If you were to die tonight, where would you spend eternity?
I saw this again the other day and I set it aside as I wanted to write about it. I grow so weary with seeing things like this. Unhealthy churches distort the Gospel and they change people’s focus from God to other things. Relationship with God is replaced with performance based religion. The message of grace is twisted and people develop warped views of God due to the faulty teachings and practices. It is about escaping hell. It becomes about bringing people to their church and not necessarily into a relationship with God. Let me give an example of what I believe to be this faulty evangelism focus.
Tim Downs is an Apostolic evangelist and pastor. His stated vision is to train Apostolics (Oneness Pentecostals) how to win souls and reach the lost. Some years back he released a poorly made DVD titled, Do You Want To Go To Heaven Or Hell (screenshot), which was touted as a ‘soul winning’ method. (The first link takes you to the film on YouTube and the second to a print out of his method.)
His approach involves asking people if they want to go to heaven or hell and then he quickly transports them to a church, gets them water baptized and attempts to pray them through to tongues. The approach seems to be to avoid hell and because of this, I view it as motivated through fear. People who come to a church or God that way often do not last and understandably so. Besides not becoming rooted, they are not hearing about the love of God and how much he cares for them. Instead, it becomes about fleeing eternal torment and is a seemingly ‘quick fix’ to that scenario.
Take note the scripted discussion in the video. Do you notice the wrong emphasis? How does this compare to what we see in the New Testament, of when believers were sharing the Gospel to someone who didn’t know? Here it is all about avoiding hell and being baptized ‘the right way.’ This causes people to believe they need to follow a few steps and they are assured of going to heaven. It’s about what THEY must do to be saved. Hey- that’s what the initial focus and hurry is all about- going to heaven or going to hell. It isn’t about coming to know Jesus.
The method used by Downs, and similar ones by others, misses what becoming a believer is about. It isn’t about going to heaven or hell. Church today is so messed up that it has strayed so far from early Christian practices that in many ways it bears little resemblance.
If you are using this misguided focus to reach people, please stop to take a long, hard look at what you see in the New Testament. Do you recall Peter, Phillip, John, Paul or any of the others ask people something like “If you were to die tonight, where would you spend eternity?” or “Do you want to go to heaven or hell?” Even Jesus himself never went around asking these questions. Did they focus on getting people baptized ‘the right way’ or was it about having a new life with Jesus? Was it about numbers being added to a church’s or evangelist’s statistics, or was it about how God loves us and the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus and what that means to them?
While such methods may produce numbers which may seem impressive without further investigation, what are the long term results? Are people doing what is told them simply to have a false assurance that they will go to heaven? Like with the scare tactic of the rapture messages, how many go for a short time and then leave or not even return at all after their initial encounter? Let’s use Downs’ own statistics as some food for thought.
On his evangelism website, Downs writes that in 2011 he left evangelizing to pastor a church in Georgia. It is stated, “In the first year they baptized over 712 people in the name of Jesus…” Yet when we go to the church website, we find that “They have seen incredible growth since opening the church on May 1, 2011 with having an attendance of 200-300 on a regular basis.” What happened to those several hundred missing people from the first year and who knows how many in the years thereafter? Did they ever come to know Jesus or have a one on one relationship with him? Or was it nothing more than avoiding hell and wanting to go to heaven? These are things we should seriously ponder.
The question should never be “If you were to die tonight, where would you spend eternity?” Rather, the focus should be on the death, burial and resurrection of Jesus and believing and placing faith in him. It should be about God’s love for us and on having a personal relationship with God. It isn’t about heaven or hell, but about knowing and following our Creator.
[2023 Edit: Since this was written in April 2017, Downs and his wife Holly divorced and in July 2019, he married his daughter-in-law, Stephanie, whom his son had married in 2012. He is pastor of Hope Center in Michigan City, Indiana. It is touted as a “a non-denominational church,” but is Oneness Pentecostal.]
I totally agree , Lois. Where’s the grace and mercy? It seems they just want the numbers being baptized without taking time for them to get to know Jesus. Some former UPC Friends of mine do the same thing. Get baptized and speak in tongues and then (if female) hands her a bag of clothes and proceeds to tell them this is what you have to wear and we expect you in church every time the doors are open. Needless to say they’ve baptized hundreds but their church barely runs 20-30 and they’ve been there since 1980’s sometime. Go figure!
I remember watching some videos on youtube of him going up to people on the street and asking them if they knew where they would go if they died today. The remarkable thing to me is that during the whole conversation, there was NO talk about the Gospel itself. The only time Jesus was even mentioned was when Downs was telling the individual they needed to be baptized in His Name. In the videos I watched, they did respond to him and were baptized.
But, I have to ask…
What exactly are you proclaiming if you are not telling them about the Gospel? What is the whole point of the rest, if you pass the Gospel to get to it?
What are we without an actual relationship with Jesus?
I remember him from ASN, he was strange then.
Thank you! This has been heavy on my heart for a long time.
The Gospel as proclaimed in the six gospel sermons in Acts.
Here is how many times these topics below were mentioned:
Heaven 0
Hell 0
Sin 1
Jesus’ life 4
Jesus’ death 9
Jesus’ resurrection 15
Jesus’ Lordship 10
Nowhere in the new testament is the *Gospel proclaimed* with reference to heaven and hell.
The Gospel is that Jesus Christ is God. It’s is about Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. That’s the good news.
The popular “gospel” today often centers around Jesus being an escape route from hell, or a ticket to heaven. Or about how wretched and sinful we are (which is definitely not good news). The above statistics show that the true gospel and good news of love is very different from this popular fear-based “gospel”.
Jesus isn’t just a means to an end (how I get to heaven (because I have said the sinners prayer 100 times, lol)). He isn’t just the way. He is also the truth and the life.
The goal is Jesus himself. NOW. Not heaven after death. The gospel isn’t fire insurance. He is the centerpiece.
The popular, and skewed, version of the gospel makes out that God only cares about souls. God isn’t rescuing souls off of a sinking ship. His scope is so much larger than that. God cares about our family, our business, our daily life – every detail, our body, our relationships, our desires, justice, etc etc. He is bringing everything (the entire cosmos, not just souls) under the sovereign reign of Jesus Christ.
Well guys Tim Downs is no longer in issue. He left his wife a few years back and started sleeping with his wifes sons wife. The whole family was tore aprt. Since then everyone has been remarried. Weird dude. I hope I never see him again thats all I have to say about that scum bag.
Well, those couple of verses in Revelation, the poetry Jesus quotes regarding the coming fall of Jerusalem and the body dump in Gehenna. and Augustine’s lies lead to the threat of eternal torture being the Gospel. Being resurrected to eternal sexless hymn-praise in heaven sounds slightly better than being burned alive but never consumed.
As long as eternal torment is orthodox, the Gospel will always be about escaping hell. These guys are just more honest about it.
I found this going down the rabbit hole as he is now running a church in Michigan City Indiana and sounds like he very much runs in the same as he did in the past. I would love to hear more information in to his past as someone I know seems to be getting quite caught up in to his church.
I believe he divorced and married his son’s wife.