Battle Cry aka Acquire the Fire

[shrewlu]

Hbe4Rxj-s4c

Just a brief clip of a CNN video. More of the typical "God Warrior" stuff with the addition of "virtue terrorists" and an intensely creepy guy shouting at kids in the audience who shout back. IMO, it's like Jesus Camp x 10.

Here is their site.

acquirethefire.com/christian-youth-conference-events/battlecry/

They used to be known as Battle Cry, but changed to Acquire the Fire - teenmania.com/donate/buses-acquire-fire/

And lookie here - there's even a site geared towards parents. teenmania.com/

No way in hell I'd let my kid go to one of those events. :snooty:

[yewchapel]

It reminds me of a more violent version of the Harris (as in Joshua Harris) website, The Rebelution.

[DefraudedbyGothard]

Things have been a little rocky for Teen Mania and the Honor Academy the last few years. Lots of exposure about the abuse.

recoveringalumni.com/

Edited by Three and Done to correct link. ;)

[The Real Pecan Thief]

I'm a newb poster (long time lurker, hey y'all!) that went to Acquire The Fire in high school in the late 1990's. it was not as showy as what it is now. I remember it being a conference that reneregized my shoving my faith down my classmates throats. At the time it was about spreading the gospel message, which seems to be different than what they are doing now. This definitely feels like a more conservative social agenda than what it was back then, which was to make Jesus Freaks more freaky.

[yewchapel]

This is the internship programme ATF is linked with.

honoracademy.com/intern-life/the-commitment/

If alcohol is totally banned then how do they partake of Holy Communion? *puzzled face*

[B5SnowDog]

Grape juice.

[divadivine]

I saw the documentary/special on one of the cable networks about Teen Maina/AtF and the survivors. It's some scary shit. I work with a guy who was a youth minister and he took his youth group to one of the programs and quickly decided he wouldn't do it again. He said he had figured it out rather quickly that it wasn't what it appeared it be.

I'm a little afraid Life Teen, which is becoming so popular with Catholic youth, is going to turn into something like Teen Mania. I was reading some of the interns stories today and it just doesn't feel right. Some of these people are just a little too extreme. They're Catholics acting like fundies and I think it's only going to get worse. Like 50,000,000 shades of cray-cray. When people suggest giving up your bed for lent and sleeping in a tent to suffer like Christ, I start to get worried. Just give up candy or sweets. Jesus won't get all bummed out if you sacrifice something small. These interns are going out and evangelizing to people on the streets... I want to scream at them "DUDE! You're CATHOLIC. We don't do shit like this- we don't read the Bible and quote scripture to people. We go to Mass every week and we sit, stand, kneel and pray. We give up meat on Fridays during Lent and go to Parish Fish Frys. We drink some alcohol, we play bingo, throw a summer festival with a beer garden and Monte Carlo night to raise money for CYO sports and we go confess our sins afterward and say some Hail Marys and Our Fathers. Then, everything's all good with the Big JC! We don't shove our faith into people's faces and down their throats. We don't evangelize at the dry cleaners or beg people for money so we can survive or give up our bed to sleep outside so we can suffer like Christ did on the Cross. Unless you want someone to actually nail you to a cross, you're never going to suffer like Christ. Give it up and stop playing the Martyr. Get off the cross, we need the wood! That's what Jesus would tell you!"

[atheistjd]

I'm a newb poster (long time lurker, hey y'all!) that went to Acquire The Fire in high school in the late 1990's. it was not as showy as what it is now. I remember it being a conference that reneregized my shoving my faith down my classmates throats. At the time it was about spreading the gospel message, which seems to be different than what they are doing now. This definitely feels like a more conservative social agenda than what it was back then, which was to make Jesus Freaks more freaky.

Sounds like the ATF I remember. Although I did briefly consider a mission trip and/or the honor academy when I really wanted to fit in with the cool kids. Reading about it all years later I'm pretty glad I dodged that bullet...

[atheistjd]

This is the internship programme ATF is linked with.

honoracademy.com/intern-life/the-commitment/

If alcohol is totally banned then how do they partake of Holy Communion? *puzzled face*

Many (most) Protestant churched do not use alcohol for communion, nor is communion a regular (weekly) part of church. At least the more fundie-lite/less liturgical denominations.

[Trynn]

The religious group I'm part of on campus uses grape juice as well. I'm not sure if that's because the church itself has an aversion to it, or if it's some University rule that groups can't serve students alcohol. At school that makes sense, but they still serve grape juice when we go on retreats, so I don't know.

[lorem ipsum]

I'm a newb poster (long time lurker, hey y'all!) that went to Acquire The Fire in high school in the late 1990's. it was not as showy as what it is now. I remember it being a conference that reneregized my shoving my faith down my classmates throats. At the time it was about spreading the gospel message, which seems to be different than what they are doing now. This definitely feels like a more conservative social agenda than what it was back then, which was to make Jesus Freaks more freaky.

