Eutychus and His Kin: May 11, 1962

Automatic Ecclesian

Our research associates report a positive outcome to experimental procedures designed to determine the feasibility and desirability of programmed instruction utilizing free operant, controlled operant, or classical conditioning for the development of verbal skills in Ecclesian. Made it through that first sentence, did you? Welcome to our little group. You are either a speaker of Ecclesian and a member of five or six committees or you have aptitude that you should report at once to denominational headquarters.

I know that you will be interested in our teaching machines for instruction in Ecclesian. Actually, our researchers worked with pigeons, but they assure me that the stimulus-response patterns they tested should work equally well with churchmen of average intelligence. To be machine-teachable, one needs only the ability to emit responses. (It helps if the subject can read and write, but this is not necessary, since we can start him on the pre-primer program.)

Our Ecclesian “teaching machine” has no moving parts. It is a programmed textbook. More elaborate machines are equipped with hardware to keep the student from cheating, but we assume that Ecclesianists will not peek.

Test yourself on the programmed material below. After filling in each blank, turn the column upside down and read the correct answer. If your answer was right you experience reinforcement—no answer is ever wrong in Ecclesian.

Ecumenical encounter may contribute significantly to the broadening of the perspective of the conversants.

Q: How may ecumenical encounter contribute to the broadening of the perspective of the conversants?

A: Significantly.

Q: Describe the broadening of conversants to which ecumenical encounter may contribute significantly. Broadening of the

A: Perhaps’ but we meant perspective.

Q: Would an ecumenical conversation signify a contribution to the perspective of broadening encounter?

Certainly; just as an ecumenical perspective may encounter the broad significance of contributions.

EUTYCHUS

The Great Commission

“Ecumenical Merger and Mission” by Harold Lindsell (Mar. 30 issue) was a real eye-opener. However, no mention was made of the Assemblies of God with our 800 foreign missionaries besides the ones to Alaska and the American Indians. The Assemblies of God is not a merger either, and our missionary force is constantly expanding as we realize the message of the Great Commission.

A. REUBEN HARTWICK

First Pentecostal Church

Coraopolis, Pa.

Is “the foreign witness of the church” only dependent on the number of missionaries they have on the field? Is not at times a reduction … a sign of wisdom? There are some boards which feel that missionary offerings can best be used to help national churches attain selfhood, undergird their own programs and grant adequate scholarships to train nationals rather than to send an army of North American missionaries overseas.

The premise of a numerical comparison at this point is by no means conclusive. Neither is a great increase in the total missionary giving of a church a sure index because at times these funds are being used in a way which sets the missionary cause back rather than advances the national church.…

It may be best for Latin American evangelical Christianity that some “Yankees go home” and some … offerings be invested for the present in the U.S.A. to evangelize North America rather than create problems for the national churches in Latin America.

JOHN H. SINCLAIR

Latin America Commission on Secy.

Ecumenical Mission and Relations

The United Presbyterian Church, U.S.A.

New York, N.Y.

May I voice my objection to Dr. Lindsell’s attempt to unite the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches with the American Baptist Convention.

Instead of trying to increase the ABC missionary force with outside figures, Dr. Lindsell would have done better to point out the combined total of 701 missionaries, for Mid Missions and Association of Baptists for World Evangelism far exceeds the total for the ABC. Add to this figure the missionaries serving with Evangelical Baptist Missions, Fellowship of Baptists for Home Missions, and Hiawatha Land Independent Baptist Mission (all GARBC approved agencies), and one can readily see that the GARBC has an impressive force on the mission fields of the world.

The whole tenor of Dr. Lindsell’s article seems to lend credence to the belief that the loss of evangelical orientation in missionary endeavor is accompanied with a proportionate loss of missionary vision and activity.

JACK BELLAIRS

Grand Rapids, Mich.

