[EDIT 08/07/2012: C3ChurchWatch wishes to report Jacobs Prasch’s opinion. We don’t necessarily agree with his views or this article. We met with Jacob Prasch last night – he recommended this article. We simply wish to report what other church leaders are saying about C3Church.]

Pastor and Teacher Jacob Prasch from Moriel Ministries wrote an article on Thessalonians 1 titled ‘The Mixture’.

In his piece, Prasch condemned many of Pringles fellow associates (including Yonggi Cho, Benny Hinn, Morris Cerullo and the Elim church movement) and those who influence him (including John Avanzini, Rick Joyner, Rodney Howard Brown, Paul Crouch, John Wimber and Peter Wagner).

Pastor Jacob Prasch writes (emphasis in bold),

“… Yet because of pop psychology, these biblical truths are distorted, ignored, or have even been heretically rejected. People are just told to ‘confess victory’, or ‘bind the enemy’ not meaning what God’s Word means by those terms, but actually meaning what positive thinking and motivational psychology means.

If one were to go to a secular motivational sales seminar for sales executives, a slick looking motivational speaker with a glossy charisma would prance around on a platform with a microphone saying things like

“There Are Three Steps”. “Step One – realize your vision”. “Step Two- forget the indicators or adverse circumstances, give no place to any negative thoughts – just focus on your goals and on your vision”.

“Step Three – Once you realize your vision and maximize the positive and forget the negative, you will be in a position to get others to invest in your vision”.

Thus , this secular psychology gets into the church masquerading as biblical theology. A hype artist preacher will stand up on Sunday and share “his vision”, and when questioned he will “Reject that negativity in The Name of Jesus”, and tell you “God wants it to be your vision too and you should sow to the vision”.

I have seen more churches get into financial trouble and loose people over this kind of psuedo-spiritual idiocy than I can count. One Kingdom Now/ Toronto maniac in the North West of England who came under the influence of anti Israel Restorationist preacher Rick Godwin literally got his church into massive debt on a massive building program not ordained of God, lost most of his flock , then began selling insurance part time to make ends meet and finally left the country. Another Pentecostal Church of the same denomination a short distance away got into a financial scandal over a scheme involving Christian retirement villas.

When of course the building program or whatever other scheme he cooked up turns out not to be God’s vision, but purely his own and things do not work out then it becomes a matter of “standing in faith resisting Satan”.

When people get fed up with being financially exploited and begin to leave the church, the heavy shepherding takes over and these people are told “they have a spirit of rebellion”.

All of this mess comes from the ‘Mixture’ of secular psychology and the vain philosophies of the world with biblical psychology and Christian doctrine. This same mixture is why we see so many Christians in churches like . . .  Preacher Phil Pringle’s City Church in Sydney get involved in things like Amway and in pyramiding schemes. Psychologised Christians are prone to such things because such schemes are based on psycho babel disguising itself as biblical principles. While there are ex-alcoholics who dried out through Alcoholics Anonymous groups and then were saved, we see so many people in 12 Step Programs on their way to hell not believing they need Christ because the mixture of biblical principles and pop psychology in such organizations misleading them into a subjective, universalist ‘God as I understand Him’ view of The Almighty instead of to The Cross of Jesus.

The theological root of this mixture is of course gnosticism, where a subjective mystical perspective of scripture ignoring the context is substituted for an objective exegetical perspective. Gnostics always use biblical terms but have different definitions for them. The gnosticism of Roman Catholicism is called sensus pleniore. The Roman Church will be quick to point out that they like classical Protestants believe salvation is by grace. By grace however, they do not mean the Hebrew word chesed meaning ‘God’s covenant mercy’, or the Greek term Charism meaning ‘gift’, nor the English definition meaning ‘undeserved favor’. The actual and sanctifying grace of Rome is not a gift of mercy or unmerited, but an ethereal substance earned by the paganistic sacraments of their spiritually corrupt false religious system. Yet etymologically, they believe in “grace”.

New Agers are Gnostics who also believe in “seeing the light” by which they mean realizing the cosmic illumination of the inner self. Many, copying Hinduism, they also believe in being “born again”, meaning reincarnation. Sufi Islam, Chassidic Judaism, and Mormonism are all false belief systems who use biblical terms with a different meaning. This is all part of the Gnostic maze, and whenever witnessing to such people we not assume that they mean what we do by the same words, but terms need to be carefully and biblically defined…”

From: Understanding “The Mixture” from 1 Thessalonians, http://www.moriel.org/articles/sermons/understanding_the_mixture.htm (Accessed 08/02/2012)