We have managed to obtain a Hillsong Vision 2015 booklet. The theme this year is “A Dangerous Declaration”.

We couldn’t agree more. Can anyone else see why this Hillsong “declaration” is dangerous to Christianity?

Hillsong also published this on their website:

An Unusual Manifesto

2000 years ago, a young first century itinerant preaching from a backwater village in an insignificant corner of the roman empire, announces his own ‘unusual manifesto’, the ramifications of which continue to reverberate down the centuries. With a dangerous brevity, Jesus the ‘hinge of history’, supersedes the many thousands of words that come before and after when He boldly declared in the Sermon on the Mount:

“You have heard that it was said… but I say to you…” Matt 5

Jesus’ manifesto was unusual. The Sermon on the Mount offers a radically different take on the world… a dangerous declaration that upends the status quo and human nature by challenging the idea of “business as usual”. It was dangerous because it was and is so unusual… re-founding the world on love and selflessness instead of hate and self-interest.

As a church, we have never been about doing it the world’s way and we aren’t about to start now. We are about doing things Jesus’ way because we long to see “His will on earth as it is in heaven”. The Church is a preview of the age to come and the Sermon on the Mount forms the constitution of the alternative Kingdom Jesus came to establish.

Our task as the people of God, is to offer an attractive alternative, a new society exampled by the church, built on the grace of Christ’s love. Love is the scandal and the dangerous declaration that can make many people angry, yet is the only thing that can set a sin bound world free.

The Kingdom cannot be enforced by coercion, it must be embodied by God’s people. The reign of God exists wherever we are subject to HIM… where love and the fruit of the spirit are evident there we find the borders of the Kingdom.

The Kingdom of God is among you. – Luke 17:21

Jesus represents the possibility of an unusual kingdom, an unusual power, an unusual glory and an unusual peace. To declare Jesus as Lord/God and to live in the love and humility of the beatitudes is our dangerous declaration to a world desperately looking for an alternative. It is the announcement of a living, breathing kingdom of grace that unceasingly calls out to the ‘whosoever will come’.

Source: By Hillsong Team, An Unusual Manifesto, Hillsong, http://hillsong.com/blogs/collected/2015/february/an-unusual-manifesto#.VOBKnvmUeSo, Published 09/02/2015. (Accessed 15/02/2015.)