IHOP Postmortem, Part 2

6 · Contrasts how Reformed and Arminian frameworks handle pastoral authority: Reformed theology allows leadership without superiority claims, while Arminian theology inevitably ties authority to merit, creating unhealthy power dynamics

And so for the reformed guy like me, I don't think of chosenness or specialness in direct relationship to merit, because it's not. But I think for the Arminians, and really there are no, within the NAR movement, there are no Calvinists. I think that's pretty obvious. Chosenness and specialness is related to merit. And so it's possible within the Calvinist church to look at a guy like me and say, well, he's the pastor, he's in charge. He's been in charge of things for a long time. He's held to unique account and so on and so forth, but also to say, like, yeah, he's, you know, he's in charge, but he's not like, like he's not in charge because he's better. You know what I mean?

7 · Personal story about his child's question on election introduces the next theological point about God's purposes in choosing the weak and foolish

That's a pretty consistent Calvinist way of thinking about things. I've told people before that when my kids were thinking through election and what all this means, one of them came to me one night and said, I just don't get it. Why did God choose me and not someone else?

8 · Expounds the biblical pattern of God's election: choosing the foolish, weak, and unimpressive to demonstrate that power belongs to God alone, using Peter, John, and Paul as examples of this principle

And I pointed him to what Paul tells the Corinthians. God chose what is foolish in this world to confound the wise. He chose what is weak to confound the strong. We're not chosen because we're better. If anything, we're chosen because we're worse. When the Sanhedrin, when the ruling officials look at Peter and John in the Book of Acts, it says they saw that they were uneducated men and yet nevertheless observed that they had been with Jesus. That's the whole point. The point of God's elective plan is to sort of contrast what a person is, a Galilean, a Nazarene or whatever, foolish, uneducated, and so forth with his divine choice. And he does that. He chooses jars of clay to show that the surpassing power of God, the surpassing power, belongs to him. Paul was an impressive guy, and at some level he was too impressive. So God gave him the thorn in the flesh so that he could say, my grace is sufficient for you, and in your weakness, I am made strong.

9 · Applies the election theology directly to IHOP's leadership problem: their Arminian framework prevents them from holding the tension between chosenness and ordinariness, producing unhealthy leader elevation that inevitably collapses

And so part of what's going on with the IHOP thing is this issue of soteriology, of understanding. God's elective choice is not tied at any way to merit. Part of what's going on in their situation, where they tend to elevate leaders in a way that is unhealthy and ultimately backfires upon them, is they don't really have any kind of original theology that's rooted in a sense of you can both be chosen and not anything special. That doesn't exist in the Arminian world. It exists in the Calvinist world, doesn't exist in the Armenian world.

10 · Synthesizes the soteriological argument: your understanding of salvation determines your entire ecclesiology, and Arminian merit-based salvation inevitably produces boasting and unhealthy authority structures, violating the church's design as a boast-free zone

So that's one of the things that I would have wanted to say in the last podcast about apostolic continuity. It's just they have a leadership problem. It's very obvious they have a leadership problem. It is very obvious that they allow their leaders to get away with things that make no sense and then in other places would be called to account immediately. And we're just looking for answers to why that is. And one of the answers to why that is is because. Because the soteriology, the way they understand salvation, see the guys, the way you understand salvation is the way you understand everything. It's just the same model reapplied over and over and over again throughout the Christian life. And so the way you get in is the way you stay in, and the way you get in is sort of the way that you act when you're in. And in the, you know, in the Arminian way, it's like I grabbed hold of the rope, Jesus threw the thing to me and I grabbed hold of the rope. And the reason I'm saved and not someone else isn't because God has specific elective choices that he's made, but it's because I grabbed the rope and so. And so didn't. And that transfers all the way through your understanding of authority and your understanding within a church and so on and so forth. And so until you get rid of that, by the way, you will never have the church as it ought to be. Because the whole design of the church, you know, Ephesians 2, the whole design of the church is that it would be a boast free zone. You can't have a boast free zone. And I'm not saying this to pick on anybody. I'm not saying this to self congratulate because I think I have the right theology, because I don't think I have the right theology because I'm better than anyone else. It carries across the whole thing. I'm just saying you won't have the church that you need to have until you get the gospel right. And understand, just as Paul says to the Corinthians, who sees anything different in you? And if there's nothing different in you, then why do you act? And what do you have that you did not receive? He continues, and then he says, and if you don't have anything you did not receive, then why do you boast as if you did not receive it? And so, like, you got to get the gospel right. It's going to affect everything, including your understanding of leadership. And one of the things going on in the new apostolic Reformation is a broken understanding of God's elective purposes in salvation and so on and so forth.

