In many churches today, there is a deeply disturbing trend that takes place within the church in reference to their city. Many churches have now substituted or added to the techniques for Spiritual Warfare in the name of fulfilling the Great Commission. Instead of seeing how the city has been destroyed by the common problems of urban plight, instead of reading the newspapers and watching the nightly news, and instead of gaining a realistic perspective on deep problems that keeps people bound, Christianity warfare "specialists" have trivialized their cities into a reality of the board game "Risk". In trivializing their cities, the problems existent in their society can be broken down into "zones" of neighborhoods where the problems are located.

In a nutshell:

Spiritual mapping is "The process of collating and putting spiritual information concerning a region or people on a map. The data gathered is used in spiritual warfare to seize that region or people group from the enemy." Spiritual mapping, according to the spiritual mappers is like having a bright light focused on an otherwise dimly lit area. This concept is supposed to enlighten other Christians in order to see how the enemy is strategizing and exposes Satan's hidden agenda for that particular region or people grouping.

In other words, it is like a "spiritualized seek and find" puzzle. Where a seek and find puzzle has letters placed in a matrix to where you have to look, search, analyze, and find words within these letters. The spiritual seek and find specialist has this city that is bound in a matrix and that he or she sees the problems of this city in front of their eyes, but the solutions are "spiritually hidden" only to be discovered by "great revelation" given by the Holy Spirit and only to be accomplished by the Spirit of the Lord. Therefore, all these pieces of physical logistics are then forwarded to God (like he does not know) and these people expect God to link them together spiritually in order to fight a war.

In theory, when you have the "map" completed, spiritual leaders in one accord, and warfare implemented, then the demonic forces would be dismantled and stripped of their power--the gospel would prevail and we would take our whole city for God.

This sounds real good to the ears. There are numerous webpages dealing with this topic online. There are numerous ministries that will teach you how to map or do the mapping for you. There is even a "Global Warfare Center" in Colorado that is spiritually mapping planet Earth in order to do warfare. In fact, this concept is so popular in my part of the country that there is a webpage devoted to the statewide spiritual mapping of every city in our state exposing all the demons and looking for people to map and fight. In theory, people are supposed to be set free, evangelism can now take place, Christians are in unity, etc. But there is one major problem here. It is not scriptural. Nowhere in the scriptures does it tell us that in order to win our cities we have to discern our cities or parts of our city with the help of demographics, history, culture, habits, etc. in order to obtain "knowledge" before we can even begin spiritual warfare. According to the spiritual warfare and spiritual mapping experts, spiritual mapping and the data gathering techniques are not the actual act of spiritual warfare. Spiritual mapping is the mandated prerequisite to the act of spiritual warfare.

The Bible does talk about proper spiritual warfare and the tools needed to fight spiritual warfare. The Bible also talks about generational curses. However, the Bible never states that people did certain acts because their cities had curses on them forcing them to do these acts. Either there were generational curses on the people, sin was present, or there was demonic possession and influence. In my article entitled Warfare Gone Wacko (which is readable on this webpage by clicking on the link in the Table of Contents), I stated and will state again that "Jesus and Paul DID NOT! go out looking for demons. The scriptures clearly tells us that the demons came out to Jesus and Paul." in order to manifest. We really do not have to go looking for demons. When a Child of God is so annointed in the Holy Spirit and blessed by God, he or she does not have to go looking for demons. The demons are so stupid enough to go out and APPROACH the annointed children of God and manifest their demonic activity in front of them..

As I also stated in my article entitled Warfare Gone Wacko, "Why is there a increased fascination with spiritual warfare. Very simple! There is an increased fascination with the paranormal and the supernatural. Look at the popularity of the TV show The X-Files. We are fascinated by what we cannot physically see in the natural. The TV show, The X-Files, exposes a world of paranormal activity, supernatural fascinations, and conspiracy theories every week to millions of viewers. In a world where the paranormal, supernatural, and conspiracy theories exist, it becomes easier and easier to unjustly blame the paranormal, supernatural, and conspiracies for some of our everyday problems. There are some problems that are due to generational curses, demonic oppression, etc that has to be dealt spiritually and not physically." However, not all problems are spiritual. In fact, the majority of our everyday problems are attributed to the poor choices that we choose to make. You see, many people now use the spiritual mapping, the spiritual warfare, and the X-files type of conspiracy thinking to alleviate their city's problems and oppressions from the mentality of "I have a bad habit. I must take responsibility for my habit. and I need to defeat this problem and become victorious" to the denial and escapist mentality of "Some external spiritual force beyond my scope of natural reach is forcing me to do these actions beyond my control (a.k.a. The Devil made me do it)". Such logic de-emphasizes our own participation in the rebellion against God. In concentrating on finding out the various forms of "territorial" demonic attachments and focusing our attention on them, we ignore the fact that all too often the enemy is us via our own freewill choice of sin. Some explore this reality, but by and large the enemy is externalized, enabling us to avoid responsibility for our sin. If the enemy is both inside (e.g., we need to repent) and outside, methodologies that ignore the inside are doomed to failure in the long run. because we have failed to deal with the root problem at hand, the personal choices of personal people.

Thomas White in his book Breaking Strongholds: How Spiritual Warfare Sets Captives Free endorses Biblically based spiritual warfare, but offers this interesting point to consider:

"How can we know if the negative influence in a given spiritual environment originates primarily from the heavenlies downward or from the corrupt leaders hearts of men outward? Before we plunge into projects designed to weaken 'territorial spirits' (we hope to be agents of positive change for the populace) we must consider the possibility that the greater bondage may rest with the wickedness of human hearts."

Here is part of the problem, the focus is external and not internal. The Old Covenant dealt with external acts of sacrifice while the New Covenant dealt with internal motives of the heart driven by the battle of good versus evil.

Click here for part two of "Christian Cartography".