Women of Faith: Beware of Snares

Women of Faith: Beware of Snares

Women of Faith: Beware of Snares

There is something about going to a Christian Ladies’ Conference at a church and coming off of a few days of sisterhood feeling exhausted yet energized. You’ve brought your Bible and your notebook and have taken copious notes on your destiny, your anointing, how YOU will lead others to Jesus.

Why? The gal on the stage told you so! You can be JUST LIKE HER! No go on out and inspire.

We all heard about Brooklyn hipster-non-binary witches putting the hex on Brett Kavanaugh yesterday. What we haven’t been talking about are Christians hopping on the bandwagon of “woke”.

Beth Moore is more than just “a gal on a stage”. She has made of living speaking on Bibical teachings, creating at-home Bible studies with companion videos and does the speaking circuit. I own several of her study books and have enjoyed a good Beth Moore study. She’s perky, she’s feisty and she speaks her mind. She, like most evangelical speakers, claims that God speaks to her. For instance, back in March, she claimed that God “spoke to her” and told her that “a bunch of manure was hitting the fan at the White House”. This was THE first time, possibly in Moore’s entire career that she has made a political statement of any kind. Just last week, the pint-sized powerhouse who is “on fire for the Lord” made a man kneel at a local conference in apology to women for the wrongs of all men.

The symbolic kneeling of Kevin Jones in apology to women for the abuses they have endured? Perhaps this was not as politically motivated as Moore claiming manure has hit The White House.

Strangely enough, she was silent on politics the whole 8 years Barack Obama was in office.

Moore claims to be “fighting for the faith”…or is she, now?

A few months back, my friends were planning on going to a Beth Moore event in Bellevue, Washington. Bellevue is a fairly wealthy suburb of Seattle and Moore was speaking at a church there. Seats were $100 each for a night and a morning session. I ended up not being able to go and gave my ticket to another friend.

That $100 seat got me thinking…what about the women who need Jesus? The women who need inspiration? The women who are unable to spend $100 or dedicate their time to an evening and morning session of a speaking engagement? What about those women?

I also started calculating in my head how many seats are in that church auditorium. I thought about book sales, I thought about possible travel expenses for Mrs. Moore, I thought about profits. How great that she can do this for a living! How great it is that she can spread the word of Jesus, give women a mountain top experience and charge women $100 each to come out of that auditorium knowing that Jesus loves them and that they were “born for a time such as this”.

So often we hear pastors selling these “mountaintop experiences”. For the one low price of $199.95, you, too can be part of this mountaintop experience. But aside of dispensing the Word in a charismatic form, what are these speakers doing? Where does that $100 go? Our women’s Christian speaking ministries of late have become more about fabulous light shows, extended worship sessions rivaling rock concerts, elaborate video productions and female fashionistas.

If I wanted smoke and pyrotechnics, I’d go to an Iron Maiden concert.

In an effort to bring our young women in, we feature fresh, clean faces, perfect filters of light, everything is just-so. Women come out donning leather pants with hair extensions and perfectly-contoured makeup that rivals a Kardashian sister. We’re told to humble ourselves by a woman who dons red-soled shoes. We’re told with our work and sacrifice, we, too can summit our Everest. We’re told by Sister Louboutin that we need to give as the buckets get passed—that the Lord loves a generous giver. (And I love her shoes…but that’s neither here nor there….I must humble myself and set my eyes on things above.)

The spirit of The Lord is present. All our sisters are present.

The only thing that isn’t is humility.

