Cary Gordon is a man on a mission, and his mission carries a vital message for today’s church. This pastor (he serves as senior pastor and president of Cornerstone World Outreach in Sioux City, Iowa) and conservative activist is using the medium of film to raise awareness of what he calls “a false gospel”—not the Good News of Jesus Christ but the false doctrine of social justice.
Godon’s new documentary, Enemies Within the Church, shares the story. Gordon explains, “The Scriptures warned us; the apostle Paul warned us in the early church, and certainly in the last days, that wolves would come into the flock, not sparing the sheep. And in the modern times … it’s become more challenging to accept the reality that we have to deal with wolves, and we have to deal with wolves with some verity and some seriousness. Many people are uncomfortable with that, because they don’t think that it appears to be loving when a shepherd takes his cane and notices a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The sheep look at the wolf in sheep’s clothing and say, ‘Hey, that’s just a sheep like us,’ but the shepherd knows better. So he takes his cane that he usually uses to tap the beloved sheep and keep them on the right path, and he whacks this thing over the head, and everyone’s upset at the shepherd.
“That’s my quick analogy of what it’s like trying to deal with wolves that are entering the flock right now in 2020,” Gordon says. “But there are wolves. … This is a New Testament warning that we have to take seriously, and we have a responsibility to deal with wolves. And the primary tool of the wolf, their teeth, allegorically, is false doctrine. They use false doctrine to destroy the sheep of God.
“And so right now, we have a wild spreading of a particular false doctrine called the social justice gospel,” he says. “And it’s a false gospel. And it’s got its own glossary of terms, words that people over 40 don’t understand what they mean. It’s very confusing, and it’s based in Marxism. And it’s really popular with the Millennial generation. It has infiltrated almost every seminary, almost every Bible college and nearly every denomination in the United States.”
Gordon points to a generational shift where faithful, gospel-focused pastors are retiring or dying. “And the new generation is arising and taking over the pulpit from churches across the United States,” he says. “And we’re finding out that this new generation of pastors are entirely devoid of a solid, absolute biblical worldview. They have been confused in seminary and Bible colleges with what we call liberal theology. They don’t really believe in the inerrancy of Scripture. They think that the God of heaven is sort of like what I would describe as a senile grandpa who just wants to give everybody a hug.”
This confusion about God has yielded a disdain for certain aspects of the Bible, Gordon says. “They really, really don’t like the Old Testament; they don’t like the Ten Commandments. And this detachment from the absolutes of God’s moral law in the Old Testament has created a nightmare of moral relativism dressed up as Christianity, and the moral relativism that is happening is called love. And everyone will be familiar with the term ‘love wins.’ And that is something that emanated from the leftist churches and found its way into the streets with hard-left progressive Democrats.”
Gordon’s new documentary (find out more at enemieswithinthechurch.com) is a sequel to one produced in 2016 by the same team, titled The Enemies Within. He says the first film “focused on the infiltration of the Marxist ideology within the very seats of power in the United States political system.” But this movie, he says, “focuses on the same phenomenon of how Marxist thinking or Marxist-based theology is wiggling its way through the entire church of the United States of America and affecting the foundations of the very gospel that is being preached—or not preached—in many churches across our land.”
As a part of their research, Gordon’s team discovered a story about how this shift to the far Left happened in a conservative Southern Baptist megachurch in Naples, Florida and produced a brief film featuring that story. Watch it here. They planned for the new film to have an international focus, but COVID forced them to restrict it to the U.S. and save global locations for a separate project. Depending on COVID restrictions, Gordon hopes Enemies Within the Church will release in April 2021 in at least 1,000 interested theaters nationwide. He reiterates his mission: to share the dangers of the false gospel or, as he calls it, the “woke” gospel.
“The world is in danger of the wrath of God. Christ paid the penalty of our sins; we must repent for what we did to Jesus. Jesus is the victim, and I’m the villain,” Gordon explains. “That’s the real gospel. The woke gospel is something that is exactly the opposite. The woke gospel takes the emphasis off of Christ, and tells the Black man and the gay man and the illegal alien and the transgender person and the sinner, and says to the sinner, ‘You are the greatest victim in the world. And the whole world owes you an apology. And Jesus is telling the world that they ought to say they’re sorry to you because you’re a victim.’
“That is a false gospel,” Gordon says. “And that’s the danger that we’re facing. And it’s very easy to confuse people between these gospels because both of them can put on the dress of love. And that’s really my nutshell: We have a false gospel telling sinners they’re victims, when really the true gospel tells sinners they’re villains, and that Jesus is the victim, and we should be asking Him to forgive us.”
Listen to the entire Strang Report podcast episode here to hear more from Gordon about how the enemy is attacking churches from within, and make sure to like and share the Strang Report podcast on iTunes and at cpnshows.com. We don’t want to be caught sleeping, and I believe Gordon’s film will help the church wake up to the wolves in our midst. {eoa}
