A Commentary on the Cornerstone Festival
The following commentary was given by Pastor Ralph Ovadal on the July 7, 2006 edition of the "Heart of the Matter" broadcast. Please keep in mind that a good deal of this commentary was spontaneous.

I have a couple of excerpts taken off the Cornerstone web site. These come from descriptions about two of the bands that played this year at Cornerstone, supposedly for the glory of God and to witness to unbelievers. Let me just read these excerpts. The first one: "Their debut album, 'Terminate Damnation' is sure to make you an instant believer. Hasn't it been too long since you've had guitar solos, blast beats and grind vocals in your metal?! Blending elements of progressive metal, thrash, hardcore, and death metal?!" That's supposed to be a Christian band, you see.

Here's another one: "Raw Rock unto all for the systematic decomposition of the composition. Raw Rock unto all for the requiem of emaciated bride, who had been given privy to a great becoming, yet lay languid, therefore, squandering the hope for this miracle. Raw Rock unto all for the broken spines of the notes now shattered under our black heels. Raw Rock will kill forever and ever, amen." Sounds a little demonic to me. It is demonic!

And we have a sample of music from one of the bands that—I think they played at Cornerstone last year. This is off the Cornerstone web site. Listen to this. [Listen to the music excerpt here.] Believe me, that man—that's actually off of a video—that young man was thrashing around and jerking and strutting like Mick Jagger, and that's a sample of what goes on at Cornerstone.

And in addition to such heathen, demonic music, Cornerstone also includes all sorts of worldly, even heathenish features such as improper, gross, worldly films; a Labyrinth prayer walk; and so many more New-Age type things. But Rev. Hamilton and I covered that pretty well in a past program. You can access that on our archives.

I will just add that at this year's Cornerstone, they also featured a Day of the Dead series of events and films. Of course, this is all to witness for Christ, they say. The films included The Body Snatcher, I Walked with a Zombie, and Curse of the Demon.

The Cornerstone Festival in Bushnell was birthed by the so-called Jesus People USA. It's been going on for twenty-two years. It's been explained to me by Cornerstone devotees that the films and the various activities are all to glorify God and to witness to any unsaved souls who may attend the festival since, of course, they won't listen to gospel preaching, we're told. But this event is simply a manifestation of the fruit of the neo-evangelical, seeker-sensitive, purpose-driven dribble that passes for preaching and teaching these days.

Well, a number of us from PCC staged a witness in front of the Cornerstone gates this past Tuesday, which was the opening day of this year's festival. We spent six hours holding signs, giving out a special flyer, interacting one-on-one with hundreds of Cornerstone-goers, and also, in my case, preaching quite a bit. And believe me, there was plenty to preach about. But I want to give you a report on this event, just a little sampling of some things I could share.

Now Cornerstone provided us with not only a look at the fruit of the sort of teaching I just mentioned but also with a penetrating example of the spirituality and the theology, if you will, of a young generation of professing Christians in America who don't even believe—it was clear—don't even believe in objective truth. There is no objective truth with these people. You should've heard them argue. And these people have rejected the preaching of the gospel as ineffective, even though God Himself has told us it is the "power of God unto salvation" to all who "believeth," and God has told us that "faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God." The Bible also tells us that the gospel is foolishness to those who are perishing. There must have been an awful lot of people perishing at Cornerstone this past week by the looks of it and by the sounds of it.

Now I want to just give you a brief report on our time at Cornerstone because the things we heard from so-called Christian young people, many of them tattooed and pierced and some dressed very immodestly—the things we heard, the things we saw—this is a real call for us to defend the gospel and contend for the faith and be concerned about young people and come against neo-evangelicalism and modernism and the other -isms that are corrupting so many young people in the name of Christ.

At the end of the day, some of us thought of Isaiah chapter eight, verse twenty: "To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them."

We were on site at Cornerstone for six hours this past Tuesday. The set-up is that there is a long drive going up to the main gates. We posted a team to hand out our special flyer at the beginning of the drive where it leaves the main road. Then further on and closer to the main gate we posted a series of large signs. The first one read, "Cornerstone dishonors God." A little bit further down the line, we had a sign reading, "Love not the world, 1 John 2:15." And then finally, we had "Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness, Psalm 29:2."

The flyer we printed and handed out by the hundreds, by the way, can be found at pccmonroe.org. It's titled "Cornerstone Dishonors the 'Head of the Corner.'" And in it, we used the two verses just mentioned that we used on the signs and also several others including:

• 1 Corinthians 6:20—"For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God's."
• 1 Peter 2:6—"Wherefore also it is contained in the scripture, Behold, I lay in Sion a chief corner stone, elect, precious: and he that believeth on him shall not be confounded."
• Luke 20:17-18—"And he beheld them, and said, What is this then that is written, The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner? Whosoever shall fall upon that stone shall be broken; but on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder."

