| The
main building at the headquarters of the Institute for Basic Life Principles,
Oak Brook, Illinois. While preparing to write this article the authors
toured the facility in mid-1997. (Photo from IBLP
website.) |
| Not
the kind of young people you would have been most likely to find at a Basic
Youth Conflicts seminar in the 1960s or ’70s. |
| Gothard
has never been shy about sharing his belief that he has the answers to
all of life’s problems. |
| Produced
by a Lutheran minister, and the only book-length critique of Gothard's
ministry to date, Bockelman's Gothard — The Man And His Ministry: An
Evaluation (Quill Publications, 1976), exposed several problems with
Gothard's approach to Scripture and the Christian life. Unfortunately,
it was virtually ignored by most of the Christian public, and Bockelman's
warnings went unheeded. |
| One
of four students fatally shot by National Guard troops at Kent State University
(Ohio) during an anti-Vietnam War protest in 1970. |
|
ORIGINALLY
PUBLISHED IN VOL. 3, NO. 4 (JULY/AUGUST 1997), OF THE MCO JOURNAL
|
Bill
Gothard’s Evangelical Talmud,
Part
1
by Don Veinot and Ron Henzel
Preface
In
about 1991 we started receiving phone calls from some residents in Oak
Brook, IL, looking for information. They were very concerned about a group
in their upscale community who, they said, were holding young people against
their wills in some kind of commune. The callers were sure this was a cult
and wanted to know what the community needed to do. When we asked if they
knew the name of the group I was told that it was The Institute in Basic
Youth Conflicts. At the time, we assured the callers that, although Bill
Gothard (the founder and president) was very legalistic, to my knowledge
they were not a cult. Don and his wife, Joy, had attended one of the basic
seminars in the mid 1970s at the urging of some other members of our church.
There were many things that they did not agree with, particularly the legalism,
which came about as a result of using Scripture out of context and either
not realizing or disregarding the grace of God as a result of Christ’s
death, burial and resurrection. They didn’t attend any further seminars
or recommend them to anyone else. In fact, they didn’t think much more
about it until MCO received these calls.
About two years ago we began receiving
more calls about Bill Gothard, and what he now calls his Institute in Basic
Life Principles (IBLP). Since we are a research and education ministry
we decided that we needed to look into the Institute’s teachings to see
if they had changed and if the abuses which were being reported were in
fact, true. This is not something that we went looking for but rather,
it seemed to come looking for us. We are aware of a number of people who
feel that the Institute has really helped them turn their lives around.
We do not want to invalidate the perceived benefits but rather point out
that God often uses people even if they are off through bad motives, content
of teaching, etc. (Phil 1:15-18). On the other hand, we also know that
error begets error, which also begets heartache.
As we have read his material and
received more and more calls for help we were compelled to share those
findings with our readers. This is not meant as a personal attack on Bill
Gothard but rather a look at the history and teachings of an organization
that has affected the lives of more than two and a half million people.
This will be a four part series
which will look at the history of Bill Gothard and IBLP. We’ll cover his
teachings, which ignore the Grace of God and favor putting believers under
a Galatian type legalism. We’ll inspect the “Umbrella of Authority” which
Bill Gothard does not seem to be under himself although he insists that
everyone else should be. We’ll also evaluate his anti-biblical teachings
about ancestral demons and terminology re-definitions.
In The Beginning
The 1950’s was an ideal time to
begin a career in the fledgling youth ministries movement. World War II
had resulted in millions of absentee fathers, and society watched with
alarm as the violence of youth gangs began to rival the tales of Al Capone
and Jack Dillinger. In response to this problem youth ministries went forth
and multiplied. Youth For Christ was founded by Torrey Johnson in 1944
(who hired Billy Graham as YFC’s first full-time employee that same year).
In 1950 Bill and Vonette Bright started Campus Crusade at UCLA, and in
1952 developed “The Four Spiritual Laws” as an evangelistic tool.
