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STEALING SHEEP FROM THE SHIITES

I want you to be forewarned right now – because I’m going to use a risky word in just a moment. It’s not dirty as comedian George Carlin would define it, so this radio station doesn’t need to get a censorship beep machine ready, but in Christian circles, this particular “p” word has fallen on hard times. And here it is: proselytizing. Maybe that brings to mind young men with short haircuts and short-sleeved white shirts, going door to door on their bikes. Perhaps it conjures up a picture of a very happy young person at the airport, offering to sell you flowers or a very big book from their spiritual “leader.” Or . . . maybe it makes you think of a certain radio preacher whose last name begins with “M,” who’s always trying to talk his listeners into signing up for the Discover Bible Course.

Is it good to proselytize? Does God want us to not only go to the airport where the Moonies are witnessing, but to get on planes at the airport and take the gospel to distant lands? There’s a very strong feeling these days of: “Why not leave well enough alone?” Buddhists in Thailand are happy being Buddhists; that’s been their culture for many centuries. Why travel over there and try to start up a Christian church?

Back in 1993, my friend Mark Finley was over in the Soviet Union, doing a five-week evangelistic series of meetings in Moscow’s Olympic Stadium. There were a good ten to fifteen thousand people attending, but the strangest thing happened on opening night and following. A young lady came to the platform with a large bouquet of roses, and for a second Mark thought, “How nice! They’re welcoming us.” But she abruptly grabbed his microphone and started shouting, “Mary David Christ! Mary David Christ! Mark Finley is a blasphemer! Mark Finley is a blasphemer!” Immediately people here and there in the bleachers stood up and began to shriek out, in Russian, “The Mother of the World, Mary David Christ, the living God on earth!” Apparently there was a fast-growing cult called “The White Brotherhood,” populated largely by disaffected teenaged boys, and they were under orders to disrupt the nightly meetings. Not only did they shout and make a disturbance, many of them began to actually rush the stage and threaten Finley with bodily harm. They burned his billboards. They defaced the posters his team had put up in the Moscow subway stops. Pastors were attacked in the metro. Some even took to putting broken glass in the bottom of Mark’s baptismal tanks so that the barefoot candidates would bleed and scare off other converts.

Tragically, Mark had to take to using a new Christian convert named Boris – ironically a former KGB man – as his daily bodyguard. People who continued to threaten Mark ended up being detained in one of the Moscow Stadium’s dilapidated latrines . . . and I can tell you, that isn’t a place you want to spend very many hours.

But the reality was this: the “White Brotherhood Cult” was essentially wanting to do the same thing Mark was doing: winning converts. They wanted people to shift their loyalties from Column A to Column B, to switch from being Communists to being followers of Mary David Christ. Mark had in mind sharing the gospel with anyone who would walk into the stadium, which could certainly mean that many hundreds of people who formerly were Russian Orthodox might end up as Seventh-day Adventist Christians instead. So it’s a very challenging question: when is it right to invade someone else’s territory with a tent and some PowerPoint slides and begin to shake up the established order of things?

Sometimes the expression “sheep stealing” is used. If a traveling preacher comes into a city, holds meetings, and ends up pulling Christians out of one fellowship and into another one, you can understand that the local ministers are unhappy about that. Especially if – which they certainly would – they feel that the invading army is preaching false doctrine and pulling the proverbial wool over the eyes of the innocent lambs. Or preaching “half a doctrine,” and giving would-be converts just the convenient half of the Christian message: THEIR half.

As we’ve studied together this week, it’s plain that the Bible says GO. Go and preach. Go and baptize. Go and make disciples. Go and share the Christian gospel. And the reality is that if your denomination feels that the gospel is Points A, B, C, D, and E, while my church is convinced that the gospel is B, C, D, E, and F – but NOT point A – then it’s going to be interesting, and difficult, if our mission boards are next to each other in downtown Bangkok. It is true today, and it always has been true, that there are Presbyterians who turn into Seventh-day Adventists, and there are Seventh-day Adventists who turn into Presbyterians. People study God’s Word and they make up their minds, and there is a lot of cross traffic running between churches. And it hurts when you lose a member to a congregation across the way.

