APOSTASY

~ Apostasy Of Judson Memorial Church

 In New York City there is a church built in honor of the great missionary to Burma, Adoniram Judson, but apostasy has closed in on this church, and from what goes on there it has no right to be called a church. They put on a show on Flag Day—a show “dedicated to the stars and stripes.” There were depraved and obscene exhibits, defiling the flag, and according to Max Geldman in the National Review, there were exhibits that were “simply unquotable.” The police closed down the show; it was so rotten.

 On another occasion the pews were removed to make room for dancing and the people sat in circles of folding chairs. The pulpit had been removed for a presentation of “Winnie the Pooh” and had not been replaced. The place where the choir used to be is vacant. On Sunday a nude couple danced there during the service. This “church” is so deep in the apostasy that it would have to reach up to touch bottom.

—Christian Victory

~ Rock And Roll Inside Church

 This is how Newsweek once described a Boston church which opened its doors to 1,100 teenagers and permitted them to conduct a rock and roll festival inside the church:

 “A procession of boys and girls placed a Bible, bread and coke, pool cue and billiard ball on the communion table to symbolize religion, eating, and playing. Then a dozen teenagers, some in shorts, crowded into the church aisles to frug on the rug and do the watusi.”

~ X-Rated Sermon

 In Richardson, Texas, they’re still talking about the worldly ways of First Unitarian Church. On a recent Sunday, Pastor William Nichols invited Diana King, a Unitarian from Fort Worth, to take part in the service. She did, and when she was through, Miss King—an exotic dancer at a Dallas nightspot—was wearing only a G-string. The congregation of 200 adults and children watched in fascinated silence as she shed her clothes in time with recorded music.

 Nichols said the dance fit “very well into our service” and nobody complained. He also said he didn’t think anyone was aroused, “but I don’t consider the erotic aspect of the dance wrong. After all, that’s the way we were conceived.”

 Miss King said it was something she wanted to do for a long time, and she would like to conduct classes for women church members. “I would like to do a sermon using the exotic dance, and members of the congregation could join me if they liked,” she commented.

—Christianity Today

~Apostasy Of Glide Memorial Church

 Glide Memorial Methodist Church in San Francisco has this Call to Worship in their printed bulletin on Sunday and recited by the leader:

 “We are all of us Christians—Jews, liberals, Bolsheviks, anarchists, socialists, Communists, Keynesians, Democrats, Civil Righters, Beatniks, ministers, moderate Republicans, pacifists, teach-inners, doctors, scientists, professors, Latin Americans, New Africans, Common Marketers, even Mao Tse-Tung. Doubtless. From Lyndon Johnson to Mao Tse-Tung, we are all Christians.”

 This church once preached the Gospel and from which, several decades ago, a most powerful evangelistic note was sounded. Today, many of its services are performed in the mode of the modern dance. Suggestive gyrations are indulged in and the church has become a haven for dope addicts, hippies, homosexuals, and sex-pots.

~Church Advertisements Section

 Some time ago I picked up a copy of a big-city newspaper and opened it to the church advertisements section. What a panorama of give-aways caught my attention. Anyone wishing to attend church in that city and “cash in” at the same time could have certainly done so, but he might have difficulty selecting the church that offered the best prize.

 One church promised Indian headbands to all the little warriors in attendance. Another held out school pencil boxes. Still another offered coloring books. An enterprising father might very well secure all his Christmas gifts for his kids by making his rounds of the churches provided he got started early enough in the season.

—James T. Dyet

~Rodentia Roulette

 Put mouse in box. Place cup over mouse. Turn him round and round. People bet on which exit hole he’ll choose. Release mouse. Mouse scurry out. Pay off. Jolly way for an Anglican church fair in Surrey, England, to raise money. but the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was disgusted. The vicar couldn’t understand the fuss over a mouse when thousands of humans suffer all over the world. Besides, he said, “The sideshow was attended by 200 responsible citizens, not one of whom raised a squeak. Nor did the mice.”

~Survey Of Protestant Clergy

 Ten years ago, McCall’s magazine reported on a survey of 3,000 Protestant clergymen. The McCall article stated, “A considerable number rejected altogether the idea of a personal God. God, they said, was the Ground of Being, the Force of Life, the Principle of Love, Ultimate Reality and so forth. A majority of the youngest group cannot be said to believe in the Virgin Birth or to regard Jesus as divine in the traditional way in which most Protestants were brought up.”

