Prophecy

The World Super Church, No. 1 - PR05-01

© Berean Memorial Church of Irving, Texas, Inc. (1971)

Now we're going to look at the World Super Church. The Bible predicts a one-world religion dominating the earth in the years before Jesus Christ returns. Such a church, as with all the other things that will exist in the tribulation period, in the nature of the case, require a certain preparatory period. So while we do not await a super World Church before the rapture can take place, for there is nothing in the prophetic program which must be fulfilled before the Lord can take us to heaven, we are aware of the fact that for the things which will exist in the tribulation period and the second coming of Christ, there are certain things that are required in the way of preparation. One of these is that on our scene in our day we see churches moving together toward an organizational unity. We also need to see an attitude of acceptance, almost an attitude of addiction, toward religion. Both of those things are evident in our day.

Religion

A few years ago, the intellectuals, the college students, outright scoffed at the idea of religion. Now there is a great upsurge of interest in religious activity. This religion has some strange forms. One of them is in the form of astrology. More and more the astrological scene is holding the center of people's thoughts. It is taking the form of spiritualism. I have a book now that I am reading through and gathering up some information on the subject of spiritualism. It indeed makes your hair stand on end. Somebody came to me the other day and said, "I think we ought to talk a little about the demonic world's activity among people who seek to move over to the realm of the dead." He said that we've got a few people in the circle of our operation, some of our young people who like to toy around with the séances and the spiritualism and that sort of thing. They do it in fun, but there is a certain serious side to it, and a very hazardous side to it.

One man was relating his experiences, and he thought that he was operating in his spiritualism on a relationship with God, only to discover when he met somebody who was an outright unbeliever and a vile man who was producing all of the phenomena he was through his spiritualism, thinking that he was doing it through God, finally came to a knowledge of the truth and of the difference. He went back to a spiritualist church for one more meeting, now that he had grasped what the Word of God had to say concerning spiritualism--that it was condemned by the Word of God, including any attempts to speak with the dead. This, of course, you understand you can't do. When people purportedly speak with the dead it is demons to whom they are speaking. The Word of God condemns this.

When he discovered this, he went back for this one last meeting, and he said, "That's when I got the shock of my life because it happened to be there that night it was my turn to act as the medium at our spiritualist church. As I proceeded in a very routine way with what I knew to do so well, I suddenly was appalled to discover that the spirits tried to kill me." And I thought that was very fascinating. We keep telling people that out in the demonic world is fantastic information, and they knew that this man had come to the truth.

Well this is what people are dealing with today. The great world of spiritualism is in a tremendous upsurge among thinking people. Along with it, of course, is the drug scene--the attempts to use the drug routine as an expression of religious worship and so on. Religion, in the form of astrology, spiritualism, and drugs is laying the groundwork for what is going to eventually head up in a super church. There is widespread practice of star worship. I read about a college fraternity recently where the members of the fraternity get out on the front lawn or the back lawn or just someplace on the fraternity grounds, and they have a little worship center they have set up, and they worship the sun and the stars and the moon.

Witchcraft is on a rising tide of interest. Courses are offered in colleges now in witchcraft. One college I read about had quite an enrollment, and then a large number of the students dropped out, because after they got into the course, they discovered that it was a course on the history of witchcraft. They thought it was going to be a course on how to become a witch. So when they found it wasn't going to teach them how to do it, they dropped the course.

All of this is preparing humanity for a very peculiar kind of church. Please remember that the Word of God tells us that at the beginning of the tribulation period, this super World Church will be in charge of the world's political scene. It will dominate the leading figure on the political scene, the antichrist, of the Western confederacy. This seems almost unbelievable. It isn't too hard for us to believe that there are vast quantities of money in the Roman Catholic Church. One businessman once told me that any time a Roman Catholic priest wants to buy anything at all, if he has the authorization of the bishop, he says that is as good as gold. You will know that anything you sell to the Catholic Church that there will be ample funds to pay for it.

But there are also vast vast financial resources within Protestant churches, and every year it gets bigger and bigger--the tremendous outlays of money in behalf of religion. Some of the leaders who are interested in uniting churches have observed that if they just got together, their very economic power would put them in a position to be able to force the governments of the world to act along certain lines. You read about this frequently. We could get together, and our economic power could force political action in any direction we wanted it. That's very interesting because that's exactly what the world church is going to do for the first three-and-a-half years of the tribulation period.

