Our church is committed to physically blessing whatever area we are trying to plant churches in. By that I mean not only do we want to see churches planted, we want to see the improvement of local education, health, and politics, and standards of living, and see the decrease of crime and poverty. We engage in projects to those ends. We don't do this as a bait and switch, as if it's just a gimmick to get people to trust Jesus. Part of the Gospel is loving our neighbor whether or not they ever trust Jesus. As a friend of mine says, "We don't serve to convert, we serve because we are converted."

Thankfully, a lot of evangelical churches today are re-embracing the need to love their world soul AND body. However, they don't always seem to agree on the reason behind why we do it. Some have never put much thought to it. There seems to be a theological haze around evangelical community ministry.

It's as if we were back in the second century! Irenaeus, an elder of the Christian church of Lyons in Gaul (France), went to Rome in A.D. 177. He returned to discover that forty of his fellow church members, including the old pastor, Potinus, had been executed by the pagan Roman authorities. He became the pastor, and spent the rest of his life protecting the flock both from the pagan authorities on the outside, and denouncing the Gnostic "Christians" and their heretical writings on the inside.

In our day, the once "Christian" society of modern-day America now looks more and more like pagan Rome. Indeed, not since pagan Rome has homosexuality been accepted in history as normal behavior, but even in pagan Rome, there was no such thing as "gay marriage." In our liberated, "secular" though actually religiously-pagan society, Christianity is silenced and pushed to the margins. That is on the outside. On the inside, we face serious apostasy. We face a form of Christianity that is nothing more than a new, virulent strain of the heresy Irenaeus labored to denounce.

My last NewsCWiPP was delayed because Jim Garlow and I were writing Cracking Da Vinci's Code: You've Read the Fiction, Now Read the Facts, a response to Dan Brown's novel, The Da Vinci Code, which has 7 million copies in print, representing some 30 million readers. Ron Howard, producer of Beautiful Mind, is making the movie version, slated for 2005. When Dan Brown finishes with America, evangelism will never be the same.

Previously, I discussed Brown's attack on the historicity of the Christian faith, but his promotion of a "new" spirituality is even more explosive. This is when the feathers begin to fly. On the "Deborah Norville Tonight" show, my co-author discussed our book in the company of two formidable Gnostic scholars, Karen King from Harvard, and Harold Attridge from Yale, who buy into Brown's views of feminism and spirituality. The conflict is out in the open.