In a decade of controversial movements rumours have been rife for over a year now of the next big thing about to hit the British church scene: Promise Keepers. EN carried news of this last September. Now Peter Glover reports . . .
Born in the USA (God's apparent spawning ground for new movements) five years ago, Promise Keepers has seen enormous growth especially among evangelicals.
Anyway, wait no longer, PK, as it is affectionately known, is officially here. A series of small evening meetings entitled 'Menmeet' took place in venues around the country throughout May and June. These were led by Derek Cook and Rod Redhead of Maranatha Ministries, Kirkby Stephen in Cumbria. And now that things are finally underway in Britain many people will want to know what all the fanfare has been about.
In fact, PK exploded onto the US church scene in 1991. It made an immediate impact both on numbers attending successive meetings and on the American church scene generally.
At the first conference in Boulder, Colorado in 1991 4,200 men attended. By 1994, 300,000 men were attending seven meetings in football stadia around America. By last year, it is believed that over 750,000 men (including 60,000 pastors), had attended PK meetings throughout the US. The goal for the summer of 1997 is one million men to descend on Washington DC as a witness to the nation.
What is PK?
The philosophy behind PK is to re-establish men in leadership and responsibility in three areas: home, church and community. PK's founder, Bill McCartney, says men must commit to what he calls 'the three non-negotiables of manhood: integrity, commitment and action'. He maintains that reducing these to its simplest terms would lead you to conclude that a man of integrity is a promise keeper.
It is best summed up in the movement's own 'Seven Promises of a Promise Keeper':
Promise 1: A man and his God:
'A Promise Keeper is committed to honouring Jesus Christ through worship, prayer and obedience to God's Word in the power of the Holy Spirit.'
Promise 2: A man and his mentors:
'A Promise Keeper is committed to pursuing vital relationships with a few other men, understanding that he needs brothers to help him keep his promises.'
Promise 3: A man and his integrity:
'A Promise Keeper is committed to practising spiritual, moral, ethical and sexual purity.'
Promise 4: A man and his family:
'A Promise Keeper is committed to building strong marriages and families through love, protection and biblical values.'
Promise 5: A man and his church:
'A Promise Keeper is committed to supporting the mission of his church by honouring and praying for his pastor, and by actively giving his time and resources.'
Promise 6: A man and his brothers:
'A Promise Keeper is committed to reaching beyond any racial and denominational barriers to demonstrate the power of biblical unity.'
Promise 7: A man and his world:
'A Promise Keeper is committed to influencing his world, being obedient to the Great Commandment and the Great Commission.'
On the face of it - an entirely God-honouring agenda. Indeed, the meetings themselves promote a strong sense of unity and brotherhood. Looked at from another perspective the seven promises are quite accepting, wide and entirely non-specific - and there's the rub. So all-inclusive and wide are the Seven Promises that they have attracted Roman Catholic and Mormon involvement in the US. Some of the main PK mega-meetings in the US have even been addressed by Roman Catholic speakers. Indeed, founder Bill McCartney is himself a former RC who describes himself as still 'on good terms with the Roman Catholic hierarchy'. (Unusual this - priests who leave the Roman Catholic church are normally considered anathema.)
But it is the wide basis of belief that has been a source of great concern for many evangelicals in the US. The question is whether PK is WYSIWYG - 'what you see is what you get?'
In accordance with the biblical injunction, we will 'test' it by looking at some aspects of PK. What we find is that the real agenda of PK does not rest in the conferences themselves, but in taking PK teaching back into the home church. While there is much to praise in the literature itself, there is also much that causes real concern.
As has already been pointed out, the Seven Promises of PK are designed to be all-inclusive, hence the declaration on PK literature to 'reach beyond any racial and denominational boundaries to demonstrate the power of biblical unity'. If this is true then what kind of biblical unity can evangelicalism have with Roman Catholicism with its vastly different understanding of the gospel, the sufficiency of Scripture and the authority of the church? In the total absence of any clear-cut doctrinal basis, PK can rightly be described as an ecumenical movement.
