‘Unite Georgia’ Crusade Event in Athens: Some Thoughts
By Elizabeth Prata
Me: I wasn’t going to write about it but now I can’t seem NOT to write about it.
Observer: How could you have negative thoughts on an event that brought thousands youth in one place to hear about Jesus, pray, confess, and be baptized?! Are you crazy? Or just a Pharisee?
Me: Neither, but let’s unroll this and see what you think afterward.
On April 3, an event called UniteUS was held in the city of Athens GA at Stegeman Coliseum. It attracted college kids, thousands of them, to hear preaching and music from the Passion music group (Passion as in the Passion Conferences). False teacher Jennie Allen had been invited to preach. There was also preaching from JP Pokluda. Afterwards hundreds of kids were invited down the aisle to decide for Jesus, and many others sought baptism, which was accommodated by bringing the kids to a parking lot stationed with pickup trucks filled with water.
Observer: Why do you say Jennie is false? She founded IF:Gathering for heaven’s sake, a globally successful parachurch ministry!
Me: Jennie is false because her catalyst for founding her parachurch IF:Gathering was based on a direct revelation. In her words, “a voice from the sky” ordered her to “gather and equip this generation”. (Too bad for past and coming generations, I guess?) Sadly, Jennie’s IF movement preaches a twisted hermeneutic, models an unbiblical lifestyle, and is saturated with a Gospel of doubt: their tagline says ‘IF God exists, then what?’
Observer: But, but, but Jennie’s message in Athens GA was so good! She “spoke about the dangers of social media and comparison and encouraged the audience to be open to each other about the things they have been hiding in their lives“, SO apt for these kids! You Pharisee. God can do anything with anyone!
Me: I agree Allen’s speech about social media is a good topic. But it’s not a sermon and it’s not the Gospel. And, yes He can do anything with anyone. He did with Saul/Paul the murdering Pharisee. But why did the demon possessed slave girl who was speaking something true, aggravate Paul so much? (Acts 16:17-18). Why didn’t he let her continue following and hollering? Because God doesn’t need truth to come from lying lips and rebels.
To continue- The UniteUS event organizers’ About page state they have 3 goals for their events,
SALVATION
For non-believers to hear a clear presentation of the Gospel in a welcoming environment. Acts 16:31; Romans 10:9
FREEDOM
For believers to know and experience true freedom from sin and burdens on their hearts. Galatians 5:1
COMMUNITY
For students to find community and discipleship through connection to local ministries and the local church. Ephesians 4:1-6.
Observer: These are good goals! It’s “a night of Christian worship, prayer and motivational speaking!” We need more motivational speaking in evangelicalism. And more environments that are “welcoming”!
Me: Beth Moore started as a motivational speaker. And look how that turned out. I’d love to know what the organizers mean by saying the Gospel will be given in an environment that’s “welcoming”. Past history shows that usually means the potency of sin is overlooked or diminished and the dire necessity of confession and repentance is whitewashed.
The Founder of UniteUS is Tonya Prewitt, wife of Auburn University Basketball Coach Chad Prewitt. “After hearing students stories about battles with anxiety, suicidal thoughts, and addiction, Prewitt said she felt like she needed something to help.” (Source)
Indeed, University of Georgia students have had a difficult time this spring semester, with a suicide of a popular boy, and the killing of girl near the campus. Crime in general is up in the city. The world’s social and emotional pressures are tremendous upon youths more than ever before.
They do need our support and guidance. But not en masse preaching from a female rebel and an emotional approach to resolving life’s difficulties. Jesus is not a patch ‘to help’ people overcome emotional depression.
I’ve written before about the Passion Conference (and also here) which bans adults from attending and manipulates kids with emotional music;
and the
Urbana Conferences, where hundreds heard David Platt speak and at the end he had them repeat a prayer, and the youths signaled their profession of newfound faith (which speakers affirmed) with a glow stick.
In an interview about the Florida State University event held this past February, the local UniteUs organizer concluded, “They came forward in droves tonight to trust Jesus.”
[The End Time: Are There too Many Conferences?]
The problem at these youth-aimed conferences is with decisional regeneration. It seems that UniteUS is in the same vein. “Choosing to follow” or “deciding for Christ” or “inviting Jesus in” have become synonymous with the supernatural act of Godly justification. They’re not the same thing.
And now here’s another ‘movement’ or ‘revival’ as Prewitt calls it (remember the Asbury Revival on another college campus?). Prewitt’s ultimate goal with this movement is “to unite the nation.”
Observer: What beef do you have with women in ministry? Are you a misogynist or something?
