One https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hckr0-OV6_8
Radical Ecumenism Fulfilling the Great Commission by 2033
Kirk Magleby
August 2024
Summary
Kirk Magleby highlights a global Christian movement uniting Catholics, Evangelicals, Orthodox, and Protestants in unprecedented cooperation to spread the gospel worldwide by the bi-millennium of the Resurrection. He shows how Latter-day Saints, through projects like Scripture Central’s 3D biblical models, the Scripture Plus app, and the Messages of Christ channel, can contribute meaningfully to this worldwide effort to fulfill the Great Commission.
Presentation
Kirk Magelby: Brothers and sisters, today is 2024. A massive event happens in 2033, nine years from today. It’s the bi-millennium. It’s the 2,000th anniversary of the Resurrection and Pentecost. And this is going to be a massive celebration around the Christian world.
The Christian Global Movement
I’m going to tell you today about some of the things that are happening in a global movement around Christianity, and then we’ll talk a little bit about what some of us here as Latter-day Saints are doing to participate in this.
In November of 2017, a remarkable institution opened in downtown Washington, DC, at the Federal Center metro stop. This is the Museum of the Bible, which now welcomes more than a million people every year through its doors. A second museum is under construction in Accra, Ghana, because that’s where global Christianity is growing the fastest—Africa. The headquarters for this organization is in Oklahoma City. You’ll hear more about Oklahoma City here in a few minutes. They are currently preparing a virtual version of themselves so they can reach massively larger audiences around the world.
In 1996, Craig Groeschel founded Life.Church with a technological emphasis. Today, this is the largest megachurch in North America. It has 35 campuses, and over 100,000 people every week attend services. And that isn’t even the beginning of the reach of this organization. They provide online virtual content that goes around the world and reaches millions of churches in all parts of the globe every single week.
Apps and Schools
There is also the place where YouVersion was created—the number one Bible app on the planet. YouVersion will soon approach one billion—that’s billion with a “b”—downloads. It is currently delivering the word of God in 1,000 languages across the world, and it is one of the top ten apps on the planet.
In addition, there are hundreds of Christian schools, theological seminaries, and divinity schools that dot the earth. Three of the most significant are Oral Roberts University—this is a recent photograph of ORU—Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, founded by Jerry Falwell, and Northpoint Bible Seminary in Haverhill, Massachusetts, which happens to be the principal theological seminary for Assemblies of God, the largest of the Pentecostal denomination currently on planet earth.
These people are interesting not just because they enroll millions, but because they have vast online presences. For instance, Liberty University in Virginia has an online enrollment of 125,000. In addition, these schools supply curriculum for churches worldwide and for lots of homeschooling that takes place. And homeschooling is a phenomenon not just in the good old U.S. of A., but all over the world.
He Gets Us
There is an organization called the Come Near Foundation, and they have an initiative they call the He Gets Us campaign. It’s an ad campaign. The ads come out of Michigan. There’s a donor-advised fund called the Signature Fund. Many of the largest Christian donors on the planet belong to this, and they run ads at Major League Baseball, the Olympics, NASCAR, the Super Bowl, places like the World Cup—anywhere where vast numbers of people gather. They were at the Republican National Convention. They’re at all the major political events.
The purpose behind the He Gets Us campaign is to make Jesus the largest brand on the planet.
Christian Movies
There’s another organization that we’re quite familiar with. It’s called the Come and See Foundation, and they produce The Chosen. Now, The Chosen has currently reached several hundred million people. They intend to reach one billion people. They are in their fourth season, and they will go through seven seasons visualizing the life of Christ. When they hit the seventh season, there’s a follow-on: a sequel, The Life of Paul, which will take us through the rest of the New Testament. Brilliant execution.
In the old days, faith-based movies were cheesy. Today, however, faith-based movies are mainstream. There’s a new title coming out about every two weeks. Christian moviemaking is now a major genre. We have a complete ecosystem in place that includes investors, distributors, and streaming deals. There’s a streaming deal with Netflix for $800 million to start streaming Christian movies. And these people are reaching all over the world because these are going out in many, many languages.
Megachurches
There’s also a phenomenon called megachurches. This happens to be a Christmas display, at Saddleback Church in Orange County, California. That’s where Rick Warren pastored for 25 years. The largest megachurch in the world is in South Korea. It has a half a million members. The largest megachurch in the United States I just showed you a few minutes ago is Life.Church in Edmond, Oklahoma, with 100,000 members. The 100 largest megachurches in the U.S. and Canada—in North America—have 1.4 million members between them.
And the vast majority of these organizations sponsor many secondary ministries such as online, radio, children’s, international humanitarian, educational—that type of thing. So a lot of subsidiary activity is happening around these big megachurches.
