How Woke Evangelism Corrupts the Gospel with Seth Richardson

This short video is sponsored by Enemies Within the Church. To support the Enemies Within the Church film project or find out more, simply go to www .enemieswithinthechurch .com. My name is John Harris, and for those who have watched or listened to my podcast, Conversations That Matter, you'll know that over the last year, I focused a lot of my attention on the social justice movement within evangelicalism.

I've talked about the theological implications, the political implications, and today we're going to talk about the implications for evangelism. This is an interview that I actually recorded about a year ago.

I've been sitting on it, and I finally decided to release it because I think the time is right now. Seth Richardson is a friend of mine. He and I both went to the same church around three or four years ago, and the church had a good doctrinal statement, still does to my knowledge.

Some great people there. I've learned a lot from some of the men that I rubbed shoulders with there, and I was happy to be a member for the short time that I was. I noticed at the time that there were some things that I couldn't put my finger on, some things that bothered me about conversations I'd hear, even some things I heard from the pulpit at times, and I didn't know what I was witnessing quite.

I knew it sounded a lot like some things I had heard in my secular college experience, but I didn't quite know how to categorize it. Well, now I know what I was witnessing was the social justice movement.

Seth Richardson was going to the church around the same time, and he was in a different ministry. He was doing evangelism, and he saw firsthand how social justice impacted his evangelism ministry at the church, and the whole evangelism ministry there.

Well, I was unaware of this at the time. I did not know that this was taking place. The reason I want to release this now is, number one, because I think there's a lot of people out there right now who are going through church splits.

I mean, I get these emails telling me this. Or you're leaving your church because of social justice. You've tried to talk to the leadership, and you've met a brick wall, or maybe you're trying to plan a church now because you don't know if there's options in your area.

Well, I understand all that, and I understand feeling like this came out of nowhere, but in many cases, it probably didn't. It probably was taking place in a certain area in the church, and you may not have been.

Aware of it.

And so, as you listen to what Seth Richardson has to say, I want you to compare what he's saying to maybe what's going on in your church, and ask yourself, is this happening where.

I am?

And if so, what can I do about it? I think Seth gives some great responses to how to identify the errors of what he noticed taking place in the evangelism ministry. And so, I think this is beneficial, I think it's helpful, and I think now is the time to release it.

Evangelism Ministry in Durham and the Shift Toward Social Issues

Here's Seth Richardson. Seth, you went to a Southern Baptist church. How long ago was that?

That's been two years ago.

And while you were at the Southern Baptist church, you were involved in evangelism ministry?

Correct.

What was that like?

We would go out weekdays, we've gone on Wednesdays, and we would go out into the community. Typically, we would just go out and walk the streets looking for people to speak with and.

Share the gospel with.

And when you shared the gospel, were you and the other members of the team sharing the biblical gospel when you went out?

Yeah, at times we were, at times no. So we had a city outreach director at the time, and whenever I would be with him, he would typically talk about social issues. So he would try to target young black men, and he would ask their opinions on things like Eric Gardner or the shooting that took place in St. Louis.

He would talk more in the realm of social issues, but never do I recall actually getting to the gospel. And there were times as well when I would just be sent out into the community. And when I say the community, it was specifically what you would call the urban community.

And I would go out with questionnaires trying to ask them what they wanted to see the church that we were in at the time, what they wanted to see the church do for them, how the church could better serve their community specifically.

What city was this in that you were doing this ministry in?

Durham, North Carolina.

So Durham, North Carolina is known for Duke University, and it sounds like you weren't doing ministry to students at Duke University. You were primarily focused on inner city urban ministry, right?

Yeah, that would seem to be the focus whenever we went out. Occasionally, I could help redirect that back into more of the progressive neighborhoods around the church, but it generally would direct itself toward what they would consider the urban community.

Was there a reason that the leader of your apologetics group, who I believe was an elder.

At your church, is that correct?

Was there a reason that they had made the decision or he made the decision to specifically focus on one demographic?

