Thousands, if not millions, of church members sitting in America’s pews aren’t really born-again Christians, a Washington, D.C., pastor said April 10 to a pastors’ conference in Louisville, Ky.

Mark Dever, senior pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in the nation’s capital, warned on the opening day of the 2012 Together for the Gospel Conference that “false conversions” are “the suicide of the local church.”

Dever was one of four religious leaders – with Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; C.J. Mahaney, president Sovereign Grace Ministries in Gaithersburg, Md.; and Ligon Duncan, senior minister at First Presbyterian Church in Jackson, Miss. – to convene the first Together for the Gospel event in 2006 to combat what they viewed as false teaching in many churches today. A statement of unifying doctrines includes male headship in the church and home and the need for church discipline of wayward members in local congregations.

This year’s conference, the fourth, was expected to draw 8,000 pastors and ministers April 10-12 to The Kentucky International Convention Center and KFC Yum! Center, with messages uploaded daily on the website t4g.org.

Dever described “members of the church who live worldly, carnal lives” as a “serious problem” in American Christianity.

“The problem I am pointing to is not just that of the occasional hypocrite lost in their own unrepentant sin,” Dever said. “I’m talking about systems which seem to produce false converts so much that it’s not just one man … but whole congregations that like Israel of old are typified and characterized not by holiness but by worldliness.”

Dever said that is a problem for church members who are “deceived about their own state before the Lord.”

“It’s just not right for a congregation to leave men or women made in the image of God with the impression that they are reconciled to God when the truth is, other than some decision recorded in 1973, there is no evidence whatsoever that they are reconciled to God,” he said. “That is not a loving thing to do for them.”

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