I was blessed to have found Christ in January 1971 through the ministry of the Navigators, a Christian outreach ministry that started in 1930 when young Dawson Trotman took up the challenge to memorize Bible Scriptures on salvation from a Sunday school memorization contest. Though he wasn’t saved yet, he won the contest! Within the following week, the Holy Spirit used the scripture verses he memorized to lead him to Christ! He continued to memorize Scripture and then won a disciple who won another disciple for Christ. I’m writing this from memory what I heard 50 years ago. The things I heard when young in Christ have stuck with me.

After I received Christ as my Lord and Savior when attending an evening church service the Navigators brought me to, I began to attend the Navigators’ weekly Bible studies. After three months I came to the conclusion based on the Bible studies that I no longer needed to go to Catholic Mass. I realized from Navigator Bible study that what the Catholic priest was teaching and the very practice of the Mass was not in accordance with the Bible.

The Navigators were not preachers, they were teachers. Their Bible studies consisted of Bible verses and questions about the verse with multiple-choice answers. Reading and understanding the Bible verse led me to choose the right answer! I attended the Navigator fellowships and Bible studies in California and Japan from 1971 to 1973.

The Navigators put a great emphasis on knowing the Scriptures, memorizing Bible verses, and basing doctrine solely on what the Bible says, not on what some preacher says it says. I sometimes met some high-ranking leadership in the Navigators and never felt uncomfortable in their presence. They did not come across as know-it-all preachers but as simple followers of Jesus Christ. The good things I learned from the Navigators and the practice of memorizing and reviewing Scriptures continue with me to this very day. And my wife Tess is like-minded with me about the Scriptures being the basis of all sound doctrine.

We are thankful to have had a good pastor when we lived in Guam. He said some things we didn’t agree with, but they were very minor things. And he didn’t preach any Endtime doctrines from the pulpit, things we would not have not agreed with, things such as a 7-year Endtime scenario of the rise of the Antichrist who makes a peace-pact with Israel and allows them to rebuild their Temple. He may have believed that based on the doctrines of the church in the US mainland that sponsors him, but he didn’t teach it. And he did not demand that we hold to the eschatological doctrines of his home church for us to be a member of his church.

Is it within the authority of the average believers in Christ to question things that Bible teachers, pastors, and evangelists are teaching? The Bereans in the book of Acts sets the precedent to do so.

The Bereans didn’t just take the word of Paul or Silas, they checked it out with the Scriptures! If they took the time to check out if the great Apostle Paul’s teaching was correct or not by going to the Scriptures, I think it certainly behooves us to do the same. Do most Christians do that today? If they did, I don’t see how so many false doctrines can abound in present-day churches!

Let’s give some examples of incorrect doctrines of preachers I like before I get into ones I don’t like.

