PENSACOLA, FL - After local congregant Alex Dargan confessed he wasn't sure if he had prayed the sinner's prayer sincerely when he was five years old, Pastor Bob Rowan reportedly assigned the man five sinner's prayers to recite as penance for his lack of faith.
Rowan later stated that he usually prescribes repentant church members either recitations of the magic words in the sinner's prayer or else a certain number of listens to DC Talk's entire Jesus Freak album, depending on the severity of the sin confessed.
"There was a guy last week who had stumbled in his pornography use again," Rowan said. "I'm really trying to get through to him, so I assigned him ten sinner's prayers and three listens to the Newsboys' Take Me To Your Leader daily."
"Anytime you sin, it's important to take steps to make sure you're still saved, you know?" he reasoned.
Rowan is in good company, according to religious experts.
"The sinner's prayer is a time-honored method of showing penance for one's failures, having been used in the Protestant church for over fifty years," a religion researcher at Liberty University told reporters. "Congregants are often assigned the prayer as a means of making sure they're really saved, especially after feeling guilty for falling into sin."
At publishing time, Pastor Rowan had seen ten other confessing church members, all of whom were assigned a combination of sinner's prayer recitations and close listenings of '90s Christian rock groups.