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| BEEN THERE, DONE
THAT |
The
“Great” Commission of Gwen Shamblin & Remnant Fellowship:
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GwenThink 101
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How Did We Fall For This Stuff?
 Many
in our group continued to experience misgivings throughout the weekend,
but by the time it ended we came to agree heart and soul with Gwen’s message.
Looking back I wonder why I accepted these teachings without more careful
thought. A healthy dose of skepticism would have saved myself, my
wife, and my church some serious heartache. However, in hindsight,
I can recognize many of the factors that led to my eventual acceptance
of this message.
First
of all, Gwen, David Martin, Gwen’s children, and various members of Remnant
Fellowship hammered on the same themes repeatedly over long, almost mind-numbing
periods of time. We sat at the tables as captive audiences and listened
passively for hours on end. They emphasized their point that believers
need to leave the “counterfeit church” so many times, quoting Scripture
after Scripture to support this contention (e.g., the narratives of Ezra,
Ezekiel, Nehemiah), that we literally became exhausted just listening to
the same message again and again.
I
believe this continual emphasis and re-emphasis eventually broke down our
defenses. Furthermore, this was also teaching to which they
had been exposing us for years as participants of Weigh Down and Strongholds.
Remnant Fellowship was simply presenting the logical conclusion of the
legalism we’d been practicing for the preceding months and years. (More
on that, later!)
Secondly,
the brothers and sisters in Christ at Remnant Fellowship were incredibly
nice, submissive, and humble. I’d never met kinder people.
Each one of these Christians was continually speaking only encouraging,
loving things. They were constantly building one another up and watching
their language to make sure their speech was acceptable before God.
They were extremely mindful of who was in authority over them, whether
a church elder or a teacher. Wives were submissive to their husbands.
Children obeyed their parents. (Somewhat oddly, it seemed that all
of the women were submissive to all of the men, which I never inquired
about fully, and may have misinterpreted.) They served one another
without complaint. This was definitely a body of Christ where everybody
seemed to take seriously every command and injunction in Scripture.
It seemed a little stilted, but it was nice to be around a committed group
of believers.
Thirdly,
as I look back on that weekend only seven months ago now, I must admit
to experiencing a massive dose of injected pride that simply intoxicated
me. Over and over we were affirmed as people whom God had obviously
called to holiness and submission, and that He was now calling us to expose
the sin and failed leadership of our church. God had set us apart
for an important mission.
Unfortunately,
I believe this pride had already existed in me for some time, and that
I simply needed the urging and affirmation of others to galvanize it.
It was a pride borne of the fact that I had been delivered from sin and
was striving to become more sanctified on a daily basis. We’d spent
the whole weekend listening to how “rare” that supposedly was. Suddenly,
I felt as though I was truly different from other believers in my willingness
to submit to God. Why else would He have called on me to lead Strongholds?
Why else would He have called me here on this weekend?
This
pride, unleashed in my heart, was a subtle creature that disguised itself
as the humility of “a true and faithful servant.” If I was insisting
that other believers conform more rigidly to what I believed Christ was
calling His church to, wasn’t that simply because I was trying to do my
duty as one of God’s “holy priests?” Could I be blamed for returning to
my home congregation and sharing what God had put upon my heart?
The Pharisaism of the Heart
Before
continuing with my narrative regarding the impact that this teaching had
on my church and my Christian relationships, allow me to digress on the
point of pride and pharisaism. Jesus often opposed the Pharisees
throughout the accounts of His life in the Gospels. The Pharisees
believed that they could live holy and sanctified lives before God by rigidly
obeying all of God’s laws, along with the traditions based on those laws
- traditions taught by previous teachers of the law. Jesus opposed
them because, although they clung to the laws of God, their hearts were
far from God and the overall intent of His laws. In Matthew 23:23-24,
Jesus says
| Woe to you, teachers of
the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices-mint,
dill and cummin. But you have neglected the more important matters
of the law — justice, mercy, and faithfulness. You should have practiced
the latter, without neglecting the former. You blind guides! You
strain out a gnat but swallow a camel!8 |
In
the same passage, Jesus also excoriates the Pharisees for looking good
on the outside, but on the inside actually being like “whitewashed tombs”
(v. 27). He states that the Pharisees “tie up heavy loads and put
them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a
finger to move them” (v. 4). I want to point out the example of the
Pharisees because I believe that the Pharisees and their self-righteous
emphasis on doing the will of God is quite similar to the emphasis that
Gwen Shamblin and the Remnant Fellowship place on obedience and doing the
will of God. Here are some quotes from the lecture notes we received
from Gwen that weekend.
In truth, doing the will
of THE ONE TRUE GOD OF THE CHURCH is the one and only thing to worry about
and to expect from its members that bear its name.9
They (the early church)
understood that the only ones who were saved were not those who heard the
word of God, but rather those who put it into practice.10
The Apostle Paul said that
he wouldn’t allow these difficult, legalistic, non-heart-effective, distracting,
man-made rules in for one moment (read Gal. 1-6). The true universal
church, whether a home group, a small group, or a large number anywhere
in any city, will teach strict heart lessons, and the foundation will be
Jesus Christ.11 |
Of
interest to me is the similarity between Remnant Fellowship’s approach
to holiness and the efforts of the Pharisees. While the Pharisees
tried to become holy through a lifestyle accommodated to the Law and the
traditions, Gwen Shamblin teaches holiness by conformity to “strict heart
lessons.” In my opinion, what this means is they are substituting
the original pitfall of the Pharisees (the Law) with a new pitfall, a new
set of external demands (Weigh Down’s “strict heart lessons” that limit
how much food a believer may eat, for example). It is not that heart
lessons are not good. Jesus taught heart lessons. Remember,
however, that His heart lessons were always tempered with love and compassion,
and that one of His heart lessons was to “not judge, or you too will be
judged” (Matthew 7:1).
