Youth Specialties Sends People to Hell

I have to chuckle a little when I think of your reaction to the title of this article. Creative writing class taught me to use a hook to coax the reader into stopping and seeing what the deal is. I'd love to take credit for this ingenious use of absurdity, but I have to deflect the praise to a man standing outside the Youth Specialties Convention entrance in Anaheim, CA. His collegue held a sign which said "Jesus Kills" while he held a sign which read the same as the title, "Youth Specialties Sends People to Hell". Both signs had a phone number, but I'm not going to post it here. Email me if you want to give them a call.

One of the guys told me I was going to hell today. Quite an interesting experience, really. I haven’t been told that since my days back at Freed-Hardeman. I had some time to kill, so I stopped and talked to one of the guys and had a good, healthy 1:45 long conversation/debate right there on the sidewalk. (I wasn’t the only one trying my bible school degree out on these guys, but might have been the only one having fun doing it). When I was talking with the guy, I found him to be down-to-earth and gracious. But he was sure that I and the rest of my convention-going peers would burn in eternal damnation.

Here’s what was interesting. In my attempts to boil his message down to its core, I found that the fundamental separation is how we view scripture. He and his people viewed scripture as Jesus… not from Jesus, or the words/message of Jesus, not merely inspired by Jesus, but actually Jesus (not sure how Jesus feels about the "Cotton Patch" translation).

He had a frighteningly literal view of the entire Bible… no room for allegory or symbolism unless explicitly self-declared. If the Bible says it, it is true as it stands with no dispute or question or intellect needed. For instance, he asked me about original sin and quoted Psalm 58:3 (The wicked are estranged from the womb: They go astray as soon as they are born, speaking lies.). I said, “but surely you can see that this is poetic language speaking in exaggeration. No one would actually agree that a baby can be born, and then immediately “speak”, let alone “speak lies”. He said, “Well, then you don’t believe the Bible. You call Christ a liar, therefore you are not following Him.” So, all I could get out of him at that point was that he believes babies definitely speak when they are born, even speaking lies, because Psalm 58:3 says it does. Either that is great faith, or he is very badly misguided (most likely both).

We exchanged names (his name is Darwin if you’d like to pray for him), and I said I hoped he would pray for me as I would be praying for him. One last theological jab in the rib-cage: “Your prayers are an abomination to God, but I will pray that you will find the truth.” I said goodbye, thankful to God that I had been led away from that line of thinking and bought some “Jesus Loves You” t-shirts.