

A decades-old nationwide Christian Evangelical group is visiting local pool and parks this summer to convert children, as young as five, into Christianity.

Established in 1937, the Child Evangelism Fellowship says it is “a Bible-centered organization composed of born-again believers whose purpose is to evangelize boys and girls with the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and to establish (disciple) them in the Word of God and in a local church for Christian living.”

This summer, they will be implementing their “Good News Club” training sessions — massing upon the city of Portland, Oregon — to convert children into born-again Christians, and they can do it without specific parental permission.

“The most spiritually productive harvest field anywhere is among the children,” the CEF website states. “Statistics show that the great majority of people who accept Christ do so between the ages of four and fourteen – when they are children.”

The TRAINING of individuals multiplies our ministry and enables us to reach many more children with the Gospel than we otherwise could. For the past eight years we have trained over 250,000 TEACHERS annually. Training is vital if we are to see more children reached for His glory.

An AP story today reports the local Portland CEF group — they have chapters nationwide, sometimes several per state — is gearing up, and “spent last week training its volunteers,” who will “span out through the area this week trying to reach children.”

“We do teach that children are sinners, but we’re not nasty about it,” Esteves said. “If we were nasty about it, the kids wouldn’t come back.” He said that they don’t try to coerce the children, as “coercion leads to false conversion.” At a park on Monday, the group laid out a tarp for children and chairs for their parents. A pair of volunteers led about 12 kids through Bible verses and songs that praised a Christian god. “My heart was dark with sin,” they sang, “until the savior came in.”

Travis Gettys at the Raw Story notes CEF’s website “claims most people become Christians between ages 4 and 14 years old, so they target children with the message that all people are sinful and that only Christian faith will save them from hell.”

Gettys adds that CEF “won a 2001 U.S. Supreme Court case that decided they could hold chapter meetings on school grounds, and a critical book argues the group uses public spaces to lead children to believe their fundamentalist views are endorsed by authority figures.”

The fundamentalist group is associated with creationist Ken Ham, head of the Answers in Genesis ministry, who claims their mission is part of a spiritual battle dating back to the temptation in the biblical Garden of Eden. â€œIf all life arose by natural processes, and there was no God, why would people even care what others were taught?â€Â Ham said. â€œAfter all, for the secularists, when they die they will cease to existâ€”and in their belief system, they wonâ€™t know they even existedâ€”so why should they care what is taught to children?â€

JournalistÂ Katherine Stewart in 2012 wrote The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children. The book’s description says CEF’s “real mission is to convert children to fundamentalist Christianity and encourage them to proselytize to their ‘unchurched’ peers, all the while promoting the natural but false impression among the children that its activities are endorsed by the school.”

Astonished to discover that the U.S. Supreme Court has deemed thisâ€”and other forms of religious activity in public schoolsâ€”legal, Stewart set off on an investigative journey to dozens of cities and towns across the nation to document the impact. In this book she demonstrates that there is more religion in Americaâ€™s public schools today than there has been for the past 100 years. The movement driving this agenda is stealthy. It is aggressive. It has our children in its sights. And its ultimate aim is to destroy the system of public education as we know it.

A group calledÂ Intrinsic Dignity warns about CEF and its Good News Club.

The Club’s dominant theme is sin.Â Its 5-year curriculum includes over 5000 references to sin, compared to less than 2000 references to “love.”Â Spread over 120 one-hour lessons, a child can expect to hear a reference to “sin” approximately every 90 seconds. Each lesson uses a black heart to vividly symbolize a child’s inner self.Â The black heart impresses children with a deeply personal sense of their own inadequacy and sordidness.Â “You were born with darkness in your heart because of sin,” says one lesson on blind Bartimaeus.[3]Â “Your heart (the real you) is sinful from the time you are born,” exclaims a lesson on the golden calf.[4] The Club frequently reminds children that they are “deceitful,” “dishonest,” and “desperately wicked.”[5]Â A lesson on Cain and Abel warns: “your heart is very sinful…. You may think you’re pretty good, but when God sees your heart He sees it is full of sin.”[6]Â Another lesson on Jacob and Esau declares: “Others may think that you are a good person, but God knows what you’re really like on the inside.Â He knows that deep down you are a sinner–you were born that way.”[7]Â “God says none of us are good,” explains a lesson on God’s omniscience.[8]Â Even the concept of redemption is used to deprecate children.Â “As Jesus hung on the cross, God punished him for your sinÂ and your deceitful heart.”[9] In one curriculum exercise, a teacher hangs a sign labeled “SIN” around a child’s neck.Â The teacher explains, “[s]ome children try to deny their sin.Â They say they never do wrong things.Â But is that true?” No, the children reply.Â The teacher continues, “He may not think it’s there, but God says it and you can be sure that other people see it too!”[10]

Image, top, byÂ Carol LinÂ via Flickr. Insert by Leslie via Flickr.