What
I believe has happened is that over the years of teaching and emphasizing
her call to obedience, Gwen Shamblin has fallen into a new pharisaism,
a “pharisaism of the heart,” which demands external signs of inward heart
changes. This type of pharisaism keeps the focus off of God, and
what He has done for us through Christ, and puts the focus squarely back
on ourselves! What better way for Satan to distract us from the joy of
serving God, and the gift of Christ? Remember the story of the Pharisee
and the tax collector in Luke 18:9-14?
| To some who were confident
of their own righteousness and looked down on everybody else, Jesus told
this parable: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee
and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood up and prayed about
himself: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men-robbers, evildoers,
adulterers-or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and
give a tenth of all I get.’ But the tax collector stood at a distance.
He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God,
have mercy on me, a sinner.’ I tell you the truth that this man,
rather than the other, when home justified before God. For everyone
who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be
exalted.”12 |
Notice
who is going home justified? The one who recognized his own unworthiness,
and appealed to God, not the one who was so blinded by his “righteousness”
that he wasn’t really thinking about God, but rather himself. The
trap of pharisaism invariably leads to self-centered pride. I can
truly say that I had fallen into this trap well before I journeyed down
to Nashville to learn at the feet of Gwen Shamblin. However, I contend
that this approach to the Gospel of Christ, where one’s salvation is thought
to be secured by one’s own “doings” instead of by trusting in the grace
of our blessed Savior, will inevitably lead anyone further into the pitfall
of pride.
What Happened Next?
Needless
to say, our group left the Remnant Fellowship weekend with very heavy hearts.
We were returning to a church body that we (that is, most of us) dearly
loved, full of brothers and sisters who we had served alongside for some
time. We now had the charge to go to them and tell them that they
were in error for allowing so much sin in the body, and if they would not
repent of it, our duty was clear: we would have to leave our church.
Prior
to leaving Nashville, we were able to secure some individual face time
with Gwen Shamblin and David Martin, and we had sought their advice regarding
what we should do at our church. Gwen was honest enough to admit
that she did not know the extent of the rebellion present in our church
body, but that she had never seen any church leadership turn 180 degrees
and repent for allowing sin in the church body. We were encouraged
to bring the message back to our church family, but we were also prepared
for the idea that repentance was unlikely, and that in all probability,
we would have to leave our church. We were also prepared for the
fact that in all likelihood, we would be rejected by our church, and that
our church leadership would not want to study these issues because they
were so convicting.
The
events over the next three months are some of the most embarrassing and
painful of my life. It is difficult to share them, partly because
they expose my own weakness, but also because they expose the weakness
and mistakes of others whom I dearly love. To save both time and
to spare my brothers and sisters in Christ needless embarrassment, I will
not share all of it in detail. Furthermore, I am not going to reveal
names unnecessarily. However, if I do not share the embarrassing
details of how I followed foolishness with more folly, then I will be shying
away from exposing just how destructive the fruit of this teaching truly
is. Therefore, I intend to be brutally honest regarding my part in
this story. I will be a little more selective about the part of others.
In the interest of time, I will compress the events that occurred over
the next two and one half months. To do so means that I will have
to leave some events out of this story, but I will try to include everything
that bears upon the final outcome.
In
the end, myself, my wife and our four friends (the other couple was from
out of town) decided that we should approach the elders of the church and
share our concern, giving them an opportunity to consider the message we
had to bring. Initially, the elder who had visited Nashville with
us also felt compelled to raise these issues. We decided that one
of husbands and I would set up a meeting with the elders and talk about
these issues, asking that our leadership prayerfully consider the degree
of rebellion present in our church and what the Lord was leading our church
to do. We also agreed to not talk about these issues with other members
of the congregation, because we did not want to sow any dissension or fall
prey to the temptation to gossip. Rather, we decided that if anyone
caught wind of what was going on, we would let them know we were meeting
with the elders to discuss some concerns, but that we felt that if people
wanted to know what was happening, they ought to discuss the issues with
the elders and hear what was going on from them. (I can honestly
say that this decision was the only bit of wisdom that we showed throughout
the entire process; it kept uninvolved people out of the ensuing mess,
and provided the church elders an opportunity to exercise damage control.) |
ENDNOTES
8 New International Version.[BACK]
9 Rebuilding the Wall Foundational
Beliefs, “Remnant Introduction and Mission,” p. 2. Conference
notes received at the June 2001 Remnant Fellowship Weekend in Nashville.
[BACK]
10 Rebuilding the Wall Foundational
Beliefs, “Christ’s Church,” p. 2. Conference notes received at
the June 2001 Remnant Fellowship Weekend in Nashville. [BACK]
11 Rebuilding the Wall Foundational
Beliefs, “A History of God’s Relationship to Man,” p. 30. Conference
notes received at the June 2001 Remnant Fellowship Weekend in Nashville.
[BACK]
12 New International Version.[BACK] |
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