Is Lying Part of the Great Commission?

I’m a missionary. You would naturally assume that I’m interested in seeing souls redeemed by the power of Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection . . . and you would be right in that assumption. One factor that I struggle with, however, is the expectation by some pastors in the USA that I should have a minimum of 1,000 people hourly saying "the sinner’s prayer." (That could be slight exaggeration, but not by much.) It seems that we have lost the focus on salvation, baptistm and lifelong discipleship and simply are playing the "numbers game" of seeing how many people we can get to parrot after us some "magic words" – which often (usually?) do not reflect true repentance and belief of the heart.

A number of years ago, a pastor of a church that supported us financially at the time, shared an example of a yearly missionary report that he seemed to think all missionaries should hold as their standard. All the statistics and figures included in that report escape me at the present but I do remember the claim that over 40,000 people were saved under his ministry in one year (in the interest of fairness, the missionary [whom we’ll call Missionary X] did not claim to have personally won them all himself) and over 3,000 were baptized.

The first red flag is raised by the slight difference between 40,000 and 3,000. Now, I’m not that great at math . . . but even I can see a hint of a problem here. Any missionary work that fails in getting well over 90% of its "converts" to take the most basic step in discipleship and Christian obedience is not carrying out the Great Commission.

The second red flag, at least for me, is the high possibility that those numbers are "padded" (falsified might be more accurate). I told the pastor who shared the report with me something to this effect (the exact words have long since been forgotten): "He [Missionary X] is lying, and it bothers me that dishonest missionaries are lifted up, while honest ones are criticized." By the pastor’s reaction, I believe I would have been better off attacking the Apostle Paul than questioning the integrity of Missionary X.

Since then, another missionary who happened to have served in the same country as Missionary X, provided me with more information: when groups from the USA would visit Missionary X’s ministry, they would be loaded up on buses and driven out to villages. A Christian film would be shown to the villagers, and then those who wanted to accept Christ as Savior were invited to raise their hands. Raised hands would be counted (with no personal counseling taking place, according to the missionary telling me the story) and then all the Americans would climb back on the buses and leave. The number of raised hands would be recorded as the number of "conversions" at that village. Furthermore, my own brother (who is also a missionary) told me he had heard intriguing rumors of different groups from the USA being bused out by Missionary X’s ministry to the same villages that had been visited by previous groups and the same number of "conversions" would happen once more in that same village. It’s enough to make one wonder. . . .

The Missionary X I’ve been talking about is an INDEPENDENT, FUNDAMENTALIST, CONSERVATIVE BAPTIST (I’m also an Independent, Fundamentalist, Conservative Baptist – but I don’t particularly desire to be identified with that branch of our movement). These unethical, unbiblical, and sinful methods are not limited to some Fundamentalists, however. Other, more "progressive" groups, are guilty of the same crime. Sometime back, I came across an article by a Warren Smith. After doing some searching on the web, I found out that he is the head of World Newspaper Publishing (http://www.worldnewspaperpublishing.com). I also discovered that he is a friend of Dan Burrell, pastor of Northside Baptist Church in Charlotte, North Carolina (http://www.northsidebaptistchurch.net). I enjoy reading Burrell’s writings on his blog (http://www.danburrell.com) and have come to respect him and his insights.

Anyway, the Warren Smith article to which I referred is titled "Body-Count Evangelism." I’ve posted it here for your consideration and meditation (and no, lying is not part of the Great Commission – it's simply a product of our sinful nature) :

COMMENTARY--- Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church, in Lake Forest, Calif., and author of "The Purpose Driven Life," which has sold 25-million copies, is perhaps the most famous evangelical pastor in America. He writes often about church growth, leadership, and related issues. Here's something Warren wrote for the Mar. 16, 2004, "Leadership Journal":

"Three key responsibilities of every pastor are to discern where (and how) God's Spirit is moving in our culture and time, prepare your congregation for that movement, and cooperate with it to reach people Jesus died for. I call it 'surfing spiritual waves' in The Purpose Driven Church, and it's the reason Saddleback has grown to 23,500 on weekends in 24 years.. You don't criticize a wave; you just ride it as best you can. When Mel Gibson showed me his film, The Passion of The Christ, last year, I.knew a huge wave-a spiritual tsunami-would hit when the film debuted on February 25 [2004], and we began praying and preparing to surf it."

When I read this passage, I was taken aback. The celebrity name dropping, the appeal to size as an indication of God's blessing, the propagation of an extra-biblical theory ("spiritual waves") as a sign of God's working, the pre-emptive strike against critics - these are heresies and logical fallacies pervasive in the evangelical church today, all rolled into a single paragraph.

