By Reese Currie, Compass Distributors
I was at a Southern Baptist Bible teaching conference recently where it was revealed that 80% of professions of faith in Christ come before the age of 18. Of those who profess faith, only 20% will do so in a church that is generally considered Christian. The other 80% will make their professions in either the Mormons or the Jehovah's Witnesses cults. Since neither of these organizations teaches the truth about Christ or God, these are false professions by deceived people.
Some people would dismiss that as "itching ears" among the young people, but that is not true. Here are my ideas about what the modern Christian church is doing wrong that is causing young people to run to the cults.
The Jehovah's Witnesses say that a conspiracy has been in place since 300 AD to drown out the Christian faith by destroying the original Bible manuscripts and replacing them with heretical fakes modified to support the Trinity doctrine and hell. Mormons similarly claim that all Bible manuscripts are unreliable. Both deny that God has preserved His Word in Scripture.
It seems astounding that supposedly Christian churches in the mainstream support this conspiracy theory mentality. However, to support their unwillingness to recognize certain traditions and practices as being wrong, liberal churches heartily endorse the notion that the Bible has not come down to us intact. Some would suggest that the basic text of the Bible was lost due to late modification, but has now been restored (lower criticism), while others would suggest that the Bible even in its original state was full of lies and falsehoods (higher criticism).
Lower criticism maintains that through copying and some church-directed doctrinal modification, some errors crept into the Bible but they are all easily identified and removed. Most Bible versions have had text removed by lower critics. Since 1881, most versions have been based on the work of lower critics. The ASV, NIV, NASB, RSV, NRSV, and a plethora of paraphrases have all been based on critical work. (The Jehovah’s Witnesses NWT is based on a critical text.)
Higher criticism maintains that the Bible was never a true account in the first place. It is odd that many higher critics remain in the church when they believe so many of the churches’ fundamental doctrines are false. The only motive I can comprehend is that they are willing to support the basic principles of Christianity, like being kind to your neighbor, as a good life philosophy although there is no salvation in it.
Both positions support the same basic conspiracy theory mentality shared by the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Mormons. When young people look at the churches, they see a group that is willing to live with a conspiracy, but in the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons, they see groups that are willing to expose the conspiracy and reject it.
The truth is, there was no conspiracy in the first place. The Waldenses, Anabaptists and Eastern Orthodox did not compare and revise their texts with those of the Roman Catholics. Yet, the majority of the texts held by all of these groups are in full agreement. As for the charge that the Bible is not authentic in the first place, you have to understand that the text was first introduced to a land in which many people were eyewitnesses to events recorded in it. What made the miracles in the Bible believable in the first century was not that they were recorded in the Bible, but that so many people remembered them actually happening.
Young people who are really seeking God don't want to be entertained. They want to learn about God. The Jehovah's Witnesses do not endorse even musical instruments in worship; all the singing is a capella. The "sermons" are notably long and boring recitations of materials exclusively from The Watchtower. This seems to have no adverse effect on their ability to draw in young people, so it follows logically that entertainment is not the key to bringing young people into the church.
My own church's outreach program to young people is seriously flawed because it doesn't recognize that seeking God is serious business to most young people. They try to reach them with repetitive, spiritually meaningless contemporary music, and attempt to entertain them with a travesty called "creative ministry," skits and dances that are designed mainly to entertain but also to convey a small, simple spiritual message. Unfortunately, some of the creative ministry skits and interpretive dances fail to show proper reverence for God. I know of people who came to our church, witnessed "creative ministry" in action, and never returned, turned off mightily by what they had witnessed.
Some churches in our area have had better success than my church by plying the young people with extremely loud music. My partner in ministry Harold Kemp and I went to visit a Nazarene church to see how they were drawing so many young people. We decided against going inside in order to preserve our hearing, the music was that loud. I have no doubt that young people are truly attracted to extremely loud music, but that is not owing to spiritual motivation. It works equally well for bars, for instance. I would say what the churches get with this strategy is a complement of uncommitted young people who will forever lack theological understanding, and probably disenchanted older people.
