The Child Evangelism Fellowship

Submitted by Nell Myhand

The Child Evangelism Fellowship (CEF) intends to reach every child and “evangelize boys and girls with the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and to establish (disciple) them in the local church for Christian living.”

Their Good News Clubs train adults to convince children that they can trust in Jesus as their savior. Under the guise of character development CEF intend to instill the values that are consistent with Christian Nationalism. In a campaign directed by major Christian legal foundations, CEF won a Supreme Court case in 2001 which ruled that if schools rent space to other groups they had to rent to religious groups even if they were providing religious education. CEF then began using the cover of the school to promote itself as a school sanctioned function, training adult volunteers to run Good News Clubs in elementary schools. The purpose of the Clubs is to pressure kids to accept Jesus.

The clubs teach children that are guilty not only of being sinful, but that they are responsible for the death that Jesus suffered on their behalf. They are pressured to bring other students to the clubs and expected to spread the message among their peers. CEF has established programs that reach over 14 million children in 183 countries. They utilize the services of over 40,000 volunteers and 700 full time workers in the US and Canada. They are currently running programs in more than 3500 schools in the United States reaching tens of thousands of students.

For more information:

DeBakcsy, Dale. “Bullies for Jesus: The Spread of the Good News Clubs,” in American Atheist, Third Quarter, 2013.

Kivel, Paul. Living in the Shadow of the Cross: Understanding and Resisting the Power and Privilege of Christian Hegemony. New Society, 2013.

Stewart, Katherine. The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children. PublicAffairs, 2012.

Child Evangelism Fellowship website: http://www.cefonline.com/