When I was six, my family moved to San Jose, Costa Rica and then to the jungles of Ecuador as part of the same missionary outfit that was a focus of the movie, End of the Spear, released earlier this year.

In fact, the tiny missionary school I attended was called Nate Saint Memorial School, named in honor of the movie’s main character. Saint, along with four other young missionary men, was speared to death in 1956 by a violent tribesman in the heart of the Amazon jungle.

This past Fourth of July weekend, sitting around the kitchen table talking with family members at my mom’s house in Akron, Ohio (my hometown), we all somehow got on the subject of favorite cars we’d owned in the past.

My mom recalled how she hated giving up her Chrysler station wagon when we sold our house in 1969 just after my dad, who had a private medical practice in town, surprised us with the news he wanted to be a missionary doctor.

My dad had somehow learned that the non-denominational worldwide missionary organization, HCJB, desperately needed another doctor at its hospital treating impoverished tribal families in Shell, Ecuador. (In fact, there was a polio epidemic there in 1969 and the sole doctor at the hospital when we arrived, Dr. Wally Swanson, was actually referenced to as “Doc Wally” in the movie!)

Upon shipping off in big barrels all the stuff we would need for our new lives in South America, we drove down to Florida in my dad’s white convertible Cadillac, leaving the car with some missionaries associated with HCJB who agreed to sell the vehicle for my parents as a favor.

Three years later my dad suddenly decided to end our stint as missionaries, and when we returned to the missionaries in Florida, to pick up the money from the car among other things, we were shocked to see the Cadillac was still around.

As it turned out, the missionaries had not only been driving the car around for the entire time we were away, but they let it sit out and rust from the persistent ocean breeze.

They explained to my father, “We couldn’t find anyone to buy it,” but he knew right away that they’d never made any attempt to sell the car.

We ended up driving the Cadillac back to Akron and my dad held onto it for another two years before trading it in.

Hearing this story at the kitchen table, my mom’s husband, in a sarcastic tone, said something like, “And these were missionaries?! How is that possible?!”

My mom simply responded, “There’s missionaries and there’s missionaries.”

Over the years, I’ve noticed people love to point fingers at Christians, mocking them for being hypocritical. The thinking is if the Bible were really true, Christians should act just like their Savior.

My pastor recently recalled how when he was a young preacher in Alabama and went door-to-door giving out the gospel and inviting people to his church, he’d consistently have people explain to him that the reason they didn’t go to church was there were hypocrites in it.

His response would be something like, “Well, aren’t there any hypocrites at your job? That doesn’t stop you from going to work or collecting your paycheck from any of them, does it?”

As a preacher I know in San Juan Capistrano, Calif., John Verstegen (www.helpersofyourjoy.org) , reminded his congregation just this past Sunday in a sermon broadcast live over the internet (under the listing, “Helpers of Your Joy,” through the free service, www.paltalk.com), “Religion is Satan’s playground.”

The church the Body of Christ, as defined by the Apostle Paul, is his favorite source of attack and he is currently doing a bang-up job of apostasizing it wholesale, serving unlearned Christians huge helpings of delusion.

It’s so apostate now that anybody who knows anything about what the Apostle Paul teaches concerning the “last days” can see the Rapture coming like a freight train.

“If you really want to see Satan at work, don’t go down to the local beer parlor or pool hall—look for a place with a steeple on top,” my pastor always reminds.