DA: Lancaster pastor ‘terrorized’ kids – The York Daily Record.

I’m not sure what to think about this Lancaster pastor.  Good intentions gone wrong would sum it up.

I understand what their goal was: to educate and bring awareness to what could happen on a missionary trip in a foreign country.

I’ve been on a missionary trip with a huge group of teenagers.  We traveled as a group and rarely separated into groups of less than three.  This was for our own protection.

(As a side note I will add that after our flight to California we went to eat at a fast food restaurant.  When I came out of the restroom, I realized our entire missionary group had left in the two rented vans.  Thank God it was me who was left behind because I don’t know how a teenager would have reacted.  No one told us what hotel we were staying at and it took quite some time for me to even find our group and have them come back for me.  Poor planning…everyone should have know what hotel we were staying at before continuing on to Mexico.)

Foreign countries are unpredictable.  What this pastor staged has the real possibility of happening on a missionary trip.  It takes faith in God to leave your home and enter foreign territory to spread His word.

What this Assembly of God  Church should have done was inform the parents and youth what was going to happen.  Even knowing it is staged would still get the point across.  After the staged kidnapping, a discussion on how to react to capture should have taken place.

In my humble opinion, no teenagers should be taken to a hostile country for missionary purposes.  Adult missionaries risk their lives to spread God’s word and understand the risks they are taking.

Teenagers believe they are indestructible.

~P.