The Ecumenical Movement

What we are speaking about here needs some background. I don't know how far we will get, but let's begin. You're hearing words that I want to be sure that you understand. One of those words is the ecumenical movement. Ecumenical is the primary word. It comes from a Greek word which means "the inhabited earth." The purpose of the ecumenical movement is to unite all churches into one universal church throughout all the inhabited earth. Ecumenicism comes from the Greek word meaning "the inhabited earth."

This word ecumenical has been used for centuries to describe the Roman Catholic Church Councils and the Eastern Greek Church Councils. Vatican II was called an Ecumenical Council. What that meant was that Roman Catholic bishops from all over the world were invited to sit down with the Pope at this council. So it was called an ecumenical council. So the ecumenical movement is a desire in which it seeks to unite certain large groups of people. They are: one, Protestants; secondly, the Eastern Orthodox Church; thirdly, the Roman Catholic Church; and, ultimately the religions of the world. That's why they use the word ecumenical. It's inclusive and gathering everybody together.

Now this dream of a united church goes back as far as the year 1910. In that year in Edinburgh, Scotland the world conference on missionary cooperation met. This group set as their goal to evangelize the world in one generation. In one generation of 40 years (they were going from 1910), they had as their goal that by 1950, the world would be evangelized, and everybody on the face of the earth would have heard the gospel. They established an international missionary council to do this, and the thesis of this movement was that the way to church unity was through cooperation in evangelism and missions. They said if we could just get all the churches on the face of the earth cooperating in evangelism and missionary enterprise, we'd accomplish church unity. 1910 is when the ecumenical movement thus really began.

The Social Gospel

Secondly, in the year 1925, another work began called the Universal Christian Council on Life and Work. It was organized in Stockholm, Sweden. This organization had a considerable difference of flavor than the one in 1910. By this time, in 1925, the liberals had come into supreme prominence. In 1925, this organization, the Universal Christian Council on Life and Work, was dominated by liberals, and they were captivated by the social gospel. That is a gospel that said that what God wants us to do is to move into society and give people better jobs, more pay, shorter hours, better clothing, better nutrition, more luxuries, more pleasures, better housing, and everything down the line to improve the human condition. The thesis of this movement was that church union lay in the cooperation of Christian service and social action. They said that the way we would unite Christendom was to get all churches cooperating in what we will call Christian service and social action.

Two years later, in 1927, was organized the World Council on Faith and Order in Lausanne, Switzerland. The thesis this time was that union of churches was going to be accomplished through rethinking the diverse Christian doctrines, the church doctrines and traditions of the various churches. Their goal was to find some common ground of belief that everybody could subscribe to. You can see, of course, where this has gradually led: to less and less and less. The rallying cry was that we must be more open-minded about what other churches and other Christians in other places believe so that we can come together on the ground of Christian fellowship. Of course, once that was begun, they had to move away from the Scriptures which are not very open-minded, but are very definitive. The Liberals became increasingly open-minded until they came to the point where they were so open-minded that their brains fell out, and they were pursuing the most inane asinine unbelievable programs you could imagine.

The World Council of Churches

These efforts, the Liberals discovered, in their opinion, were not achieving the goals of the ecumenical movement as they envisioned it. So they made another move. They decided in August of 1948 to hold a conference, and at that conference they decided to pool their resources. These various organizations that had been operating separately toward an ecumenical goal were united, and in Amsterdam, Holland on August 23, 1948, the World Council of Churches was born. When you read in your newspapers about the WCC, this is what it is speaking of--the World Council of Churches.

It was a liberal operation from the beginning, and its constitution set forth this as its goals:

  1. To carry out the work of the two world movements that had preceded it (the Faith and Order, and the Life and Work movements), and they were to seek union thus through social action and through redefining doctrinal positions.

  2. They were to facilitate (and notice the words) "common action" by the churches.

  3. Thirdly, they were to promote cooperation and study.

  4. Fourth, they were to promote the growth of ecumenical consciousness in the members of all churches. Notice the words "ecumenical consciousness."