I am one who voted for the union (of 1925), and later entered the ministry of the United Church of Canada. The greater part of my 27 years as an ordained minister … has been spent in the Maritime Provinces.…

While having a reduced staff overseas, in our mission fields, we are extending our cooperation with other church groups in these far places. An example of this is seen in our United Church work in Japan. Here we cooperate with the Nippon Kirisuto, or the United Church of Japan.…

As a Maritimer, I am totally unfamiliar with what Dr. Lindsell calls “wounds yet unhealed” which he says were caused by the union of 1925. The church where I worshipped, and my father and grandfather before me, came into the union as simply and painlessly as though we were to have a summer amalgamation for the holidays. I was not aware of any upheaval. One day we were Methodists, and the next we were members of the United Church of Canada, and found ourselves working with a larger group of fellow Christians.…

ARTHUR H. LONG

Westfield Charge

Westfield, New Brunswick

I cannot see how reunion in itself is to blame for lack of power for missions as exhibited in reunited churches.… The basis for reunion is the culprit. Those who say, “We are only going, by different roads, to the same place,” are indeed saying that Christianity is some vague thing and of no real import in the world today. The complete watering down of the faith is the destroyer. Many proponents of reunion are ready to ignore Christ in order to come together. The … only basis for reunion lies in Christ and the Church he founded. Missionary zeal comes from commitment to Christ.

The Church is God’s, and he can do his work with or without denominations. When the denominations begin to see God in his Church, then there will be a real return to the Catholic Faith once and for all delivered to the saints. There are too many people working for the devil on both sides of the ecumenical movement. Those who are opposed to any idea of reunion must need to consider self in relation to the Church of Christ. To be closed to the disgrace of separation is indeed as large a sin as being ready to give all to man’s super-church of pan-protestantism.

CARL C. RICHMONDS

St. Luke’s Church on the Island

Wheeling, W. Va.

The issue on missions was a gem. It has certainly justified my own observations and limited experience, even though this truth is very saddening. But there is an answer on how to evangelize the world, and that is through a missionary conference and faith-promise plan of missionary giving.…

In our own church, it has doubled attendance, increased missionary giving from $800 to over $7,000, raised candidates for full-time service, and led to the conversion of many in less than two years. We did more for world evangelization last year than we did the previous ten. His plan is still best, and still works.

ORVILLE WOLFF

Grace Evangelical United Brethren

Yankton, S.D.

Dr. Kermit Eby’s “New Delhi Doesn’t Excite Me” (Mar. 30 issue) struck a responsive note in my soul. I can’t get excited about “bigness” especially when it is moving so fast toward a monolithic union misnamed unity. I don’t trust big Protestantism any more than big Romanism, for power corrupts men.

Out of 25 years in pastorate, seven years in foreign mission fields, fellowship with men and women of both the Council churches and the independent movements, I am convinced that mere bigness is no surety of spiritual power, but that every time men slice off the edge of conviction to be able to “unite” with some other group, they lose the vitality of faith and often submerge the Holy Spirit leadership under the paraphernalia of bureaucracy.

Let us review Harold Lindsell’s “proposals for action” in his article … humbly and prayerfully.

P. E. WILLIAMS

First Church of God

Chicago, Ill.

Expository Preaching

Professor Lloyd M. Perry reviewed a volume (Mar. 30 issue) that I have compiled and edited, Special-Day Sermons for Evangelicals (Channel Press, 1961). In the first part of the review, he called attention to features in accord with what I strove to do.… In the latter part, he expressed a preference for a larger degree of “direct exposition of the Word of God.” With this feeling I am heartily in accord. Anyone who reads my books knows that I have long advocated expository preaching worthy of the name. But as a compiler of two volumes of contemporary sermons, I have had to select from the messages that I received, and among them I found few that seemed to me expository. For these printed sermons I make no apology. More than a few able pulpit masters, such as Spurgeon and Macartney, almost never preached expository messages, and yet God honored their way of dealing with his inspired Word.

ANDREW W. BLACKWOOD

Philadelphia, Pa.

We’Ll Only Tell Kinfolk

“For depth analysis I prefer a blotter to a couch because.…”

I am participating in your survey (Eutychus, Mar. 30 issue) lest, by sheer failure to do so, I should be labeled a “non-cooperative” in this ecumenical, organizational and program-minded world.

