What do you get when you mix the hip celebrity culture with a pseudo-religious attempt to make yourself look and act all spiritual?

Hillsong!

Carl Lentz, the lead pastor of Hillsong Church in New York City was recently quoted in a Fox News article stating, “We don’t use the word ‘religion,’ because it’s hard to get people excited about religion, religion is dead. I don’t know anything about religion, I couldn’t help you. Religion has no power. But a relationship with God is a superpower.”

Of course this is what he would say, because his religion is dead. In fact, the entire, gospel-less motivational-speaking man-centered entertainment culture that is the Hillsong religion is dead.

However, true Christianity is a religion and it is alive and well.

Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.
Jame 1:27

This passage denotes exactly what the Christian religion should look like. Does this look like Hillsong? Does Hillsong look like it’s unstained from the world?

No. Hillsong is the embodiment of carnality that calls itself Christian.

The textbook definition of religion is “the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods,” and the second definition is “a particular system of faith and worship.” To say that you have a relationship with God apart from religion is to say that you have a relationship with God without a particular set of beliefs — and the Scriptures say you can’t know God apart from the truth about Him.