This was my experience back in the day as well. I remember one part where they challenged audience members to demonstrate their "fearless faith" by shouting out "I love you, Lord!" (that declaration meant you wouldn't be afraid to prostelytize to randoms when you got home, or somesuch nonsense). I thought at the time it was an odd way to demonstrate fearlessness since where else is LESS threatening to shout that than at an Acquire the Fire conference? But stupidity and peer pressure prevailed so I did it anyway. :oops:

[dawbs]

I once 'chaperoned' a group of kids to ATF :oops:

FWIW, we caused all sorts of waves because 1-we tried very hard to get the info on what would be presented before we went--we were promised info that we never got. Bastard liars.

2-we declined to go to the 'grown-up' trainings (they send all the group leaders away so they can talk to the teens more privately. Nope. Even though I was all of 22 and there w/ a crazy person [i'd link his blog if it wouldn't 'out' everything about my identity :-P], I said I'd taken on the responsibility, I wasn't letting these kids be bullied by manipulative adults w/o me present

3-we left before the final push because they had irritated us greatly.

I wasn't ever comfortable w/ the entire mess.

[shrewlu]

I'm a newb poster (long time lurker, hey y'all!) that went to Acquire The Fire in high school in the late 1990's. it was not as showy as what it is now. I remember it being a conference that reneregized my shoving my faith down my classmates throats. At the time it was about spreading the gospel message, which seems to be different than what they are doing now. This definitely feels like a more conservative social agenda than what it was back then, which was to make Jesus Freaks more freaky.

Exactly! It feels like some sort of indoctrination/social agenda sort of thing more than a "hey, lets introduce kids to Jesus!" sort of thing. I can't quite put my finger on what bothers me so much about it, but it makes me feel very uneasy.

I once 'chaperoned' a group of kids to ATF :oops:

FWIW, we caused all sorts of waves because 1-we tried very hard to get the info on what would be presented before we went--we were promised info that we never got. Bastard liars.

2-we declined to go to the 'grown-up' trainings (they send all the group leaders away so they can talk to the teens more privately. Nope. Even though I was all of 22 and there w/ a crazy person [i'd link his blog if it wouldn't 'out' everything about my identity :-P], I said I'd taken on the responsibility, I wasn't letting these kids be bullied by manipulative adults w/o me present

3-we left before the final push because they had irritated us greatly.

I wasn't ever comfortable w/ the entire mess.

Not giving info beforehand and separating adults from kids are giant red flags for something, I'm certain.

[yewchapel]

Many (most) Protestant churched do not use alcohol for communion, nor is communion a regular (weekly) part of church. At least the more fundie-lite/less liturgical denominations.

I have experienced wine in Holy Communion services in Protestant churches, but they were Methodist, URC and Pentecostal so I'm guessing different to the ones ATF affilate with.

[Savoring Samsara]

A childhood friend of mine drank the Kool-Aid HARD at an Acquire The Fire conference in the mid-90s. Growing up, she had kind of a rough home life with an absent father, an autistic brother, and a mother who was frequently out of work and/or supporting deadbeat boyfriends. When she was about 11 her mom got converted by a local Pentecostal church and dragged the kids along. On the one hand, the church often served as a source of stability for the family, but on the other hand, it also provided an equal dose of stark raving over-the-top fundamentalist whackadoodlery. (For example, while the church supported the family with food and clothing when they were in crisis and desperately needed a hand up, they also basically browbeat my friend's mom into homeschooling despite the fact that she was both working full-time and totally unqualified to do so. The homeschool experiment lasted a year, which was long enough to make my friend have to cram hard to catch up with our graduating class when she re-entered public school and was also totally devastating to her brother's educational and social progress...but I digress.) I was a party to a LOT of ridiculous stories from the various fundie periods of this person's life, but I will stick with the Acquire The Fire one for now.

At the time that my friend went to Acquire The Fire, she had a fairly serious boyfriend who she had met at her church's youth group. Apparently in the repentance encouraging portion of the event, one of the speakers laid into anybody there who had a boyfriend or girlfriend, basically saying that dating was not in God's plan and that anybody who wanted to be a true Christian and follow Jesus should break up with their significant other immediately in order to focus on their walk with Christ. My friend took this completely literally. She was so swept away by the ATF experience that in the break between speakers, she found a pay phone, called her boyfriend of more than a year long distance, and unceremoniously dumped him over the phone for literally no reason other than "the pastor at Acquire The Fire told me to do it." So, yeah, that's the level of brainwashing and indoctrination we're talking about here.

However, I am happy to report that my friend eventually drifted away from the more extreme expressions of Christianity after spending many years ping-ponging back and forth between "fundie" and "not." She is now heavily tattooed, happily married to a Marine, and constantly posting obnoxious NRA talking points on Facebook. Good times.