Please forgive my use of blue rather than black ink. I merely seek to retain one shred of individuality. Yet, herein lies the trait that may well nullify my good intent in participating. Please don’t tell on me!

ROBERT E. MANN

First Baptist Church

Mt. Carmel, Ill.

As a daily newspaper editor of many years, this one has learned that most scrawls are not worth the trouble it takes to convert them into English, whether it be done on couch or blotter.…

Every scrawler scrawls in three different forms: (a) on newsprint with soft pencil; (b) on unglazed paper with ball point; (c) on highly glazed paper with expensive gift fountain pen. Specimens of each must be studied to analyze the real character of the scrawler. And it can’t be done lying down.

C. M. STANLEY

Editor

The Alabama journal

Montgomery, Ala.

Book Of Common Prayer

The account by Philip Edgcumbe Hughes (Current Religious Thought, Mar. 16 issue) of the 1662 Common Prayer Book is a poignant instance of how a particular stress affects the whole story. In substance, the Fifth Common Prayer Book was no different from the Fourth which appeared in 1604. As a historical fact, the Fifth which the British Parliament agreed upon in 1662 was not so much a reaffirmation of the Reformation but rather a reaction of the Restoration under Charles II to the Puritan changes in the form of worship during the Commonwealth. A continuous acceptance of many of those changes, as proposed by Richard Baxter at a conference held at Savoy in 1661 between the progressives and the reactionaries, was rejected by Parliament the following year. The story of 1662 is not complete unless we also admit that one out of every three clergymen refused to follow the Fifth Prayer Book as a means of worship as their predecessors had done in 1559 under Elizabeth. The Non-Conformists of England and Wales, this year, will have every reason to celebrate the gallant stand of the 2,000 clergymen who lost their livings and suffered imprisonment like Bunyan because they believed that the British Parliament should not interfere in such matters as freedom of conscience and religious liberty.

R. R. WILLIAMS

Llandudno, Wales

The Book of Common Prayer is all that writer Hughes claims for it, but let us not deprive of its heritage a book that has for its origin an antiquity of 413 years—also from a Book (of 1549) which in some respects is superior to any subsequent revision, and to which all revisions seem to tend to revert.

HORTON I. FRENCH

Trinity Episcopal Church

Excelsior, Minn.

Our Heritage

The year 1620 marked the first colony in northern Virginia, established “for the glory of God and advancement of the Christian faith,” according to the Mayflower Compact. Some years later the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut made a confederation to maintain and preserve the “liberty and purity of the gospel of our Lord Jesus.” In 1643 a number of colonies joined and stated their end and aim in coming to this country thus: “Whereas we all came into these parts of America with one and the same end and aim, namely, to advance the Kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ and to enjoy the liberties of the gospel in purity and peace”—this is the New England Confederacy. God greatly honored their faith and their stand and made of that small beginning a mighty and prosperous nation. Does he not say in his Word, “… for them that honour me I will honour, and they that despise me shall be lightly esteemed”?

Now we read in our newspapers of the efforts of some to ban all Bible reading from the public schools. The Massachusetts School Law of 1647 established the first system of public education for the express purpose of teaching our children to read the Scriptures.

In the past the United States has been called a Christian nation and has been a land where the Bible was revered and the Gospel preached to the world. Now it becomes necessary to define these terms. A Christian is one who is in Christ and Christ in him because he has believed on the Lord Jesus Christ and has been saved from his sins.…

In 1959, I visited a country in Southeast Asia. It was grievous to see that the people knew all about the United States except the God who had made her great. They had been introduced to our movies, television, electric appliances, engineering feats, fashions and customs, but the Lord who gave all this prosperity had been ignored. I was invited with other new arrivals to a reception at the home of the ambassador. He made a very good speech and then presented a film made by the United States Information Service. It should chill the blood of any Christian. The film showed scenes of the places and people of Thailand and some of the Buddhist religious customs, and summed it up by saying that Buddhism has contributed much to the peace and happiness of the world. The United States Information Service also published a book on Buddhism. The inscription in the front says, “This volume dealing pictorially and descriptively with the life of Buddha has been published by the United States Information Service and is presented to the people of Thailand by the people of the United States on the occasion of the observance of the year 2500 Buddhist Era”.… Edmund Burke said all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. Religious freedom has deteriorated into promotion of idolatry. Christianity is an exclusive religion. Our God states that all others are idols and that he is a jealous God.

