#KenHam, Take a Word from General William Booth

Ken Ham has a huge expensive dream – to build a life size replica of Noah’s Ark and theme park in Kentucky.  And he needs to raise 29.5 million dollars to do it. 

Yesterday Dan Arel, at the blog Danthropology, called out Ham and his project:  Ken Ham Says Building His Ark Is More Important than Feeding the Homeless

Ken Ham takes on a wearied tone when he writes to rebut these sort of claims:

Nearly every time I post an update on the exciting Ark Encounter project, there seem to be those habitual complainers who claim the money should be spent on the poor instead and not be “wasted” this way. …

I think it’s a simple as this—it’s the message! The Ark project (like the Creation Museum) will in a professional, powerful, and gracious way present the truth of God’s Word and the gospel. Sadly, even some people claiming to be Christians complain about the Ark project and that the money should be given to the poor instead. Such people either don’t understand or don’t seem to care about the millions who will be reached with the most important food in the universe—the spiritual food of the saving gospel—the very message that their eternal life depends on. …

So while it is important to help the poor and needy meet their physical needs (which we do), it is even more important to help meet their spiritual need—the need to come to know Jesus Christ, the Savior of the world—because lives—and eternity—hang in the balance….

But all this pious sounding talk about “spreading the gospel” is just window dressing.  The Ark Encounter Park is less about spreading the gospel, than it is about Ham and his fellow creationists doubling down on their insistence that their idiosyncratic young earth creationism interpretation of the biblical stories is the gospel.

Even if we were to concede that the Ark Park was, in fact, about spreading the gospel, it is still an expensively misguided project. As the founder and first General of the Salvation Army, William Booth said, “You can't tell a man about the love of God if he has an empty stomach.” 

That $29.5 million would be better spent feeding, clothing, sheltering, and educating the poor-and that would be a better proclamation of the gospel than any amusement park.