AWANA Continues On the Road to Spiritual Disaster

Typical of any movement, the Ecumenical/Emergent Church/New Age Movement is continuing to zero in our children. AWANA is one such avenue.

I reported over a year ago AWANA's loss of biblical theology---now it continues to get worse.

Here is a snippet of the latest report from Lighthousetrailsresearch group on AWANA. TAKE HEED! Do NOT compromise Truth for the sake of keeping little children busy for a couple of hours each week. WE CAN DO BETTER THAN OFFER AWANA TO OUR CHILDREN. God demands purity of doctrine as well as lives, folks!

Deu 12:3 You shall tear down their altars and dash in pieces their pillars and burn their Asherim with fire. You shall chop down the carved images of their gods and destroy their name out of that place. 4 You shall not worship the LORD your God in that way.

Exo 34:13 You shall tear down their altars and break their pillars and cut down their Asherim14 (for you shall worship no other god, for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God),

The report says in part:

For Awana to include Ken Blanchard's teachings into its organization, shows that the situation is quite serious. Blanchard has been promoting eastern-style meditators for over twenty years, and to this day is still doing so. In addition, he is a board member for the occultic Hoffman [Quadrinity] Institute. Blanchard participated in the Hoffman Process and said it made his spirituality come alive. We believe this experience he had through Hoffman is similar to what Blanchard refers to in his Lead Like Jesus book, when he says people who "quiet their mind[s]" during the Lead Like Jesus Encounter have "powerful experience[s]." This means that now children and families in Awana could possibly wind up with the same experience.

Blanchard, who has been a professing Christian since the 1980s, wrote the foreword for a 2001 book titled What Would Buddha Do at Work?. In the book, Blanchard said:
"Buddha points to the path and invites us to begin our journey to enlightenment. I ... invite you to begin your journey to enlightened work."

Some people may not understand why we write this report about Awana. After all, they have done some wonderful things for children. But that is the very reason we do issue this report - we do not want to see Awana sell out to the fast growing apostasy of contemplative spirituality and the New Age; and because we care about children, we speak up. With more and more public schools teaching kids to meditate and do yoga, and with more and more Christian schools bringing in emerging leaders like Rob Bell (through his Noomas and his book Velvet Elvis), millions of children are now placed in harm's way by learning meditative techniques that will possibly take them into altered states and demonic realms. We hope Awana leadership will reconsider their position on contemplative/spiritual formation for the sake of children and their parents. And if you have children in the program, please use extreme caution in light of these new developments.

Let us leave you with this sobering thought: Sue Monk Kidd was at one time a conservative Southern Baptist Sunday school teacher. She was led down the road to apostasy (i.e., worshiping the goddess Sophia) through the practice of contemplative prayer after someone handed her a book by Thomas Merton, the same Thomas Merton who is endorsed and quoted in the Awana book, Perspectives on Children's Spiritual Formation.

Full article here.