  5. Fifth, they were to establish relations with denominational federations (and notice) of world-wide scope with other ecumenical movements."
So right here in the declaration from Amsterdam of the World Council of Churches, we see what they were out to do. They had these strategic words that pop out from their statements: common actions; ecumenical consciousness; and, world-wide scope.

Well, who belongs to the World Council of Churches? Churches all over the city of Irving belong to the World Council of Churches, as well as all over the Dallas / Fort Worth area. There are 300 churches or denominations through about 100 countries which cover about 500 million church members that constitutes the World Council of Churches. It includes churches of vast theological differences and of vast differences in church organization, political viewpoints, and sociological background.

This is an attempt at uniting churches that are extremely diverse. Just everything you can think of in religious groups, every kind of church service you can imagine, every kind of theological point of view that you have ever heard about, all of these are in the World Council of Churches, and they're trying to come to a common ground. In order to come to a common ground, they came to an idea which has become a fad, and that is the dialog. The dialog means that people who have completely opposite points of view sit down and start talking to one another in order to arrive at the truth.

Every now and then, a letter comes to me inviting me to dialog and donuts with the ecclesiastical professionals here in Irving, in order for us to talk over together to find the truth. The idea is that we can sit down ultimately with the religions of the world. We can sit down with the Mormons, and we can finally discover what is really the truth about God. We can sit down with the Seventh Day Adventists and the Jehovah's Witnesses, and we can see what God is really thinking and what He has for us. We can sit down with the liberals and the Roman Catholics and the Jews, and we can see what it's all about.

This is an inanity because this is what the Word of God describes (which Paul spoke of to Timothy) as those who are ever learning and never coming to a knowledge of the truth. That's what dialog gets for you. The Word of God never calls upon God's people to carry on a dialog. That's a travesty. You know what the Word of God calls upon the people of God to do? To find themselves a local assembly that has a qualified pastor-teacher in authority in that assembly to dispense the knowledge of the Word of God. We've already got the truth. All we need is someone to help us explain it and interpret it so that we can grasp and understand and use it. That's where the truth lays. The truth does not lay in a bunch of people who have diametrically opposite points of view, most of which is human viewpoint, sharing their ignorance with one another.

So this membership is something imposing. It's run by a central committee of 100 members who tightly control the operations through a secretariat headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. Its leaders have immense power in influencing every phase of church life. The member churches increasingly are taking their cues from the pronouncements and the programs which are handed down by the World Council of Churches' Secretariat.

The National Council of Churches

You've also heard about another organization. Its letters are the NCC. What does that stand for? The National Council of Churches. This is simply a national expression of the international organization. It is identical in its goals and its structure and its concepts to the World Council of Churches. In the United States, it is the National Council of Churches which is the organization on the national level which is giving the thrust to the ecumenical movement--the uniting of all churches.

Now what's the program? The program, as we have indicated, is this. First, let's get all of the Protestants together. There are vast numbers of Protestants that have joined and have united. Up into the millions of members, churches that were separated have now joined a common church organizational structure. It's not occurring as quickly as liberals want, nor to the degree that they want, but there is great interest about churches getting together. There is something about this that people just exude.

I was talking to a Roman Catholic a couple of years ago, and something was said about the ecumenical movement and churches getting together. He said, "Well, it's about time, and the sooner the better." This was from a Roman Catholic. When John the 23rd called Vatican II, it was an ecumenical council just for the Roman Catholic Church. However, in the process of that council, certain things came out. Pope John wanted to remove barriers of interrelationships between Catholics and Protestants and with the Eastern Orthodox Catholic Church.

Appeasing the Jews

One of the things they did was that they changed a longstanding Roman Catholic view as to who killed Jesus Christ. For centuries, the Jew has been held solely responsible for the death of Christ. Now the Roman Catholic Church has changed that, and they no longer say that the Jew was alone responsible for the death of Christ. Well, they should have known that from the fact that there were Roman soldiers around the cross, and Pontius Pilate had a finger in the pie. It didn't take too much brains to figure that out, that the Jews weren't the only ones who pulled off the murder of Jesus Christ. But the Jews were just delighted. One of the rabbis stood up and just thanked the Pope, and he was just so grateful for the fact that they took the finger off the Jews for the death of Christ. Then the rabbi observed, "We are grateful for this, and by the same token, we must now give consideration to the fact that Jesus of Nazareth was something more of a blessing to the Jewish people than we had given him credit for being." This is the beautiful result of dialog. The Pope has scratched their back and he has scratched the Pope's. What could be nicer?