Youth ministry was not a new concept.
The late 19th century had brought forth InterVarsity Christian Fellowship,
and the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA). But what made the second
half of the 20th century so unique was a phenomenon unparalleled in American
history: the fabled Baby Boom. Following World War II, the rate of live
births in the U.S. accelerated sharply, until between 1954 (just after
the Korean War) and 1964, they exceeded 10 million annually. (This is the
period officially designated by the U.S. Census Bureau as “the Baby Boom,”
although most people use that phrase to roughly denote to the two decades
following World War II, 1946-1965.)
Along with a skyrocketing birthrate
came mounting fears about a generation that was being raised in a “permissive
society” and seemed to be getting out of control. By 1967, fully one-half
of the U.S. population was under 21 years of age, and by 1968, it had become
frighteningly obvious just how much damage they could do! Aside from the
Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy assassinations, and the subsequent
riots — none of which could be blamed on Baby-Boomers — 1968 also witnessed
the Manson murders and mounting campus unrest over the Viet Nam War which
would eventually produce major explosions, both literal and figurative.
The vast majority of these young people were among “the best and the brightest”
of their time, and would have been so in any generation before or since.
But if tomorrow’s leaders were mixing it up on the streets of Chicago with
the local fuzz, blowing up college buildings, burning draft cards, inciting
to riot, taking drugs, challenging traditional sexual morality, listening
to raucous music, and making a general nuisance of themselves, what hope
was there for the future?
Poised at the brink of this social
tidal wave was a man who promised order in the midst of chaos, peace in
the midst of conflict, sanity in the midst of psychodelia. To the more
cynical, politically correct unbelievers of our day, he would have been
considered merely a spiritual pied-piper who offered to bring the children
back from darkness, only to lead them there. But to the church-going, God-fearing
parents and grandparents of the ’60s and ’70s, he was a Godsend armed with
overheads and three-ring-binders. His name was Bill Gothard.
Where Did We
Go Wrong?
A symbol of what seemed to have
gone wrong in many people’s minds was the arrest of “The Baby Book” doctor,
Dr. Spock, for assisting in the destruction of draft cards. Millions of
mothers in the ’50s and ’60s had raised their children on the instruction
that Dr. Spock had given — which included the advice that children should
not be spanked. And now here was that same baby doctor aiding and abetting
many of those same children in breaking the law. Could it be that the whole
essence of the ’60s youth problem was that an entire generation had been
turned into a bunch of spoiled, narcissistic brats because their parents
listened to the wrong “experts?” Maybe we needed new experts! Bill Gothard
was more than happy to present himself and his teachings as the solution
to the problems of youth conflict.
Now, it would be unfair to caricature
the 1960s as one long Yippie love-in. In the early ’60s, youth rebellion
had been pretty much limited to the occasional street and motorcycle gang.
With a president who mirrored their own youthful idealism for them to follow,
the Howdy Doody generation exchanged their Mickey Mouse hats for membership
in the Peace Corps, and the future was full of hope. Young people were
able to isolate American political demons and send Freedom Riders to exorcise
them through African-American voter registration drives in Mississippi
and what-not. But with the JFK assassination, youthful idealism began to
fade, and with the troop build-up in Viet Nam, it seemed ready to disappear
altogether.
It helps to remember that the discovery
of the German concentration camps and their Jewish Holocaust was only about
20 years old back then — about as recent as Viet Nam is for us today. And
the post-World War II Nuremburg war crimes trials had left the world to
ponder the haunting refrain that was used to justify 6 million savage murders:
“We were only following orders.” In light of this monumental horror, it
was only natural that the next generation should recoil from the dangers
of unquestioned authority. Added to this was the re-discovery of America’s
own heritage of civil disobedience for the cause of liberty and justice.
By all accounts, the first hours of the “Free Speech Movement” on the campus
of Berkeley University in 1964 were almost a religious experience for those
in attendance. The violence that later came to characterize the 60s can
be seen as youthful-idealism-turned-angry.