Storytelling Editions of the Bible
Now, we’re all familiar with Gideons, who’ve distributed two million Bibles since 1889. But few people realize there’s an organization that was founded back in 1987 that has also distributed two million Bibles. But this is what their Bibles look like. These are age-appropriate, biblically based storytelling editions that are going around the world in hundreds of different languages to get the Bible out to every child and every youth that they possibly can. This happens to be called OneHope International.
Door-to-Door Campaigns
There’s another organization here. This is called Every Home for Christ. They’ve been around since 1946. They are an international missiology ministry, meaning they go door-to-door and they put on what are called saturation media campaigns to reach every single person in a given geography. They partner with local churches, and they have reached, since they began 76 years ago, over two billion people one-on-one with this type of personalized evangelization.
Theme Parks and 3D Models
Then there’s the theme parks. You go to Cincinnati, Ohio, and within one hour of each other, you’ve got the Creation Museum and you’ve got the Ark Encounter. And I know this audience is not much into young earth creationism—nor am I—but nonetheless, these guys are driving almost two million visitors every year to these theme parks.
In addition to the personal visitation, they’re actively building 3D models right now, which are going to greatly expand their reach. They expect to be able to influence many, many more around the world virtually.
What’s the common denominator between every one of these things I’ve just shared with you? They’re funded by this family. These are the Greens. They own Hobby Lobby. They live in Oklahoma City, and they have a net worth of approximately $15 billion. Hobby Lobby has over a thousand stores and adds more every year. And they give away half of the profits of their corporation. So they basically invest half of the profits of Hobby Lobby to grow the business, and the other half—they give away. That’s Steve in the middle. He’s the patriarch. Barbara is his wife. The odd man off to the side is Steve, their second son. The one right next to Dave is Mart, who’s their chief investment officer. And then Darcy’s their sister. These five people fund all of the projects that I just described.
Far-Reaching
And their projects are reaching anywhere from millions, to tens of millions, to hundreds of millions, to billions of people around the globe. They’re doing that with a modest investment of somewhere around one to two billion dollars a year, strategically going out there and impacting high-impact, high-return-on-investment ministries and investing in those ministries.
Now, there’s something else interesting going on here, and that is that the particular series of organizations I’ve just described cross all denominational boundaries. Well—that’s not true. They are not into Catholicism yet or mainstream Protestantism. But as far as across the evangelical spectrum, they cross all denominational boundaries.
Working to Fulfill Christ’s Great Commission
There’s another very large organization that’s out there doing incredible work across the world. This is called Campus Crusade for Christ (Cru). They have about a $700 million a year annual budget, and they have 16,000 employees around the world. They’re in 160 countries, and they are so big that they consider themselves the Great Commission movement. That’s one of their acronyms they talk about themselves.
Back in the year 2000—because let’s face it, the year 2000 was kind of an epic year in the history of mankind— Cru said, “We think we can fulfill the Great Commission by the year 2000.”
Matthew 28:19
Now what is the Great Commission? The Great Commission is Matthew 28:19, where the Savior, as he’s about ready to ascend into heaven, tells his disciples, “Go ye therefore into all the world, and teach all nations.” In many Bible versions it says, “Make disciples of all nations, baptizing them,” and so forth. This is the Great Commission: preach the gospel to every nation, kindred, tongue, and people—the Book of Mormon version of it.
Well, Cru said, “We’re big. We’re effective. We should be able to go and fulfill the Great Commission by the year 2000.”
They fell flat on their face. Didn’t make much progress at all. Their particular model of church planting, with very enthusiastic mission teams of young college-age kids being sent out from their bases all over the world to go into what they call the “unchurched,” simply didn’t make much of a difference in very staunchly atheistic, or Buddhist, or Hindu, or Muslim areas.
Bi-Millennium
So, global Christianity got together and said, “Okay, we failed in the year 2000. Let’s go hit the ball out of the park for 2033, which is the bi-millennium.” And they said, “Okay, how did we mess up? Well, we didn’t include the Catholics.”
And so they started with the Catholic participation, and the Orthodox, and the mainline Protestant, and the Evangelical. And they’re all working together in what is an amazing—what I call radical ecumenistic—kind of endeavor.
This happens to be the Catholic version of let’s go fulfill the Great Commission by 2033.
And this happens to be the Evangelical version.
The Protestant Version
Now, who’s behind the Protestant version here? It’s Rick Warren, the guy that used to pastor Saddleback Church. He’s the one who wrote Purpose Driven Life, which sold 35 million copies. He has inherited the Evangelical mantle of leadership now that Billy Graham has passed on to his eternal reward. So the guy that represents Evangelicals at the White House and other places is usually Rick Warren.
This is what he’s doing. He stepped down from pastoring Saddleback, and this is his current gig. He calls it Finishing the Task. Now the interesting thing is Rick’s on the board of the Catholic version, and several monsignors are on the board of Rick’s version right here. There’s tight integration between these two. That’s why this has an interesting possibility of success.
