ENCINITAS, CA - A recent youth "Spring Kick-Off" pool party at pastor Rod's house was revealed to be a covert attempt to inflate the church's baptism numbers, a source close to Growth Church revealed Tuesday.

The event was pitched as a fun time for the youth to get to know each other, swim in the youth pastor's pool, and develop crushes on one another in a complex web of opaque relationship statues comparable to those in an HBO drama series. But new evidence suggests it was something more sinister: an opportunity for the church to pad its baptism statistics, counting every youth who dunked himself in the pool as a baptism for the church's annual report.

Partway through the event, a deacon was spotted in a nearby bush, marking down each youngster who cannonballed into the pool as a baptiz

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