When former President Eisenhower made his trip to many countries, I hoped that he would give glory to God, but I listened in vain for any mention of the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. The results of that trip are well known.

In the United States we have Moslem mosques, Hindu temples, and hundreds of religious organizations that are not Christian. In the light of the stated purposes of the early documents of America, is this what the founding fathers mean by religious liberty? The amalgamation now prevailing will result in controlling heathenism and we can expect the judgment of God to come down upon it. We put “In God We Trust” on our coins and extol Buddha. Jonah warned Nineveh to repent and the city heeded the warning and was spared. Will America have that much sense? Our only remedy is to turn to God—God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. In our present state we cannot sing “God Bless America.” We should be crying “God save America.”

ELIZABETH S. LANDON

Arlington, Va.

Into The Dialogue

Some editor did an uncommonly perceptive and compassionate job on “The Hunger of the Masses” (Mar. 16 issue). I intend to give it some currency in the evangelism-social action dialogue within the United Church of Christ.…

WILLIS E. ELLIOTT

Literature Secy.

Office of Evangelism

The United Church of Christ

Cleveland, Ohio.

Book Of The Month Plan

“Book of the Month” clubs are quite popular in America today. Sharing this popularity is a renewed interest in Bible reading. With the publication of the revised editions of the Bible, people are again manifesting a renewed interest in the reading of the Scriptures. As preachers, we should capitalize on these interests. To do this, one might suggest the use of what may be referred to as the “Book of the Month” plan of biblical preaching.

This plan of biblical preaching puts the emphasis upon one particular book of the Bible.… It is a concentrated effort to learn the nature and structure of a book of the Bible with a view to making its truths alive in the experience of the hearer today.

You might introduce this type of preaching to your people by using the Bible as the first “Book of the Month.” An introductory sermon might be entitled, “How We Got Our Bible.” Here, you could present the facts as to (1) how we got this “most beloved book,” dealing with the development of the canon; and (2) how we know it to be the Word of God. For the remaining three Sundays of the month, you might preach on such subjects as: (1) “How to Read Your Bible;” (2) “How to Study Your Bible;” and (3) “How to Understand Your Bible.” Having introduced this type of preaching, you might proceed some time later by using the same approach with your favorite book of the Bible.…

Instead of choosing sermons at random …, you might choose to preach on a book of the Bible where you could use the basic outline of the book as the plan for the sermons. The Epistle of James affords a good example. You might use as the title of the introductory sermon “God’s True or False Examination.” In this sermon you could use the five major divisions of the book as the outline for your message. This sermon would thus call for a brief treatment of the following subjects: (1) “The Truth about Testing;” (2) “The Test of Attitudes;” (3) “The Test of Faith;” (4) “The Test of Wisdom;” (5) “The Test of Conduct.” In such a presentation, you should always exercise caution so as to present the truth as it is found in the particular book from which you are preaching. You should stress the truth as it is found in the book and not use the occasion as a springboard “to go everywhere preaching the gospel.”

You could fill out the remaining Sundays of the month by preaching on one of the divisions of the book of James. You might use as the titles for these sermons: “God’s Word for Those in Difficult Places” (Chaps. 1 and 5:7–20); “God’s Answer to the Integration Problem” (Chap. 2:1–13); “God’s Evaluation of Your Faith” (Chap. 2:14–26); and “God’s Judgment of Your Speech” (Chap. 3 to 4:13). In these sermons, you would deal more specifically with the passage and devote more time to the practical application of the truth than you did in your introductory sermon.

Using these two general methods of approach, one can utilize any book of the Bible as the “Book of the Month.” He can suggest to his people that they read the “Book of the Month” in preparation for the sermon series.

G. WILLIS MARQUETTE

The Methodist Church

Spring City, Pa.

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