My Response to Mark Cahill

This weekend I was at the Florida Statewide Retreat listening to a speaker named Mark Cahill who is better known for his book, “The One Thing You Can’t Do In Heaven.” He seems to me to have a fundamentalist background as he believes in the KJV very strongly if not exclusively as well as being in love with tracts and talking about hell. I came in very skeptical of this retreat mostly because it was called, “Can I Get a Witness?” I have been to these type of things before so I was ready for an in your face type of weekend where we are quilted into sharing our faith with complete strangers. I feel like I need to respond mostly for my own benefit as I have been processing what he has taught over the last few days. Let me say that I do not do this in anything but a spirit of love and I also do this because I think Mark would want me to do this since he talked several times about how we need to be very careful what we are taught and not take everything at face value. I agree and in that spirit will respond to some of what I heard. I also want to say before anything else that I did appreciate Mark’s heart for those that Jesus misses most. It is not doubt out of a sincere appreciate for what God has done for him personally that Mark wants other people to experience the life that Jesus Christ has given him. So with that said, here we go!

The first thing I noticed about Mark’s presentation was his focus on the afterlife. He told stories of close to death experiences where people would wake up saying, “The flames, the flames, etc.” A majority of the substance of the first session seemed to be on whether a person would go to heaven or to hell. His goal of evangelism is to get people saved so they can go to heaven when they die and that is the focus of most of his teaching from here on out. My question has always been, “What about this life?” The afterlife is only 33 1/3 % of the gospel? Why all the morbid stories of death and hell when that is just one part of the full gospel? Not only that but that is how he starts conversations with the age old Evangelism Explosion styled, “If you died tonight would you be 100% sure you would go to heaven?” I don’t want to discredit this question because I think it is important but I’m not sure about it being a great conversation starter nor should people be guilted or scared into becoming a Christian. I think that is why we have so many mediocre lifeless (“gross’ in his own words) Christians today is because they are scared to not be a “Christian” because they don’t want to go to hell so they stick around the church doing absolutely nothing of value and frustrate the crap out of everyone. So is there a better starting place for the gospel then hell and flames and burning and death? That doesn’t sound like good news to me. I believe that hell is a very real place no matter what the substance may be. Whether it is literal flames or just being separated from God, it’s bad. But what if we actually started with “good news”? Isn’t the fact that God wants a relationship with you great news? Is that a better starting place than trying to scare people? Next…..

He told a story about praying in a crowded restaurant with a large group of people before dinner. He asked, “When you pray in a restaurant should you pray soft or should you pray loud?” He said, “Loud, of course! Everyone should hear you praying in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.” I have personally had experiences with those who have prayed extraordinarily loud and I must say it just left me feeling like a complete ass, enough so that I wanted to apologize to the people for the “pray-er” being obnoxious. This is my question. Where is the line between being bold and being obnoxious? That is a HUGE issue in evangelism for me.

The biggest problem I had with Mark’s talk was that he obviously has the gift of evangelism. He can talk to anyone under the sun and really loves to talk to complete strangers. He is very much like Neil Cole in this respect and I love that! But he goes on to make everyone think that they can do exactly what he does when it is clear that not everyone has the gift of evangelism. I think many people will walk away from the retreat discouraged or thinking that something is wrong with them for not being able to do the things that he does. He told a ton of stories which was good but I would have liked to have heard more of your failures as well as your stories with incredible results. It would have made me feel more human. But instead it made me discouraged thinking that I could never do that. Not everyone has the gift of evangelism. Not everyone can do what he does and I think he misled a lot of people thinking they can do what he does. That is what I appreciate about Jim Henderson’s book, “Aka Lost; Reaching the People Jesus Misses Most” because it lets people know how you can make ordinary attempts to share your faith.

Mark Cahill is very very very big on tracts. He wants to get a tract in everyone’s hand that he can. He stands outside of stadiums, he goes to the gay and lesbian festival in Atlanta, is constantly handing the out in airports, etc. I have always hated tracts every since I have my first experience with them at a Marilyn Manson concert. I have found them relatively useless and have seen 0% fruit from them or from those I know. I’m not for sure but maybe Mark knows how to use them better than I do. I have never found them to be very helpful but he certainly has so God bless him! My struggle has always been with this question: “Is lack of information really the problem of why people don’t come to a relationship with Jesus Christ?” Do they really not know about sin and salvation? Is that the barrier or is it that they haven’t seen the gospel lived out in the lives of believers? Or maybe it’s both! Not to mention that a majority of tracts are just not well written or they are in an obnoxious and arrogant spirit that would turn 99.9 percent of the people that read them off to Jesus.

I loved his emphasis on planting seeds. Not everyone is ready for harvest. People have gotten away from the idea of planting seeds and just want to get people to cross the line when that is really God’s job to make happen. So hooray for seed-planters!

Mark believes strongly in the KJV. He said once that, “I went all the way back to the KJV and this is how it is translated correctly.” Why not go all the way back to the Greek and see what it really says? I have yet to look up the verse in Revelation that he did not agree with the translation on but I’m not sure it matters either way it is translated. I believe it says the same thing in both translations. You could have done without giving us an earful about that one.

Mark said that “The church is for believers who can be equipped and taught to make disciples; it’s not meant to be an attention getter to get non-believers to Church to hear the truth, which is the job of the Christian. You will never see the Church in the Bible trying to get non-Christians there, but rather Christians are going out from the church to make disciples.” I totally agree with Mark’s point here. He seems very missional but again missional in a method that I would not want to partake in completely.

Once he ripped The Purpose Driven Life (which isn’t terribly difficult) for Rick Warren using 15 different translations. He asked the question, “Why in the world would someone have to use 15 different translations?” The obviously answer is because he is trying to make Scripture say what he wants it to say. Once again, I would agree completely. I don’t think that is good use of Scripture and is one of the reasons I don’t like the book very much. But there is the opposite end of the spectrum that has seen several people come back to church or start spending time with the Church community for the very first time because of this book! To me it makes me realize that God truly can work through anything, even a book that is the equivalent of Nickleback’s music (easy target).

I respect what Mark Cahill does and am glad that God has given those people the gift to do what they do. I really am thankful. And I appreciate his passion and how he encouraged me to think how I can be more intentional with people I meet. I love his heart but I don’t believe everyone can use the method he uses effectively. God has created some people different than that. I’m not using this as an excuse not to “evangelize” but I think there are different ways to go about it.

Overall I thought I was going to disagree with much more than I did. I ended up actually enjoying Mark and his heart for the lost. I can sense his sincerity in what he does and I think he does witness in a graceful and loving way which I can appreciate. So thank you Mark for the challenge! We need to be shaken a little once in a while to get out of our comfort zones. I’m still not ready to start walking around malls and asking unsuspecting shoppers if they were going to hell until I got kicked out by security guards which is what a majority of the students did that day but you certainly got me thinking so thank you!