Christians have long wanted a book that seriously reviews the teachings of Bill Gothard (1935– ) and his Institute in Basic Life Principles, originally called the Institute of Basic Youth Conflicts (1966–present). Christians alternately adore and vilify this winsome hermit and the teachings of his Institute.
In the heyday of Bill Gothard’s ministry in the early and mid-1970s, there was a book written by a Lutheran clergyman, Wilfred Bockelman, entitled Gothard: The Man and His Ministry—an Evaluation (150 pp., 1976, Quill Publications). The book never had a wide distribution.
While Gothard himself had granted Bockelman a four-hour interview, he was displeased with the outcome of the book and thereafter has avoided journalists as one should avoid gossips and scandalmongers.
Bockelman does not write from a sympathetic stance as much as someone alarmed at the sweeping influence that Gothard enjoyed in the early 1970s. But why should an American Lutheran minister blame Gothard for being popular? Those mainstream Protestants had largely squandered their opportunity to address the issues that faced the Church. Now it was Gothard’s time to stand up as a man with a message.
Bill Gothard addressed issues that were being ignored by the traditional Protestants and by the trendy evangelicals. The evangelicals had been spending their time in front of the mirror blow drying their hair and adjusting their polyester leisure suits, when Gothard stepped forward as a man wearing garments of camel’s hair and who dined on locusts and wild honey.
The young people who had survived the Sixties were hungry for a coherent message about a spirituality that touched down on planet earth, and Gothard gave it to them in his seven Basic Life Principles. It was packaged in a week long seminar where participants received his teaching in a heavy red loose-leaf binder.
Gothard’s rise and impress on the evangelical community is a passing phenomena with dozens of spinoffs and its own lingering monument, reverently referred to as “The Institute” by its subscribers.
A second book written about Bill Gothard and the Institute of Basic Life Principles is A Matter of Basic Principles: Bill Gothard & the Christian Life, by Don Veinot, Joy Veinot & Ron Henzel, with a foreword by Ron Rhodes (380 pp., copyrighted by 2002 Midwest Christian Outreach, Inc., published by 21st Century Press).
After reading it I am personally disappointed that Dave Hunt has recommended the book in his Berean Call newsletter. This book is unworthy of a Christianity that claims that “the servant of the Lord must not strive; but be gentle unto all men, apt to teach, patient, in meekness instructing those that oppose themselves; if God perhaps will give them repentance to the acknowledging of the truth” (2 Tim. 2:24-25).
It is doubtful that this book would help someone who is tied up in knots with “the Institute” with its endless “how-to steps to success.” Those who would enjoy reading the book either don’t know much about Bill Gothard and his Institute and therefore don’t know what they are reading, or else those who are burned out and embittered by the Institute and don’t need more bitterness.
When the authors finally begin to discuss the doctrinal ideas of the Institute (around page 90), they do so in an unorganized fashion. Going through this book is like searching for chicken feed in the barnyard; it is all hunt and peck. My advice to Don Veinot, Joy Veinot and Ron Henzel: carve this book down to a 100-page biblical evaluation of the seven basic life principles, then find an editor whose Christian dignity will spare us your sarcastic invectives.
This book goes far to prove that Gothard’s dread of journalists is well placed. Use is made of the muck raked by Donald A. Waite, author of several attack articles on the Gothard ministry. Amazingly the Veinots and Henzel are so impressed by Waite’s abilities that they quote him at length in Chapter 1 of the book.
The spirit of men like Waite seems to embolden the authors to compare Gothard to the fictitious Charles Foster Kane of the film Citizen Kane, or to the man behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz or to the character Napoleon in Orwell’s Animal Farm. These are ridiculous and juvenile comparisons.
All that said, the authors do have legitimate concerns, but they fail in their purpose to express them by their insulting manner. And why this failing? I wonder if it is because they are so out of sympathy with Gothard’s own legitimate concerns with the moral condition of the Christian world. This seems to be evident from their slender praise of Gothard and their shovel loads of blame.
The authors have little good to say about Gothard’s encouragement of parental involvement in rearing, education, and courtship. They have little good to say about Gothard’s encouragement to use the Bible practically to solve the dilemmas of life, and to meditate on the Word of God. They have little to say about Gothard’s encouragement to make restitution for past wrongs. Whatever good there might possibly be in Bill Gothard’s ministry, these authors can only measure it in teaspoonsful.
What the authors miss is that Bill Gothard just might be a true brother in Christ, and there might be some good gained from some of the Bible teaching he has given. Most of the 2.5 million Basic Seminar attendees have not become glassy-eyed automatons. How many young believers have gone to one of Gothard’s basic seminars, picked up on some practical exhortations, and have gone home rejoicing? Most do not offer their firstborn son to the Institute, or buy into Gothard’s extensive formulaic how-to programs.
Bill Gothard comes from the old fundamentalist, dispensational stance with the circa World War II dress codes, and the heavy Keswick deeper life emphasis which men like V. Raymond Edman encouraged at Wheaton College. Gothard’s vocabulary is akin to the inscrutable hyper-spirituality of Oswald Chambers. It is true that Gothard has a convulsive reaction to the Scofield and Chafer dispensationalism that tended to diminish the teaching of the Lord Jesus in the Gospels, and to sharply separate the requirements of the Old Testament law from “the gospel of the grace of God.”
Gothard has a legitimate concern about the entrenched antinomianism of many evangelicals. He is still a fundamentalist who believes in personal holiness and a life of self-denial, characteristic of those who hold to a belief in the pilgrim calling of the Church on earth. For instance he still holds to the imminent return of Christ for His Church before the Tribulation period.
Of course, the Institute’s enormous real estate holdings and Gothard’s political activism run contrary to the pilgrim calling of the saint, but somehow Gothard has these contradictions reconciled in his own mind. But Don and Joy Veinot and Ron Henzel only pity the old fundamentalism, it seems, and instead embrace the new evangelicalism espoused by its advocates like Harold John Ockenga.
Bill Gothard and the Institute of Basic Life Principles are like so many other passing phenomena in the Church. He arose in a critical time and stated vital things. What he did say was powerful at the time, but it needed then—and still needs to be—balanced out by other biblical truths.
Certainly what is taught by the Institute cannot be the total answer. Some seem to pin all their spirituality on the integrity of Bill Gothard and his Institute. Those who do so are being set up for failure, since only one Man will never disappoint us. Gothardites often appear cultic in their unswerving loyalty to a man and his ministry. Wandering from church to church, they wonder why they are not under authority and can’t seem to resolve conflicts—when the big topic of Gothard’s Institute is how to get “under authority” and how to resolve conflicts. They keep going back for more Gothard teaching, convinced that they didn’t sufficiently engraft the new insights of authority and resolving conflicts. They cannot believe that the problem could be with the inadequacies of the Institute.
Our advice to all present and past Gothard listeners is to eat the orange, but spit out the seeds. In the words of Paul, “prove all things, hold fast that which is good” (1 Thess. 5:21). Be sure your eyes are fixed on the Lord Jesus, thus laying claim to the secret of the life that pleases God:
In [Him] are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. And this I say, lest any man should beguile you with enticing words. For though I be absent in the flesh, yet am I with you in the spirit, joying and beholding your order, and the steadfastness of your faith in Christ. As ye have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in Him: rooted and built up in Him, and stablished in the faith, as ye have been taught, abounding therein with thanksgiving. Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ. For in Him dwelleth all the fullness of the Godhead bodily. And ye are complete in Him, who is the head of all principality and power (Col. 2:3-10).