And yet, in the middle of it all,
there Gothard stood: holding out one simple word as the center of his world
view: “authority.” It was not a message designed to appeal to those youth
who were at the forefront of society’s problems at that time, but that
in itself did not make it wrong.
One of the more popular youth slogans
in the ’60s was “Never trust anyone over 30.” For the first time that anyone
could remember, kids stood right in the face of their elders and shouted
“Hell, no! We won’t go!” And yet there Gothard stood: a thirty-something
(born November 2, 1934) ordained evangelical Christian minister, when he
founded the “Institute in Basic Youth Conflicts,” who dared to tell young
people that their basic problem was a failure to submit to authority. (Note:
it’s difficult to pin down exactly when Gothard’s organization was “founded;”
today it prefers to date itself back to Gothard’s first seminar in 1964.)
Thanks to Cold War politics, not
only were we losing thousands of young people in Southeast Asia, but we
were also spending billions to beat the Soviets to the Moon in order to
demonstrate our technical superiority. America was on the cutting edge
in space, the economy was buzzing along smoothly, and it seemed as if science
had discovered just about everything short of the meaning of life. So millions
left the church in search of answers elsewhere. And yet, there Gothard
stood, quoting verses from a Bible that pre-dated the scientific method
in order to prove something that many people were actively rejecting: that
authority was their friend.
From Out of Nowhere
Gothard had graduated from Wheaton
College with a B.A. in 1957 and an M.A. in 1961. His Master’s thesis was
entitled, “A Proposed Youth Program for Hi-Crusader Clubs.” According to
those who remember him from those days, he was reclusive throughout his
college career, seeming to shun the limelight, his picture appearing in
only one college yearbook. Some were impressed by the amount of time he
spent in solitary prayer. At one point he devoted 35 hours per week to
youth work with a Chicago missionary society while still a full-time student
at Wheaton, 25 miles away.
Gothard also seemed to have a tender
conscience. One day some of his fellow youth workers confronted him with
an attitude of “spiritual pride” that they detected in him, perhaps due
to his success in youth ministry. Gothard became convicted that this was
true, and confessed it to one of his fellow workers. That person dealt
harshly with him, and advised him to confess the sin to several others,
including the head of the missionary society, who fired Gothard shortly
after he made a similar confession to him.
Many people have been discouraged
right out of the ministry by incidents such as this. But despite this negative
experience, Gothard kept pressing on. He would also later counsel thousands
of young people to follow his example and confess such sins to others.
It is difficult to gauge just how
“successful” Gothard was in the early ’60s. We were able to interview only
one person who had been a teenager in a church where Gothard had served
as a youth pastor, and this woman remains convinced that Gothard was not
very effective at dealing with young people on a one-on-one basis, and
not very capable of seeing real problems in a young person’s home life
when they existed. If this is true, it may help to explain why Gothard
began gravitating toward larger audiences, where individual problems are
more easily painted over with the broad brush-strokes of general “principles.”
Sometime around 1964, Gothard was
invited to teach a course on youth ministry at his alma mater, Wheaton
College. Forty-five students attended, including pastors, youth workers
and educators, and the materials he presented at that time became the foundation
for his seminars.
In 1966, Gothard presented a seminar
for 1,000 people in the Chicago area. He repeated the performance in 1967,
and held his first out-of-town seminar in Seattle for 42 people in 1968.
Gothard’s new organization, the “Institute in Basic Youth Conflicts” (IBYC)
was born.
From such meager beginnings, it
was difficult to see where things would eventually head. His combined attendance
for all his seminars in 1968 was actually around 2,000. But then things
really took off! As Wilfred Bockelman would later report in his book Gothard
— The Man And His Ministry: An Evaluation (Quill Publications, 1976),
“In 1969 there were 4,000; 1971, 12,000; 1972 over 128,000, including 13,000
in the Seattle Coliseum; in 1973 more than 200,000” (p. 35).
