Elevation Church Did Fake Baptisms And I Can Prove It!

Opening Appeal and the Claim of Fake Baptisms

Hey guys, Colin here. Welcome back to the channel where the Bible and critical thinking meet to give you real Christian commentary about the things that matter. And please don't forget to like, comment, share, and most importantly, subscribe and hit the notification bell to join the fight for truth.

Thank you so much for your continued prayers, viewership, and support. Let's get into the video. No, the title of this video is not an exaggeration. All sources will be linked in the description, and I am not the first person to make a video about this.

In fact, the story is pretty old news. But many people don't know what the actual evidence of the case is, and many people have not heard the entire story. So I've decided to make a video and give you the entire story and all the evidence that comes with it.

Elevation Church’s Baptism Guide and the Use of Planted Participants

And with that, let's get into the fake baptisms of Elevation Church. Now for starters, Elevation Church is a megachurch, which is currently in the Southern Baptist Convention and based in Charlotte, North Carolina.

It has over 20 locations and a reported weekly attendance of over 25 ,000 people. Steve Furtick is probably the most famous pastor in the United States, if not in the top three, and most people aren't even aware that there's anything sketchy about him.

There are several issues with his ministry though, and many of them are listed in the original video I made about him, which will be linked in the description of this one. But I can assure you that there is nothing more obviously unbiblical about Elevation Church than the evidence that you are about to see.

Now Elevation Church likes to do altar calls and baptisms very regularly, and there's no problem with that. And I'm sure many people in the church are probably doing it for the right reasons. But it's very clear that the leadership of Elevation Church has an entirely different goal in mind.

You see, in 2011, Elevation Church published a public guide to other churches called, quote, Spontaneous Baptisms, a how-to guide. In this guide, they wrote this, quote, Recently, we prayed and asked God to lead thousands of people to take a public stand in their faith in Christ through baptism.

God blew our minds, and in two weeks we saw 2 ,158 people respond and be baptized. So first we start off on this great note, and we read them boasting about the fact that they've baptized thousands of people in a few weeks.

Awesome. Apparently, Elevation Church is not familiar with the phrase quality over quantity, but that's fine. We'll get into that later. But this is just the tip of the iceberg, because this how-to guide described in detail how Elevation Church was able to facilitate such a massive number of baptisms in such a short amount of time, and a lot of the document is just dedicated to logistics and statistics of the events, nothing interesting.

Like how many people got baptized, how many t-shirts they had to provide as dry clothes, how many people built the tank to hold the water, and how long it took on average to baptize each person, etc.

Boring stuff. But hidden amongst all of this useless information is a statement about how they convince people to step out in faith and get baptized in the first place. You see, the document says that, quote, Fifteen people will sit in the worship experience, that's code for the audience, apparently they don't know how to use normal words in these documents, and then they will be the first ones to move when the pastor gives the call, end quote.

In case you're not sure what you just heard, that was Elevation Church admitting that they have fully-fledged Elevation Church members, most likely who have already been baptized, sitting in the audience waiting for Pastor Stephen Furtick's cue.

When he invites people to get baptized spontaneously, the church members planted in the audience pretend to be new converts and walk up to the front of the church to get baptized. It gets even worse, though.

The document goes on saying this, quote, Move intentionally through the areas of highest visibility and with the longest walk. So let's establish what this is. It's lying to manipulate other people's emotions.

There's nothing else you could call this. Elevation Church knows that people are scared to walk in front of a bunch of other individuals to get baptized. There's the emotions. So then you have them deceive the audience and pretend to get baptized as new believers.

There's the manipulation. There's the deception. So by definition, Elevation Church baptizes people by deceitfully manipulating their emotions. That's a fact. Contrast this with Colossians 3, 9, which says, quote, Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have put off the old self with its practices.

Do not lie to one another. Do not deceive one another. Now the next question you're probably thinking is, is this document accurate and really made by Elevation Church? The answer to that is undoubtedly yes.

