God used the wonderful ministry of the Walk to Emmaus as an instrument of magnificent change in my own life.  God sent it into my life during a time when He was already at work in a magnificent way.  It came one month after I had been so transformed by God that I had left liberal theology behind as the demon of darkness that it is and embraced fully conservative evangelical theology as it emerges from the Bible as the inerrant, infallible and fully sufficient Word of God.  God was already teaching me so much when I made my Walk to Emmaus and that wonderful weekend was just fuel for the fire that God had started.  It triggered within me a desire to have others enjoy this experience so I immediately became a part of the Emmaus Community and began to lead the way for others to have the kind of experience that I had enjoyed.  It was my great privilege and wonderful delight to see God work in the lives of  the “pilgrims” during the weekend experience.  That is why the words that follow are so hard to write.

The Walk to Emmaus is based on a sound biblical model that has been tested over time.  The weekend flows on the basis of the model or plan for the weekend.  The weekend is not designed for evangelism and not even really for edification; it is designed to develop leaders for the church who will be taken by the Spirit of God through the Word of God into deeper dimensions of delight in God during the three day Walk to Emmaus.  The weekend is a pattern that was designed to be used of God to build up the local church and to encourage pastors, not to produce super-saints who return to their churches to confront their pastors and to change their churches.  But whenever an Emmaus Community begins to tweak the model or to sponsor as pilgrims people who are not already leaders in the churches, the model is in trouble.  The path too often trod in the past by those who have gone before us begins to emerge.  It looks like this:  The Walk to Emmaus is a place to which immature believers are sent and in some cases even those who are not believers at all, and the measure of the manifestation of the Spirit becomes emotional outpourings including charismatic contrivances like being slain in the spirit or speaking in tongues, only one of which is biblical and it is the proclamation of the Gospel in a language that is not native to the speaker but is known among the language of the world and  is permitted only when one who speaks that language is present to interpret.  When the model is tweaked and the measure of meaning becomes emotional outpourings and charismatic contrivances, the Walk to Emmaus becomes a travesty that can in fact produce heresy.

When I was actively involved in the Walk to Emmaus I heard a pastor talk about what I wrote about in the paragraph above.  I thought that he surely must be a patent liberal or paranoid.  I could not see that happening.  And then I saw it and it grieved me.  What it produces is people who go on a “walk” only to return and think that true Christianity comes through the Walk to Emmaus.  They make Emmaus their church and measure all of life in the church by how excited we get in church.  They see worship as praying down the spirit and then participating in a party atmosphere of praise that includes everything but those elements that truly constitute genuine worship.  Some of these churches that have become weekly gatherings of a perverted Walk to Emmaus model sing a lot and preach and teach almost not at all so that what is the heart of genuine biblical worship is gone.  And preachers who don’t participate in this kind of party atmosphere are seen as men who either need to go on the Walk to Emmaus or leave the church, and these folks are willing to help them do either.  This state of affairs is both sad and sinful and those who would think this way don’t need to walk to Emmaus; they need to walk southeast from there about seven miles until they arrive at a little hill called Calvary.  You can’t go to Emmaus until you have been to Calvary and some of what I hear and see in the little part of the world in which I live makes me sad and mad; people who have been to Emmaus and want everybody to go and want to educate or eliminate those who haven’t been.  Such people need to take a hike.  They don’t need to take anything with them.  They need to go empty to Calvary in repentance where they might just receive a true baptism in the Holy Spirit that always kills pride and brings humility and love to life.

I loved my Walk to Emmaus.  I grieve over what I have seen happening and it began even while I was working walks.  I hope that it has all changed by now and the community is back to the model.  It is too good a gift of God to be perverted by those who in the name of being led by the Spirit just want to do their own thing for their own glory so that people will praise them.  Maybe Calvary is where I need to go even again today because the One who shed His blood there for me can heal the hurts in the body when the body makes a mockery of such beauty as is found in the Walk to Emmaus.

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