I am a Baptist, and I know why I am a Baptist. Do you know why you are whatever denomination you are? Have you ever been told from the pulpit why you should attend that kind of church? Every Jehovah’s Witness or Mormon is told routinely why their church is best.
I am a Baptist because, following an investigation that included three complete readings of the Bible, I believe all five distinctive Baptist beliefs, and I believe the Baptist practice is closest to the model of the first century church. The five distinctive Baptist beliefs in a nutshell are: 1) Jesus Christ is the only head of the church. 2) The Holy Scriptures are authoritative in all matters of faith and practice. 3) The church is composed only of believers who have borne witness to their faith through believer’s baptism. 4) All believers have equal access to God through the mediator Jesus Christ (priesthood of the believer). 5) The church should not be controlled by the state, nor should the church control the state (this is called the separation of church and state).
My answer is not “my parents went there so I go there” (neither of my parents, nor anyone in my entire family line has ever been a Baptist but me). I have no respect for that answer even from a fellow Baptist. I think all people should research and know why they attend the church they attend, or if learning there is no Biblical basis, changing denominations until there is a Biblical basis for your attendance.
Repentance is the only way to come to know God. We cannot know God unless we have repented. Actually, if we have repented, it is impossible for us not to come to know God eventually, for God grants us that ability to repent, and God finishes every work He starts.
This is affirmed in Scripture. 2 Timothy 2:24-26 says, "And a servant of the Lord must not quarrel but be gentle to all, able to teach, patient, in humility correcting those who are in opposition, if God perhaps will grant them repentance, so that they may know the truth, and that they may come to their senses and escape the snare of the devil, having been taken captive by him to do his will."
If you repent, you may know the truth about God. If you know the truth about God, you will not go into the Jehovah's Witnesses or the Mormons. But most churches teach people to "just accept Christ" without giving them any idea of what that means. Many of their members never know God, because they are never told they need to repent of their sins.
Everyone with any spiritual insight at all knows you can't just go on in sin and be a follower of God. Unfortunately, in many local situations, only the cults will actually tell the young people that. The problem is, they still don't really preach repentance. Rather, the cults teach that you can do better on your own. They pooh-pooh being born again or claim that being born again only means baptism. Without your salvation already in hand, baptism is just a way of getting really wet. The cults all claim your own strength is needed to get to salvation, and you have to do certain good works to attain salvation, like go door to door peddling tracts and books for your multi-million dollar cult. The Jehovah's Witnesses say salvation is available only to those who associate with their organization. Mormons have an universalist salvation doctrine in which they believe they will attain godhood for their having become Mormons and other people will simply have eternal life regardless of whether they believed in Jesus Christ.
Their followers are never told, "But we are all like an unclean thing, And all our righteousnesses are like filthy rags; We all fade as a leaf, And our iniquities, like the wind, Have taken us away" (Isaiah 64:6). Believing themselves righteous because of their good works and their association with the cult, they are never given the opportunity to trust Jesus Christ alone for their salvation. They feel it is important to have a role in their own salvation, and that is what causes them to fall.
I truly do not believe that enhanced entertainment, dumbed down Bible versions that lose half the message, or shortened sermons are the stuff that causes young people to come to Christ. I truly believe that the preaching the full gospel message of repentance and faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior is the only possible route we can take to bring any person, young or old, into the fold.
We may be young or we may be old, but if we are Christians, the Spirit that abides in us is ageless, existing since before time began. We absolutely have to learn that the One who resides in us is the same age in all of us, and that we are not as different as we seem to think. We must recognize that preaching the full gospel message has worked in every age since Jesus began and there is no reason for that to change now.
Why Are the Cults Winning? Copyright © 1999 by Compass Distributors
All Scripture taken from The Holy Bible, New King James Version, (Nashville, Tennessee: Thomas Nelson, Inc.) 1982.