Casting Crowns
Jult 16, 2014
David Cloud, Way of Life Literature, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061
866-295-4143,
fbns@wayoflife.org
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The popular contemporary worship band Casting Crowns is led by Mark Hall, a youth pastor at Eagles Landing First Baptist Church in suburban Atlanta.

The band leads the contemporary worship services with their rock music.

The group has broad influence through songs such as “Come to the Well,” “Always Enough,” “Who Am I,” “Courageous,” “Glorious Day,” “If We Are the Body,” “Praise You with the Dance.”

Casting Crowns songs are increasingly popular among fundamental Baptists. For example, “Prayer for a Friend” has been performed by a group at Lancaster Baptist Church, Lancaster, California.

Casting Crowns’ radical ecumenism and spiritual carelessness is evident in that they participated in the National Worship Leader Conference in 2011, joining hands with men such as Jack Hayford who says God spoke to him and told him not to judge the Roman Catholic Church.

Another prominent speaker at the conference was Leonard Sweet who promotes a wide variety of New Age heresies. He calls his universalist-tinged doctrine “New Light” and “quantum spirituality” and “the Christ consciousness” and describes it in terms of “the union of the human with the divine” which is the “center feature of all the world’s religions” (
Quantum Spirituality, p. 235). Sweet defines the New Light as “a structure of human becoming, a channeling of Christ energies through mindbody experience” (Quantum Spirituality, p. 70). Sweet says that “New Light pastors” hold the doctrine of “embodiment of God in the very substance of creation” (p. 124). In Carpe Mañana, Sweet says that the earth is as much a part of the body of Christ as humans and that humanity and the earth constitutes “a cosmic body of Christ” (p. 124). Sweet says that some of the “New Light leaders” that have influenced his thinking are Matthew Fox, M. Scott Peck, Willis Harman, and Ken Wilber. These are prominent New Agers who believe in the divinity of man, as we have documented in the book The New Age Tower of Babel. Sweet has endorsed The Shack with its non-judgmental father-mother god, and he promotes Roman Catholic contemplative mysticism and dangerous mystics such as the Catholic-Buddhist Thomas Merton. (For documentation see the book Contemplative Mysticism, which is available in print and eBook editions from Way of Life Literature -- www.wayoflife.org.)

At the National Worship Leader Conference, Casting Crowns also joined hands with Tim Hughes who heads up Worship Central and is on staff at Holy Trinity Brompton, one of the birthplaces of the Laughing Revival in England and the Alpha program which has a close association with the Roman Catholic Church. Worship Central definitely follows “another spirit” (2 Cor. 11:4). (See “Tim Hughes” in this Directory.)

Casting Crowns performed with Sanctus Real in December 2011. Matt Hammitt of Sanctus Real participated in the 2003 tour of the
!Hero rock opera, which depicts Jesus as a cool black man. In !Hero, the Last Supper is a barbecue party and ‘Jesus’ is crucified on a city street sign. Sanctus Real and Steven Curtis Chapman played a concert in 2003 at St. Mary Seminary sponsored by the Roman Catholic Diocese of Cleveland, Ohio. (See “Sanctus Real” in this Directory.)

In “What This World Needs” Casting Crowns attacks every Bible-believing “fundamentalist” church. They sing that we need to “stop hiding behind our walls,” which is a brash denunciation of biblical separatism. On the video of “What This World Needs” they say that “this world doesn’t need my denomination or my translation of the Bible; they just need Jesus.” This is foolish heresy. To say that the world doesn’t need “my denomination” is to say that it doesn’t matter what a church believes, that any denomination is fine. And to say that the world doesn’t need “my translation of the Bible” is to say that it doesn’t matter what translation we use, when it most assuredly does matter! What this world most desperately needs is the sound teaching of a translationally-pure Bible. What this world needs is the true Jesus, but the Bible warns repeatedly and forcefully about false christs, and the only way to know the true from the false is to have sound doctrine taught from an accurate Bible, and this requires a doctrinally-sound denominational stance and a sound translation.

In July 2012, Casting Crowns was one of the bands featured at the 14th annual Lifest in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Christian rock’s one-world church building enterprise was in full steam at this event. Other popular groups and artists participating were Switchfoot, Newsboys, Underoath, Building 429, Norma Jean, Steven Curtis Chapman, Tammy Borden, Love & Death, and Disciple. 15,000 enthusiastic fans gathered to celebrate ecumenical unity through the sensual power of rock & roll. Participants could choose from three worship services, including a Catholic Mass led by Bishop David Ricken, who officially approves of the “Marian Apparitions” at the Shrine of Our Lady of Good Help in northern Wisconsin. The apparition appeared to Adele Brise in 1859 and said, “I am the Queen of Heaven, who prays for the conversion of sinners,” plainly identifying itself as a demon, since the only Queen of Heaven mentioned in Scripture is an idolatrous goddess that was condemned by the prophet Jeremiah (Jer. 7:18). That Christian rock is intimately associated with such things is clear evidence of its apostasy.

Casting Crowns is the blind leading the blind, and Bible-believing churches that are messing around with their music are not wise.



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