The One World Church

During the June, 1999, Summer Solstice, the United Religions Initiative (URI) began the final stage to became the United Religions (UR). Attended by representatives from every religion around the world, this 1999 URI Global Summit put the final touches on the United Religions Charter, to be signed and implemented on June 26, 2000. Once ratified, the UR will become the world church according to its promoters.

Little known to even the evangelical Christian Church, the WRI has been steadily working since 1993 to establish a world church that will be structured in a manner similar to the United Nations. UR has been a longtime dream of Robert Muller, another mover and shaker within the UN. During his keynote speech to the 1997 Global Citizenship 2000 Youth Congress in Vancouver, BC, Muller revealed that, "My great personal dream is to get a tremendous alliance between all the major religions and the UN."

Muller has served as the right hand man to UN Secretary General’s U Thant, Kurt Waldheim and Javier Perez de Cuellar, as well as in numerous high ranking educational positions within UNESCO. Originally a Catholic, Muller became a student and practitioner of U Thant’s Eastern mysticism. In his book, New Genesis: Shaping a Global Spirituality, Muller asserts, "Peace will be impossible without the taming of fundamentalism through a United Religions that professes faithfulness only to the global spirituality and to the health of this planet." "What the world needs today," continues Muller, "is...the cosmic or divine laws which ought to regulate our behavior on the planet."

Muller used the 1993 Parliament of World Religions Conference to put his plans into motion. Attended by approximately 5,500 religious leaders from every religion and denomination, Muller called for the creation of a "permanent institution" to promote religious unity during his keynote address. To that end, the Parliament created an inner circle of religious authorities called the Assembly of Religious and Spiritual Leaders.

The Assembly immediately adopted an interfaith document drafted by Catholic theologian Hans Küng entitled Towards a Global Ethic, An Initial Declaration. The Global Ethic establishes a "common set of core values" that are based on "ancient guidelines for human behavior which are found in the teachings of the religions of the world and which are the condition for a sustainable world order." The ethic forms "an irrevocable, unconditional norm for all areas of life, for families and communities, for races, nations, and religions."

Following Muller’s lead, the Assembly also introduced the "United Religions Initiative," designed to be the vehicle for implementing the Global Ethic in coordination with the Earth Charter. Bishop William Swing of Grace Episcopal Cathedral in San Francisco was tapped to lead the effort. In a June 23, 1997, press release, Swing confirmed the UR’s ultimate purpose, "The URI—if successful—will be a spiritual United Nations."

By collaborating with Muller, the Gorbachev Foundation, the Vatican, the UN and the Temple of Understanding (see March, 1999, issue of DTT), Swing has brought the URI to fruition. The UR is to be functional on June 26, 2000, and fully operational by 2005.

The UR will be headquartered in San Francisco at the Presidio, along with the Gorbachev Foundation. Mikhail Gorbachev is fully supportive of the UR, noting on his Green Cross web page, that "we need a new system of values, a system of the organic unity between mankind and nature and the ethic of global responsibility." Green Cross, along with Maurice Strong’s Earth Council, is writing the Earth Charter to be the legal hammer after it is ratified in 2002 to enforce this pantheistic religion (see June, 1999, issue DTT).

Tragically, the evangelical Christian Church is blind to this emerging world church and the monumental Biblical implications it conveys. By reducing Jesus Christ to the level of Buddha and other avatars, the ER denies the deity of Jesus. Jesus proclaims to the world that, "I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live," and ‘‘I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me." (John 11: 25 and 14:6 KJV) Not only did Jesus claim to be the only way to God, heaven and eternal life, but he professed to be God himself by claiming in John 8:58 to be the great I AM of Exodus 3:14.

Either Jesus is who he claims he is, or he is a liar and a fraud. There is simply no middle ground. Jesus warns in Matthew 7:13-14 that all-inclusive efforts like UR lead to destruction, "wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which [enter]." Christianity, on the other hand, represents the narrow way or gate.

Such narrow minded, exclusionary beliefs will not be allowed by the new World Church. Küng, in his book Global Responsibility: In Search of a New World Ethic warns, "Any form of...church conservatism is to be rejected.... To put it bluntly: no regressive or repressive religion — whether Christian, Islamic, Jewish or of whatever provenance — has a long-term future."

The Biblically based Church has been served a warning. Comply, or be eliminated. But rather than cower in fear, the Church should be preparing itself to once again become the light on the hill, the hope of the world! V