Me: The Bible calls women to keep her sphere to the family if possible, to the local church, and to resist stepping out in leadership. Why is it that women who are moms and wives are not content to persist in ministering to their family or locals, but must be founders of massive movements with lofty goals like ‘unite the nation’, or ‘disciple this generation‘ or be ‘a woman who leads and believes you were made to lead‘? Whatever happened to ‘Be a mom’?
Prewitt has said, “When your faith is strong and you trust God to do big things. Big things are going to happen and we’ve just seen that” [at Auburn’s UniteUS event]”
Why is it that these non-Titus ladies desire “big things” like large platforms but not the REAL big things like, a child’s justification…a strong, beautiful marriage modeling mutual submission, a prayerful devotional at home…honoring elderly parents… why do the “big things” always seem to mean to these non-Titus ladies, high profile and filled arenas?
Let’s take a look at UniteUS founder Tonya Prewitt:
“My husband was probably as far from God as you could be and it’s like when we met I knew he was supposed to be my husband…”
God has said not to yoke with unbelievers. What was she doing with dating a person who she admits was so far from God? If he was unsaved he was not “supposed to be” a husband to a believer. (2 Corinthians 6:14)
Later, Prewitt said Chad would not go to church but he would go to a concert, so she took him to a Christian Concert where they did an altar call at the end. Chad went forward and decided for Christ. “It changed his life and he went in full on with God.” So THAT’S where she gets the idea that mass decisional regeneration events are acceptable ways to convert.
Oh, I should have waited a second, because she says exactly that in the next video frame:
“Even what happened at Auburn is almost a correlation of what we saw with him [Chad], in that you you can take somebody as far going as him, but an event like that can sometimes be an encounter that changes someone’s lives for eternity.”
In an interview, Tonya Prewitt named herself as “a mom and a spiritual mom” when describing her former ministry to young girls on campus. Initially counseling 5 young women though discipling and prayer, something the Bible applauds and expects of older women, within one year she founded a multi-state organization and now adds to her named jobs of mom and spiritual mom, “Incorporator and Director of a non-profit business entity in the State of Alabama.”
UNITEUS is an Alabama Domestic Non-Profit Corporation filed on November 16, 2023. The company’s filing status is listed as Exists and its File Number is 001-108-449. Source Alabama Secretary of State.
Yet the Bible says we are told to live quietly, “encourage the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, to be sensible, pure, workers at home, kind, being subject to their own husbands, so that the word of God will not be dishonored.” (Titus 2:4b-5).
Did you know that ‘God’ gave Tonya a vision for revival and for thousands of youths filling arenas?
Tonya said on one interview, she was praying with students “for revival…God gave me a vision for thousands of students gathered in Auburn’s arena.”
In another interview, she said “God gave me a vision ahead of time of what was to come and I’ll tell you this; I have a vision for what’s coming even greater than what we witnessed on September 12th. Nationally… globally… something so big that is coming it’s going to hit our college campuses.” (Source)
“I saw the students gathered, I saw the worship, but I didn’t see the baptisms that were coming. It was really cool because God didn’t show me the full vision. I could have messed that up and gotten in the way of it” (source).
Yes, because puny humans who are given direct revelation from God are powerful enough to thwart His plans. Oy.
Apparently Tonya is not only a biblical visionary but a prophetess too:
“About a year before Unite took place, we were sitting in small group one night and I just stood up and I looked at the girls and I said ‘Something so big is coming a year from now and you’re going to be part of it.’ What’s coming? and my co-leader said ‘What’s coming?’ and I said ‘I don’t know all I can tell you is something so big is coming. I feel it.” (Source).
“God could and only the spirit of God could draw all of these students into this Arena.” (Source)
Observer: See?! And it came true. Ha.
Me: No, Satan draws them too. Not “only” God. Just because the event worked out like she wanted it to does not mean necessarily it is of God. In fact, the numbers are usually small when it comes to a real move of God. Noah’s 7. Lot and 2 daughters. The crowds left Jesus and would not follow any more. (John 6:66). Only 5 were at the cross with Jesus when He died.
Prewitt said she emphasizes getting plugged into a local church, so “we had every campus ministry, every local church represented at our event so students could go to the back into the Concourse and get plugged in to a church.” (Source)
Hm, including the Auburn Catholic Campus Ministry, the college ministry of St. Michael the Archangel Parish? And the Adventist Christian Fellowship Auburn Chapter of the 7th Day Adventist Church? And the local Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints on College Avenue? Those campus ministries and local churches also had a table on the Concourse kids could sign onto?
Observer: They have the right approach, for sure.
Me: Well…not so fast. First, I wonder HOW the organization links thousands of bouncing, burbling, emotionally high students with local churches on the spot before they wander off. Secondly, this approach has not been too successful in the past. Some Parachurches like Walk to Emmaus/Chrysalis compete with local churches to deliberately draw away congregants, or like IF:Gathering, they become a sort of substitute church all on their own.
