The SBC's Jerusalem Prayer Center Needs Your Ca$h

Last year the IMB's fundraising push for the Southern Baptists in Israel was the Baptist Village.  This year it's the Jerusalem Prayer Center (JPC).  And like last year, you have to give the fundraising maestros credit for their, um, creativity - they really know how to ram those square pegs of modern mission's marketing razzle-dazzle into the round holes of truth and reality.  All for the coveted missions dollars from the naive, dear Southern Baptist lay-folks on whom they cynically target in SBC churches.

If one wants to be honest, this appeal for funds for something like the Jerusalem Prayer Center (and the BV last year) is all about institution building and legacy establishing - nothing more.  This is perfectly fine, except for at least two things.  First, obviously, is that there is no mention about any connection between how saying your prayers in the JPC (as opposed to, say, anywhere else on the planet) will concretely result in "Outreach & Evangelism",  the category it's listed under.  Second, is the minor detail of how this is all diametrically opposed to IMB core values of investing in "institutions".

As opposed to my screed from last year, I'll be brief about the ongoing culture of IMB's 'Deceptions for Dollars' racket in this particular appeal.

The FIRST problem is that the appeal is under the category of "evangelism", when in fact, the appeal makes no claim that any concrete evangelism is ever going to happen by anyone.  Read it:

https://www.imb.org/give/project/jerusalem-prayer-center/

Nothing is more crucial to the spread of the gospel than prayer. 

The Jerusalem Prayer Center is a powerhouse for prayer, affecting harvest fields across the world. As of 2019, visitors from at least 111 different lands have lifted prayers for their nations within the JPC walls. Included in that number are both Arabs and Jews from Israel, itself. In recent years young families have regularly visited the JPC to pray for the nations as a family unit. Your gift will fund the installation of family-friendly prayer spaces, including an outdoor Family Prayer Garden and an indoor family prayer room, called Samuel’s Space. Both areas are designed to provide tools that parents can use to deepen the prayer life of their family, and in turn, strengthen their own work of sharing Christ to the nations. The JPC staff will provide monthly prayer events geared to young families. Prayer-related activities give parents the ability to take abstract prayer concepts and make them concrete while strengthening fathers as the spiritual leaders of the family.

The Family Prayer Garden will house the seven species of indigenous plants that God promised in Deuteronomy 8:8: pomegranates, figs, grapes, olives, dates, barley, and wheat. Verses of Scripture in English, Arabic, and Hebrew are printed on large tiles inset into the garden wall. Stone benches and water features provide quiet spots where adults can enjoy time with the Lord.

Jerusalem is a multicultural city in Israel that is significant to Jews, Muslims, and Christians. The Jerusalem Prayer Center borders the largest ultra-Orthodox Jewish area of the city; the northern wall of the property is shared with a Muslim boys’ school; the front of the property borders an Arab traditional Christian school; and to the south, an evangelical church. Prayer elements allow parents to teach children to pray for the Jewish, Muslim, and Arab-Christian neighbors.

Give today to help this global prayer center flourish in the heart of Jerusalem.

What it DOES say is:
👉 The JPC is a "powerhouse for prayer, affecting harvest fields across the world" (whatever in the world that means)
👉 Your giving will fund:
  ✔ "installation of prayer spaces" which provide "tools...to deepen the prayer life" which will "strengthen (the) work of sharing Christ to the nations" (again, whatever that means).
  ✔ "Monthly prayer events" and "prayer-related activities" to make "abstract prayer concepts ... concrete"
  ✔ "Strengthening fathers as the spiritual leaders of the family".

For the cool price of $116K - installation of spaces, 'prayer elements'(?), deepening stuff, and strengthening things.  Gobbledygook.  Sophisticated spiritual missions lingo that amounts to over a hundred thousand dollars of exactly nothing.  Just vague assurances that somehow, somewhere, some nebulous evangelism should occur some time in the future.  Maybe next month, next year.  Maybe in your own lifetime.  Or hundreds of years later.  Or not.  They don't even try to explain.  But go ahead, trust them.

Let's give them benefit of the doubt (after all, you just never know, right?) why the JPC categorized "Outreach & Evangelism" (when maybe it would be more accurate to be categorized under "Discipleship & Training, or even "Missionary Care" and/or "Ministry Access").  Maybe some obedient intern hit the wrong button when publishing the appeal and accidentally mis-categorized it.  ...

 But this is exactly what they did last year with the appeal for funds for the BV.  One might conclude that a pattern is emerging, like the premeditated intention to deceive?  (If you think that's harsh, see my last few posts on this same pattern of behavior endemic in the IMB in posts from 2020 below👇, ad nauseum.)

Let's hope that maybe the writer of the appeal just couldn't stretch the truth so far as to actually make the claim that the JPC has ANY REAL CONNECTION with outreach and evangelism.  After all, this appeal is meant to appeal to the emotions - Israel+prayer+evangelism = GIVE💸💸💸.  If so, at least they didn't wander completely off the plot and give up the gig.

The SECOND problem I'd like to point out is that funding the Jerusalem Prayer Center (and, for what it's worth, the Baptist Village) violates one of the IMB's own core values of investing in institutions.

 

I've heard IMB vice presidents dutifully recite, with the same conviction and seriousness as when saying the Lord's Prayer, that the IMB is no longer in the business of financially funding/supporting these things.  Except in Israel, where they know they can fleece the flock, in spite of IMB doctrine.

Again, all of this is perfectly fine if it weren't for the brazen hypocrisy of the IMB's against its own core values.  Oh yeah, and the whole integrity thing.  Buy hey, these people are in missions and approved by the infallible IMB, so they have a special dispensation that we mere mortals can't comprehend🧠.  Just TRUST them.

Don't get me wrong, looking through the IMB's website at their appeals for funds is always good for a giggle.  The sheer chutzpah and lack of integrity of some of the appeals is always a sight to behold.  I see things like this and it only reaffirms EXACTLY WHY I left the IMB in the first place.

 

They are all good and sweet people, for the most part, who have been given authority and budgets they have neither earned nor deserve.  And it's all absent of any real, meaningful accountability (the IMB holding itself accountable is not accountability).  And, sorry, the trustee system is a broken farce - if you could only hear the private conversations of IMB folk (which I have for years), it is a pathetic joke.  But that's another subject for another day.

Go ahead and give to these things, it's a free country and please don't take my word for any of this - what do I know?  It's just one person's biased opinion.  As long as you know what is going on and see through the rubbish, give to your heart's content.  But you will get exactly nothing from what you pay for....  if you're OK with that.