Warren continues:

"We booked 47 theater screens for members to take their lost friends to. Kay [Warren, Rick's wife] and I personally invited over a thousand lost community leaders of Orange County to a VIP premiere showing, including every mayor, congressman, superintendent of schools, other community leaders, and four billionaires. The results? Over 600 unchurched community leaders attended our VIP showing; 892 friends of members were saved during the two-week sermon series. Over 600 new small groups were formed, and our average attendance increased by 3,000. That's catching a wave!"

When I read this, I wondered: Even setting aside the theological and philosophical problems, how could these numbers possibly be true? There was something about them that just didn't make sense. So I turned to "Outreach" magazine, which each year publishes lists of the largest and fastest growing churches. The 2005 list (which covered the period about which Warren writes) had Saddleback's weekly attendance at 23,194. The 2006 "Outreach" list had Saddleback at 20,595. That's a drop of nearly 3000. And - at least according to these numbers, which were reported to "Outreach" by the church itself - at no time did Saddleback have the 23,500 that Warren asserted.

"Outreach" reports the largest churches and the fastest growing churches on adjacent pages in the magazine. So I flipped the page and discovered something even more puzzling. Even though Saddleback's weekly attendance fell by 3000, it reported a "gain" of 1,149 for the year! How does a church that loses 3000 report a gain of over 1,000? Maybe they planted a new church. That's an admirable thing, but even if true why should Saddleback be reporting the numbers of another church as its own?

In the "Leadership Journal" article, Warren also touted his church's ability to attract young people, saying that "the largest Gen-X church in America is Saddleback with over 20,000 names under 29 on our church roll." Again, how could a church with only 21,000 members have more than 20,000 under the age of 30? And even if that is true, is it a good thing to have so thoroughly "shut out" those over 30? How could such a congregation possibly represent the true community - or "koininia" - spoken of in the New Testament?

Some pastors are growing wise to these self-aggrandizing perversions of truth. Dan Burrell is the pastor of Northside Baptist Church in Charlotte, N.C. Burrell says he has grown disillusioned with the efforts of what I and others are calling the Christian-Industrial Complex to get him to participate in Body-Count Evangelism. Interestingly, the movie "The Passion," which provided the context for Rick Warren's comments, provided the context for Burrell's epiphany.

"I will admit that I got seduced with Mel Gibson's 'The Passion of the Christ,'" Burrell writes. "I was convinced enough that it had evangelistic value that I bought out five screens at a local theatre before its public release and we invited scores of non-believers to join us in watching the movie and discussing it afterwards. I recall one 'decision,' but no conversions, after all the effort and I learned my lesson. From that point forward, I've been pretty much immunized against 'partnering' with Hollywood. Upon further reflection, I've reached the decision that pastors are actually being asked not to partner with, but to pimp for Hollywood."

Burrell makes the important distinction between "decisions" and "conversions." If that distinction seems a false one, consider this: The American Church Research Project reports that in 2000, only 18.7 percent of the U.S. population attended a Christian church on an average Sunday. Ten years earlier, in 1990, that percentage was 20.4. In other words, the percentage of churchgoers in America is going down, not up.

Of course, Warren is not alone in making outrageous claims. The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association claimed in its 2005 annual report that 3.2-million people had made "decisions" for Christ as a result of its ministries. Emergent church leaders, Willow Creekers, and others constantly propagate the claim that they are reaching unchurched people. I'm not saying that some of them are not doing good work, but the most basic demographic analysis suggests strongly that many of their claims cannot possibly be true. Indeed, it reminds me of the one-liner going around during the church-roll padding scandal of the Southern Baptist Convention a few years ago: "There are more Southern Baptists than there are people."

The Southern Baptists took steps to clean up their scandal. I can only hope that Rick Warren and other megachurch and parachurch ministries choose to exercise more care and integrity in the assessment of and reporting of their impact. Because the inescapable conclusion is this: the Body of Christ in America is not growing - either numerically or spiritually. It is, relatively speaking, shrinking -- burdened by crass commercialism, a lack of integrity, and the quest for power and glory of celebrity preachers. An all but inescapable second conclusion is this: the rest of us, if we do not speak out against the lies of those who practice "body-count evangelism," are standing by just as Paul stood by when he guarded the cloaks of those who stoned Stephen. We, likewise, are guarding this cloak of falsehood - subjecting the Body of Christ to a modern stoning of its own.

Comments

[Kim]

I enjoyed the post and I agree with you.