(FYI: The End Time The Problem with Parachurch Organizations is…)
Also, remember Billy Graham Crusades? You might be too young. But Graham was a global itinerant preacher who gathered hundreds of thousands to huge arenas and preached. He called people forward at the end of his sermons where endless choruses of the song Just As I am played, to make a decision for Christ (language never in the Bible). Counselors were stationed at the bottom to counsel seekers who flooded down by the hundreds. Except, Graham had Jewish rabbis and Catholic priests there to counsel folks back to their own ‘church’ where they’d be returned in the same state of non-belief they were in before.
It should be noted that Cecil Andrews said in his video called, “The Man and His Message” about Billy Graham’s Crusades, “I know of a number of men who do door-to-door work in Northern Ireland. They constantly come across people whose view is ‘Oh I made a decision at a Billy Graham Crusade, but I don’t go to church now. I haven’t gone for years.’ But yet somehow or other they’re relying on this emotional response they made 30 or 40 years ago. Yet they would have gone down as one of the people who went forward as an ‘Inquirer’ and they would be viewed rightly or wrongly by others as fruit.”
Sadly, it’s reported at a recent UniteUS crusade, that:
“We ended up having hundreds of students walk forward to receive salvation,” Denning said. “And then almost 300 students got baptized in our Westcott Fountain, in the front of our campus.” (Source).
So it’s the same all over again. The way is NARROW. It’s a turnstile, not a mass event.
This turnstile only takes one at a time. It is exclusive from the start. It is intensely personal. You can’t be born into it. You can’t join the church and sort of be swept in with the crowd. It is intensely personal. It is intensely individual. It is you and you alone. All our life prior to coming through that gate we ran with the crowd, but when we came through the gate we came alone. Many others have come, but they came alone. Salvation is an individual miracle. You don’t go through a turnstile in groups. You go through by yourself.” John MacArthur, on the Narrow Gate sermon “The Way to Heaven.”
I’m suspicious of conferences aimed at youth. I feel protective of children and youth, and college students are children. These mass conferences tend to be filled with false teachers, false gospels, emotionalism, and affirming declarations of faith in an instant rather than careful scrutiny and waiting to see if actual fruit develops. I’ve written about this before-
Tonya Prewitt, who claims visions from God and utters prophecies in the midst of a gathering, who states she served formerly as a Youth Pastor and as a Deacon, discontent with ministering to 5 and now wants 5000, who hires Jennie Allen to preach; lacks discernment and should NOT be organizing events for thousands of emotionally worn, spiritually floundering youth.
While I admire Tonya Prewitt’s desire for youth to have comfort in their life difficulties, putting forward a goal of “uniting the US” is not what the Bible calls women to do.
Observer: You’re just a Negative Nellie Debbie Downer, aren’t you? You have a critical spirit!
Me: I always bring things back to the Bible. Women are to be tending the home, at home, raising the children if the Lord gave any to her, ministering to the husband as helpmeet, and doing good in the community. (Proverbs 31, Titus 2, Genesis 2:18, Proverbs 29:15, 1 Timothy 5:14). She should have a reputation for local good works and again, be primarily oriented for the home.
Nothing in the Bible shows women gallivanting off to found revival movements to unite the entire world. Not even the unique time of the first century church. Lydia hosted gatherings in her home. Dorcas didn’t run off from region to region gathering women into the Areopagus or Solomon’s portico to “change their lives.” She sewed garments for the poor. Do we hear of Mary Magdalene (allegedly the first evangelist?) after the moment at the tomb? (John 20:18). No. Not one mention after that. No Billy Graham-like Crusades for her.
Observer: You gave me a lot to think about. I’ll read some of the links you posted. I still think you don’t have to throw cold water on everything. Maybe some of those kids were actually saved.
Me: Maybe some were. And maybe a lot more weren’t but THINK they were, which is worse. The name of Jesus is the most important name in the universe and salvation is the most important event ever. We must be careful and see if these things are so. Always look at the founder’s testimony and lifestyle, and also see what she says, not just what she does. Compare to the Bible. If she claims direct revelation, utters extra-biblical prophecies, or lives a lifestyle the Bible doesn’t allow for her point in life, avoid her and her ministry.
The Good News is available in any church, THE welcoming place Jesus established for people to confess, repent, and be saved. THE place to discuss a growing conviction of sin and sort out what it all means, in the quietude of a conversation with a knowledgeable, wise believer or pastor. What an eternal shame it would be for these college kids to grow up, relying on their emotional response they made 30 or 40 years ago when they face the Lord Jesus on Judgment day, only to discover Matthew 7:21 applied to them
“Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven will enter.