~ Stalin—A Saved Man?

 In The Alliance Witness David Enlow quotes the “Red” Dean of Canterbury, Dr. Hewlett Johnson, as having made the statement: “Stalin was a rough and stern man … because he had a dirty job to do. But God’s eye is a big eye and sees everything, good and bad. To know all is to forgive all. So from Heaven’s point of view I think Stalin is safe.”

~ Studying Religion Scientifically

 The Society for the Scientific Study of Religion. Sounds like something they would dream up in Moscow, but this fast-growing, doctorate-stubbed group is pure Americana, and about half its 1,600 members are clergymen.

 Whether professional religionists or professional social scientists (religious and otherwise) the members (largely Easterners) believe religious behavior and institutions are as fair game for empirical study as cabbages and kings. The idea is to find out “what are the social mechanisms by which this whole thing works, and the cultural patterns which define it,” explained bearded, congenial Executive Secretary Samuel Z. Klausner, 43, in his Washington, D. C., office. “It has little to do with theology per se.”

—Christianity Today

~ Dr. Ockenga On Apostasy

 Dr. Harold Ockenga of Gordon Divinity School said:

 “In this present great apostasy from New Testament Christianity we could see a sign which will warrant us in believing that Christ’s coming may not be far away. There has always been some measure of apostasy and at times that apostasy has been great, but not as it has been in the last fifty years.”

~ Founding Purposes Of Early Colleges

 Eighty-eight of the first 100 colleges founded in America were organized to promote the Gospel and the claims of Jesus Christ.

 Every collegiate institution founded in the colonies prior to the Revolutionary War—except University of Pennsylvania—was establish by some branch of the Christian church.

 Even at the University of Pennsylvania, the evangelist George Whitefield played a prominent part. The first building of the present university was built for the purpose of accommodating the crowds which wanted to hear Whitefield preach—a decision of Benjamin Franklin and other supporters. A statue of Whitefield stands on that campus today.

~U.S. Public School System Began With Bible

 Five years after establishing the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Puritans started in Boston the first elementary school supported by tax money. In 1647, they passed an ordinance which marked the beginning of the US Public School system.

 Among other things, the ordinance required at least 1 qualified teacher for every 50 householders, and a grammar school in every town of more than 100 families. It also put the Bible in the center of its curriculum, asserting that it is “one chief project of that old deluder, Satan, to keep men from the knowledge of the Scriptures.”

~ Ivy League Schools To Train Ministers

 Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth—these famous universities are part of New England’s Ivy League. Perhaps it stands alone in its successful training of illustrious graduates for America. Yet most do not realize that—excepting Cornell University and University of Pennsylvania—every Ivy League school was established primarily to train ministers of the Gospel and to evangelize the eastern seaboard.

 Cornell University is the only Ivy League school whose origins have no particular connection to evangelical Christianity. But it is understandable, since it did not come along until 1865—well after secular trends had become established in the US college system.

~Testimony From Harvard

 The first college, HARVARD, was established for “Christ and the Church.” In his bequest of the first large gift to what is now Harvard University, John Harvard said:

 “Let every student be plainly instructed and earnestly pressed to consider well the main ends of his life and studies; to know God and Jesus Christ, which is eternal life, and therefore to lay Christ in the bottom as the only foundation of all knowledge and learning and see that the Lord only giveth wisdom. Let everyone seriously set himself by prayer in secret to see Christ as Lord and Master.”

 Above Harvard’s gates are etched today these words: “After God had carried us safe to New England, and we had built our houses, provided necessities for our livelihood, reared convenient places for God’s worship, and settled the civil government; one of the next things we longed for, and looked after was to advance learning, and perpetuate it to posterity; dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches, when our present ministers shall lie in the dust.”

~Harvard’s Christ-Centered Rules

 Harvard’s “Rules and Precepts” (adopted in 1646), read:

 (1) Every one shall consider the main end of his life and studies to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life.

 (2) Seeing the Lord giveth wisdom, every one shall seriously by prayer in secret seek wisdom of him.

 (3) Every one shall so exercise himself in reading the Scriptures twice a day that they be ready to give an account of their proficiency therein, both in theoretical observations of languages and logic, and in practical and spiritual truths … ”

 And thus, 52% of the 17th century Harvard graduates became ministers!

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