11 · Brief pastoral pivot acknowledging the sermon's evolving scope and introducing a new angle on NAR analysis: generational factors, particularly Baby Boomer vulnerabilities, as contributing to charismatic excesses

So that's one area, another area related to this. And I'm going to get back into the Holy Spirit in the next episode. But a few things have happened since the first episode that make me realize I need to maybe deepen this a little bit. Another issue that I think is worth pointing out related to the hyper charismatic movement is the generational effect.

12 · Personal observation of a protest's demographic makeup serves as entry point for discussing Baby Boomer generation's cultural influence and vulnerabilities, connecting contemporary political behavior to church dynamics

So on Saturday there was a big nationwide demonstration against Trump, against Elon Musk and so on and so forth. And one of the sort of observations that's going out amongst the folks online right now is just how old the crowds were. I myself was on the way to the gym, so I was, I was kind of on 87th and like real close to 4:35 and you know, on the West Lenexa side. And I was there close to City Center. And I was stopped because that's where the Johnson county anti Trump protest people had decided to be, kind of by sprouts and McKeever's and Red Door, like that intersection there, that's right where I come out of my neighborhood to go to the gym. Anyway, I myself noticed wasn't a small crowd. I mean, it wasn't like this sea of AI created masses that you've seen online. But it also wasn't small. There was at least a few hundred people there. And it was overwhelmingly obvious that this was by and large an older crowd. By older, I mean baby boomers older than me.

13 · Claims Baby Boomers are a particularly broken generation with outsized cultural influence, carefully qualifying the statement to allow for substantial exceptions while maintaining the statistical force of the critique

And so one of the things, if we're talking about the new Apostolic Reformation and IHOP and so forth, that we probably need to just handle at least partially, is that the boomers are a particularly broken generation and have a particularly outsized effect on American culture as it stands today. And I can say that in such a way as to not castigate individual people that I know who are of that age. And a leaving room for exceptions and so forth. And friends, listen, the number of boomers is so large that even if the exception is, say, 40% of all boomers are not as I'm describing them to be, and then you still got 60% that are. That's a massive number of people.

14 · Proposes 'low antibodies' framework for understanding Boomer vulnerabilities: they were the first generation to encounter postmodernism and consumerism without cultural immunity, making them uniquely susceptible to these ideological viruses

And so one of the things that is going on in America right now is that we are really undoing a lot of damage created by this particular generation. Now, I don't really think I want to get into offering, you know, prognosticated explanations as to what went wrong there. I would just say this. I don't think that blaming the parents is the probably the correct explanation. Exactly. I believe that the most likely explanation, the one that is kind of default in my mind, is that this was a generation with low. With low antibodies for postmodernism and low antibodies for consumerism.

15 · Medical/historical analogy explaining 'antibodies' metaphor: just as Aztecs lacked immunity to European diseases, Boomers lacked cultural immunity to new ideological threats

And what I mean by antibodies is like, you know, when you're kind of surrounded by, you know, the flu or whatever, by a certain age, you're going to have all these antibodies sort of ready to answer a particular virus if it were to enter your body. But, you know, as you know the stories of the Aztecs getting wiped out or whatever, you know, if, if they're, if, if a native population encounters a particular disease for the first time, there are no antibodies. And so there's a really successful infection rate that takes place amongst a population that has not experienced a particular disease before.

16 · Three historical examples (Gen X/internet porn, millennials/HD pornography, WWI/machine guns) demonstrating the 'antibodies' pattern across different generations encountering novel threats without cultural preparation

And so I think it's kind of over simplistic to blame the parents of boomers for the way that this generation, by and large, has turned out. Even if you grant 40% of those turned out great. I think that it's overly simplistic to say that that's something to do with parents. I think that there are certainly just been cultural developments over the last 60, 70 years that are uniquely novel. Parents, to some degree, Gen Xers, of which I'm a part, just barely got out of the formative years before Internet pornography became a thing. So millennials are the kind of ground zero there. And I don't think there were sufficient antibodies built up against this phenomenon of instantly available 1080p pornography. That's a brand new concept. And so I think millennials were uniquely hit by this. Another example would be The World War I generation, specifically related to automatic gunfire. There was this moment when we have all these soldiers in World War I. And suddenly we have a method of war fighting that is developed around single shot munitions. And now suddenly we have this thing called a machine gun or mustard gas or whatever. And so you find these little overlaps in history where a new virus, technology, whatever you want to call it, emerges. And then like. But the auto, the antibodies of the majority of people who are encountering this new thing hasn't really elevated to the level of being able to defend against it.

17 · Applies the antibodies framework specifically to Boomers: psychology, self-esteem culture, and consumerism were novel viruses to which they had no immunity, making them particularly vulnerable to deception and manipulation

So I think there's a reason why, you know, for instance, in millennials where the hardest hit with porn, because it's like they literally didn't. It didn't exist before then, so no one was preparing them. You know, there's just. There were no cultural supports, there was no even cultural conversation happening about Internet pornography when most of these millennials became addicted to it. And, you know, there just wasn't like a cultural spiritual antibody to it. Well, my sense with the boomers is that they're the first generation to be raised where in an environment where psychology, self esteem and consumerism was sort of unleashed as a virus into the world. And they are the ones that have the least number of antibodies. And so they were just far more gullible and bought it and were affected by it far more than other generations.

18 · Connects Boomer vulnerabilities directly to NAR susceptibility: their lack of antibodies against psychology, self-focus, and consumerism left them defenseless against hyper-charismatic excesses when the movement emerged

And you could say, well, I blame the parents for that. Well, how many parents, you know, how many parents are functionally wise enough to understand a brand new emerging concept has fallen upon popular culture and then helped their kids to avoid being, you know, consumed by it? There are certainly some people who have that level of discernment, but not many. So all that to say boomers are a uniquely problematic generation, even if you give a massive exception to a lot of people who aren't at all like the rest of them. And I know plenty of those people, by the way. But for the most part, or in a majority segment, there are just a lot of boomers who were, in my opinion, infected by a psychologized self, a sense of self importance and consumerism, such that when the hyper charismatic movement emerges, they have literally no antibodies to deal with some of the most audacious elements of it.

19 · Identifies the Jesus Movement's cultural-music fusion as creating Boomer over-confidence in personal preferences, treating subjective tastes as objective truth, particularly evident in worship wars—a fundamentally consumerist posture toward church

And I'll just bring up two. One, they were taught very early when there was this movement, and I'm grateful for this movement, but there was a Jesus movement where a bunch of washed up hippies suddenly became interested in Jesus. But all of that was done with, you know, sort of a very unique thing. And that was, let's take modern cultural kind of expressions of music and Turn and put Jesus words into them. And so even, you know, music's this very unique thing. It's almost like food. It's a kind of a force of will. You know, you really realize like that you're in missions, for instance, when you go somewhere else and you're just willing to eat what is put before you and not be a wuss about it and not whine about it and so forth. There are these certain kind of things in life that test whether or not you're indeed humble. And one of them is like you just presented a plate of food in another country. It's like, will you just eat it and shut up? Or will you import all of your personal preferences into this? And music is one of those things. And there's a reason why the worship wars were such a big deal in the time period that they were. It was mostly a boomer issue. And it was mostly sort of, I would say, connected to this personal, like deep confidence in their own tastes and preferences as being essentially the same as truth.

20 · Connects NAR's experiential worship style to Boomer consumerist preferences: the movement's success correlates to its mastery of emotional experience designed to appeal to a generation trained to trust their preferences

And so with the hyper charismatic stuff, like, one of the things that has been going on there is that they've really have perfected the sort of bells and whistles, experiential aspects of worship. And I don't think that's coincidental that they've grown largely in this kind of boomer centric period of time.

21 · Diagnoses Boomer gullibility toward wolves in sheep's clothing: trained to distrust overt authority but lacking categories for sophisticated deception, they're easily manipulated by leaders who perform casual humility while being predatory

Another piece that's pretty remarkable and looking back, rough to consider is just that boomers are by and large very trusting of their senses and very non critical of sort of like the first take. And so if you as a leader, say you're a wolf, if you can successfully put on the sheep's clothing enough to appear humble and so forth. You know, the one generation most likely to fall for all this stuff are the boomers. They just had a more trusting sort of. What's funny about it is that they were kind of classically trained to not be trusting toward outward overt expressions of authority. But if you can just put on a sweatshirt and jeans and some tennis shoes and stand behind a pulpit with your hands in your pockets and sort of have your hair a little disheveled, they're suddenly like, of course this guy's great, because look, he's not even trying to impress. It's like they don't even have a category for the kind of person who's three steps ahead of them and understands that I'm going to wear these jeans and this sweatshirt and these tennis shoes so as to appear humble.

22 · Offers humorous but pointed illustration of Boomer gullibility: repeated Facebook account hacking demonstrates their consistent failure to recognize deception, validating the broader critique despite the potentially defensive response

So there was just a level of Trusting one's senses, that emerged in the boomer generation and it really elevated. It gave legs to the new apostolic reformation in a unique way as well. And listen, if you're a boomer and you get upset about this, just try to be logical, because, number one, I'm granting that it's potentially 40% of all the boomers that aren't like this, and I'm suggesting that even if that were so, the numbers are so massive that 60% is effectively worth talking about. But secondly, let's be honest. How many times has your Facebook account been hacked?

