Feb 2, 2013

Letter To A Young Disciple - Lost And Saved

Are you baptized, or thinking about doing it? Is someone you love studying with the church or become a member already?

This is the second in a series of letters that I am writing about things that I wish I had known or fully realized before investing years of my life in Kip McKean's churches.

There is no other way to say this. Kip's church believes that it is the only one saved on the planet. Yes, they will say that this is not true, but this is more for political reasons than anything. Coming right out and saying, "We are the only saved ones on the planet!" tends to turn people off pretty quickly.
So instead they frame it. You don't have to be a member of Kip's churches, you just have to be:

1. a "sold-out disciple", who has been
2. baptized by another sold-out disciple,
3. have the overriding purpose of your entire life be bringing other people to God/the church,
4. be willing to do whatever the church tells you to do,
5. make the church your absolute focus in your life,
6. believe and teach that baptism is the precise moment when God forgives your sins
7. believe that the only valid baptism is done by total immersion, and no part of your body can stay out of the water or maybe God won't count it,
8. already a 100% committed disciple before you are baptised or the baptism is invalid,
9. believe in a fundamentalist, literal interpretation of the Bible,
10. believe and teach others that the only way to be saved is to meet each and every one of these conditions,
11. believe and teach a list of other doctrines about God, Jesus and etc,
12. stay totally committed to God and God's true church (that would be Kip's churches) for the rest of your life.

(Did you get all that? The list is exhausting although not exhaustive.)

In other words, by definition, no-one on the planet fulfills all of the requirements except people in Kip's ministries. And even most of them don't do it, at least not for long. (It's pretty hard to make your life focus inviting people to church day after day, year after year.) So the long and the short of it is that 99.9999999% of all humanity is disqualified and goes to hell. You have to both believe all the right things, and do the right things, and remain totally committed to the church, or you are lost and therefore go to Hell for all eternity.

If it sounds kind of harsh, that's because it is harsh. Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Pentecostals, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, pagans, New-Agers, traditional Native American religions, African religions, all other religions, and the non-religious, are all lost, separated from God and condemned to burn in Hell forever. That includes all Evangelicals, because they don't believe that baptism is the moment where you are saved. And basically anyone who leaves the church (like, me).

The current membership of Kip's churches numbers in the low thousands.
Maybe 2,000 or slightly more. There may be some random "saved" holdouts in Kip's former church who have not yet yanked over to the new one. Let's be very optimistic and say that there are 3,000 there. And another thousand or so in other churches who by some miracle meet all of the stringent requirements for salvation.

That would make 6,000. And most of those people will eventually leave the church. Most, approaching ALL, of the people who are baptized into Kip's ministries end up leaving, or falling into "lukewarmness" over time. In fact, over my 15 years in the church, and many thousands of disciples I have known, I only know of TWO people from back in the day who I would say are still living the disciple's lifestyle as Kip's teaching spells out.

So today's numbers would be that, assuming all of the members of Kip's movement are saved, which not even Kip will attest to, then less than one person in one million (6 thousand out of 6+ billion) is saved. And if we let history be our guide, and see that most of those members will sooner or later fall from grace, we will see that the eventual number is much, much smaller, possibly approaching one person in a billion. That's right, only one person in a billion is going to Heaven - all the rest are going to Hell. That includes your mom and dad, all of your friends, your favorite teacher at school, your sweet old Grandma who talked to you about God and got you to start going to church, your old priest or pastor and everyone at your old church. In fact, every single person who is not part of Kip's church.

That's pretty depressing, isn't it?

So if God exists, and made each and every one of us, and is the most loving being in the universe, does it really make the slightest sense that he would condemn 99.9999999% of us to infinite, unending eons of suffering, burning, and damnation for all of eternity?

Because that is EXACTLY what the church believes.


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