The New Indigenous "Christian" Religion
by Sandy Simpson, 10/23/10

Nothing exemplifies the new indigenous "Christian" movement of people like Richard Twiss, Daniel Kikawa, Aloha Ke Akua, YWAM and other proponents so much as the following statement on the home page of the Aloha Ka Akua web site.

As Indigenous people, we need to embrace God as ours, and also know that God embraces us as His. . . just as we are.  Our goal is to provide indigenous people, missionaries and Christians with information, training and materials that show the true nature of Jesus; that his way is not to be a foreign religion that destroys people groups and their cultures, but one that brings people groups and their cultures to their highest fulfillment. (Aloha Ke Akua, home page as of 10/23/10, http://akaministries.tripod.com/aloha/)
Mike Oppenhiemer and I have written extensively on the neo-paganism of this movement, and you can find it on the WCGIP page of the web site or in our book entitled "Idolatry In Their Hearts".  If you wish to read up on their efforts to vilify mission work and ruin the Gospel message please familiarize yourself with what is going on.  I will hopefully not plow too much ground that has already been plowed with this article, but I felt I had to address the above statement by Aloha Ke Akua for the number of unbiblical ideas and lies with which they are trying to diaprax people.  I feel very sorry for many indigenous peoples in various cultures who are buying into this stuff without thinking through the ramifications.

(1) we need to embrace God as ours ... You need to understand what Daniel Kikawa and others of the WCGIP mean by this statement.  They do not mean that everyone is free to repent and believe when they hear the Gospel.  They mean that they present a "god" within the context of the various indigenous cultures that has been worshiped in the past as some kind of supreme being, thus they can claim it is truly their god and not an import from the Bible.  This is so silly because if their god is God and other gods are also God then this does away with the One true God eternally existing in Three Persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  What Kikawa and others are all about is getting people who want to be "Christians" from different cultures to make up their own mythology in order to prove that their cultures always worshiped the true God.  But that is patently false and they should know it by studying cultures and religions.  Just because God revealed Himself to His chosen people, Israel, does not now, in the dispensation of Jesus Christ, make Him unavailable to all cultures.  But by trying to sever the ties between the Gentile Christians and the Jewish people ends up cutting the branch from the tree (Rom. 11, Eph 3:6).  Read Foreign god’s as God, The God’s of the Nations are not God and Cultivating other gods.

(2) God embraces us as His. . . just as we are. ... Just as we are?  You mean as sinners who worshipped other gods and our own sinful lusts?  If we believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, Yeshua Ha'Meshiach, and repent of our sins then, as the song says, we can come "just as I am".  But God does not accept unrepentant sinners from any culture, including Israel, "just as they are".  This is why God had to send His only Son to die in our place and the Gospel must be preached for a person to come to a saving knowledge of Christ (Rom. 10:14-15).  Jesus Christ was born a Jew but came to die for the sins of anyone who will believe and repent upon believing the Gospel message.

(3) show the true nature of Jesus; ... When they talk about the "true nature of Jesus" they are not talking about the nature of Jesus Christ as defined in the Bible.  They are talking about another "Jesus" who has revealed himself in all religions and cultures from the beginning.  His "gospel" is seen in the stars and was not a mystery before the Apostles revealed it (Rom. 16:25, Eph. 3:6).  They also claim that there were ways for people to be reconciled to God quite apart from hearing the Gospel message as revealed to the Apostles.

“So these are clues that we felt God had left (the Hawaiian people) and evidence that He’s left as well as processes He has left in which our Hawaiian people can respond in a very natural way to God and really set things right between them and God. … A few years ago some friends and I were contemplating how we would be able to reach indigenous peoples and we thought that what was prevalent at that time was a misconception among, within the church of God's presence here in the islands.  The misconceptions that, as was expressed earlier, was that God didn't arrive until the missionaries arrived.  You know, and so when we started to look at this we started to look into our culture and see what things within our culture what God had originally intended for this particular group of people, Hawaiians.” (Leon Siu, Aloha Ke Akua, Word to the World with host Danny Lehmann, KLHT, 2001, show #544)
(4) his way is not to be a foreign religion that destroys people groups and their cultures, but one that brings people groups and their cultures to their highest fulfillment. ... This last statement shows their contempt for mission work.  They believe that preaching the Gospel to the whole world is actually destroying cultures and people groups.  But God's Son did not come to "bring people groups and their cultures to their highest fulfillment". He came to save sinners from every cultural and religious background.  He did not come to affirm cultures that are the constructs of men (Mark 7:8-9) and their false religions but He came to show people that they cannot be saved without Him.  When you take that away you take away any hope of salvation.