Mega-church Pastor Carl Lentz of Hillsong, New York, may be yet another one of those trendy pastors who look cool in a pair of tight skinny jeans while preaching about Jesus, and then stands for nothing substantial when pressed against the wall on serious issues.
Though Hillsong, New York, has been flirting with the SJW Gospel for some time now, pastor Lentz’s latest refusal to outright condemn abortion as sinful — a slam-dunk of a theological question that a two-year-old could answer correctly — indicates the congregation is now being led by a spiritually blind man.
Speaking on The View last week before a group of pro-abortion feminists, Lentz did not emphatically defend the unborn when asked by the catty hosts regarding his position, and instead offered an effeminate, watered-down, limp-wristed appeal to relativistic hogwash.
“So, it’s not a sin in your church to have an abortion?” pro-abortion host Joy Behar asked.
Lentz responded: “That’s the kind of conversation we would have finding out your story, where you’re from, what you believe. … I mean, God’s the judge. People have to live to their own convictions. That’s such a broad question, to me, I’m going higher. I want to sit with somebody and say, ‘What do you believe?’”
“So it’s not an open and shut case to you?” Behar asked.
“Some people would say it is,” Lentz responded. “To me, I’m trying to teach people who Jesus is first, and find out their story. Before I start picking and choosing what I think is sin in your life, I’d like to know your name.”
That may be all well and good on the engagement with individual people, and surely, Christ asks we not condemn anyone’s soul. The question of abortion being sinful has nothing to do with the spiritual disposition of the sinner and everything do with the objective nature of the act. Abortion is either a sinful action or it’s not. The only in-between is the culpability of the act, which only God can judge. If the question probed to Lentz were “do you condemn people who have abortions?” then his answer would be correct. That is not the case here, however.
Later, co-host Sara Haines asked Lentz his position on homosexuality and abortion; again, he gave a watery response.
“Hillsong is seen as this hip, progressive church that’s drawn huge millennial crowds, but it’s still evangelical,” Haines said. “So, where do you stand on social issues that young people are particularly passionate about, like gay marriage [and] abortion? Like, how do you address those types of things?”
Lentz replied: “I think our job is still to help people — not necessarily change how they think — but try to point them to what God has said, what we believe the Bible [has] to say. We believe that God is good, that God loves everybody, that Jesus was here to set people free, and that’s still the good news of the gospel.”
LifeNews highlighted that an alarming number of Evangelical pastors, especially the younger generation, have adopted Lentz’s mode of thought.
Lentz has received a lot of publicity and criticism for his remarks, but he is not atypical. Studies indicate many pastors are hesitant to speak about abortion. A 2016 Pew Research Center poll found that just 29 percent of respondents heard their clergy member speak about abortion during a religious service. Most who did said their clergy spoke out against abortion (22 percent), while a few (3 percent) said their clergy spoke in support of abortion.
via Daily Wire
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