Appeasing Protestants

Another thing that came out of Vatican II is that all we Protestants have for centuries been called heretics. The Roman Catholic Church doesn't call us heretics anymore. Pope John said, "That's got to stop. From now on, we call Protestants 'separated brethren.'" You don't mind that, do you? When you meet a Roman Catholic priest, he reaches out his hand and says, "Welcome, separated brother." You don't mind that, but you didn't like it when he put out his hand and said, "Hi, ya heretic." It just has a different ring to it. Now right away, some of you are ready to join up, aren't you? That really isn't too bad, after all, to be called a separated brother.

John 17:22

Well, the ecumenical leaders have bemoaned this division of Christianity into its various individual segments. When you talk to an ecumenical leader, here's the approach he will give you. Here's how he will hit you, and unless you're prepared for it, you will say, "Boy, that makes sense." He will take you to the Bible, and he will turn to John 17:22. John 17 is the high priestly prayer of Jesus Christ the night before he was crucified. In that prayer, Jesus says, "And the glory which You gave me, I have given them, that they may be one even as We are one." And the ecumenical leader will say, "You see, it is the acts of sinful men that have violated this request of Jesus Christ that Christians should be one even as God the Father and God the Son are one.

On the surface that sounds pretty good. Certainly we must agree that there are some divisions among Christians that are not justified. They are downright inane. As a matter of fact, this was the problem in the Corinthian church. In 1 Corinthians 1:11-13, Paul took to task the Corinthian believers because of divisions among themselves. He says, "For it has been declared unto me of you, my brethren, by them who are the house of Chloe, that there are contentions among you. Now this I say, that every one of you says, 'I am of Paul;' and 'I am of Apollos;' and 'I am of Cephas;' and, 'I am of Christ.' Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you, or were you baptized in the name of Paul?" He rebukes the Christians of Corinth for the divisions that they were establishing--the little denominations and the little cliques within the congregation they were establishing among themselves.

We agree that there are some differences of splitting among Christians that is not on justifiable ground. But be that as it may, do not be deceived by what Jesus Christ is talking about here in John 17. He was not talking about an organizational unity. What he was talking about was a unity which God the Holy Spirit produces through the baptism of the Spirit of God. This is what 1 Corinthians 12:13 speaks of: "For by one Spirit were we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Greeks, whether we be bound or free, and have all been made to drink into one Spirit." The unity of John 17:22 already exists. That's the point to remember. The unity that Jesus prayed for already existed. When he asked the Father that they would be one as He and the Father are one, in just a few days' time, God the Holy Spirit was going to descend upon the believers and fuse them together into the body of Christ. On the day of Pentecost, the church was born, and they were united. What Jesus prayed for was a spiritual unity. And it now exists. Ephesians 4:4-5: "There is one body and one Spirit even as you are called in one hope of your calling; one Lord; one faith; one baptism; one God and Father of all who is above all and through all and in you all."

Christian Unity

Now the Christians are never told in the Word of God that they are to seek to create a unity among themselves. Do you realize that? There is no place in the Bible that tells you to go out and create a unity among Christians. What you are told is what you have in Ephesians 4:3: "Endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace." We are called upon to keep the unity that God the Holy Spirit has already created among us in joining us one to another unto our head, Jesus Christ. This spiritual unity is something that every saved person in the world enters at the point of salvation. When he passes the point of propitiation, he enters this ecumenical church of God. This is the real ecumenical church. It is the body of believers from all over the world.

2 Corinthians 6:14-18

Today's ecumenical movement wants something totally different. It wants a world-wide organization of a super church of all the religions of the world. The ecumenical movement is controlled by liberals who deny the fundamental doctrines of the Word of God. 2 Corinthians 6:14-18 forbids us to have any traffic with people who deny the fundamentals of the Word of God. Right away I know I'm going to start creating some problems for you, because some people have a little bit of difficulty in trying to square in their minds how some prominent religious leader can play ball with liberals who deny the fundamentals of the Word of God.