• John MacArthur in a sermon only 11 days ago at the time of this article gave a talk about “The Coming of a False Peace.” There is no phrase, “false peace” anywhere in the Bible! I know where he got that doctrine. It’s Dispensational Futurism from John Nelson Darby and C.I. Scofield. It’s what I was taught when still young in Christ. Former hippies called the first 3.5 years of the reign of a future Antichrist a “plastic peace.” It’s based on a false interpretation of Daniel 9:27. My hat is off to John MacArthur for many of his other sermons exposing sin in America, and for his defiance of unconstitutional COVID medical mandates and keeping his church open. But he’s off on his eschatology.
• Charles A. Jennings of Truth in History. We like his stance on Israel, eschatology, and the fact he believes all the gifts of the Spirit are relevant today. But last night we heard him teach the “Anglo-Israel” doctrine which says that the English are descendants of the tribes of Israel. How can they be when the Bible clearly says Israel is descended from Shem? The white European peoples are all descended from Japheth! English people are white! It was the descendants of Japheth, not Shem, who populated white Europe. It surprises me how pastor Jennings could teach such an error when he knows the Bible so well.
• Steve Gregg of the YouTube channel The Narrow Path. My wife and I think he’s a great Bible teacher, and he came out of Dispensationalism, but nevertheless, he doesn’t teach the Historicist interpretation of the Book of Revelation! I heard he even mocked it. That tells me he has not read the commentators of the Protestant Bible teachers of the past.
• Chuck Baldwin of Liberty Fellowship. My wife and I used to listen to him every week but we stopped when he began to teach the Preterist view of the Book of Revelation, namely that the Book of Revelation is all about the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in 70 AD! This is much worse than Steve Gregg’s view because it ignores the Great Whore, the Scarlet woman who rides the Beast of Revelation chapter 17, the Vatican’s worldwide covert government, the “Holy See”, the murder of Bible-believing followers of Jesus Christ through the centuries, the Woman who claims to be the true Bride of Christ but is actually a whore working for Satan! How Chuck Baldwin could be so misled as to not see that despite all his knowledge and education is shocking! He’s so right on other things including his views on the modern nation of Israel, and the correct interpretation of the Olivet Discourse of Matthew 24, Mark 13, and Luke 21.
• Christian J. Pinto of Noise of Thunder Radio. Tess and I love to listen to his podcasts, but sad to say he’s wrong about Israel. I heard him once say the 1948 restoration of Israel was a fulfillment of Bible prophecy. I hope he changed his position on that. We are excited to see his new documentary when it comes out, Jesuits in America.

And then there’s a bunch of popular preachers I don’t like and never listen to. Everything they teach is questionable. I’m talking about all the prosperity Gospel preachers such as Kenneth Copeland. You know who they are.

You might question me too and that’s fine with me. Today a man said a reference I quoted on an article did not have the information I said it has. I proved it does by taking a screenshot of the article and posting it as my reply.

I stand with the majority of the Protestant Reformers on all my views of the Bible on this website. There are some things from Calvin I don’t agree with, but I think his view of the Catholic Church was the same as mine.

Nobody’s perfect, right? I don’t claim to know it all. I like to listen to what others have to say, and then I test it with the Scriptures. I still like to listen to the above mentioned Bible teachers, but only on subjects I believe they are teaching correctly.

1 John 4:1  Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world.

For more on this subject, please see an article on an external website, Is it Wrong to Question My Pastor?. It contains many insights not covered here. Here are a couple of quotes from that article I like:

It is important for every individual in the church to have growing familiarity with the biblical word. We are to trust that the Holy Spirit will “guide us into all truth” (John 16:13). Posing questions about a pastor’s teaching is to take ownership of our spiritual growth. As Christians, we are to ensure that we can differentiate between “the spirit of God and the spirit of falsehood” (1 John 4:6). Authentic pastors, committed to their congregation’s spiritual growth, welcome such questions. Questions are seen as invitations to look at the biblical word in a deeper way. Authentic pastors see questions as an opportunity to journey together in faith and learning.

Toxic or abusive pastors, however, refuse to answer questions pertaining to their teaching. It is suggested that questioning a sermon is tantamount to questioning his or her spiritual authority. After all, they are the ones who have the biblical education (and understand the bible rightly); they are the ones charged with declaring God’s voice; they are the ones who God has called to the ministry. Instead of an invitation for growth, questions are considered obstructive. Abusive pastors equate God’s voice with their own.

This is no different than the attitude the priests and bishops of the Catholic Church have. I believe they are the Nicolaitans of Revelation 2:6.

But this thou hast, that thou hatest the deeds of the Nicolaitans, which I also hate.

One interpretation of the Nicolaitans I heard is the clergy who oppresses the laity. Not even the Apostles Peter or Paul had that authority. They wrote letters to the churches in various cities to advise them, but if those churches didn’t heed the apostle’s advice, they suffered the consequences of their choice. They weren’t bullied and forced to obey by an ecclesiastical hierarchy.

To sum up, the answer to the question in the title of this article is, absolutely yes!

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