Purpose
More than 60 years ago athiest George Orwell wrote, “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.” The national media’s rejection of biblical truth has created a climate for fake news to flourish.
The corrupting influence of sin has made its way into the religious media world giving voice to the prosperity gospel and other destructive heresies.
The Christian Sentinel enters this darkened media world to share truth and encouragement. Our objective is to keep the living saints informed on current events, to defend persecuted believers, to equip the followers of Jesus with a biblical worldview and to oppose destructive heresies contaminating the Church.
Therefore, the Christian Sentinel will shine the light of God’s Word upon all the seductive lying narratives of the enemy so that the nature of the beast is exposed and loses its power to deceive the elect.
“Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful. And let us consider one another in order to stir up love and good works” — Hebrews 10:23-24
“And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them.” – Ephesian 5:11
History
The original quarterly, the Christian Sentinel, was in print for five years, from 1992 to 1996, at which time it became an online periodical until about 2009. It was part of the ministry of Eastern Christian Outreach (EChO), a non-profit organization in Philadelphia that specialized in evangelizing those ensnared by cults and shepherding groups that were wreaking havoc in the eastern seaboard in the 1980s.
“EChO was founded in 1984… as an outreach to evangelize the cults. The first president was journalist Bill Alnor. Meanwhile on the West Coast the former Jackie Miller was involved in her own ministry, publishing a newsletter called The New Age Alert. Bill and Jackie met in 1987 and were married later that year by the late Dr. Walter Martin, combining their extensive files and resource materials.” [From the first issue of the Christian Sentinel]
Bill and Jackie wrote for various Christian publications such as Eternity Magazine, Christianity Today, Religion Report, RNS (Religious News Service) and others before starting their own publication. Bill was the news editor of the CRI Journal for several years under Dr. Martin’s leadership until his passing and the Alnors wore out their welcome. Bill completed his education, earned his PhD at Temple University, and became a tenure-track journalism professor while still working with his wife on the Christian Sentinel online. When he was diagnosed with cancer, he ended the online updates while Jackie turned her attention to her own research, writing books, and starting her blogtalk radio program on Rapture Ready Radio. Bill lost his battle with cancer in 2011.
The Christian Sentinel had some groundbreaking investigative reports that had mixed reviews, depending upon who you ask, at a time when few journalists in the church would report on anything controversial. Titles included, “Did Benny Hinn Repent?”; “Televangelist Morris Cerullo Caught Faking Healing”; “TBN’s Joseph Good Denies the Trinity”; “Holy Laughter: Is it Biblical?”; and “The Cult of Sophia.”
The relaunched Christian Sentinel, under the direction of Jackie Alnor and Barry Bowen, both seasoned Christian journalists and researchers, will carry on the tradition of keeping the Body of Christ informed on issues in the Church without regard to political correctness.
The Team
Jackie Alnor is a veteran researcher, writer, teacher and defender of the faith.
She has a BA degree from Texas A&M University in the field of
Communications/Media and was trained in apologetics at the former Simon
Greenleaf School of Law (now Trinity Seminary extension). She is the author of
two books, The Fleecing of Christianity, and The United States of Israel, as well
as chapters in anthology books: On the Wings of Grace Alone and The
Challenge of Church Discipline Today. She is the editor and helped write and
research her late husband’s four books, as credited in the acknowledgment page
– Soothsayers of the Second Advent, UFOs in the New Age, UFO Cults in the
New Millennium, and Heaven Can’t Wait.
Jackie was the director of Rapture Ready Radio (a spin-off of Rapture
Ready dot com), and hosted her own show for ten years, The Scattered Sheep
Report, formerly called Apostasy Alert. She continues to publish a free monthly
newsletter to subscribers under the same name in which she also posts links that
track the birth pangs Jesus warned of leading up to His soon return.
She is a monthly guest on the podcast, Prophetic News, heard on various online
apps such as Spreaker, where along with host Susan Puzio, they discuss current
events in light of Bible prophecy.
She taught news and opinion writing at Olivet University, a Bible college in San
Francisco. She monitors trends in the church that corrupt the truth of the
Christian faith. In the mid-1980s, the then Jackie Miller published a newsletter
called “New Age Alert” to raise awareness of the infiltration of occultic ideas
creeping into the church. In the 1990s, along with her late husband, journalism
professor Dr. William Alnor, she co-founded ‘The Christian Sentinel,’
that tracks religious trends and educates the church on new movements
and the world of religious publishing and broadcasting.
She is the past secretary/treasurer of EMNR (Evangelical Ministries to New
Religions) and helped coordinate their annual conferences and was featured in
workshops. Jackie has appeared on national television and radio discussing
televangelism, the prosperity gospel, and end times deception. Under the
auspices of her networking association, Women on the Watch, she coordinated
an annual conference attended by hundreds of women who share her concern
for deception in the end times.
She wrote, produced and hosted the highly acclaimed 1999 video presentation,
“The Great Apostasy: The Lost Sign” in an effort to expose the influence
“Christian Television” has played in spreading the great falling away. This led to
joining the team that produced the comedy segment, Godstuff, for Comedy
Central’s The Daily Show, as a paid researcher, consultant.
Mrs. Alnor has been monitoring, taping, and documenting religious programming
since the 1980s and her clips have been used by many online ministries for
primary documentation. She believes that God has called women, as well as
men, to be grounded in the Word, cognizant of prophetic signs of the times, and
promote sound doctrine at a time when that is losing popularity in the church.
You can find Jackie on Facebook, where she posts newsworthy links where
subscribers can discuss items they won’t post to their own pages. And she can
be found on YouTube and Rumble.
As the son of a Baptist minister, Barry Bowen grew up reading Christian magazines and realized that Christian media had great potential to cover topics rarely discussed in Sunday School or the pulpit. He graduated from Nicholls State University in 1993 with a BA degree in Mass Communications. In 2000 he founded the website Christian Headlines and published the news aggregator for 11 years while also working in the Christian film industry as a publicist and production assistant. He currently posts prayer lists at the aggregator Prayer News. For three years he worked as blog manager at The Christian Post. He also served as a third-party whistleblower digging up corporation and property records during Senator Grassley’s inquiry into tax avoidance and fraud committed by televangelists. Bowen is writing a book about religious financial fraud and hopes to release What Would Judas Do? sometime in 2017.