I don't know the exact reason behind it. Like I said, we had a city outreach director who seemed to be the one guiding the activities that took place, where we went, what we spoke about. But this particular elder also had gone to, there was an event in Pennsylvania, and he had gone there.

If I recall, it was Eric Mason that put it on, and so he kind of had a lot of things that shifted in his thinking through that as well.

Eric Mason, Woke Church, and a Different Posture Toward Young Black Men

After the director of this ministry came back from this conference with Eric Mason, did things change in the evangelism ministry?

Yeah, so this was actually one of the elders. It wasn't the city outreach director. So one of the elders in the church, he went to this conference, and so he started saying things about how we should approach men, especially young black men, that we should approach them differently than we would approach white men on the street, that we had to take a different.

Posture.

We had to come to them more with a posture of humility and our head down, and that part of the reason he felt that we were talking to them. So he put us all in this one category. I think he was feeling guilt, and he lumped us all into his guilt and said that the reason that we approach young black men the way we do is because of our superiority that we feel toward them, and that we needed to really address that, but that was a sinful thing within us that had to be addressed.

Now I wanted to ask you, Seth, did you feel or have you felt superiority when you're in situations with minorities, or did that thought ever occur to you before you had heard this?

No.

In fact, I mean, just briefly in my background, I was raised up around the Jehovah's Witnesses and was in that community as a Jehovah's Witness for 18 years, and actually the people that I served in that organization with 90 were black.

I felt as equals and on the same level, so this all just kind of blindsided me. I didn't see it coming. I spent most of my life with people who didn't look like me, and we were centered and focused and had peace with our focus being an organization and a false gospel, and then to see the beauty of the true gospel that should unite us together in Christ, give us a new identity in Christ, and to see that that's been pushed aside or feels like there has to be an addition to that, it's hard for me to really deal with at times.

It does, it angers and it saddens me.

So you were okay with your children marrying folks that might have been a different ethnicity. You had no issues, but you were being told now that you actually did have an issue.

Right, and that was something I found very difficult to quite understand because we did fully anticipate, I fully accepted that my daughters, and was fine, we didn't care that they would marry likely a black man.

We were probably one of four families in our congregation that were white. So yeah, it was this whole thing, okay, you're a racist, you don't know it, and your privilege blinds you to the fact that you are part of the problem.

White Privilege, the Gospel, and the Charge of Racism

So you're a freshly saved individual out of a cult, and you are now at a Southern Baptist Church in Durham, North Carolina, and you want to share the good news that has made such a difference in your life and your eternity, and you're being told now that you harbor racism in your heart, and the way that you need to approach others in this particular demographic is by asking them what they want to see the church do for them.

Is that correct?

Yeah, that would be part of it. A lot of the conversations, again, would lend themselves to social aspects, what they would see as social injustices, and the conversations would go that direction, and when they did, I never heard anything about the gospel.

It was all in a political realm and social injustice.

So when you were out doing evangelism, hearing others in your team share, well, what was supposed to be the gospel, they would use political issues like police shootings. Were there other political issues that they would use to try to converse with someone?

Primarily the police shootings that had taken place, and it wouldn't be everybody. So there were guys who would go out with us, and they would actually share the true gospel, but with the outreach director, it would typically, really, I don't recall any time it didn't focus around social issues.

Was there a curriculum that your evangelism team used at all, like Way of the Master or Evangelism Explosion?

No, we didn't really have a curriculum, although we were provided, there was a booklet that we were provided called Gospel, and it was written by D .A. Horton, and we were encouraged to talk using what they would call theobonics.

What's theobonics?

So it would be theology through ebonics, basically. So when I would talk to a young man, I should have read this book, I should be understanding of lingo that you would find within the rap community or what they would call the hip-hop community, and then I would have to express the gospel using those terms.

So if it would say, hey, you know, we'd like to get together maybe on Wednesday afternoons with you and sit down and look at the word of God, well, what I would have to say to this guy, I mean, I wouldn't have to say it, but what was encouraged would be to say something like, hey, why don't we sit down and chop it up next Wednesday evening?

