In actuality, they bring nothing new to religious thought. Church history reveals their births occurred prior to the mid 1800s. How does one determine the exact time and place when someone turned the rudder of the Church's ship ever so slightly? Big gates do swing on little hinges.

The changes that developed into the current emerging, postmodern, and seeker principles started before Charles Spurgeon's era in London. In 1987, he began a public conflict against what he termed the downgrade of the Church. He fought against encroaching modernism in the Church from his pulpit and publications until his death in 1892 at 58. Historians attribute his early death to the stresses of the conflict.

Not many years later, J. Gresham Machen undertook the same battle. In his book, Christianity & Liberalism, Dr. Machen tackled the pre-emergent, modern, and pre-seeker leaders of his day. Encroaching modernism had blossomed into sentimentalism. Their ideas gained influence and respectability among Church leaders. Like Spurgeon before him, Machen faced increasing opposition.

I first faced these new positions during my undergraduate studies at Wayne State University. I took a class called "The Bible as Literature." The professor's lectures routinely attacked the Biblical narrative. Her narratives bordered on heresy as she rejected Bible accounts and questioned mankind's ability to know the truthfulness of the Bible.

In another class, "The Psychology of Communication," the text and the professor referred to the Apostle Paul's discourse on Mar's Hill. We studied it as an example of how to adapt to crowd attitudes in the presentation of public discourse. This interpretation has now become common in Church circles.

During these same years, I met and dated my wife. Her father pastored a Church in the Detroit, Michigan area. He had a reputation of using seeker methods long before it had a name. He frequently employed special events to attract crowds to the new Church that he had started.

Once a year, the Church planned a Roundup Weekend that followed a cowboy theme. It included a makeover of the Church building adapted to the theme. Even the Church leaders dressed to the theme. He brought in ponies and offered free pony rides to every child who attended. Boy, did they attend. By the hundreds, approaching 900 on some occasions, they came to these events...quite an accomplishment for a struggling, new Church in that era. The annual Church calendar included a variety of such extravaganzas.

During my college years, I met with this devoted pastor every Saturday for lunch and talked about Church programs. One day, he startled me by announcing that he planned to quit all of the special events. He would do no more of them.

He had done an evaluation of his activities over the years and could not account for one person in the current Church congregation that had come from the many special programs over the years. He left the seeker friendly ranks before it even became a movement.

In the 1990s, I began a new ministry, Master Ministries International, Inc.. In preparation, I studied the then current Church world. The seeker friendly movement had just started and has continued with zest until now. More recently the emergent Church ideas have burgeoned along side postmodernism. I discovered that they offer nothing new. They are as shallow and impotent as the early Church movements they emulate.

Who would have thought that the challenges that encroached upon the Church during Spurgeon's day would grow next into sentimentalism and then into popularity and acceptability? Many of the same issues that Spurgeon and Machen attacked and that my father-in-law practiced surface in proclamations today from emergent, postmodern, and seeker friendly proponents.

If we want to be exact, these disputes have centuries old roots. No less a sage than Solomon stated,