B.K.: Back in 1993 is when the Lord drew us to Him and we became saved and then shortly after that we were in a small Baptist Church and this was in 1994. We were baptised there and then the pastor started to bring some changes into the church. He brought in material from Pastor Rick Warren apparently he had gone to some conferences with Pastor Warren and was really touting his material, touting his (Rick Warren’s) whole programme and implementing all of it in a very rapid fashion at the church. He (the pastor) was telling us stories about how the little small church was going to grow to huge numbers and also was boosting me into leadership. He wanted me to be, sort of, his right hand man and be close to him from the ground floor and twenty years from now we would be able to look back and look on this huge ministry and say that we had been there, you know, right from the beginning all along.

But quite a few changes started to happen in the church. The music was changing - was part of it, bigger changes that he was doing, he took the pews out of the sanctuary and replaced those with chairs. They restructured, what they called ‘discipleship’ and they started to put us on tracks to leadership - we had to go through courses and they implemented ‘101’, ‘201’ and ‘301’ courses that they wanted everybody in the church to be involved with the courses and they would do assessments at the end, tests and tests and assessments of us, also required that people sign covenants in order to move on to the next level which of course in the Scripture we are commanded not to sign any covenants because it says that let our yes be yes and our nay be nay any more than this comes of evil.

D.M.: Alright, now of course did you notice that they were sort of changing the structure of the service, in other words - and the minister, instead of coming in a coat and tie was coming in more casual dress and people certainly were encouraged, at least indirectly, to be casual in their approach to the services?

B.K.: Yes, that is a very big part of it as well, is the right to not be intimidating to so called ‘seekers’ - unchurched people - churched and unchurched people trying to bring in more unchurched and again trying to make it so that it was more of a ‘comfortable’ - more of an entertaining type of service.

They started to bring in more drama - actually, even the day that we were baptised - the pastor dramatised the point - actually chained himself to the pulpit - he was chained to the pulpit during the entire service. It wasn’t until somebody actually brought the key - it was ‘Jesus Christ’ and unlocked him from the ‘bondage’ of his chains - things like that.

D.M.: What you are getting was more of entertainment rather than relying upon the Christian message. Entertainment - things that would hold people’s attention, a drama, a video, a television and things of that sort. Is that what they were sort of getting into?

B.K.: Right.

D.M.: What about dance and other things of that sort?

B.K.: Well we weren’t there all that long, so we saw a lot of these being implemented and then we left because - the main reason we left was 2 reasons:

(1) That he was going away from deep Scriptural teaching - much more superficial messages. He would give a hand out which had a few ‘fill in blanks’ and basically once you fill in the four blanks which were on handout, that meant the sermon was over.

D.M.: But of course now, wasn’t this really trying to get people into church - wasn’t the motivation behind it certainly a good one, in other words, that if we can get people into church, why then of course, we can get them the Gospel after that.

B.K.: Ostensibly, that’s what is stated.

D.M.: Of course, weren’t a lot of the courses - what happened in these courses - that you had to take ‘101, ‘201’ and ‘301’ ? (D.M. states on the tape that these course numbers are ‘101’, ‘102’ and ‘103, where in B.K.’s introduction they are different - have altered the transcription to agree with B.K. J.S.). Did that take you into the Gospel itself?