[mockingbird]

I'm a little afraid Life Teen, which is becoming so popular with Catholic youth, is going to turn into something like Teen Mania. I was reading some of the interns stories today and it just doesn't feel right. Some of these people are just a little too extreme. They're Catholics acting like fundies and I think it's only going to get worse. Like 50,000,000 shades of cray-cray. When people suggest giving up your bed for lent and sleeping in a tent to suffer like Christ, I start to get worried. Just give up candy or sweets. Jesus won't get all bummed out if you sacrifice something small. These interns are going out and evangelizing to people on the streets... I want to scream at them "DUDE! You're CATHOLIC. We don't do shit like this- we don't read the Bible and quote scripture to people. We go to Mass every week and we sit, stand, kneel and pray. We give up meat on Fridays during Lent and go to Parish Fish Frys. We drink some alcohol, we play bingo, throw a summer festival with a beer garden and Monte Carlo night to raise money for CYO sports and we go confess our sins afterward and say some Hail Marys and Our Fathers. Then, everything's all good with the Big JC! We don't shove our faith into people's faces and down their throats. We don't evangelize at the dry cleaners or beg people for money so we can survive or give up our bed to sleep outside so we can suffer like Christ did on the Cross. Unless you want someone to actually nail you to a cross, you're never going to suffer like Christ. Give it up and stop playing the Martyr. Get off the cross, we need the wood! That's what Jesus would tell you!"

LifeTeen has always bugged me. My PSR (public school religion) classes used some of their worksheets and I remember looking them up and being turned off by the website. I think that is part of why my parents never encouraged me to join our church's youth group. Just a few weeks ago they had a post about how you can get "addicted" to birth control :doh:

One of my friends won't tell people what she gives up for Lent because she thinks that falls under the making a big show about praying publicly umbrella. I was also encouraged that if you didn't want to give up anything, you could choose to work on a specific virtue, instead. Both seem like better ideas than sleeping in a tent to me.

[Closed Womb]

This was my experience back in the day as well. I remember one part where they challenged audience members to demonstrate their "fearless faith" by shouting out "I love you, Lord!" (that declaration meant you wouldn't be afraid to prostelytize to randoms when you got home, or somesuch nonsense). I thought at the time it was an odd way to demonstrate fearlessness since where else is LESS threatening to shout that than at an Acquire the Fire conference? But stupidity and peer pressure prevailed so I did it anyway. :oops:

I never went to ATF, as I was a little too old before my church started touting it, but this how I remember the youth (HS age) kids speaking about it. Also, we had some ATF rah-rah meetings as part of the regular church service, encouraging the HS age students to go. It was basically all about "being on fire for the LORD."

[JesusFightClub]

Google Sunsara Taylor. A young Revolutionary Communist Party activist who looked into Battle Cry back in 2006 and wasn't impressed by what she found...

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/200 ... theocracy/

[Thefranks2009]

This was still a thing when I was going to high school, some 5 years ago. I was hoping it would have died off by now, but I guess not. I am a christian myself, but this sort of thing has always creeped me out. My parents forced me to go to one of these things when I was about 12 and I hated it with a passion. Like the real pecan thief said above, a big emphasis is put on shoving your agenda down other peoples throats, regardless of how they or you may feel about it. It reminds me of that movie, Jesus Camp. Go watch it if you havent already because it os an eye opener, and seriously disturbing too.

[Raptured_Pope]

I saw the documentary/special on one of the cable networks about Teen Maina/AtF and the survivors. It's some scary shit. I work with a guy who was a youth minister and he took his youth group to one of the programs and quickly decided he wouldn't do it again. He said he had figured it out rather quickly that it wasn't what it appeared it be.

I'm a little afraid Life Teen, which is becoming so popular with Catholic youth, is going to turn into something like Teen Mania.

I agree, sadly, but that's so weird because back in the day (late 80's/early 90's) Life Teen was seen as a real danger (rock band worship, adjusted liturgical wording for youth masses) by the more conservative folks in my parish and diocese. I always thought it was a lot more liberal than the previous youth programs at our church. 'Course that was a few decades ago now so it wouldn't surprise me if LT was also now one of those shiny faux-rebellious organizations in the Catholic Church now.

I wonder if they took a more fundamentalist turn after Life Teen's founder, Msgr. Dale Fushek, was accused of sexual harassment and abuse of minors, pled guilty to one charge and then was excommunicated by his Phoenix bishop? There has been a mention on LT's website for years about how Fushek plays no role in LT any more so its leadership obviously sees it as toxic, still.

[Knight of Ni]

Just last weekend while driving back to school I saw two church vans with "Acquire the Fire with ___ church" I had never heard of it before and just thought it was a stupid little slogan they had made up. Had no idea about this crazy stuff.

Edited to add: According to the site George W. Bush is an endorser of this program.

[yewchapel]

Not all student religious groups are bad - I'm involved with a UK one, the Student Christian Movement, which is all about campaigning on social justice issues (eg tax justice, fair trade, disability rights, LGBT rights) and do not proselytize at all. They are disliked by Christian Unions :twisted:

movement.org.uk

Having said that, these Acquire The Fire people sound...scary. The Recovering Interns website was really harrowing to read.

[OnceModestTwiceShy]

Just last weekend while driving back to school I saw two church vans with "Acquire the Fire with ___ church" I had never heard of it before and just thought it was a stupid little slogan they had made up. Had no idea about this crazy stuff.

Edited to add: According to the site George W. Bush is an endorser of this program.

Welp, sign me up! :roll: :lol: