RE-IMAGINING CONFERENCE. How bad can it get?

[Excerpted from AFA Journal, June 1998, p 9.]                                                                                        Vol. XI, No. 7, August 1998

With the participation of supposed Christians, this year's Re-Imagining Conference continued to follow the heretical trail blazed by its inaugural meeting five years ago. This year's event was called "Re-Imagining Revival," but some considered that moniker misleading. "It's not a revival; it's a rebellion - a rebellion against orthodox Christian beliefs and practice," said Janice Shaw Crouse, Director of the Ecumenical Coalition on Women and Society (ECWS), a conservative Christian women's group.

Founded partly in response to the first controversial Re-Imagining Conference in 1993, ECWS sent representatives to this year's April gathering in Minneapolis, Minnesota. As has been the case in previous Re-Imagining meetings, attendees participated in and listened to New Age gobbledygook. According to ECWS, some of the most outrageous examples:

>The program opened with a darkened room, lanterns and drums, and a welcome that included the words, "We call upon spirits, we call upon you from the past ......

>'When gospel hymns were sung by the more than 900 participants, the words were rewritten to strip away all references to the blood of Christ, the cross, and the Second Coming.

>The divinity and sinlessness of Christ, as well as His substitutionary and vicarious death on the cross and His resurrection from the dead were all explicitly denied.

>Great pains were taken to repudiate the God of Scripture in favor of elevating pagan goddesses like Sophia, Isis, Aphrodite, and Brigid.

>Missing from the meeting place were all traditional symbols of Christianity, replaced by over 400 liturgical stoles formerly worn by gay, lesbian, and transgendered clergy.

>Regarding sexual morality, speaker Delores Williams said, "No sexuality is unclean in the context of the sacred. In the eyes of the deity, it doesn't matter who you are sleeping with."

>An ECWS spokesperson said that on Sunday morning, the women "defiantly took a bite from an apple to show their solidarity with Eve's quest for wisdom and her 'resistance’" to the boundaries set by God's Word.

The 1993 conference received significant financial support from some mainline Christian denominations in the U.S., resulting in vocal protests from local congregations, some of which withdrew their financial support from their church hierarchies.