2 Corinthians 6:14 says, "Do not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers. For what fellowship has righteousness with unrighteousness? And what communion has light with darkness? And what concord has Christ with Belial (Satan)? Or what part has he that believes with an infidel? And what agreement has the temple of God with idols? For you are the temple of the Living God; as God has said, 'I will dwell in them, and walk in them; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Wherefore come out from among them, and be separate,' said the Lord, 'and do not touch the unclean thing; and I will receive you; and will be a Father unto you, and you shall be my sons and daughters,' says the Lord Almighty."

You don't have to be a very great theologian to read those words and to understand what God is saying. God is saying that when a man is an unbeliever, when a man denies the basic fundamentals of the Word of God, you are not to join forces with him. It's just as simple as that. We could read many similar Scriptures. Some of the verses tell you not to even sit down and have a meal with a person like that. It says, "Don't even say, 'I bid you God speed,'" to say goodbye to him, because you would be, by that token, calling blessing upon his infidelity. It is very confusing when good evangelical leaders find themselves in the position of playing ball with the National Council of Churches and the World Council of Churches.

In a little bit, when I give you perhaps a little more information on the program of the World Council of Churches, this will even become a greater problem for you to put the two together. How can this be? And please don't ask me how it can be, because the only answer I can give you is that every man is responsible for his own priesthood, and he sees it from his own point of view. And each of us can only speak for ourselves.

Communist Ideology

However, one writer observed, and I will quote from a little volume called Those Red Bears in Clergy Collars. We won't be able to get too far into how much the realm of the clergy has been infiltrated by Red Communist ideology. However, the writer here points out that Billy Graham, in an article which appeared in Christianity Today, entitled "False Prophets in the Church," frankly admitted that there is "no doubt that secularism, materialism, and even Marxism not only have invaded the church, but deeply penetrated it." The question is where has the main penetration taken place? The obvious answer is in theological seminaries and the National and World Council of Churches.

Then the writer goes on and says, "The next question is not so easy to answer. If the National and World Council of Churches have both been deeply infiltrated by Marxism and theological liberalism (and they certainly have), then why does Billy Graham still give both organizations a respectability they do not deserve by associating with both? Not only did Mr. Graham speak to the National Council in Miami a few years back, but he was listed as an official observer at the World Council proceedings in Uppsala in July, 1968."

The World Council of Churches has a meeting every five years. The last one was in 1968 at Uppsala (Sweden). At that meeting, the United States was castigated severely. I couldn't believe what I was hearing on the radio of reports coming out of that meeting as to what they were saying and the attacks that were being leveled against the United States, and what the United States was being accused of. But the thing I also noticed, and as I have found confirmed subsequently, is that there was not a whisper about Russia or communist China and the bestiality and the brutality that has been exercised upon thousands and literally millions of Christians in those countries, so that there is no Christianity freely and openly expressed--probably nothing at all, except what is underground in China, and only in Russia what is state-controlled and what is a showcase for ignorant visiting ministers who look at the showcase and say that there's religious activity and freedom in Russia.

Now it is at a meeting like this that an evangelical leader is an observer, and at the National Council meeting in Miami was a speaker. It was at that point that Dr. Graham said (I forget the exact words, but something to the effect) that he had a fundamentalist heart but an ecumenical spirit. It was an attempt to join together that we fundamentalists not only should be telling people how they can get right with God for all eternity, but we should also be out in the streets marching with our placards; we should be in social action; and, we should be conscious of the social needs of men. I am always amused when I hear that, because when you look upon the mission fields of the world, it is so self-evident that it has been the evangelical fundamental Bible believing Christians who've been the thrust behind the orphanages and the hospitals. All of the works of mercy that have gone out through our missions have been because of fundamental Bible believing Christians. We have produced a vast quantity of good works in behalf of human need.

