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The Restoration Of Our Restoration Institutions
George L. Faull
When
I was a teenager, I started a club called “the North End Gang.” We had four members and wanted to grow. There was to be no smoking, no drinking, no
girls, no cussing. I was quite proud of
the chicken coop we made into a clubhouse.
My father told me, “Son, you can belong now but in a
few weeks you’ll have to get out.”
“Why?” I asked, puzzled by such
a statement. “Son,” he said, “it will
corrupt itself. Men are sinners and
good things go downhill and become the opposite of the founder’s purpose.” This was beyond my understanding as a
16-year old boy. I just wrote it off as
parent goobleygook!
In a few weeks I was out of the club with my other
Christian friend. Not two weeks after
we were out the police raided the clubhouse and arrested the remaining members
for alcohol, drugs, and sex. It never
made it 3 months before they made the headlines. I decided my father was a genius.
I tell you this to make this point:
Institutions corrupt themselves. The core value system of an institution will
be lost in just a matter of years. Want
more proof? What was Sam Walton’s
slogan when he began Wal-Mart? It was
“Buy American.” In 2004, 18 billion
dollars of products from China alone was on Wal-Mart shelves. They reported 70% of the commodities they
sell are from China. They have 5,000
factories in China. Quite a difference,
don’t you think? Did “Buy American”
remain Wal-Mart’s anchor? I think not.
How about Walt Disney’s dream of “good, clean,
family entertainment”? Guess who is one
of America’s biggest pornographers?
Guess who has 40% plus of its employees from the Gay community and has
Gay Pride Day each year?
Shall we mention the YMCA or YWCA? You get the point? Institutions drift. We’ve
lost Transylvania, Drake, Southern Illinois University, College of the Bible
and on and on. So new Colleges were
started as well as new conventions.
These stood firm against compromise, ecumenicalism, liberalism, and open
membership for a while. About every 30 years a new college has to start. Good colleges start up sending out good
preachers that are true to the Bible and the Restoration plea. They encourage
using Bible vocabulary and calling Scriptural things by Scriptural names. Then they drift. We can see some of our older schools drifting and we feel
helpless to prevent it.
Want an example of the kind of men we had even as
late as 1960? Read the following
example of the late R. C. Foster.
In 1960, a speech was delivered by a brother at the
Conference on Evangelism at CBS suggesting that Brethren should enter into and
infiltrate colleges, missionary organizations and religious institutions that
had been hijacked by liberals and recapture them.
The honorable R. C. Foster rose to refute such a
decision. Some felt he was unkind but
the bold man said this:
“I think I
would not be true to the life that I have spent diametrically opposed to the
suggestions of Mr. Wade if I did not say a word here. The motto of my life has
been, ‘No fellowship with unbelievers.’ That’s where I still stand, ‘so help
me, God.’ I resent completely the
suggestion that a man of faith should go in and become a member of the faculty
in a radical institution. You can call
it infiltration, or you can call it anything you want to. I think that will necessitate the surrender
of his convictions. He will not be able
to speak out. I resent completely any
suggestions that we should have any sort of official relationship with the
ecumenical council. Now, if Mr. Wade
wants to go as an observer to that, or any of you, I haven’t the slightest
objection. In fact, I might go as an
observer. But that is quite a different
thing from proposing in an assembly of faith like this, that we can connect
ourselves in any official way with those who are trying to destroy the
faith. And I deny absolutely the
contention of Mr. Wade that you have a choice between monasticism on the one
hand and any sort of official relationship on the other. I have stood through the years saying, ‘no
fellowship with unbelievers,’ but I haven’t ceased to preach to them. I do not have to stand on their platform in
order to preach to them. I stand on the
solid rock, Jesus Christ, and preach, and I refuse to change my location in any
way that will compromise myself.
Furthermore, there was another good thing that Mr. Hayden said in that
editorial in which he was replying to Orval Crowder’s suggestion that we should
go into the ecumenical council.
(Earlier brother Wade had made reference to a Christian Standard article
advocating that the “independents” send a representative to the World Council
of Churches indicating that the editor did not entirely agree with the author’s
position. Ed.) The best thing that Mr. Hayden says in that
editorial was ‘You couldn’t get a word in edgeways if you went in.’ Why, of
course you couldn’t. What happened to
us in the International Convention? And
the UCMS? Go into the International
Convention in order to convert the infidels back to the faith? They won’t let you have the floor. And how much more would that be true in the
ecumenical council? The only
opportunity that you would have to try to convert anybody to Christ in getting
into any sort of relationship with ecumenical council would be when you met
some preacher in the hall or in a restaurant and would have a chance to talk to
him. Those infidels would see to it
that
you wouldn’t
have any place on the platform where you could present the case of New
Testament Christianity. And that sort
of opportunity to reach the unbelievers we have at any time. We have it in the halls. We would have it in the general community
where the ecumenical meeting is assembled, so I feel that I would be untrue to
myself if I did not make very clear to this audience that I am in complete
disagreement with any suggestion that we should sidle up to the radicals either
in a common faculty with them in a college, or in any sort of official
representation whatsoever in the ecumenical council.”
Our Churches need to listen to this old sage of
CBS. Today our brotherhood is marching
to a different drummer. We are called
to be evangelicals and those who practice open membership have become our main
speakers at conventions and conferences.
R. C. Foster is a respected name among many of our
older preachers but the young men have not had many men as professors who guide
them with such wise counsel. Can there
be a doubt that our institutions that we support are drifting from the core
values of their founders? Must we
lament with David, “How the mighty are fallen and the weapons of war perished?”