According to Brian McLaren, a leader in the emergent church movement, we’ve moved into a new age when it comes to our understanding of the Bible. McLaren calls this new era "Bible 3.0." According to him, the Bible must be seen as less inerrant and more like "conversation with everything and everyone." This new understanding of Scripture has been necessitated, McLaren argues, by the broad range of readings and interpretations of the Bible on the internet. McLaren contends that the result of everybody hearing everybody else's interpretation of the Bible requires Christians, the lone stewards of the Bible in the world today, to stop insisting that there is only one right way to interpret Scripture. In other words, the church needs to give up on the idea of studying the Scripture with the illumination of the Holy Spirit in order to "rightly divide the word of truth" (2 Timothy 2:15; 1 Corinthians 2:14) and start showing leniency toward diverse and even contradictory interpretations of Scripture proposed by biblical illiterates void of the Spirit's illumination.

Of course, McLaren's heretical argument, like those of so many others in the contemporary church today, is precipitated by his elevating of image over substance and content. The church, in McLaren's mind, cannot afford to be seen as arrogant over its defense of the absolute truths of God's infallible Word, but must portray itself as tolerant of diverse and even heretical interpretations of Scripture in these politically correct times when men can no longer "endure sound doctrine" (2 Timothy 4:3). By failing to preach sound doctrine in preference to obtaining worldly approval and appeal, McLaren's emergent church, as well as much of the contemporary church, is on the fast track to becoming the biblically predicted apostate church of the end-time; that is, the "great whore" of the Book of Revelation, the church in bed with the world and with whom the whole world is willing to climb into bed.

It is the likes of Brian McLaren and the thinly veiled heresy that they promote under the ruse of it being the only effective method of evangelism in a postmodern world that compelled me to take up the subject of Hipster Christianity in a planned series of sermons. The church of Jesus Christ in the world today must wake up to this subtle spiritual deception that is taking the contemporary church by storm. Far from being the only effective method of evangelism in a postmodern world, the heresy of Brain McLaren's emergent church and of the contemporary church's Christian hipsters actually renders the church impotent of reaching anyone for Jesus Christ, since the method being employed is a false gospel rather than the true Gospel, which alone is "the power of God unto salvation" (Romans 1:16). You can hear the first sermon in this important series of sermons here: http://vimeo.com/112012942