Former Maranatha Pastor Stars as Thomas Jefferson in Fox and Friends Segment
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Fri Mar 08, 2013 at 11:36:36 PM EST
I wasn't planning on playing Seven Degrees of Maranatha Campus Ministries this evening, but was instead perusing my usual array of news and opinion websites when I found this gem on Talking Points Memo: `Fox & Friends' Hosts Pretend Man Is Actually Thomas Jefferson.

According to TPM, Stephen McDowell, who comes across in the interview less like a Jefferson impersonator than a 21st century Christian Right talking head in a wig and early 19th century garb, is "president of Biblical Worldview University."  Biblical Worldview University is an arm of the Providence Foundation, which was originally started as a Maranatha subministry with then-MCM pastor McDowell in charge

For those who don't know, MCM was a "campus ministry" deeply connected with the rise of the dominionist right in the 1970s and 80s.  They disbanded in 1989, widely denounced even in evangelical Christian circles as an abusive cult.  Several descendant and offshoot organizations still exist today, including Every Nation and Providence Foundation, among others. (I am a walkaway from an Every Nation church.)

Their theology was (and is) a fusion of Latter Rain/Third Wave and Christian Reconstructionist forms of post-millennial dominionism. While former MCM leader Bob Weiner was (and still is) more Third Wave charismatic, other MCM offshoots including Providence Foundation skew more CR.

The Providence Foundation is a major contributor of American "history" textbooks to the homeschool movement--particularly America's Providential History.

And now they play presidents on national TV. Nice.


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Former Maranatha Pastor Stars as Thomas Jefferson in Fox and Friends Segment | 6 comments (6 topical, 0 hidden)
Still working campuses (none / 0)
My school is one of the ones that actually banned them (temporary) for the abuses they were committing, but as soon as the ban was lifted they came back.  Now there are multiple offshoots and "relatives" of MCM on campus.

You cut one head off, and another grows in its place.  Even the heads of the organization are like bad pennies - they keep popping up in strange and troubling places after being cut off.

by ArchaeoBob on Sat Mar 09, 2013 at 12:24:20 PM EST


I didn't know that about McDowell, (none / 0)
...that he came out of Maranatha. But I'd add, on the Maranatha/CR angle, that The Forerunner website has featured an extensive amount of CR material over the years.

by Bruce Wilson on Sun Mar 10, 2013 at 05:05:52 PM EST
He and Mark Beliles... (none / 0)
...headed the Providence Foundation for many years going back to the late 80s.  It was started as an MCM ministry I think only a year or two before they officially disbanded.  Bob Weiner talked about it in the final chapter of his 1988 tome, Take Dominion!

The guy who runs the Forerunner site took over editorship after Lee Grady left for Charisma.  I've always wondered if that move was a bit of a corporate parachute for Grady, whose stance continued to baffle me because on the one hand he would openly rebuke MCM's (and EN's) leadership abuses but on the other was close to EN's once-best-bud C. Peter Wagner, being an NAR "apostle" himself and all.  The Weiners retained the Forerunner for a while after the breakup and it's not connected at all (officially) with Every Nation or even anymore with the Weiners.  But it really does