There’s something else going on here, and that is, since they failed in the year 2000, Cru created a film. It’s just called Jesus. Guess how many people around the world have seen this Jesus film since 1997, when they first went live with it, until 2024? Five billion people have seen this film. Guess what their goal is by 2033? One hundred percent of all the humans on the planet will see this film. So in their mind, that’s one way of fulfilling the Great Commission: every single person will see their film called Jesus.
How Scripture Central Is Helping in this Commission
In 2017, one month after it opened, Jasmin—her last name was Jimenez back in those days, but it’s Rappleye today, here in the audience—and Daniel Smith and I went back to the Museum of the Bible. And we said, “How on earth can we as Latter-day Saints participate in the global biblical conversation? They are so far ahead of us. We have almost nothing to say.”
The best efforts of all the BYU faculty notwithstanding, there’s not much here that we have to share where they aren’t already miles ahead of us in terms of commentaries, scholarship, and all the various sub-disciplines of biblical scholarship. And then it dawned on us: there was one area where we could lead the world, and that was in 3D modeling, because we happened to have a scripture visualization project at BYU that benefited from the tremendous school of animation they have there at the Y. And so we went home and immediately we put together a 3D modeling project.
That was 2017. And today, this is what the temple of Herod looks like in the Scripture Central 3D model of Jerusalem at the time of Christ. Daniel Smith and I just went back and visited several of the institutions in the Oklahoma City area that I showed you earlier in the presentation, and we showed them this model, and they all went gaga. Their mouths dropped. It was like, “This is the best model we have ever seen.” Which we knew it was.
An Impactful Asset
And by the way, if you go out to the Messages of Christ YouTube channel—as we speak, six hours ago—we just put up a video that takes you through some of the inner workings of how this model was created and some of the reasons why we think it’s going to become an impactful asset around the world. And we at Scripture Central are literally trying to figure out what do we do with this unique asset that we’ve created of a whole bunch of models of biblical sites in glorious photorealistic 3D.
Now, back in February 2018, Elder Bednar and Elder Anderson took a trip to Google headquarters in Mountain View. They found that Google had nine products, each of which had more than one billion users. Think Gmail, think Android, think Chrome, think Search, think Ads, think Maps. Over nine products, each of which had over a billion users. This is what Elder Bednar said: “We’ve got to raise our sights.”
Now, we know that’s what he said because we were there two weeks later, and this is the team that went from Scripture Central. We went to Google headquarters and we worked with the very same LDS Googlers that the apostles had, and they told us all about the visit. That’s how we know what Elder Bednar said.
But in any event, we asked one simple question: If you wanted to get the Book of Mormon in front of billions—or let’s just go with hundreds of millions, okay, we’ll just have an easy number to start with—you want to get the Book of Mormon in front of hundreds of millions of people, how would you do it? To a man, they said, “Build an app.”
Scripture Plus
So we went ahead, went home, and built Scripture Plus. The Scripture Plus app has now been downloaded 400,000 times, and version 2.0 comes out at the end of this year. We believe we are going to get the Book of Mormon around the world with this particular app. And if anybody wants to talk afterwards about the strategy of how we expect to do this, I’ll be glad to share that with you. But nonetheless, this is one of the ways that we at Scripture Central believe we’re going to be participating in this tremendous enthusiasm over the next several years in the run-up to 2033, where literally all of Christendom is trying to fulfill the Great Commission.
Now, this is what our Messages of Christ YouTube channel looks like. These are some of the top videos out there. This particular YouTube channel is one of the strongest in the entire Church, and its demographic are thoseabout 80% of the people that come here are not of our faith.
And we at Scripture Central decided, okay, as part of our participation with the global 2033 initiative to try to take the gospel to every nation, kindred, tongue, and people, we’re going to invest more. We’re going to beef up this particular channel. And you saw that six hours ago with this video about the 3D modeling. Go check it out, see how we’re doing.
Parables
Now, there’s something else that we’ve decided makes a lot of sense. We at Scripture Central found a little window of opportunity with the parables, because the parables are 33% of all the red-letter words in the New Testament. In other words, of the words Jesus spoke—33% of all those words were in parables. And yet they are underrepresented in the visual storytelling that we see around the world. That opens up an opportunity for us. We don’t quite know exactly how it’s going to come down yet, but we’re committed to going out and doing something with that opportunity that has been presented to us.
Another thing we do pretty well at Scripture Central is evidences. This happens to be our new website. We’ve produced over 470 evidences of the Book of Mormon. You’re welcome to go to scripturecentral.org and check those out. They are glorious. In fact, Ryan Dahle, back in the back there, is the key driver behind that enterprise. Thank you, Ryan.
We’re going to start doing evidences of the Bible as well.
Brothers and sisters, 2033 is coming—and we want to be part of it. Thank You.
