In the crossing of the fine line from the tribes of the one body of Christ to the tribal cultures and methods of pagan cultures, we see an assimilation of bringing the profane practices of the tribal cultures into the body of Christ. In fact, the tribal concept of correlation to the pagan mentalities is so popular in our society today. We see this from the 'drum circles of inner manhood' where men go out into the woods and enact out their primitive instincts to rediscover themselves by beating on a drum to the popularity of the television show Survivor where the entire tribal concept is shown to us once a week. No matter how advanced our civilization becomes, there is still an internal part of us that is fascinated with the primitive to the point where we think that by partaking of the primitive, we take a break from the culture which we live in. However in many cases, many of the actions of the primitive we partake in has its roots traced back to basic polytheistic idolatry where we pay homage to 'the gods' instead of God Almighty.

I am seeing this tribal mentality play out more and more in many of these newly formed 'third wave' churches. It appears that more value is placed on the experiences, the dance, and the worship instead of the actual move of God. In many cases, the move of God is judged by the experiences. If the worship was not vibrant, God did not move, etc. Why is there a quest to simulate while Christianizing the pagan when our God calls us out to be a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, and a peculiar people called to show forth praises to Him (God) who called us out of darkness into his marvelous light? Are we at the point of gasping for straws to do something 'so different' from the other churches and other 'tribes' to where we will sell out the Gospel by becoming like the pagan cultures instead of the peculiar people? Just because one will take something that is inherently pagan and place a bible verse on it does not 'sanitize' and 'purify' the pagan ritual. There is a big problem when people come together in 'prophetic percussion circles' to beat on congas and speak in tongues to drum up a Word of God and to 'get caught up' in 'the Spirit'. I have seen this firsthand in person and online and because I do sometimes play percussion instruments I was even asked to participate in one of these drum circles in which I vehemently declined. I have to go on record now and state that I do not believe the drums as a musical instrument are wrong. I have to state this because many fundamentalists will not see the root problem of the creeping paganism and blame the drums themselves. Therefore, the drums are seen as the pagan itself and not the sensual spirit that is the driving force behind it. I have played percussion instruments in the praise and worship environment before, but as a working musician within the worship group to play skillfully with a loud noise in order to edify and praise Jesus and help lead people to a pure worship experience, not as group of percussionists beating rhythms for a "word from the Lord" for people to dance to calling it "a mystical experience in the Spirit".

Why are we lowering our standards of being a chosen generation to act like the pagans? We need to be separate from the world system and bring forth Christ and his Great Commission. In fact, the tribal mentality is not the "Christianization" of the pagan and a cheap substitute; this is paganism itself in action. I see no desire in the 'tribal' movements to come out of and resist the fleshly manifestations of totems, taboos, tattoos, transgressions, and temptations that surround us, affect us, and prevent us from pure Holy Spirit Temple living where our body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. All I see is the conversion and the sanitizing of these totems taboos, transgressions etc. into a "Christianized' version. For some reason they pride themselves in their rebellion against the norm thinking they are the only ones who know God and the only ones to experience a Spiritual breakthrough. Where the scriptures state that God is a God of order, the disorderly flow of the service is considered to be more annointed. Where the fundamentalists believed the extreme that to be of God it had to be diametrically different from the world, the Third Wave / Third Day church philosophy has gone to the other extreme where to be God, it has to be like the world but be diametrically opposite to the way the "Pharisee Church" (any other church but theirs) did church and worship. People are encouraged to get drunk in the Spirit, encouraged to get high on Jesus, and like a famous Carman song encouraged to get 'addicted to Jesus'. I have news for the people out there who are walking out of the tribal paganism they have disguised as Christianity. Jesus does not want us drunk, high, nor addicted. Jesus wants us sober, vigilant, and free to set other captives free. When we attempt to convert the experiences that pays homage from 'the gods' to 'God' all we will get is strange fires that will backlash and burn us instead of a Holy Fire that consumes us. The tribal mentalities trying to manifest in today's Christianity is fleshly and draws more attention to the self than to Jesus.