Yet, we have these inane statements that now we must become socially conscious. I'll tell you what they mean by being socially conscious. It means that we can accept, as you perhaps read in your Dallas news today, two or three textbooks for the state of Texas that have books recommended in them by writers like James Baldwin. I can't even read you a paragraph. I can't even prove my point to you because I couldn't read you what your high school kids are going to be picking up and reading in order to cover the recommended reading courses from James Baldwin alone. Most of you curious ones are going to rush to the library tomorrow. I'll tell you right now you're going to get a big shock when you start reading a few paragraphs, let alone the vituperation against the United States of America that comes from him.

Vatican II gave a great boost to the ecumenical movement. Jews are not solely responsible for the death of Christ. The Protestants are no longer heretics--instead they are separated brethren. And furthermore, Pope Paul met with the patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox Church. They exchanged an affectionate kiss, and this was another move of drawing together the bodies that are separated. The World Council of Churches and the National Council of Churches are theologically liberal. That's point number one. When it comes to theology, they are liberal. When it comes to their position on economics, they are socialistic. And when it comes to their position on politics, they are collectivists. That's not a bad summary for you to get in mind as to what the world council church stands for. Then when you read about what these groups are proposing, you will know what's going on.

By the way, one of the biggest things the World Council and the National Council of Churches has been championing has been the entrance of Red China into the United Nations. And the Red Chinese are in their indebtedness because it is the National Council of Churches that have been a moving factor in bringing the United States to the point where it says, "Well, OK, so you did kill millions of people as good agrarian reformers, and the United Nations is an organization that rejects aggression and that kind of bestiality, but let's pretend that you didn't do it. Come on. Get in. You've got so many people. We're going to sit down and talk things over. As a matter of fact, I'll tell you what we'll do, Mao. We'll get our president to take his hat in hand, and he'll go to China and sit down right in your country. He won't even ask you to meet him in a neutral country. He'll go right there to your domain. Can you imagine, Mao, how great that will be? What flags you can wave and what propaganda you can make of that? That's better than playing ping pong. How about it, Mao?" Mao says, "You know, that is a good deal. That's a really good deal."

So this is what we're dealing with. Everything that they put out is going to reflect this point of view. The leaders are openly contemptuous of biblical inerrancy. They reject the Word of God.

I would like to read another quotation here from Those Red Bears in Clergy Collars. One of the leading organizers of the World Council of Churches and the National Council of Churches was a Methodist bishop named G. Bromley Oxnam. And Methodists, of course, are big in these world and national organizations. This is the man who is credited with having said that the God of the Old Testament was a dirty bully because he couldn't believe that God would or could approve of the death of Christ for the forgiveness of man's sin, or as Oxnam himself put it, "God for us cannot be thought of as an angry awful avenging being who because of Adam's sin must have his Shylockian pound of flesh."

It is this man, this Methodist bishop, who set the blueprints for the goals and structure and organization of the World Council of Churches and the National Council of Churches. Now you can't ignore the people who found a group because it is the people who are first on the scene who organize an organization and who give it its thrust. You can tell a lot about a church. If you don't know a thing about a church, and you find out who is the organizing group and who gave it its thrust, right away you know worlds about that church, from that alone. Now this is the man, to somewhat the embarrassment of the ecumenicists, who is a leading figure. These people reject the inerrancy of Scripture.

Tremendous Unity on Nothing

Here's another quotation. The Dean of Wheaton College Merrill Tenney referred to this resistance toward the fact that the Bible is the infallible Word of God. Dr. Tenney said, "We shall get to the point where we are united more and more on less and less until finally we have tremendous unity on nothing." That's the theological position of the World Council of Churches--tremendous unity on nothing.

Their economic pronouncements have strong anti-capitalistic and anti-American feelings. Just listen to them. And they have strong socialistic flavors. When it comes to their political feelings, we say that they're collectivists because they are united in the goal of a one-world government. They say this is needed in order to handle the world welfare state. Our ecumenical leaders are deluded about the function of Christianity. And therein lies our problems.