Or you would say, hey, we're going to rip the roof off this thing on Sunday if you want to come to church. Things of that nature, and it's just an odd way, I think, to present things.

When you would use theobonics, what was the reaction that you got from those you were trying to engage?

Well, I refused to use theobonics. But one of the elders, the one that I spoke of, he did try it, and the reaction was actually hostile.

Really?

Yeah.

Yeah, he was warned by a guy one afternoon and said, don't talk to me like that.

So it was seen as disingenuous then. Interesting. Now, you had some concerns, I'm sure, about this. Did you express these concerns that the true gospel is being watered down or not preached? How did that go when you expressed?

Yeah, so I expressed that to the outreach director. It's a weird dynamic. Outwardly, he could talk to me, and it was very gracious in the conversation, but the words used talked about my privilege, and that's where I first ran into the whole thing with white privilege.

My white privilege blinded me to what true issues were, and I wasn't to feel at fault for that. I wasn't to necessarily look at myself as bad, but it's just the way it was that I couldn't see things for how they truly were.

With the other guys on the team, I would typically just kind of branch off. I would go do some open-air preaching, so depending on where we went, and whenever I shared the gospel, I would try to stick to law and grace and sin and show them who we are, born sinners, desperate need of a Savior, and that all of us have broken God's law, and that we need Christ and His finished work, His perfect life, death, burial, and resurrection is what we need to be saved.

But that's where I would focus on, and I wouldn't get into so much of the social stuff.

Social Justice, Theobonics, and the Loss of Gospel Clarity

You've already perhaps answered this in a way, but I want to get a direct answer from you. Do you feel, or I should say, do you think that the Theobonics, am I saying that right?

Yeah, Theobonics.

Do you think that Theobonics and this way of engaging others actually compromise the gospel?

Yeah, I do. I feel like it does because it takes away the clarity of the gospel, but it also comes across as disingenuous, so it's like if a guy from the city came out to my house, obviously you hear my accent, if he came and he started trying to talk like me, it's going to be obvious to me that this is disingenuous, and I'm not going to hear what he has to say, I'm probably going to tell him to get lost, and I think that's the effect that it has when we try to go in and talk to these guys, and we make assumptions about them, and I actually find it to be in itself a sense of racist in a way, because I'm looking at this man because he's a young black man and just assume that this is how he thinks, this is how he talks, and that he couldn't hear the gospel given plainly in a biblical way and actually understand that and take it to heart.

You know, Theobonics was used as a way of trying to present the gospel. Once it blew up, and it was a very hostile blow up, it kind of curbed that particular method within our team, but what I did see consistently was we would try to keep reaching out to the same people, so where the church is settled, you have one side of the church is what they would call in quotes the urban community, on the other side would be the progressive community where they spoke of gentrification taking place, and we didn't go into that community.

We only focused on the urban community for evangelism, and it was like if you're going fishing and you're going to catch all these different types of bass, but if it's a striped bass or a rowan oak bass, we're going to throw back one kind of bass.

That's not what we're after. We're after one specific fish.

They only wanted to lure that one type of fish would bite.

Right, because...

And the gospel is something that every fish...

Right, and it seemed to be more of building the dynamic of the church, the ethnic dynamic of the church in that small kingdom than building Christ's kingdom with whatever fish you do catch, so we were restricting our fishing hole down to just one hole because we had to try to gather these type of fish, which would help the church to look more like what they would say the church in Revelation looks like.

That seemed to be the goal. I think it's pressure from the Southern Baptist Convention. There's pressure to have your church look like the neighborhood that it's in, and so the pressure to try to build that, pull people out of that community that look a certain way.

Church Leadership, Social Justice, and a Compromised Social Gospel

Interesting. So you talked to the leader of this evangelism outreach, and then did it go anywhere else from there? Was there any kind of reception at all to your ideas, or did you have to talk to other church leaders?

Yeah, it really didn't go anywhere. There was a disagreement, and I did end up talking to the head pastor of the church and expressed my concerns primarily around the gospel, but just in general the direction of things, big sermons being preached, white privilege and things like that being buzzwords in the teaching throughout the church.