23 · Articulates the core Boomer discernment failure: equating appearance with reality, they cannot recognize that truly loving actions may appear harsh while truly cruel people can project gentleness—a fundamental confusion between surface and substance

There is a trust issue. And it is essentially the trust issue appears to be related to if you appear nice, then you are nice, and if you appear mean, then you are mean, which is fundamentally a trusting of your senses. And that's a problem, because the truth is that lots of times the kind, gracious, loving action will appear to be a harder action. And the mean, cruel person is sophisticated enough to know how to project softness and humility and meekness while being actually terrible as human beings.

24 · Returns to the protest scene as comprehensive illustration of Boomer hypocrisy: performing anti-establishment postures while benefiting maximally from institutional advantages, embodying the generational contradictions being diagnosed

And so as I was parked at this intersection watching all these boomers pass by with signs that literally were just utterly nonsensical, and these are all people, of course, that all of the cliches are absolutely true in this sense. They all bought real estate before it had blown up. They, they somehow managed to perfectly execute this quasi anti conformity vibe coming all the way through the 60s forward, while also just taking advantage of literally every institutional problem, every institutional, what's the word, inequity. Anyway, it's a real thing.

25 · Extends the critique even to godly Boomers Oswald respects: their generational over-emphasis on personal preference and lived experience created conditions for NAR emergence regardless of individual piety

But even the boomers that I know now, who I think are godly and I love and respect, probably the biggest issue for them is they really do have an over amount of emphasis on their own tastes and on their own sort of lived experience and on their own preferences and on their own like, sort of, sort of like read on things and you know, so that would be one reason why the hyper Charismatic movement, in my opinion, emerged when it did.

26 · Identifies Boomer contempt for church history as the third key vulnerability: their unprecedented dismissal of tradition allowed NAR novelties to enter evangelicalism without the critical scrutiny that 2,000 years of precedent should have triggered

And the other one that I would add, and I'm trying to make some generational arguments here, is that there's really, I don't know of another generation in church history where a group of people just unilaterally decided that everything had happened that had happened before them was meaningless and unworthy of consulting. And so one of the other reasons why I think the new Apostolic Reformation has emerged when it did is because there was a particular moment in Western evangelicalism where church history did not matter at all, or hardly at all. And it really allowed people to bring in completely novel expressions of Christianity without really anybody looking and asking, well, you know, we've been at this for 2,000 years. Like, let's just look back real quick. And I'm not saying you're wrong, but let's just look back real quick and just like, see what the old guys have said. There was, for the first time that I'm aware of in a very long time, a real kind of Chesterton fence kind of moment, especially in American church history, where we stopped asking, like, why is it that we didn't do music like this before? Or why is it that we weren't asking those Chesterton fence kinds of questions.

27 · Synthesizes the entire generational argument into a comprehensive diagnosis: Bickle and other NAR leaders gained entrance through three Boomer vulnerabilities—no antibodies against therapeutic language, consumerist trust in personal preference, and contempt for church history

And so one of the main reasons, I would say that the Bickles of the world and the Joneses, All of these people who wound up, by the way, being, you know, quite sexually cruel, just like the cult masters of the 60s, the commune masters of the 60s. Like, there's a reason that these people got an entrance into evangelicalism and some of it is generational, partly because they were able to speak this sort of therapeutic gospel language that appealed to this first generation that had basically no antibodies built up against psychology as we think of it now and then. Also, they just had a really high level of trust in their tastes and preferences and sort of imagined that Christianity could just conform to their particular musical tastes and so forth. And then thirdly, they just were uniquely sort of susceptible to being deceived because they didn't have really any legitimate amount of respect for church history. And in some facts, some extent, like a decent percentage of them had a contempt for church history, which goes all the way back to don't trust anyone over 30 and so forth. If my music's too old or too loud, you're too old, and so on and so forth.

28 · Concluding qualification reiterating exceptions and pastoral tone while insisting the generational analysis remains statistically and logically necessary for understanding NAR emergence, timing, and funding

So that's part two of this conversation about the ihop. I don't. Again, I want to be clear. I know plenty of boomers who love their Lord and are full of generosity and are out there. I see them every day hustling to serve the kingdom and so forth. Plenty of those. I would just argue that they are for sure a minority even within the Christian boomer population. And that that's one of. And we just have to be somewhat logical about when did this new Apostolic Reformation ar Did they get their money? Who are their leaders? How old are their leaders? And so forth. I think we can just begin to say, like, yeah, there's probably got to be, at least as we're trying to understand this some generational element to the explanation.

29 · Final frame previewing the next episode's focus on biblical pneumatology versus NAR teaching, positioning the Holy Spirit's service orientation as the corrective to charismatic self-focus

Okay, well, thanks for listening and we'll come back next time and talk about how the Holy Spirit is fundamentally in the Bible, given for us to serve other people. And we'll talk about that in contrast to what we see in the new apostolic Reformation. Thank you. The army blues.