Let me share with you a few lines that come out of a wonderful old book in my own Adventist faith community about half a century ago. It was entitled Questions on Doctrine – a kind of Adventist response to common queries that come to us from those in other Christian bodies – and right at the close, the questioners asked this question:

“What is your attitude as Christians toward the general missionary program for the evangelization of the non-Christian world?” And then this follow-up: “Do you accept responsibility for assigned areas, leaving the rest for other Christian bodies?”

In other words, maybe Adventists should take the gospel to all places that begin with “A” – Afghanistan, Armenia, Argentina – and let the Baptists take Botswana and Brazil, etc. But my friend Mark Finley, there in Russia during that tumultuous time of witnessing and preaching, not only had to battle with this cult, but also with the official Soviet governmental view that the U.S.S.R. was settled Russian Orthodox territory, and that other church groups should just frankly stay out of there.

Well, here are the points that this book, Questions on Doctrine, made in response. And I love this first statement:

“We recognize every agency that lifts up Christ before men as a part of the divine plan for the evangelization of the world, and we hold in high esteem the Christian men and women in other communions who are engaged in winning souls to Christ.”

If you’re a regular listener here on the Voice of Prophecy, you already know that WE feel this way, but it feels good to have the entire denomination say the same thing. Listen, I’m a lifelong Seventh-day Adventist, an ordained pastor in that system, but I am thankful beyond words when Baptist missionaries in Borneo lead people to Christ, or Methodists in Myanmar, Episcopalians in Ethiopia, Assemblies of God in Athens, Nazarenes in Nigeria, and right down the line. We tell missionary stories all the time on this broadcast; in fact, we already mentioned two of our great current heroines, Dayna Curry and Heather Mercer, who were imprisoned in Afghanistan for the crime of sharing Jesus. We applaud those two ladies; they are our fellow citizens in heaven’s kingdom, and soldiers in one vast Christian army. The Bible tells us to pray for them and we do.

Now, the reality is that Antioch Community Church there in Waco has some denominational perspectives that are different from my own Adventist communion. We celebrate the seventh-day Bible Sabbath and they don’t. There have probably been times, down in Waco, Texas, where sincere Christians have made the difficult journey from our church to theirs, or from theirs to ours. Is that sheep-stealing? I hope and pray it isn’t seen or perceived that way. Because Antioch Community Church has a moral obligation to preach its full message with as much conviction and power as it can, and so does every other church in that city. And then people go where the Spirit leads them to worship and to cast their lot.

Here’s a bit more of that response essay in Questions on Doctrine:

“Wherever the prosecution of the Gospel work brings us into touch with other societies and their work, the spirit of Christian courtesy, frankness, and fairness should at all times guide in dealing with mission problems.” And just one more: “We recognize that the essence of true religion is based upon conscience and conviction. It is therefore to be constantly our purpose that no selfish interest or temporal advantage shall draw any person to OUR communion, and that no tie shall hold any member save the belief and conviction that in this way he finds true connection with Christ. When change of conviction leads any member of our society to feel no longer in accord with us in faith and practice, we recognize not only his right but his duty to change his religious affiliation to accord with his belief.”

Well, friend, there’s more, but that’s where it is with us. Christianity ought to be a warm, vibrant, sometimes passionate interchange of ideas, but always a community – what C. S. Lewis called the many rooms in one great house. We will plead for what we feel God has called us to proclaim, but there are no bribes dangling in the windows and no bars on the doors. Witnessing should have no trace whatever of the cult persona, where people are tricked or hounded or seduced into the kingdom. Jesus never did that, and neither should His disciples.

So the Bible doesn’t just teach us to “Go,” but to go on our best behavior, as sons and daughters of the one King.