Those Red Bears in Clergy Collars has this quotation from Christian economics. "When John the Baptist beheld Jesus at the Jordan River, he said, 'Behold, the lamb of God which takes away the sin of the world.' He did not say, 'Behold, the Lamb of God that will equalize wealth and abolish poverty and war.' Jesus knew that the ills of the world can be cured only at the spiritual level. Poverty cannot be overcome by the distribution of money. The slums cannot be abolished by providing good housing. Delinquency, divorce, crime, and drunkenness cannot be eradicated by law, courts, and jail. Sin is the cause of most of the evils of the world. The ugly manifestation will disappear only when sin is removed. That is something that courts, laws, jails, fines, and punishment cannot do. Sin can be taken away only by the grace of God. That is what our Savior came to do for us."

The World Council of Churches is missing completely the mission of the local church. Dr. Lehman Strauss, in a little publication called The Coming World Church has another excellent summary of the problem (the delusion) of the ecumenical leaders as to what they're calling us as Christians. Dr. Strauss says, "The leaders in the modern ecumenical movement have been deluded in being sidetracked from the major function of Christ's true church. Modern churchmen of ecumenical persuasion, along with Roman Catholic nuns, are working industriously in civil rights programs, labor unions, politics, industry, international problems, and numerous other civic affairs, including agitation against America's participation in war. But in so doing they are meddling in affairs outside the domain and duty of Christ's church. Our Lord never intended that His church should play a heroic role in saving the world from its many ills.

"It is my personal opinion that this delusion of the National and World Council of Churches is a satanic substitute introduced in order that the real issues should be overshadowed by this parade of civil affairs. The program of the ecumenical movement is only remotely related to the real purpose for the church's existence. Its program has no message to the individual unsaved person who is sick with the malady of sin and perishing without Christ. Its program gives the impression that it is concerned exclusively with its own self-preservation; guarding the vast amount of wealth in real estate, annuities, and investments; and, preserving the jobs of many thousands of clergymen, some of whom fear the loss of their jobs. While every true Christian should be concerned about the social ills surrounding him, the major function of Christ through church is the proclamation of His saving gospel to the uttermost parts of the earth. And wherever Christ's gospel is preached, and believed, social conditions always improve."

You don't have to read the Bible very far to be aware of the fact that neither Jesus nor the Apostles carried on any social action campaigns against one of the greatest abuses of the New Testament world, and that was slavery, or any of the other social ills and brutalities that existed. But where Christianity goes, these problems begin to be solved.

Religious People Are Gullible

When the Russian Orthodox Church came into the World Council of Churches, it brought its views of atheistic communism along with it. I want to read to you a little bit again from Those Red Bears in Clergy Collars by Charles Secrest. I want to quote what Nikolai Lenin said. Nikolai Lenin, the founder of Russian communism, in a school in Moscow told the students: "We will find more fertile field for infiltration of Marxism within the field of religion because religious people are the most gullible and will accept almost anything if it is couched in religious terminology." The Russian Orthodox Church came into the World Council of Churches, and they are everywhere in it now.

We have had many people who have defected from way up in the highest echelons of the secret police structure of Russia that have given testimonies before Congress of how every Russian clergyman is an agent of the state. He is sent to seminary. He is trained. He is used in order to control religion. As one man who had suffered under communism said, "Russian atheism is different than atheism anywhere else in the world. You can meet an atheist in the United States of America, and he just doesn't believe there is a God. And you can talk to him and you might change his mind that there is a god. But when the Russian says he's an atheist, he despises the thought of God, and he wants to reach up there and take God by the throat and drag him out of his heaven. It's a hateful kind of atheism. It's something entirely different."

Now people are gullible. Lenin was exactly right. There are no fools like Christians, I'm sorry to say. If you just say it in nice religious language, and you use the right cliché, and you throw the stereotypes at them, they'll swallow it. I've been aware that I, as a pastor, have spent a lot of time trying to point out to people the contrast between what is God's viewpoint and what is human viewpoint, often in purportedly good churches. And there are some people that just don't like it at all. With the Russian Orthodox came the tremendous influx of these clergymen.

We summarize with Philippians 3:18-19. This is the condition that we have in the World Council of Churches and the National Council of Churches today: "For many walk of whom I have told you often, and now tell you even weeping; that they are the enemies of the cross of Christ, whose end is destruction, whose God is their appetite, and whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things."

Dr. John E. Danish, 1971

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