Agape Press reports that a "soul-winning" contest is underway to see who can come up with the best and most creative "methods" of winning converts.
The infamous late Rev. Jack Hyles of Indiana, was always holding contests for his Bible college students. Some inner city bus kids who came to the church were baptized multpile times because the students got points for these "conversions".
I have seen what some of these "soul-winning" sorties look like. One of my sons used to visit a church on Wednesdays because he had friends at the youth group of this very conservative Baptist church. One Wednesday night the kids were taken out to go soul-winning. This meant they were taken to a subdivision and let lose on the unsuspecting neighbors of the church. They knocked on doors, just at dinner hour, and the kids would ask, "Do you know you're going to heaven? If not you're going to hell." One harried woman screamed that she was burning the family's pork chops and slammed the door in their faces. One zealous soul-winner informed a Presbyterian woman that she was going to hell because she had been baptized as a child. Despite her claims of being born-again, the 14-year-old "soul winner", never having been taught about the covenantal view of baptism, continued to maintain that her soul was in a perilous state until the woman sent the kids packing. Tramping across flower beds and laughing uproariously between their "soul-winning" visits, they managed to offend an entire zip code that evening.
I also was visited at the radio studios by a zealous soul-winning pastor who said that his church had been thrown out of one of the area's largest malls and he wanted me to go on the air to defend him against this outrage. He pulled out a notebook that was lined with the names and addresses of all of their "conquests" from the week before. All these are converts, he told me authoritatively. He said that they had had hundreds of conversions over the last year at Mayfair Mall. Knowing that his church was made up of about 30 people in a make-shift facility, I asked him where the converts all were in that they clearly weren't coming to his church for discipleship. He didn't have an answer for that one.
You do not collect souls like scalps for your belt. Clever ideas and creative methods don't win souls. The only true conversions are those brought about by the work of the Holy Spirit. This contest is offensive in the extreme.
No comments:
Post a Comment