Question: I have appreciated The Berean Call and read it eagerly each month as soon as it arrives. I ...

Question: I have appreciated The Berean Call and read it eagerly each month as soon as it arrives. I was disappointed, however, that you never said a word about the huge ecumenical gathering of Roman Catholic and Protestant charismatics last June in St. Louis. It seemed to me to be a major event because of the fact that the tongues movement has been the main bridge to Rome (“We speak in tongues and so do they, so we are one”). So I watched for something in TBC about this but it never came. Was there a reason why you never mentioned it?

Response: We just don’t have room for all we would like to discuss. It is difficult, out of so much that is happening, to choose what to report, given our limited space. The event you referred to was called “Celebrate Jesus 2000" and was held last June 22-25. This was the sixth ecumenical charismatic conference sponsored by the North American Renewal Service Committee (NARSC). The first in Kansas City in 1977 had about 50,000 participants while St. Louis had about 15,000. Each has been one more repudiation of the Reformation by alleged Protestants and one more triumph for the Roman Catholic Church.

Speakers were mostly Catholic priests, nuns and lay leaders and included presumed Protestant leaders such as Ted Haggard, pastor of New Life Church in Colorado Springs, a major center for the spiritual warfare movement worldwide; Jack Hayford, pastor of Church on the Way in Van Nuys, California; Stephen Hill, who led the revival at Brownsville Assembly of God in Pensacola, Florida; John Kilpatrick, Brownsville pastor; Richard Roberts; Pat Robertson; Steve Strang, publisher of Charisma magazine; and Thomas Trask, General Superintendent of The Assemblies of God. Try to imagine such a conference featuring Martin Luther, John Calvin and other Reformers as speakers along with Roman Catholic priests and lay leaders!

NARSC claims to be “committed to sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit and striving for unity in the Body of Christ.” David W. Cloud attended St. Louis as a journalist (davidwcloud@worldnet.att.net). His comments tell the shocking story: “One would think that a conference allegedly dealing with world evangelism would be clear about the message of salvation, but this was not the case. Nowhere was the gospel defined in the conference literature. None of the speakers during the main evening sessions defined the gospel. Many of them referred to it, but none of them plainly described what salvation is in such a manner that the listeners would understand how they needed to be born again. Why was this? Because the meeting is ecumenical...and there are a variety of gospels that are believed. To have clarified the gospel would have destroyed the ecumenical unity.

“I took my own survey during the three days in St. Louis....I focused on the Roman Catholics, since we were told that these particular Catholics love and know the Lord. These are the evangelical Catholics we have heard about. I asked the following simple question of each individual: ‘When were you born again?’ Not one Catholic that I interviewed gave me a scriptural answer to this most important question. A nun from Notre Dame said, ‘I’ve always been in love with God.’ A woman who teaches...at the Franciscan University of Steubenville said she was born again either when she saw a miraculous light shining around the priest at her first Mass when she was 15 years old or at her first charismatic retreat in 1972. A representative of the Chariscenter USA told me he was born again when he was baptized as a teenager and that his children were born again when they were baptized as infants. A representative of Marian Publishers was very puzzled when I asked him the question. He told me that ‘born again’ is not a Catholic term. I reminded him that Jesus used the term in John 3. He then told me that he was born again when he was baptized as a baby and also when he was confirmed. One of the founders of the Signs of the Times Apostolate told me she was born again when she was baptized, confirmed, and when she rededicated her life to God at age 21. Joseph, a “lay brother” in a Catholic order, told me he was born again when he attended a charismatic meeting in the 1970s...and that it was a gradual thing of becoming serious about God. A Catholic man who grew up in a Baptist church told me he was born again at confirmation.

“One of the key speakers at these conferences is Tom Forrest, a priest headquartered in Rome [who] works closely with John Paul II as the head of Evangelization 2000. Forrest brought the concluding NARSC message in New Orleans in 1987, in Indianapolis in 1990, and again in St. Louis. His descriptions of evangelism illustrate the confusion which surrounds the gospel in the ecumenical/charismatic movement. In a message at New Orleans, for example, he said that he evangelizes by walking through the streets of Rome praying the ‘mysteries of the Rosary’ for the people he passes...yet he is exalted as a Spirit-filled, evangelical Catholic. In Indianapolis, Forrest said that he praises God for purgatory because he knows that unless there is a place where his sin can be purged he cannot go to heaven.

“[But] sin is purged through the blood of Christ shed at Calvary...the one and only place where sin is purged. If purgatory is necessary...Christ did not die for all our sins...[and] if He did...purgatory is a lie.”

In New Orleans where at the invitation of Reinhard Bonnke many thousands of these supposedly Spirit-filled evangelical Catholics stood to get saved, Vinson Synan (Chairman of the NARSC Executive Committee and Dean of the School of Divinity of Pat Robertson’s Regent University) was asked how it could be that so many “Spirit-filled” participants were willing to pray to receive Christ for the first time. He suggested that most of them probably thought they had been asked to renew their “baptismal vows.” When asked why “something as major as the definition of the gospel itself and what...brings about the conversion of a lost soul” wasn’t made clear, he responded, “Well, you know, it took me 52 years to come to my understanding of what Pentecostal theology is. And it probably took Dave [Sklorenko, Roman Catholic Director of the New Orleans Conference] 48 years to understand what his is. We can’t in one night get a crystal clear understanding on the part of everyone, because we come from different traditions.” When pressed as to why the Conference leaders didn’t clarify such important misunderstandings, he replied, “Well, we don’t have time to do that.”

This is typical of the entire ecumenical union with Rome. A major purpose is supposedly to evangelize the world together, but evangelicals are willing to join in a partnership with those who don’t know the gospel and aren’t themselves saved. So it was with ECT, “Evangelicals and Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium” (signed by Colson, Packer, Bright, Robertson, et al.), which declared, “We thank God for the discovery of one another as brothers and sisters in Christ.” Martin Luther would be shocked by this full embrace of all Roman Catholics as true born-again Christians and who are not to be evangelized. The subsequent documents signed in the interest of “clarification,” have changed nothing. Incredibly, the “evangelical” signers of ECT signed later documents which contradicted it but have never removed their names from ECT and still support it. Confusion? Words have lost their meaning—and the lost are left to trust in false gospels.