Mike Gendron says he is a former Catholic who has been saved by the Bible. He travels the United States whenever he can, in search of Catholics who will buy his books, tracts and his version of Scripture. He also publishes a lot of misinformation on the internet. His entire mission is to convince Catholics that they need to separate themselves from the Catholic Church if they want to end up in Heaven someday. There is a lot of dishonesty in Mike’s approach to his “ministry”, but the one consistent truth behind everything he does is this: Mike is allergic to facts. He sees things his way and his way only. If you present a simple fact to him that runs contrary to his personal interpretation, he stomps off like an angry child. I know because this is exactly how he behaved when I showed up at one of his “Bible Conferences” with one of my buddies. To see what I’m talking about, you can read here, I think you will find it very entertaining.

The events leading up to that article are kind of interesting as well, as are some things that occured after Mr. Gendron visited Nebraska on that occasion.

Several months prior to my meeting with Mr. Gendron, I wrote a letter to a local church, correcting the minister on numerous misunderstandings his particular church apparently held regarding the Catholic Church. The minister did not appreciate the information I provided him, but he did pass my letter off to a group of guys who had a solution in mind and that solution was that hey would hire Mike Gendron to come to Lincoln, Nebraska, to debate me. Although I wasn’t looking for a debate with anyone, I accepted their offer as long as they did all the work to set up and conduct the debate. After the discussion of some details, we agreed that the debate would take place, but the group of Christians from Lincoln did not want it to happen until nearly a year later. I thought that was odd, and when I pressed them on the purpose for the delay, the response was vague. I later discovered the reason when one of them accidentaly included me in a group email that I was not supposed to see. The email I received is shown below:

To “Pastor Scott’s” credit, he apparently counseled the group from being dishonest in their efforts to help Mr. Gendron out. I did not let their scheming deter me from the debate, but I did reply to Mr. Ball and I gave him the opportunity to explain the activities of his group of “cunning Christians”. He simply said:

“ I was the culprit and I won’t waste time trying to justify it.  My nose is back in place, :-))”

It was clear that he didn’t intent to send the email to me, but it was enjoyable to catch them in their ploy.

I decided to check out Mr. Gendron’s website a few weeks later, in order to see some of his recent claims about the Catholic Church. That is when I disovered that he was going to put on a little “Bible Conference” in Central City, Nebraska. I decided to attend some of his event in order to see how he behaved during his “conference”. That is how the Catholic Answers article came about.

After my visit with Mr. Gendron, I let a few weeks pass before I contacted the group of Christians in Lincoln, regarding the upcoming debate. At that point, Mr. Ball informed me that they had cancelled the debate. I had hoped that Mr. Gendron would not have gotten cold feet after our brief encounter in Central City, but alas, he must have decided he would be better off avoiding the debate.

It is evident that the pastor of the little church in Central City caught a significant amount of criticism for the way he handled the situation when I had Mr. Gendron backed into a corner at the end of the second night of his “Bible Conference”. A few weeks later, he posted his sermon, justifying his unchristian behavior toward me. You can listen to his explanation in this link. In a nutshell, the pastor explained that he had to treat me uncharitably in order to protect them from the information I was offering them. I’ve since reached out to Pastor Prettyman, but he has not accepted my offer to sit down for a private discussion.

A few months ago, I joined one of Mike’s facebook pages and at one point, he engaged me in a brief discussion after one of this blatantly false posts. When I provided Scripture passages and historical facts to show how incorrect he was, he blocked me. I then emailed him and offered to debate him at an upcoming event of his in northern Kansas.

The point of all of this is to show several things about Mike Gendron:

1. He is dishonest;
2. His information is indefensible when his Scripture, Catechism and historical references are placed in context and he appears to realize this weekness;
3. He relies heavily on people to protect him from situations in which his claims are about to be proven false;
4. He does not actually practice what he preaches; He does not engage in honest dialogue regarding Scripture or the actual teachings of the Catholic Church.