 2005). The ugly truth is Wallis wishes to see the destruction of the United States as a nation and in its place "a radical nonconformist community" patterned after the progressive, socialist commune he established in Washington, D.C., in 1971 (Laksin, Ibid.)."The Sojourners community," says Laksin, "actively embraced 'liberation theology,' rallying to the cause of communist regimes that had seized power with the promise of bringing about a revolutionary restructuring of society." Clark Pinnock, a disaffected former member of Sojourners, said that the community's members were "100 percent in favor of the Nicaraguan [communist] revolution" (Laksin, Ibid.).

Is this what Prestonwood endorses? Brannon says that if they really want to have Jim Wallis speak then at the least invite someone like him to show up for a formal debate. If someone like Jim Wallis can be invited to speak at a church like Prestonwood then it should be warning to all of us in leadership positions. Who booked this guy and why? What is Prestwood going to do about it and what does this say about the individual or individuals that thought this was a good idea? Is this the type of staff Prestonwood is now employing? Do young, church staff members think a guy like Jim Wallis is a great guest speaker because SBC schools are teaching the worldview of Wallis?