E-Proselytizing At Public School

This is really stooping low, to stalk children at school to get their MySpace information and email addresses in order to proselytize to them online and invite them to church activities, even offering to pick them up without parents’ consent.

From Sandhya Bathija at Americans United:

LINK: E-Proselytizing At Public School?: MySpace Missionaries Spark Complaints In Washington State

It’s the age of MySpace and Facebook, text messages and e-mail, and for some fundamentalist evangelists, maybe even e-proselytizing.

According to reports from two Washington state newspapers, a local middle school student recently received this MySpace message from a 19-year-old church youth leader.

“Hey, 628 tonight! 6 o clock, free espresso for visitors. Super rad games and activities. Hang out with cool people. Plus you are really cool so it would just make it that much cooler. Are you going to be there? If you need a ride, I can hook it upJ”

“628” is Turning Point Church’s youth group for sixth through eighth graders, and youth group leader Emily Masten sent that message to Rianne Olver’s 11-year-old daughter after meeting her at Totem Middle School in Marysville, Wash.

Olver, concerned that an adult was soliciting her child and offering to pick her up without parental permission, filed a complaint with Marysville School District.

“To me, it’s really disturbing to know there are adults at the school sitting down with the kids saying, ‘Hey, can I have your MySpace and your phone number,” Olver told the Everett Herald. “It’s a huge red flag. It’s really creepy.

And it IS creepy! Who knows who these people are. Are they screened like teaching and assistant staff are screened? I had to be fingerprinted and a background check in order to teach children and be around them.

The public school allows church volunteers to serve as informal mentors, keep an eye on students during lunch and plan games and activities, Assistant Superintendent Gail Miller told the Herald.

Mentors are not permitted to mention religion unless students bring up the subject, and they are not supposed to ask students for phone numbers or MySpace information, she said.

But apparently, they have a secret motive for their volunteering, and while the church of course play innocent and states they tell their volunteers to “follow the rules”, they really are glad for the “witnessing” their volunteers are doing.

Turning Point Senior Pastor Mike Villamor claims he tells the volunteers to follow these rules. The church has sent representatives into the schools for years, and vows it is looking into the incident to figure out what went wrong. He also insists the congregation just wants “to give every person an opportunity to hear about how much God loves them,” and has no desire to recruit anyone.

But it appears Turning Point’s people are known for doing just that. Four years ago, Nick Poling, a former Totem Middle School student, said emissaries from the church would hang out in the school’s open-air hallways and hand out Bibles.

“[They said] that we should all to go to Turning Point Church because it’s a cool place to be,” he told The Stranger. “They were out there waiting for us when we came out for the buses.

“I just was kind of confused,” said Poling, “as to why the administration would let them do that.”

On one hand Villanor states that his church has no desire to recruit anyone, and then he contradicts himself by saying that their church “just wants to “give every person an opportunity to hear about how much God loves them.” The truth is they are being sneaky and scheming just to spread their religion to unsuspecting children. It’s pathetic,and could be downright dangerous.