This is not meant to pick on poor little Beth Moore. I enjoy a good Beth Moore study in a small group. I have not drunk enough Kool Aid to think she is conspiring with the devil, as some Christian outfits claim. But Beth Moore has gone from brushing a poor man’s hair in an airport to making a man kneel in repentance and this shift requires discernment among women of faith and principle. Our faith, as women in this new age has been more about the show of things than it is about kindness, humility and acts of service. We get competitive in our clothing choices for church! We get political in the fact that want to be in the orbit of the right people at church or just around the “right people”. We drop a bunch of money on speaking engagements, books from speakers who charge us $100 a pop to watch them speak, and cute gear from the pop-up shop. But…where are these profits going? Are they going to help other women in our communities? Are they going to help men in our communities? What is the point of filling a church auditorium in Jesus’ name when we can’t even go out into our communities and fill them with love and compassion? Shoot, these are the same people who can’t even acknowledge and say hello to people they see every Sunday at church when they run into one another at the nail salon down the street! Really. Who are we kidding? WE, as WOMEN need to KNEEL!

As Christian women, we’re too busy looking at the Instagram perfect face of Christianity and reveling in its vanity. As women, we need to be aware of these snares because at this rate, a $10 hexing session in Brooklyn or a $100 speaking engagement in Bellevue can sometimes summon the same demon.

Photo Credit: Odyssey

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7 Comments
  • Toni Williams says:

    Oh, Lisa. Amen.
    T.

  • David says:

    Proverbs 29:23 – A man’s pride shall bring him low: but honour shall uphold the humble in spirit.

  • CSS says:

    Nailed it!

  • Robin H says:

    I went to a Joyce Meyers conference recently and I was kind of surprised that she doesn’t charge admission. I was able to attend for just the cost of a hotel room and a few meals or I could have driven in just for the one day with no cost other than gas. The gal I went with commented “How does she pay all her employees if she’s not charging?” Made me think. They use these arenas to tape her shows. So there’s money made on the broadcasting, book sales, monthly subscriptions for the daily devotions, etc. So what seems to be from the goodness of her heart may or may not be. I have to assume if they say the collections they took went to the specific causes then I hope they did. I didn’t contribute, I give through my own church. There’s big money in finding Christ, I hope at least a few actually do.

  • Overgrown Hobbit says:

    I don’t think I could read any of Beth Moore’s writings after reading this “The symbolic kneeling of Kevin Jones in apology to women for the abuses they have endured?”

    If it’s exactly as presented here*, she’s crazy. No one can repent of sins they haven’t committed. I can’t publicly wail and beat my breast and beg forgiveness for all the wrongs aging bottle blondes have done. I’m not Mrs. Clinton for one. And I have my own sins for another. And I’m not the Messiah to take on other’s sins. Holy Hannah: crazy + hubris. And charging a pretty penny for it.

    Even though I know most of the witch trial stories were anti-Catholic propaganda, stories like this one* make me understand why they got told.

    *If this is the whole story.

  • Cameron says:

    “the pint-sized powerhouse who is “on fire for the Lord” made a man kneel at a local conference in apology to women for the wrongs of all men.”

    Sounds like she’s a believer in “collective salvation.” In other words, she’s the kind of heretic that needs to be excommunicated.

  • GWB says:

    Our women’s Christian speaking ministries of late have become more about fabulous light shows, extended worship sessions rivaling rock concerts, elaborate video productions and female fashionistas.
    Honestly, that has been a plague in Christian ministry for a long time now, not just among women’s ministries.
    Contrast Billy Graham meetings with a great many others – humility before the Lord is the order of the day, every day.

    forgiveness for all hurts & harms they’ve ever received at the hands of men
    Sorry, but no. That concept is a mess. You can, if you’re acting as an official representative of the group/person, ask for forgiveness from someone for a group’s/person’s wrongs. But, “men” is much too large a group to claim to represent – a LOT of hubris there. And you can’t really ask for forgiveness from such a group as “women” – again, much too large to be treated in that fashion.
    Now, since I didn’t see the video….
    I can see a case made for asking all the women in attendance to forgive all the individual men who have done them wrong. That would be appropriate. But it doesn’t sound like that’s what happened.

    And, yes, even Christians must guard against making a celebrity into a god or messiah. We already have One. And we don’t need any intermediaries between us and Jesus, or between us and the Word.

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