Now as I said, we distributed many hundreds of those flyers; and we can literally say that some of the people getting them ate them up—defiantly, arrogantly, and just to make a scene, they literally ate the flyers. But in one case, some parents who read the flyer went back into Cornerstone to try to get their teenagers out. And their children laughed at them and stayed. This is the lawlessness engendered by Cornerstone and the whole Christian rock culture.

We spent our six hours at Cornerstone defending the gospel and God's honor against the worldly presuppositions, and even hostility, of hundreds upon hundreds of teenagers and young adults who, though they claimed to love the Lord, came out to rebuke and challenge us. And when I say that we were defending the gospel and the honor of God, I am not exaggerating—quite the opposite.

I do want to say there were a some young people who politely disagreed with us, but they were a small minority.

To talk to the rest was reminiscent of defending and preaching the gospel in front of a government school or even a sodomite carnival, quite frankly. We heard the Lord and His Word misrepresented the same ways. We heard the same false gospels. We experienced the same disrespect and vitriol. We saw the same deceptions in a group of people who love themselves and the world far more than the truth of God's Word. We saw a group of people who have more faith in craftiness and worldly wisdom than in the Word and the work of the Holy Spirit. These people have been discipled not to use the gospel as it's written, not to put their trust in the work of the Holy Spirit. These people have been discipled to not defend immutable truth. These people have been discipled to love the world.

And how did these Christian rock fans from around the nation, even the world, greet us with our biblical signs and biblical literature and biblical preaching? Well, we had things thrown at us. In one case an individual made an obscene gesture at each of us. Several young people held up packs of cigarettes to taunt us. Several times, cars swerved at us. Young people screamed mocking comments out their windows or just screamed. Several times, we were called faggots. We were told to get a life. Some shouted, "Cornerstone rules!" One individual—and I think very truthfully—chanted, "Me! Me! Me!" Many crumpled our flyers up and threw them at us. We noted one car had written on a window, "Caution: Hot babes on board." The occupants of another car held a sign out the window for us to read. It said, "First stop Cornerstone. Next stop hell."

And the many young people who gathered around to talk to us were no better. I mean, the ones in the cars were like that; the ones on foot that came back, of course, were the same way for the most part. Many vehemently defended Christians having multiple piercings in various areas of their body, defended being tattooed, defended even being dressed scantily—all, of course, in the name of reaching the world and identifying with the world. One young person blasphemously defended piercing by saying, "Jesus was pierced," referring to His death on the cross.

The young people just as vehemently defended the most extreme rock music, saying it does glorify God no matter how the performer is dressed or acts and even when the lyrics have nothing to do with the Lord or His Word. Others said, "Well, some of that music, I don't like it as much—that real hard-core stuff, but there's some other music that's better"; and so therefore, everything's justified.

Referring to a past performer at Cornerstone, a number of young people said they had no problem with performers using the f-word in their songs. Others defended the use of profanity by saying a word could mean different things to different people. You see what I mean about no objective truth with these people? One middle-aged, long-term Cornerstoner backed up her daughter who insisted it was all right to use God's name in vain, after doing so several times in the form of "Oh ---," and you know the rest.

As I said earlier, this is a so-called Christian generation which is increasingly rejecting immutable, objective truth, just like the rest of the world. But no wonder when so many of their neo-evangelical pastors so glibly ignore or render their own interpretation for so much of God's immutable Word. The young are being taught to treat God's Word with contempt or even totally ignore it in favor of following a false Jesus who panders to their carnal opinions, wants, and needs.

We were told over and over by Cornerstoners that all that is necessary to glorify God is to use in a way you and others enjoy the talents He has given you, no matter how you use them. One girl said she could glorify God by laying in the road.

Jesus said, "For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh." The hearts of many were revealed to us at Cornerstone this past Tuesday as we spent six hours defending the gospel, contending for the faith, and battling against the devil for the hearts and souls of thousands upon thousands of deceived young people, a vast majority of which are false converts who are being comforted on the road to hell, comforted that they're really Christians.

Now the most shocking thing of our entire day was the utter ignorance of the Bible displayed by these young professing Christians who swarmed around us to take us to task for supposedly misrepresenting Cornerstone.

