When Jehovah’s Witnesses come walking up your driveway, do you shut the curtains, turn the TV off and make a run for it?”
The crowd at First Baptist Church, Double Springs, laughed when Bob Waldrep, vice president and Alabama state director of Watchman Fellowship, posed the question at a recent seminar, but Waldrep said it happens more often than not.
“It’s like we’re being invaded — every man for himself,” he said. “‘Honey, run! The Jehovah’s Witnesses are coming!’ What message do we convey when we do not confront false teaching or error?”
It’s a message that indicates indifference, fear, embarrassment or a lack of preparation, Waldrep told the group of 70 Baptists gathered at the Winston Baptist Association church for an Interfaith Witness Training seminar Aug. 14.
The association is one of four in the state that has hosted the seminar since a partnership formed between Birmingham-based Watchman and the office of evangelism at the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions (SBOM) in 2004.
“Faith groups are always changing, and we didn’t feel we could stay current enough on all of them to meet the needs of the associations — we wanted to try to provide the best information we could for them,” said Sammy Gilbreath, director of the SBOM office of evangelism.
He said the relationship has proven valuable as Watchman leaders are able to provide Baptists with a game plan for evangelizing people from more than 25 different cults and faith groups from Scientology to Wicca.
Waldrep and others help Baptists get an understanding of what it takes to reach people of other faiths and then provides them with materials from those faiths to serve as discussion-starters.
“What we want to do is use their material, not ours, to make them question their beliefs,” Waldrep said. “When they come to the door, answer it and say, ‘come on in,’ but then ask if they can come back another day at a time that’s better for you. Be polite. Tell them you have lots of questions about their faith that you would love to ask them.”
When they come back, be ready, he said.
At the Winston Association seminar, Waldrep provided those in attendance with resources containing references to sacred documents belonging to Jehovah’s Witnesses, Muslims and Mormons that were laden with internal contradictions.
Asking people of other faiths about these contradictions helps Baptists respectfully lead them to question their own belief system rather than get them into a round of “Bible pingpong,” he explained.
“Reaching them starts with the desire to do so, but you need the tools with which to do it,” Waldrep said. “When you show them the documentation, it’s irrefutable.”
Copies of such documents were just the type of thing Derek Comeens, a member of First, Double Springs, had been looking for.
“I work with several Mormons, and it’s been a really trying time, to say the least,” said Comeens, a senior at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
In instances which co-workers have presented Mormonism to Comeens, he said he knew their faith didn’t add up against the Bible’s truth but wasn’t sure how to refute it. “I want to keep learning so that I can be prepared to talk with them,” Comeens said.
Waldrep said such learning is of vital importance in order to win the next generation, so “you can most effectively share the gospel … but also have the skills to explain why [people of other faiths] are wrong.”
For more information, call the SBOM evangelism office at 1-800-264-1225, Ext. 245, or visit www.watchman.org.
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Islam
One night at sundown last fall, Bob Waldrep of Watchman Fellowship made his way to a mosque in Birmingham. There he broke the fast of Ramadan with local Muslims, eating a fig and drinking a glass of water — as is customary — and sat back and watched as the men went off to the side to pray together. The women prayed together in a separate room.
“While they were praying, the Muslim children came and sat around me, talking and playing their GameBoys,” Waldrep said. “You can see how the culture here is impacting them already. If we’ll stay the course, we’ll see that Muslims here will be more reachable as they get into the second and third generation.”
And we must be willing to understand them in order to reach them, he said, noting things such as:
• Islam is not a “relational” religion. “Let them see that Christianity is a relationship with God, not just a religion. They don’t understand that you aren’t just a Christian because your parents were.”
• There is no assurance of salvation in Islam, except for those who die in the cause of Allah, or God. “I try to talk with them about how hopeless that sounds.”
• Use a new or clean Bible when around Muslims. “When I see your Bible marked up, that impresses me, but it’s disrespectful to a Muslim. If you use a copy not well-used … they will see that as respect for your Bible.” (TAB)
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Jehovah’s Witnesses
Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that salvation is found only in being associated with the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society, which they regard as Jehovah’s only accurate channel for biblical interpretation.
Finding ammunition for debunking the society is easy, according to Bob Waldrep of Watchman Fellowship, who said to point out the internal conflicts in Watchtower publications. Here’s one of Waldrep’s examples:
For decades, Watchtower publications have made adament predictions as to when the world would end. For example, in “Studies in the Scriptures Vol. 2,” an article states: “We consider it an established truth that the final end of the kingdoms of this world … will be accomplished by the end of A.D. 1914.”
Similar predictions were made about the years 1874, 1925 and 1975. One article even stated that The Watchtower had clearer indication of God’s plans for the end of the world (at that time, predicted for 1925) than Noah had that the flood was coming. In multiple articles over the years, The Watchtower identified Jehovah’s Witnesses collectively as a prophet, which, in other words, would have made the predictions prophesies.
In its May 15, 1930 edition, The Watchtower states, “[h]ow are we to know whether one is a true or a false prophet … If he is a false prophet, his prophecy will fail to come to pass.”
So by Watchtower’s own definition, the passing of the 1914 date and others makes the organization a false prophet. (BP, TAB)
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Mormonism
According to “Dale Morgan on Early Mormonism: Correspondence and a New History,” Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, received revelations from a “seer stone” that he placed in a battered white stovepipe hat, then buried his face in the hat to view.
Mormons also state in their literature that The Book of Mormon has endured no textual changes as it has been reprinted over the years, but the book itself proves otherwise, according to Bob Waldrep of Watchman Fellowship. For example, in the 1830 edition, Mosiah 7:28 reads, “… king Benjamin had a gift from God, whereby he could interpret such engravings; yea, and Ammon also did rejoice.” But the same verse in the 1981 edition substitutes King Mosiah’s name for King Benjamin. “Why did they change it? Because King Benjamin had died in Chapter 6. Joseph Smith must have forgotten he’d already killed him off. Someone caught it later and changed it,” Waldrep said.
And though 2 Nephi 5 detailed the Mormon belief that black skin was the sign of being cursed by God, in 1978, Mormons revised that stance and 2 Nephi 30:6, for example, changed from “they shall be a white and delightsome people” to “a pure and a delightsome people.”
The book also reports incorrectly basic historical and biblical facts, such as in Alma 7:10: “And behold, he (Christ) shall be born of Mary, at Jerusalem …”
Yet Mormon literature states that The Book of Mormon is “the most correct of any book on earth.” (TAB)
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