The Army of God Comes Out of the Shadows

Orthodox Christians are vigilant for signs of the heresy called “Ecumenism,” our generation’s movement to unite people of faith – any faith – to change the world. As Father Michael Pomazansky has written,

The question of the Church has become a real one in our days also, but now it has a broader scope. Although the “ecumenical movement” of recent times is occupied not with the question of the unity of faith, but with the aim of participating in the proposed plan of an epochal reconstruction of human society—still, sooner or later, the question of the foundations and scope of Christian faith in this attempt at union will have to arise. It is our obligation to show why this movement cannot be justified. But we ourselves will not be completely justified if we descend from the breadth of the Orthodox world-view, with all its fullness, to a narrow platform of conceptions and, most importantly, to Western conceptions of the Church. (From Is There an Invisible Church?)

The article below concentrates on the frightening reality of the charismatic movement that seeks to destroy the secular state in order to replace it with a broadly Evangelical Protestant regime. While the writer emphasizes the movement’s alarming political agenda, Orthodox readers will see the chilling, inevitable evolution of American Evangelicalism into an Ecumenist Babylon having nothing in common with the Gospel. Evangelicalism, by its nature, regards dogma and creed and disciplines as matters of opinion – not merely seeking to unite the world’s religions, but to assert a kind of “Christianity” in which the content of belief is irrelevant. In this ecumenist movement, anyone who names the name of Jesus is “Christian” enough, and in a “Christian state” there is no longer any use for the Church, let alone for any Orthodoxy [literally right belief, right worship].

The ecumenist religion described below stands in contrast to the Christ who said, “My Kingdom is not of this world.”

In The Atlantic, Stephanie McCrummen writes:

Tens of millions of believers—about 40 percent of American Christians, including Catholics, according to a recent Denison University survey—are embracing an alluring, charismatic movement that has little use for religious pluralism, individual rights, or constitutional democracy. It is mystical, emotional, and, in its way, wildly utopian. It is transnational, multiracial, and unapologetically political. Early leaders called it the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, although some of those same leaders are now engaged in a rebranding effort as the antidemocratic character of the movement has come to light. And people who have never heard the name are nonetheless adopting the movement’s central ideas. These include the belief that God speaks through modern-day apostles and prophets. That demonic forces can control not only individuals, but entire territories and institutions. That the Church is not so much a place as an active “army of God,” one with a holy mission to claim the Earth for the Kingdom as humanity barrels ever deeper into the End Times.

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