QUICK PRAYER-ISM

Pastor Art Watkins of Coden Bible Church (Coden, Alabama)

October 14, 2016

Written by Brother David Cloud:

Quick Prayer-ism is characterized by soul winning reports that are grossly exaggerated, since the number of real conversions are minute compared to the overall statistics. I call it “prayer-ism” because it focuses on a prayer. I call it “quick prayer-ism” because it specializes in quick presentations and quick decisions and an overall shallowness of spiritual and biblical depth. Quick Prayer-ism is death in the pot for any church that practices it.

An example of Quick Prayer-ism was communicated to me some time back by a pastor friend who had the following experience at Lancaster Baptist Church, home of West Coast Baptist College. The soul winner in question is a veteran Independent Baptist missionary to Japan, a man with significant influence in the Independent Baptist movement. “We went out with their staff on Saturday morning for soul winning. We were immediately partnered up with some of the veterans. The first door we went to, we spoke to a friendly Catholic guy and to my surprise, the guy got ‘saved’ before my very eyes as... took him from a few scripture passages to the sinner’s prayer so smoothly that I was caught off guard. I caught myself and while... was recording this man’s contact details and writing it down, I asked the man whether (1) he believed that he was a good person and (2) that it is possible to go to Heaven by being a good person. This man who had just got ‘saved’ told me ‘YES.’ I looked around and the other two men beside me said nothing and did nothing. We went to a few more places and eventually reached a home with a Roman Catholic young lady who came to the door. She said she was a professing Christian. Even though she said that all churches were the same... gave her assurance of salvation by quoting 1 John 5:13.” Churches that have adopted this unscriptural method of evangelism have produced millions of false professions and have given a false hope to the same multitude.

The late Jack Hyles, pastor of First Baptist Church, Hammond, Indiana, was the king of “Quick Prayer-ism.” He claimed that thousands were saved every year that he was in Hammond, though these numbers did not reflect the reality of the active church family. If hundreds of thousands of people had actually been saved at First Baptist over the years that Hyles was pastor there, that entire region would have been dramatically affected. The reality is that most of the numbers were empty professions. I have a friend who pastored a fundamental Baptist church in northern Indiana near First Baptist of Hammond. In 1980, a Hyles-Anderson student in his church obtained roughly 1,000 decision cards from First Baptist Church’s visitation ministry. They diligently followed up on these individuals but were extremely disappointed to find that not even one individual was interested in the things of Christ. The batch of professions was entirely void of spiritual reality. The pastor testified to me that this opened his eyes to the danger of the Hyles approach to evangelism and underscored the duplicity of the reports that are published by First Baptist. I will not give his name, because I don’t want him subjected to the carnal harassment to which I have been subjected, but I have it on record, and the Lord knows. When we were given the “decision” cards for follow up on a county fair ministry in Oklahoma in the late 1990s, of the hundreds of professions that were recorded we could not find even one person who gave any evidence of salvation or was even interested in attending church.

A pastor friend followed up on the more than 100 “salvation decisions” that were made at a county fair ministry in Kentucky in 2011, and he did not find one soul who was even interested enough in Christ to attend church.

There is something wrong about that picture. It is a very serious error.