I have taken the liberty of digging up Elevation Church's official response to these accusations, which will be linked in the description as well. It was written in plain English that Stephen Furtick himself had a 45 minute phone call with the journalist who first reported on these events.

Then he spoke to that journalist for two hours in the church offices at some point. If the document was not accurate, this would have been the perfect time to come out and say it. He could have easily told the actual reporter who reported on these events that these were not sanctioned by Elevation Church or by Steve Furtick, or that they had never taken place, that they weren't true, but no such comment was ever made.

In fact, in their official response, Elevation Church still did not say that the document was anything other than an official Elevation Church project. There is no evidence that the employee who wrote the guide was fired, and for all we know, they still work at Elevation Church to this day.

Since Furtick has not said that he was unaware of this method of getting people baptized, common sense actually tells us that he knew about it beforehand. But it's definitely the case that Steve knew about it after it happened, after it was reported on, and at the very least, he did not disapprove of the practice.

Pastoral Qualifications and the Charge of Dishonesty

There's a good chance they're still using it to this day. In fact, he's never disapproved of it, at least to my knowledge. So here are the conclusions we can come to. Steve Furtick knows that Elevation Church was conducting fake baptisms to manipulatively increase their baptism count, and he does not care.

Biblically, this absolutely disqualifies him from ministry. Let's focus on two major lists of qualifications for pastors, 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1. 1 Timothy 3 says that a pastor must be, quote, respectable, and this action is anything but respectable.

It also says that they must be above reproach, but this action by Stephen has provided a big opportunity for reproach. Titus 1 says a pastor must be, quote, upright, and this situation demonstrates that he is not.

It also says that he must be disciplined. This action by Steve Furtick does not indicate discipline or maturity, but rather a consistent desire to cut corners and conduct his business, I mean church, in a deceptive and subversive way.

Let's establish something. Pastors do not have to be perfect. In fact, none of them are. But a pastor's character must consistently reflect the traits listed in these major passages. There's really no debate about it.

Steve Furtick is biblically unqualified for ministry. Let me make myself even more clear. I don't mean that Steve Furtick is not a real Christian. I'm not saying that. I'm saying that he's not a real pastor, and there's a difference between those two.

Evidence, Manufactured Spiritual Results, and the Call to Trust God

And this whole situation, funny enough, actually reminds me of a song by Elevation Church called Evidence. It was very popular a few years ago, and it's ironic considering all the evidence is stacked against them here.

But in this song, Steve Furtick's band sings, quote, a miracle can happen now for the Spirit of the Lord is here. The evidence is all around that the Spirit of the Lord is here. So first of all, you want to talk about evidence.

The song's called Evidence. For all my true crime buffs out there, people who like to watch shows about that, when evidence is planted, it doesn't count as evidence. You don't get to say, oh, the evidence is all around when you planted the evidence all around, namely 15 people pretending to get baptized as a fake move of the Spirit.

It's not actually happening the way other people are meant to see it happening. It's you being deceptive. It doesn't count when you plant evidence. And then they say, a miracle can happen now for the Spirit of the Lord is here.

But do you really believe that at Elevation? I'm just concerned. I'm genuinely asking the question, because if you really believe that the Spirit is convicting people and drawing them in, then you shouldn't have to actively deceive them in order to solicit their response.

Or are you not confident that a miracle can happen now, Elevation Church? You see, Elevation, like many megachurches, always brags about how they have great faith that the Lord will do great things. But here's the truth.

Actions speak louder than words. And your actions make it clear that you trust yourselves to get people saved. You see, it would be much better to baptize one person who genuinely wants to be baptized because the Spirit is drawing them in than to baptize a thousand people who got baptized just because they saw someone else do it.

If you trusted God to do it, you wouldn't need to use unbiblical methods to make it happen. And that line is just as much an indictment on Elevation Church as it is on all of us, including myself. If we trust God to do something in our lives, we don't have to use unbiblical methods to make it happen.

We don't have to make counterfeits of those things. We can just trust God to bring them about. Another line in their song, Evidence, is actually spoken by Steve Furtick himself, where he says, quote, We're not waiting on a move of God.