Those of us on the PCC side made heavy use of the Scriptures to show why such features of Cornerstone as the Mick-Jager-wanna-bes strutting and jerking spasmodically and screaming on the stage to ear-splitting music are so at odds with what the Bible says about honoring God. Up until the time of this commentary, an example of that performance which you just heard—that sort of performance was proudly posted on the Cornerstone web site at cornerstonefestival.com. After our ministry at Cornerstone, it will be interesting to see if they are more discrete in revealing what goes on there.

During our ministry at Cornerstone, the defenders of hard rock and ungodly dress made heavy use of phrases such as "That's the only way young people can be reached," or "That's what we like," or "That's what young people relate to," or "God doesn't care what you look like or how you act; He only cares about your heart."

But our opponents made almost no use—not even a misuse—of the Scriptures. They did not know the Scriptures. They didn't even know how to misuse them, many of them, because they didn't know the Scriptures at all. It's like they had never cracked open a Bible. I am not exaggerating. They came out and said, "We're Christians," but they didn't know the Scriptures at all. I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that I didn't hear more than three or four Scripture verses quoted the entire day I was there preaching and debating and contending for the faith with these people—and this in spite of the fact I constantly pushed the young people to give me biblical basis, give me a biblical basis for these excuses for the goings-on at Cornerstone. Get away from all this subjective stuff; give me Bible.

I asked one smug young man who claimed to have attended seminary to just quote two verses of the Scriptures—I mean, just quote them, even if it's not perfectly quoted; just quote two verses of the Scriptures other than the ones on our signs. Well, after a long, hard time of thought, he gave out the only one he could think of: "Jesus wept." That's it. That was it, and believe me there are witnesses to verify this, and it wasn't out of the ordinary.

In fact, some of the young people made comments about the Bible in this way. They said, "I'm not into that," talking about the Bible; or "God speaks apart from the Bible—by the Spirit, through music, in other ways."

We were repeatedly and often told that just preaching the gospel, handing out gospel tracts, and holding gospel signs is a totally ineffective way to reach people—ineffective. You can't reach young people for Christ that way. We were repeatedly told quoting the Bible "pushes people away from Christ." We were literally told "the gospel is ineffective these days." We were even told that we just simply cannot reach the lost young for Christ unless we look like them. In fact, I was mockingly told, "No one is going to listen to a guy in a button-down shirt and dungarees." That's the way the tattooed, multiple pierced, weirdly dressed, supposed follower of Jesus put it. Now I don't know if I was wearing dungarees or what I was wearing; I was wearing just a pair of nice pants, I thought.

When repeatedly challenged to justify their arguments for Cornerstone with Scripture, some confidently quoted non-existent verses. I mean, for instance, to counter our "Love not the world" sign, one young person said, "God made the world, and it was good." So you're supposed to love the world. Another up-and-coming Christian apologist firmly insisted the Word of God commands, "Be conformed to the world." Another quoted this from her Bible—it's not from the true Bible—"God's Word will not return sterile." A pink-haired, very angry girl who gave us back our flyer confidently stated, "Jesus said, 'Come as you are.'"

One of my personal favorites—I'm being facetious but—is a young man who stated without batting an eye, "Paul said, 'When in Rome, do as the Romans do.'" He, of course, stated that or supposedly quoted that from the Bible to justify how the Cornerstone people were acting, what they were singing, how they were looking.

One young person insisted to me that when the ark was brought to Jerusalem, King David ripped off his shirt and was doing cartwheels in front of it. He was trying to justify the antics up on the stage at Cornerstone. I'm not making this stuff up, and that's what's so troubling.

Proverbs 29:9 says, "If a wise man contendeth with a foolish man, whether he rage or laugh, there is no rest." Some of the Cornerstone defenders simply turned to laughing with contempt at us. Some definitely raged at us, including one of the few middle-aged rockers to whom we spoke who, as I debated with him—it turned into a debate—would respond, "Big deal," when I quoted from the Scriptures. I mean, his main defense was his charge that I am a legalist. You've heard that before, haven't you? They don't know what a legalist is, do they? He also said that Christians should dress like the culture and that persons living in other lands where nudity is the norm could and should remain nude. His justification was to say, "Well, Paul said we should be all things to all people." I don't think that man should be around thousands of young people, do you—especially young ladies that are not dressed very well?

