Controversy FAQ Interview Question 2

Are you saying that the focus that ACCD puts on personal responsibility and mankind's response to God gets misinterpreted or labeled as New Age or secular humanism?

Yes, in our experience, people often use this question to create a polemic through which they can leverage their agenda of defending their right belief. If somebody's looking to find something in the history of our organization, our emphasis on personal responsibility is what has been misconstrued and placed into the framework of New Age thinking. If you don't define your terms and throw around words like "New Age", you can attempt to demonize anything you want. That's the power of not defining terms: it allows you to throw around blanket accusations without having to stop and actually have a conversation. It's a power play. These sorts of charges depend upon a definition of terms. Most times, when people make these sorts of accusations, they are not clear on the terms they are using. They frame accusations as questions without any real inquiry.

The bottom line is that there's a hidden agenda behind this question, and that agenda is "Do you believe like I do (and of course, I believe like God does), and if you don't, then you must not be for God."

Take the question, "Is ACCD secular?" The first thing we would say is, "Well, what do you mean by secular?" If you mean by that we are non-Christian in our orientation or that Jesus Christ is somehow outside of the center of what we do, then, no, we're not secular, because the exact opposite is the essence of what we're about.

Or if they mean that we're secular because we use structures such as the experiential format of our trainings (what we call experiential education, which means that rather than a strictly lecture or teaching-based format, we use small group discussion, exercises, and one-on-one interactions) or secular music in our trainings that the non-Christian, secular world also uses, then we would say, in that case, yes, and so are you. For example, a question we'd ask in response to this question is, "Have you ever done an icebreaker?" If you've done an icebreaker in a small group, you've done an exercise that came out of an experiential education book…a secular system. Which means that most any kid that has ever been to a typical youth group has taken part in a secular experiential education exercise. It so happens that the experiential education format is similar to some things we do in our trainings. But to take it to the extreme that because our format is related to a secular format that our content is somehow secular is a leap that doesn't make sense.

Along these lines, many times people like to take what is in reality a preference and then endeavor to dogmatize it. For example, because our educational format is very distinct and not used commonly within the Church, they endeavor to label it as something outside of the mission of the Church. In reality, all the educational formats of the Church were borrowed from the secular culture. And, therefore, in that sense, to take someone else's educational format with which you are unfamiliar and then try to label it as outside of God's way simply because you don't do it or aren't familiar with it is ridiculous. Again, "secular" or "New Age" is a label that people tend to apply to anything that's outside of their personal format/environment preference.

To the question of are we humanistic, again, it's a vague, ambiguous question. We would say we are humanistic in the Christian sense of the word: we do not deny the human aspects of Jesus Christ nor do we deny our human responsibility in being a faithful citizen of the kingdom. If by humanistic the questioner means that man somehow replaces God, then no, in no sense are we humanistic.

As to the question of whether we are masquerading underneath a nominally Christian garb-in other words, taking secular principles which are essentially self-actualization principles and then putting Christian language into them--that is at the opposite end of the spectrum of what we do. The orthopraxy that we invite people into speaks to the very heart of the essence of the Gospel, which is repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation.

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