There is an ever-increasing fascination in the Third Wave church to act and worship with dances and customs very similar to the Native American Indians. I find it interesting that the Third day concept is hung up on the 'tribal', a.k.a. tribal worship, tribal drumming, tribal music, tribal family, tribal dancing, etc. I have seen both locally and online via Real Audio where Christians who do these 'tribal dances', etc. and called it God. It was definitely fleshly manifestations and the people danced like Indians at a powwow and they actually called this "the rain dance" in order for "the rain" "the wind", and other metaphorical metaphysical stuff to happen in worship. It was very pagan in appearance as the people dressed like the Native Americans doing this tribal dancing calling it praise and worship unto God. A Native American Christian told me in regards to the third wave worship that "Well, this is great. My people have been dancing our prayers in worship for thousands of years, and your people called it demonic and damned our drums, rattles, and flutes as instruments of the Devil, still won't let us bring them into church, and here y'all are dancing your prayers in worship! Will wonders ever cease?" I am not 'damning' the flutes and drums, etc. I am calling out the dances because the dances were done in homage to and in the name of foreign Gods that were placed before God Almighty breaking one of the Ten Commandments. However, our Bible does tell us to dance during the worship service that is pleasing unto the Lord. However, one can easily distinguish the spirit that is behind the pagan tribal dance and the Spirit that is behind an anointed dance unto the Lord. The dance of the paganism and tribal urges appeases only the flesh. The dance in the Spirit unto the Lord ministers to our spiritual well being and edifies the church. For too long we have taught people that converting the energies of the actions is ok but when I was saved and washed in the blood of Jesus, I was changed into a new creation. The changes in and of themselves were not permanent, but the change inside was permanent!

I have never seen this before but a person e-mailed me stating that the Christians in her area enacted a 'peace pole' and it 'grieved her spirit'. Since I had never heard of a peace pole, I asked this lady to further elaborate on this concept. She replied with an e-mail explaining and I verified through some Internet research that the original peace poles are a Buddhist tradition where handcrafted monuments (they look like obelisks and miniature Washington Monuments) are erected the world over as an international symbol of peace. Their purpose is to spread the message "MAY PEACE PREVAIL ON EARTH" and act as a constant reminder for us to visualize and pray for world peace. Sounds good but the postmodern concept of all roads lead to heaven and world peace manifests here. I am grieved also. What some Christians are doing with the peace poles are taking this pole, writing down Bible Verses, and writing apologies in the name of identificational repentance for shameful acts Christians did to other cultures in the name of God and then erect the pole as a symbol of peace and repentance. Because the pole is hollow, many Christians have written down messages and prayers of peace and placed them inside the hollow obelisk. In fact, if one studies the creation of the obelisk, it can be traced back to the Egyptian god Osiris where Osiris is said to have been killed by his jealous brother Typhon by trickery. Osiris was nailed in a chest and cast into the Nile. Later, his dead body was cast up at Byblos in Phoenicia and left at the foot of a Tamarind tree. Isis retrieved his body only to lose it again to the jealous brother who then cut him into fourteen pieces, which he scattered around the kingdom. Isis again went in search of Osiris and found all the body parts except the phallus (male penis), that had been eaten by a crab in the Nile. Isis then made a phallus that was to be sacred (origin of the Obelisk). She embalmed him thus claiming restoration and gave rise to the concept that the immortality of the soul was dependent on the preservation of the body. Osiris was afterward known as the Lord of the Underworld. He was also god of the Sun and god of fertility, worshipped in orgiastic sex rituals." In fact, this is important in relation to the tribal mentality because the obelisk and it's relationship to Osiris is used deeply as a symbol of seduction and power in one of the most demonic tribes of all that grips many powerful and influential Christians called Freemasonry. In fact, the symbols and name of Osiris is called out in many internal and secret rituals of the Freemasons mixed with some Christian scriptures making this a noxious sight in the Lord.

Amazing. We go deeper into the primitive and into the ungodly acts traced back into perverted sexual rituals of totems, taboos, and tattoos which in turn leads to temple prostitution. Where in the old days temple prostitution was a literal act of selling sex in the temple and having sex with prostitutes as a sacrifice of worship to the gods, temple prostitution of today is actually the selling out of our Christianity and holiness for pagan rituals that appease our flesh because these rituals are eventually tied deeply to sexuality and the outworking of sensual expression and therefore defiling the temple of the Holy Spirit. If one researches this further, one will also notice that in many of these third wave churches, there is an extreme attack on the family and marriage covenant in reference to sexual immorality and adultery. We are seeing more and more people of the Pentecostal / Charismatic / Word of Faith / Riverite / Third Wave movements experience the sins of pornography, adultery, perverted sexual practices, basic human selfishness deemed as 'irreconcilable differences', and a desire for the sensuality of the things of the flesh and not the fruit of the Spirit. There are divorces happening to Christians of all denominations but the explosion and prevalent place of many of these divorces are within the Pentecostal, etc. groups mentioned earlier. In fact, many of the early founders and current prominent ministers of this movement were married and later on divorced (Aimee Semple McPherson, Maria Woodworth-Etter, Kathryn Kuhlman, Richard Roberts, Clarence McClendon,). Could it just be that these problems are not the fault of Christian men, as many Christian groups like to constantly blame but can be traced and attributed to a worship style that is based deeply into the sensuality of appeasing the flesh and a selfish motive of pleasing ourselves instead of worshipping Christ in Spirit and in truth? Where Pentecostals / Charismatics love to blame everything on 'dat big ole debilllllllllll', the Pentecostal movement from the very beginning has a history of divorce and dysfunction from many of it's leaders. The appeasing of the flesh goes from the tribal worship experience to the sins of marital infidelity to the selfishness, rudeness, arrogance, and dominionist mentalities that manifest. In fact, the sensuality is basically sin and also poor personal choices. Instead of crucifying our flesh, we feed our flesh. Instead of dying daily to the flesh, we try to keep it alive and worship the flesh instead of the Spirit. Where other sins are sins outside our body, sexual sins are sins done against the body according to Paul in 1 Corinthians 6:12-20 which state:

12 All things are lawful for me, but all things are not helpful. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be brought under the power of any. 13Foods for the stomach and the stomach for foods, but God will destroy both it and them. Now the body is not for sexual immorality but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body. 14And God both raised up the Lord and will also raise us up by His power. 15Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a harlot? Certainly not! 16Or do you not know that he who is joined to a harlot is one body with her? For "the two," He says, "shall become one flesh." 17But he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit with Him. 18Flee sexual immorality. Every sin that a man does is outside the body, but he who commits sexual immorality sins against his own body. 19 Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own? 20For you were bought at a price; therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God's.

In fact, in 1 Corinthians 6:12-20, we see Paul ask the question (verse 15) of since our bodies are members of Christ, should we make them members of a harlot? Of course Paul answers 'Certainly Not'. He then tells us (verse 16) that by joining ourselves with a harlot, we become one flesh with a harlot for 'the two shall become one flesh'. I wish to ask a rhetorical question here. Since many Christians have engaged in 'Christianized' paganism of taking the rituals that paid homage to other gods and 'converting' them to a sanitized version of the ritual. Therefore we now know that this is a parallel to temple prostitution when we sold out God for 'gods' and it's deep traces to sexuality. Does this mean that the paganized church that expressed themselves via worship in the pagan customs leading to temple prostitution have now made themselves and their worship a member of spiritual harlotry therefore making their worship and themselves become one in body with a system of spiritual harlotry and therefore became 'one flesh' with themselves and their worship with a harlot system appeasing the sensual instead of joining themselves to the Lord to become one spirit with him? Have we now become one with something (the fleshly manifestation of tribalism) that the Scriptures tell us to set ourselves apart from? It looks like we have. It looks like many of these Third Wave / Riverite churches have allowed themselves to prostitute themselves and become one with paganism in their worship therefore sinning against their own (globally speaking) body of Christ.

How do we separate ourselves from the sensuality of the flesh and from the pagan tribalism that surrounds us? Paul gives us a good start in verse eighteen when he tells us to "Flee sexual immorality". Like Joseph did in Genesis 39:1-12, if you need to physically run from sensuality and sexual sins then by all means run. Paul also tells us to flee from youthful lusts, die daily to the flesh and to crucify the flesh. As we flee sexual immorality in the physical sense, we need to flee the root of sensuality from our worship and offer up a sacrifice of praise that is acceptable to God. Like Gideon who chopped down the asherah poles dedicated to Baal, we need to chop down our 'peace poles' and totems we erect to cast down the sensuality of Baal from our midst. Like the true psalmists that offered up the sweet incense of praise and worship through both music and dance, we need to kill out the pagan rituals that we have profanely called worship that desire us to become one with and make the little leaven leaveneth the whole lump. Like the idolatry to the many gods many of these tribal worship rituals have become, we are guilty of making the 'worship of worship' a god that exalted itself above God Almighty. It is when we cast down the tribalisms of totems, taboos, transgressions, and tattoos that we allowed to infiltrate worship by fleeing from them that we will be able to see that our body and the body of Christ is the temple of the Holy Spirit who dwells within us. We are told in verse 20 to glorify God in our body and in our spirit, which belong to God. Therefore, it is time to sever ties with the illicit relationships we have had with the tribalisms that allowed us to prostitute the temple of the Holy Spirit and clean out the temple to offer sacrifices of praise, not sacrifices of sensuality and fleshly manifestations.

Click here for part four of this article.