I was also and had conversations with the pastor about MLK being elevated in some way, but yet when I looked at his theology and I looked at the theology of where I just came from, they seemed to match.

There was no difference there. So one question I posed to the pastor is, would we elevate Charles Taze Russell because of something he did on a social level? Would we elevate him in our church? Would we promote his books?

I don't think so, because his theology was off. He was a heretic, and so for me it was hard to see that, why we would really promote a heretic.

Do you think that your background in being a Jehovah's Witness helped you see the error in this social justice movement where others could not see it?

I think by God's grace that's a possibility that what he had led us through, me and my family as Jehovah's Witnesses, did help us to see and allow some discernment to see things maybe that others were not seeing.

So did you bring this to the attention of the pastor? What was the reaction when the pastor found out that this was going on in the evangelism ministry?

One of not really surprise, but there wasn't a lot really said about it. It was just kind of brushed off. But as far as the topic in general, social justice and how that was affecting the church, the pastor said that he and I were on the same page.

So he was concerned that the gospel was being compromised or not?

That the social justice issue was really making its way through. There were people with that thinking, but he was in agreement that it wasn't healthy for the church.

Was anything done to try to change the way evangelism was done?

No, nothing really changed. In private conversation it was said, but as far as outwardly what you saw in the church and how we did things, I didn't notice a change.

Now is this primary reason that you and your family ended up trying to find another place to worship and have some accountability and leadership?

Yes.

Is there anything you want to add to the story that I may have missed?

Just in general, I had been going out in Durham with a man who I was introduced to through the church. We would go out weekly in Durham. We would do open air preaching and evangelism for probably six hours a weekend.

He got caught up in the social justice rhetoric. It ended up causing a split between he and I. We would go out and he would want to talk about Black Lives Matter. He'd want to talk about social justice issues.

Then it became really hostile and aggressive. I was told that I have a problem. I was publicly called a racist on Facebook. Then chiming in on that was the former city outreach director from FBC. Both saying that because I refused to buy the narrative, it wasn't that I didn't listen.

In fact, I listened. I would go sit with the city outreach director. I actually bought the guilt that wasn't mine for about a year and just assumed I was guilty because I was white, that I was the things that they said that I was and I just couldn't see it.

Then there came a point where it was like, no, this is nonsense. I know that this is not right. Once I came back and said, look, I don't buy your narrative any longer. I called it for what it was. That's when things got really nasty.

Really, the evangelism stopped. Even being able to refer people that I would meet in another city, in the nearby city of Raleigh, if I said, hey, I met this young man. You're serving in Raleigh. I'd like to send him your way for discipleship.

It would be because he was black and I was white and I didn't have the ability or the desire to sit down with a black man and share the gospel with him. I was basically called out publicly on social media for that.

Your motives were questioned and nothing was done by church leadership who would have known about this.

Right.

The former director was no longer there at the church, but the attitude, I approached the pastor about it, the general disposition attitude toward social justice did not seem to change. So I feel like if the church continues on this path, the gospel that's going to be presented when we go out, if we go out and do evangelism under the umbrella of some of these churches, the gospel that's being presented is no gospel at all, but it's a social gospel.

It's a gospel of addressing social issues, but it's kind of like be warm and well fed. We're going to try to put a Band-Aid on all these things that you see in the social realm that may or may not be true depending on how it's presented to us through news media or other outlets, but we're not ever getting down to the root of the problem, that all of us, whether I'm black, white, Asian, Latino, it doesn't matter, and that's sin, that we are born in sin, enemies of God, and we're in desperate need of reconciliation, and the reconciliation is not one man to another, a broken man to another, but it's reconciliation with a holy and righteous and just God.

And once we're reconciled in the gospel, then that will spread. Now I'm a new creation, and now the things I see in my community, they will automatically take care of themselves because people are being reconciled to Christ through the true gospel.

I hope this short interview blessed you. If you would like to contribute to the Enemies Within the Church film project as they make more similar videos, simply go to www .EnemiesWithinTheChurch .com.