Wednesday 14 November 2012

PAUL WILKINSON SAYS "I DON'T RECOGNIZE JESUS IN THE PROTESTANT CHURCH TODAY" IN AN ADDRESS IN JERUSALEM! YOU CAN HEAR MORE DYNAMIC TEACHING LIKE FROM PAUL AT NANCY'S FARM IN NEWPORT THIS SATURDAY.

I don’t recognize Jesus in the Protestant church today. 


 UK Pastor Paul Wilkinson comments on the current anti-Israel sentiment in Protestant churches as he participates in an  interfaith consultation outside Jerusalem:
I don’t recognize Jesus in the Protestant church today.
The Times of Israel report on this meeting here.
Protestant clergymen painted a largely pessimistic view of the church’s relationship with Israel and the Jewish community during a  visit to the Holy Land, suggesting that anti-Semitism is a deep-seated problem based in Christian theology that will be difficult to uproot.
Jewish-Protestant relations are currently undergoing a severe crisis after senior leaders of Mainline Protestant churches in the US last month accused Israel of “widespread” human rights violations and urged Congress to reconsider military aid to Jerusalem.
“I am completely pessimistic in terms of believing that I, we, are going to overturn 2,000 years of erroneous theology that has manifested itself in all kinds of diatribes and anti-Semitic factions,” said the Rev. Paul Wilkinson, the associate minister at Hazel Grove Full Gospel Church, a small pro-Israel congregation in Stockport, England. “I believe we’d be fooling ourselves if we believed that we can overturn and change what I perceive to be a Goliath of theology in the church. The Goliath we face is the Goliath of replacement theology, the Goliath of Christian Palestinianism that taunts Israel, that goads Israel, that accuses Israel, that condemns Israel and those Christians who stand with Israel.”
Replacement theology, also called supercessionism, is the belief that Christendom has taken the Jewish people’s place as the recipients of promises God made in the Old Testament.
‘The problem isn’t political, the problem isn’t sociological, the problem isn’t about lack of education or lack of dialogue. The problem is a spiritual one’
“That Goliath cannot be felled with a stone and a sling as in the days of King David, because the problem isn’t political, the problem isn’t sociological, the problem isn’t about lack of education or lack of dialogue,” Wilkinson said. “The problem is a spiritual one. The problem is that there is an adversary of God, of Israel, of Christians.”
Wilkinson was speaking on Monday at the opening session of a consultation organized by the B’nai B’rith World Center in Jerusalem and the Ecumenical Theological Research Fraternity in Israel (ETRFI). Founded in 1966 by Jerusalem-based clergymen and theologians, ETFRI seeks to promote Jewish-Christian relations.
Some 20 pro-Israel Christian pastors, laymen and activists from across the globe gathered this week in a hotel outside Jerusalem to discuss anti-Israel attitudes that have typified Mainline Protestant Churches over the past decades. According to B’nai B’rith World Center, the three-day consultation aimed to build bridges between Israel and the Protestant denominations, and “to help change the biased positions they have adopted regarding the Israel-Palestinian conflict.”
Yet some participants painted a dark picture of Protestant-Jewish relations vis-à-vis support for Israel, saying the church overwhelmingly sided with the Palestinians.

Wilkinson, the reverend from England, on the other hand, was adamant that Mainline Protestant churches are a lost cause when it comes to their views of Jews. Speaking at the consultation on Monday night, he recalled attending an international conference organized by the pro-Palestinian Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center a few years ago, which he said proved to him how deeply ingrained anti-Semitic notions are within some Christian denominations.
“That conference was my first exposure to the absolute hatred toward Israel that exists in the heart — in the heart — of the Protestant Church.”
During the conference, Wilkinson witnessed how organizers and participants denounced Israel as an apartheid state guilty of ethnically cleansing the Palestinian people, and were told that there was never a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. One speaker called the God of the Christian Zionists “the great ethnic cleanser, the genocidist,” and described the biblical Joshua as the “patron saint of ethnic cleansing,” Wilkinson said. Not one Protestant clergymen protested, he added.
In 2010, a Scottish Baptist minister gave a devotional address to members of the Scottish parliament, Wilkinson continued. “He spoke about the hope of Christmas being found in the birth of another Palestinian child, born a refugee, living under military occupation,” he recalled.
“I don’t recognize Jesus in the Protestant church today,” added Wilkinson, who wrote his dissertation about Christian Zionism and studied for some time at the International School of Holocaust Studies at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. “What we’re finding now is a propaganda campaign being waged by the Palestinian Authority, the Islamic world and by the Protestant church, including the Evangelical church.”
Read full article here

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