We are a move of God. In retrospect, considering the situation, the phrase takes on a completely new meaning. Of course, it was unbiblical from the first time he uttered it. Yes, we are waiting on a move of God.

We're not going to manufacture a move of God without Him actually being there. We will wait if that's necessary. But Steve Furtick doesn't actually care about having sound biblical teaching. He cares about clever wordplay.

Elevation Church doesn't, quote, wait on a move of God, because it's much faster and more efficient to fake a move of God. So if you like wordplay, Furtick, you can use that in your next sermon free of charge.

You're welcome. And let me say something directly to Elevation Church and the leadership of it. When you say, we've baptized this many people this week, my response in the future is going to be this. I don't care.

I don't care how many people you've baptized. I care about how and why you baptized them. Don't tell me how many points you scored in the game when you cheated to score them. Cool story, bro, but you still cheated.

So it doesn't count. In almost any sporting event, when an athlete cheats, they get their accolades taken away from them. They get their awards and their championships and their titles taken away from them.

So don't tell me, Elevation Church, how many people you've baptized using unbiblical methods to baptize them. And here's another thing you need to know, Elevation Church. The size of your church doesn't matter at all.

I hear this all the time from people in the comment section of my videos, from people who are at Elevation Church. They talk about the Lord's really blessing them. They must be doing something right. It doesn't work like that.

The size of your church does not indicate that. At one point, the whole of Christianity was composed of a couple dozen people. The early church in its entirety was significantly smaller than Elevation Church.

So I'm not sure what kind of point they're trying to prove when they say these things. Acts 115 indicates that there were only 120 members of the Jerusalem church before Pentecost. To put that in perspective, that's over 200 times smaller than Elevation Church.

But which church was more biblical? That's my question. That should be your question. Here's another thing. How big your congregation is, is not evidence of God blessing you, like at all. Joel Osteen has a huge following, a massive church, and he's a total heretic and a false teacher, recognized by pretty much every sound pastor in the nation as somebody who does not have sound doctrine.

There are millions of Mormons in the world who would completely disagree with many of the fundamental doctrines of Christianity. There are millions of Buddhists in the world who do not believe in the Christian God at all.

Does that mean that God approves of their beliefs? No. The size of your church or your religious group means nothing. The principles of your church or your religious group are what means something. But Steve Furtick, Mike Todd, Joel Osteen, T .D. Jakes, and all the rest of them are absolutely certain that their churches are large because God is blessing them.

And I hope they figure out soon that that's not the case. Your churches are large because you water down the Bible. That's why. I'm not saying every large church does, I'm saying those ones do. Your churches aren't big because God is blessing you.

Your churches are big because you aren't blessing God. That's the difference. And here's what this means to you, the average viewer watching this. When you watch Steve Furtick's sermons and you listen to the music of Elevation Church, you are unknowingly, inadvertently, you're not purposely doing this, but you are supporting a system of lies and deceit that has existed for years.

You are supporting a system that tells unbelievers that their eternal security in Christ can be attained by merely making a fleeting decision to believe in Jesus, followed by absolutely no sanctification or repentance or sound biblical action whatsoever.

But hey, would it make you feel any better if I told you they baptized over 2 ,000 people? If you listen to Steve Furtick, I'm not against you. My heart goes out to you. Because I used to be in those kinds of traps too.

He's a clever speaker and a charismatic person, and if you don't know that he has bad doctrine, then you can't be held responsible for that. Proverbs 24, 12 says, quote, If you say, Behold, we did not know this, does not he who weighs the heart perceive it?

Does not he who keeps watch over your soul know it? And will he not repay man according to his deeds? And yes, you know what? There might have been some negligence on your part, but getting disappointed and depressed about it isn't going to help anything.

Find a biblical church to follow and follow it. You can either act on this information or ignore it. But don't worry about what you were like before you knew it. Pray for Furtick and all his deceived congregation that they would reject this unbiblical nonsense and get on the right path.

Closing Appeal and Channel Support

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