In May this year, Bill Randles, a visiting American pastor, warned a conference of church leaders in Cambridge about the movement on three main grounds:
* its practices depend on Freudian and Jungian psychology;
* it teaches 'six stages' of masculine development including the so-called 'phallic', 'wounded' and 'sage' stages and speaks of 'worshipping with the phallus';
* its teachings focus on the self and inner healing, rather than God and the death of the self through the Cross.
Randles has written extensively in the US on the false teachings lurking behind the facade of the men's movement in America. But what is PK's actual agenda?
PK's agenda
The chief aim, after the main PK meetings, is to get local churches to appoint key individuals as 'Ambassadors' and 'Point Men'. Ambassadors introduce PK to the churches in the community while the latter are the primary contacts in individual churches. It is at this stage that some of Bill Randles's points become practical issues. Once people return to their churches, they are encouraged to start PK groups. These small groups have a very specific format and are based on the discredited 1970s style encounter-group model where everything, including explicit sexual discussions about personal sexual fantasies and all intimate sexual activity between husband and wife, is up for discussion.
Much of the tone of PK groups is set by Robert Hicks's book The Masculine Journey, a book freely given away at many early PK meetings in America. Some of the questions members of the group are asked include whether they are wearing boxer shorts or bikini briefs; if they were neglected or abused by their father; if they have recent emotional scars from a family feud; if they have had circumcision, a vasectomy or prostate operations. Based on Hicks's books groups encourage discussion on 'When I was potty trained and stopped wetting the bed', pubic hair and growth, unfortunate experiences with pornography, the wedding night and 'conceiving my first child'. (I think you may have got the message.)
US researcher Al Dager says: 'Hicks would be classified as an integrationist - one who blends humanistic psychological theory with biblical truth.' Hicks holds to techniques of healing one's 'inner child' by visualising Jesus in the midst of past trauma. Both Hicks's book and his questions raise major theological issues for Christians in terms of unbiblical technique and practice. The section that has caused most controversy in the US is Hicks's view that 'we are called to worship God as phallic kinds of guys.' As Doug Le Blanc says in America's Christian Research Institute Journal: 'This brings forth images of Greek paganism rather than biblical manhood.' Hicks's book seems obsessed with what Dager calls 'spiritual voyeurism'. In the chapter on the 'phallic male', the group leader is told how to get the men to open up about their deepest sexual experiences including their sexual fantasies. If any refuse, the leader is to get them to talk about why they are having trouble talking about these things.
There is an extremely strong emphasis on psychological theory throughout the PK material. Much of the advice offered through PK depends on an 'if it works' pragmatism designed to make one feel good about oneself. Anything that achieves this is to be commended by the group. Controversy and confrontation are to give way to acceptance. One wonders how then sin and error can be dealt with?
Other problem areas
Other problem areas include the encouraging of a close 'mentoring' which smacks of discredited 'heavy-shepherding/discipling' techniques. Significantly, the whole vitally important area of personal sin is totally downplayed in PK groups. What the Bible would call sin - sex outside marriage, homosexual activity, misuse of drugs, etc. are to be looked on and celebrated as 'rites of passage' for younger men and 'honourable wounds' for older men. The pastor is also encouraged to 'model his woundedness' from the pulpit (i.e. share his own past sins). Of course, the upside of this is that church attendance will rise, according to the literature.
In short, much of PK's material refers to the importance of God's Word, while in practice much of its advice runs counter to God's Word. This is the thread running right through PK's materials: many of PK's writers have been heavily tainted by secular psychological theory which has in turn tainted their understanding of Scripture. Essentially as Dager concludes: 'PK is not a biblical discipleship program, but a male-bonding encounter group ...encouraging men to share their most intimate sexual secrets with each other.'
The US Mormon church has become aware of the potential of PK's ecumenical, interdenominational approach to such an extent that they are formally encouraging their own leaders to participate. As Mormon leader Chip Rawlings told the Los Angeles Times: 'The movement's 'Seven Promises' are like something straight out of the men's priesthood manual for the (Mormon) church.'
All this should set alarm bells ringing for Christians and Christian leaders alike. The real problem, however, will be that as PK takes off, people will (once again), only look on the surface. Faced with the 'seven promises', who could argue against them? They sound entirely spiritual. It is only when you begin to dig at the roots and look closely at the detail in the materials of many new movements, however, that a whole array of theological and psycho-heresy problems arise.
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