Before you could say “post-Watergate social malaise,” Gothard’s public
career had outlasted that of most major rock-and-roll stars including the
Beatles (as a group at least), and his live audiences were at least as
huge.
Churches in every city, town and hamlet in America were sending their
young people to his seminars by the busload, and little bands of three-ring-binder-touting
Gothard disciples sprang up on college and university campuses across the
country.
In the early ’70s, toga parties began to replace campus sit-ins. In
the shadow of the Kent State Massacre, the Woodstock generation woke up
to the fact that radicalism could cost some of them their lives. And seeing
as how the prospect of getting killed was a big reason why they were protesting
over Viet Nam in the first place, getting shot on campus seemed to defeat
the purpose. When the war finally did end, there seemed little left worth
caring about for many young people aside from where to take their next
toke on a joint, or have their next sexual encounter. So while the older
generation was relieved that its children were no longer about the business
of tearing down “the Establishment,” new fears dawned of a directionless
generation with declining scholastic aptitude, addicted to instant gratification.
In this environment, Gothard could be assured that hundreds of thousands
of parents would continue to send their kids to his seminars, and IBYC
soon grew into a multi-million dollar organization. In 1976 alone, Gothard
held 32 seminars at $45 per attendee ($35 if part of a church group; $55
per married couple). And it was not unusual for Gothard to pack-out auditoriums
with capacities of 8,000 to 20,000 people. Society’s continuing problems
with its youth virtually assured IBYC’s growth for the foreseeable future.
Promotional
picture of an early Basic Seminar.
|
But Just What
Was In Those 3-Ring Binders?
When your home is on fire, you don’t ask the fireman what denomination
he belongs to. And during the ’60s and ’70s, many Americans thought their
home was on fire, and it was their children who were burning. So maybe
that’s why so many parents and pastors did not get overly critical about,
or exercise a great deal of discernment with respect to the actual content
of Gothard’s seminars. They seemed satisfied knowing that he professed
to be an evangelical Christian, and that he had the confidence and even
endorsement of Christian leaders whom they knew. Besides: what they did
hear sounded good! Obey the authority-figures that God has ordained! Follow
Biblical principles in making every decision! Why should they worry about
Gothard when the Timothy Learys and Abbie Hoffmans of the world were advising
their kids to drop-out, tune-out, get high and enjoy “free love?”
But some people were paying attention, including people who
study and teach the Scriptures for a living. One of them was Ronald B.
Allen, Th.D. As Professor of Hebrew Scripture at Western Baptist
Seminary in Portland, Oregon, he committed his thoughts to writing in a
paper he wrote in 1984, entitled “Issues of Concern — Bill Gothard and
the Bible,” which begins as follows:
| The
week that I spent at Basic Youth Conflicts in 1973 (Portland) was one of
the most difficult of my life. In this seminar I was regularly assaulted
by a misuse of the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, on a level that
I have never experienced in a public ministry before that time (or since).
All speakers, myself included, fail to interpret and apply the Bible rightly
from time to time. But in the Gothard lectures, Old Testament passages
were used time after time to argue points that they did not prove. I was
as troubled by the errors made from the lectern as by the seeming acceptance
of these errors as true and factual by the many thousands of people in
attendance. |
It would be tempting to think of this description as an exaggeration
based on misunderstanding, but if that was the case, then Gothard had every
opportunity to correct the misunderstanding. When Dr. Allen attempted to
arrange a meeting with Gothard through his seminary president, Dr. Earl
D. Radmacher in order to discuss these problems, Gothard told Radmacher
that “he had no interest in meeting with me [i.e., Allen] to discuss these
issues.”
In Part Two
of this series, we will begin dealing with the specific areas of concern
raised by Allen, Bockelman, and others with respect to Gothard’s doctrinal
teaching and his method of handling the Bible.
|
|
