There's this Christian mega church in North Carolina. It's called Elevation Church and it's run by this guy Pastor Steven Furtick.
And he's in the news a lot, because he makes a lot of money and no one really knows where all this money is coming from.
But he was in the news recently,
because everyone found out that his church was participating in something called
Spontaneous Baptisms.
And basically, a lot of these mega churches,
they love putting up tally marks of how many people they've saved, and how many people they've baptized.
And one way to boost those numbers
is to peer pressure people into getting baptized, if they're not already.
And so, the way they did this, and the church actually put out an entire guide to help other churches learn how to do this,
is they said,
during a sermon,
you're basically going to tell everyone we have everything ready for you to get baptized right now.
And if you haven't been saved,
"we want you to stand up and come forward and we're going to save you right now and will give you the clothes you need to wear."
"And we will take pictures,
so that your family can have a record of this, and everything."
"So, come on up and get baptized now." And that's the spontaneity
to the whole thing.
But here's one of the problems with that.
It turns out in the guide,
it says, when you say that,
there should be volunteers planted in the audience
to automatically get up and lead the charge to get baptized.
Basically they have shills in the audience faking the baptism,
so that other people can be peer pressured into doing it as well.
And, I mean, that's just giving people like me ammo because it's like,
Are you really that unconvincing
that you have to plant people in the audience to get baptized?
Are your sermons so unconvincing that the only option you have left in your toolbox
is to plant people there so others will just follow them?
And it even got worse, because in the guidebook
it said, you know, when they finally come out to get baptized,
don't let the old people go first. Let the young people go first. So everyone thinks, "Oh, the young cool people want to get baptized."
"That'll really make me wanna get baptized."
And it's funny, because the few times they've done this at Elevation Church,
all of a sudden their baptism numbers went through the roof.
And of course, that's the sort of number they're going to throw in when they're
making a pitch to donors. Like,
"Look why you should give money to our church. Look at how many people got baptized here; look at how many people are saved."
And it's basically saying, "It's okay to lie,
as long as it's for Jesus."
But the whole thing-- I mean, yeah, it ought to give Christians
a bad feeling in their chest, but it also makes me a little disturbed because it just proves
that they're not really selling anything worth buying.
They're not giving you anything that's honestly worth changing your life over.
Because if they were honest, if they said, you know, "Here's why you should get saved and here's why you should get baptized,"
when they did that,
they'd have a couple of people, a handful of people do it every year. Nothing to brag about,
certainly, if you're a Christian.
But when they lie about it and they plant people in the audience and they fake it,
they have hundreds, maybe even thousands of people doing it.
And it just goes to show like these people are selling you a lie.
Why would you want to be a part of a church, or even a larger group of churches,
that would participate in this sort of thing,
when they're just demonstrating to you right up front
that they can't be honest about what it is they preach?
And why they want you to be a part of their faith?
The whole notion of spontaneous baptism just says
you can't give people time to think about whether they want to get baptized. You can't give them a choice.
You just gotta make him do it there and now without any thinking, only reacting.
Because I guess if you'd thought about whether you want to get baptized, you wouldn't do it.
You know, and if I were an honest person, I would say, "Well, if they don't wanna do it, they don't wanna do it."
But if I'm a pastor of this church, I would say, "Who cares? We need to boost our numbers. Let's just--
"Let's not give them a choice."
"Let's just put people next to them who'll stand up and get baptized and maybe it will coerce them into doing it."
I'm very tempted now, though, to send a bunch of atheists to Elevation Church
and then in the middle of the sermon, maybe, all those atheists can just stand up and "spontaneously" walkout of the service.
And maybe everyone else will follow, since that's apparently what they do in North Carolina.
My name is Hemant Mehta and I write at FriendlyAtheist.com
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