How Should Christians Respond to the Sparkle Creed?
Be on your guard so that you are not carried away by the error of unscrupulous people and lose your own firm commitment,but grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ– 2nd Peter 3:17b-18a NASB
Every once in a while, I have to decide whether or not I’m going to hop on a bandwagon and write about something that’s getting a lot of attention in the news cycle.
As a I general rule I just say “no”.
Angry ranting about the unrelenting moral decay in our world feels really good. However, eventually it gets super old and kind of tedious. Peevish complaining helps no one and changes nothing. Furthermore, bitter ranting has a way of transforming Christians into a weird cartoony version of our calling (Matthew 5:13-16, 1st Corinthians 13:1-3).
Sigh.
This week I decided to break my rule and rant a little before offering a response.
It all started when I saw a report on secular news channel concerning a church trend I had never heard of before this week: The Sparkle Creed. Apparently, the Sparkle Creed has been a thing in a number of progressive churches for a couple of years now. It is the brainchild of Satan and the Reverend Rachel Small Stokes.
This is it in its entirety:
I believe in the non-binary God whose pronouns are plural.
I believe in Jesus Christ, their child, who wore a fabulous tunic and had two dads and saw everyone as a sibling-child of God.
I believe in the rainbow Spirit, who shatters our image of one white light and refracts it into a rainbow of gorgeous diversity.
I believe in the church of everyday saints as numerous, creative, and resilient as patches on the AIDS quilt, whose feet are grounded in mud and whose eyes gaze at the stars in wonder.
I believe in the calling to each of us that love is love is love, so beloved, let us love.
I believe, glorious God. Help my unbelief
Amen.
The Sparkle Creed is a steaming pile of bad doctrine wrapped up in woke twaddle. One need not be a Pastor, Bible scholar or even necessarily a Christian to see and understand this so-called creed is a total departure from historical, biblical, orthodox Christianity (1st Timothy 4:1).
Sadly.
The architect of the Sparkle “Creed” is a member of and a teacher in a denomination that exchanged the truth of God for a giant pack of lies years ago (Romans 1:18). Therefore, her teachings should shock no one. This is simply what happens when a “Christian” pastor or teacher has no connection to spiritual reality, biblical truth and/or Jesus (Colossians 1:15-20, Colossians 2:10, Colossians 2:19). When human beings lean on their own limited understanding of life and faith things are bound to go south and they clearly have (Proverbs 3:5-6).
The Sparkle Creed is the byproduct of apostasy (Jeremiah 8:5, 2nd Thessalonians 2:3). There are two types of apostasy. The first is the one most Christians think of when they think of apostasy. It’s when an individual professing Christian turns their back on the church, ditches sound doctrine and goes off do their own spiritual thing. Whether or not these folks ever really knew the Lord at all is open to debate. Different schools of thought (and theology) have differing opinions on the subject. In one sense it doesn’t really matter. What matters, is that these folks have departed from the faith and are no longer a functioning part of the body of Christ (1st Timothy 6:20-21, 2nd Timothy 2:17-19).
The other type of apostasy happens when the organized church of Jesus Christ leaves sound doctrine and loyalty to Jesus in the dust to follow deceitful spirits and teach things that appeal to the unredeemed (1st Timothy 4:1). This is not the first-time in history churches have become apostate. The same thing happened in the Middle Ages. That apostasy eventually led to the Reformation.
The church was designed to be a preserving influence in the culture (Matthew 5:13-16). Therefore, apostasies always affect more than just the church. When churches depart form truth it impacts everything. Crime goes up, governments go bad and people in general, become much ickier and more violent.
It’s just what happens.
The question for followers of Jesus is: what do we do about it? Do we clutch our pearls in horror? Do we lament the loss of biblical truth? Do we weep and cry and wail over the moral drift? Do we scream and yell about all the dirty rotten heretics who are attempting to take over the church?
Yes.
All of those are acceptable responses. For a minute.
Then it’s time to get a grip. We must remember the Church of Jesus Christ will never be defeated by anyone or anything including woke pastors and the Sparkle Creed (Matthew 16:18). Jesus is still firmly in control. There will always be a remnant who love Jesus and stay faithful. Period.
However.
It is critical we do our part. Our part is to know truth, live truth, love biblically and stand firm against the encroaching madness (Colossians 1:13-23, Romans 12:1-2, 1st Corinthians 16:13, Ephesians 6:11).
Doing our part might mean having an uncomfortable conversation with a Christian brother or sister who’s being pulled into Sparkle Creed kind of thinking. It might mean leaving a church that’s in the process of going woke. It might mean rethinking how we educate our kids.
It definitely means loving messy people who need Jesus.
When we choose to do those hard things, we become pleasing to Jesus and the solution to all the confusion in this world (Matthew 25:21, Matthew 5:11-12, 1st Corinthians 3:13-15)