One young man told me he is studying to be a Vineyard pastor; and after talking to him, I could certainly believe he was studying to be a Vineyard pastor—if you know anything about the Vineyard movement. I asked this future Vineyard pastor what sort of doctrine he held to and if he could explain any biblical doctrine to me since he was close to being a pastor, he said. Well, this brought nothing but sort of a haughty laugh, an above-it-all laugh. Of course, this man has doctrine; of course, he has a sound knowledge of biblical doctrine. So I asked him, "Well, could you briefly explain justification?" Well, then he scoffed and wouldn't answer. So I said to him, "Could you simply point me to a place in the Bible where I could learn about justification?" Now that triggered some real anger. I was told I am a right-wing, conservative fascist—those were the words used—who pushes kids away from Christ. And at one point, he sneered at me, "You don't even know my name." And I said, "You are right; I don't. For all I know it could be Beelzebub." At that point, the man's eyes narrowed; his face began twitching under both eyes; and his true nature really did come out.

Now our time at the Cornerstone Festival reminded us of Proverbs 30:11-13: "There is a generation that curseth their father, and doth not bless their mother. There is a generation that are pure in their own eyes, and yet is not washed from their filthiness. There is a generation, O how lofty are their eyes! and their eyelids are lifted up."

Having said that, the people who really need to be rebuked over the Cornerstone carnival are the older people in charge who are leading thousands upon thousands upon thousands of young people down such a destructive path and discipling a new generation of false converts.

And while we're at it, some other people that need to be taken to task are these neo-evangelical churches with their rock 'n roll bands. We have seen the fruit of this manifested in one place at Cornerstone. It's quite a unique opportunity to see tens of thousands of young people come together and just manifest the fruit of this rock 'n roll culture, this so-called contemporary Christian music. I mean, what can we say to those older people that organize Cornerstone, except, Woe to you, and, See you next year?

Now a couple of more things on Cornerstone before we push on to other issues. We did not leave that place without encouragement. Do we ever leave the scene of ministry, the scene of a contest for the gospel and the faith of Christ without encouragement? Of course not. The Lord's glory and honor were defended, and the faith of the gospel was vigorously contended for. Thousands upon thousands of young people had the biblical truth shared with them, and we are just going to trust the Lord of the harvest to bring in the increase. We're sure that He will. Our hearts go out to those young people.

And there were some young people who came under great conviction about various matters, including, I believe, their own salvation, their own souls, through the preaching of the Word, including one contentious young man who finally hung his head—he was finally silent—his eyes filled with tears, and he said, "I'm involved in so many bad things. I'm not doing well." And I was able to take him to the side and have a nice, gentle talk with him about the Lord and about sanctification and his relationship with the Lord.

Now there were also young people who said they don't agree with certain things in Cornerstone after we pointed those things out. And some were going to raise issues inside the Cornerstone gates.

And it was reported to us that we stirred up much conversation inside Cornerstone; and again, we trust the Holy Spirit was at work and will continue to be at work in that regard.

Also, several of us were interviewed by a Christian rock—as though we can put those two terms together—a Christian rock magazine from California and by the makers of a documentary on Cornerstone. Now, Lord willing, those interviews will also propagate truth.

And our presence was noted by local residents. One local Christian brother came by to thank us for being there. The year before, he had visited Cornerstone and been appalled by such things as the Gothic influence and the rap music performance he had witnessed. He told me, "Don't let the Cornerstone people intimidate you." We won't, and Lord willing, we will be back.

And I do want to finish with this note. I believe there are people—some people—who work with the Cornerstone Festival that are sincere in their misguided efforts. On the other hand, I believe some of the Cornerstone people—many of the Cornerstone people—are just plain evil. I don't care how good they look to some people. They're just plain evil, and they're working for that being who does appear at times as an angel of light.

Either way, the Cornerstone Festival is a graphic manifestation of the evil fruit of the corrupt "lure the sinner to Jesus by acting, looking, and talking like the world" evangelism. Our time at Cornerstone just gave us such a penetrating look into the fruit of that sort of evangelism.

And I want to tell you, I came away hating even more the neo-evangelical, seeker-sensitive, purpose-driven approach that passes for preaching today. And I came away with an even greater urgency to warn others against the charismatic error that lures the unwary away from the Word of God and teaches them to trust their feelings and lying spirits and teaches the lie that God is doing a new thing and continues to give new revelation. That error has seeped out of the charismatic movement and into even non-charismatic, neo-evangelical churches. Some of that is due to all the ecumenism that goes on. Some of that is due to the refusal of people to separate from unbiblical doctrine and those that preach it. Now it is producing a generation of "Christian" young people—and we put Christians in quotes—who do not even believe in objective truth and who are shockingly illiterate, even the ones that are perhaps true converts, when it comes to the Word of God.

Please, please pray for these young people; and please stand against the theology and the church which is deceiving and ruining them. Stand for the Word of God; put on the full armor of God; and in this evil day, stand.

Photos from our witness at Cornerstone

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