The following is another installment of the Friday Church News Notes designed especially for use in churches. It is published by Way of Life Literature’s Fundamental Baptist Information Service. For instructions on how to unsubscribe to this list or to change mailing addresses, please consult the information paragraph at the end.

GEORGIA BAPTIST CONVENTION ENDS RELATIONSHIP WITH MERCER UNIVERSITY. Friday Church News Notes, November 25, 2005 (David W. Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061-0368, fbns@wayoflife.org) - The Georgia Baptist Convention (GBC) voted last week to end its 175-year-old relationship with Mercer University. This was in response to the school’s activities in relation to homosexuality. It was discovered in October that a Gay-Lesbian-Bisexual-Transgender organization exists at Mercer and is supported by students and teachers, including some in the theological department. Heretofore the school has received financial grants from the GBC to the tune of $3 million per year. Mercer University has been a hotbed of theological poison for at least 50 years. Kirby Godsey, president of Mercer for 26 years, is a modernist who denies practically every doctrine of the Christian faith. In the book When We Talk about God ... Let’s Be Honest (Smyth & Helwys, 1996) Godsey denies that the Bible is infallible and claims that “the notion that God is the all powerful, the high and mighty principal of heaven and earth should be laid aside.” And Godsey is only one example of the rank modernism at Mercer. Thus, after at least a half century of putting up with the vilest apostasy, the Georgia Baptist Convention has finally voted to disassociate from Mercer, and that not primarily because of the liberalism but because of homosexuality. It should be understood that the Georgia Baptist Convention (as most other SBC state conventions) remains an unscriptural mixture of conservatism and liberalism. In spite of the conservative renaissance in the Southern Baptist Convention and the many commendable steps that have been taken to distance the convention from modernism, it remains a deeply compromised New Evangelical hodgepodge of truth and error. Though there are godly Southern Baptists and some good and Scriptural things in many Southern Baptist congregations, this good is leavened with Billy Graham ecumenism, Jimmy Carter-style modernism (Carter still teaches Sunday School in a Southern Baptist-associated congregation even though he has distanced himself from the SBC in public statements), rock & roll worldliness, contemporary worship charismaticism, Rick Warren pragmaticism, and Masonic Lodge paganism.

WORLDLY TEEN MINISTRY. Friday Church News Notes, November 25, 2005 (David W. Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061-0368, fbns@wayoflife.org) - The following is from The Berean Call, Nov. 18: “The very successful Women of Faith Conferences spawned the Revolve Tour for teenage girls. This is funded by Thomas Nelson, that publishing house that produces the Revolve Teen girls Bible-zine. Bible-zines are supposedly a tool to get teens to read the Bible so they put Scriptures in a format that looks like ‘Cosmo’ or ‘Teen’ magazine. Scriptures are found on the same page with advice on boys, skin care and clothing tips, etc. Having a young daughter, I was intrigued to look at the Revolve Tour website and see what they are offering girls spiritually. I searched the website but couldn't find one mention of Jesus. I did see "beautiful" women all over, flawless skin, airbrushed celebrities and music stars writhing in tight clothes on the music videos. Our moral standards have gotten so low in the church that women in low rider jeans and tight t-shirts are considered wonderful role models for Christian girls. At one point, a teen in the video collage says, ‘I look at magazines and there are all of these skinny models...’ What do you think the Revolve Tour is presenting as beauty? Skinny, heavily made up women who are the farthest thing from the norm. In the Revolve Teen Bible-zine I looked through there wasn’t one average looking young girl. They were all physically beautiful, without a flaw evident in the photos. Many teen girls with weight trouble or skin trouble or who simply just don’t look like that will view this and say, ‘Even the Bible(zine) is filled with images of physical perfection. I must really be a loser if I can’t even find hope in the Bible!’”

HARRY POTTER CONTINUES TO EXPAND ITS INFLUENCE. Friday Church News Notes, November 25, 2005 (David W. Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061-0368, fbns@wayoflife.org) - The Harry Potter empire continues to expand its influence with the debut of the fourth Potter movie last weekend. The PG-13 rated “Goblet of Fire” enjoyed the fourth-largest movie opening ever at $101.4 million (“’Goblet of Fire’ Keeps Wizard Tales Hot,” USA Today, Nov. 21, D1). The Potter movies have grossed $930 million in the US alone and $3 billion worldwide. The Potter books have sold at least 300 million copies worldwide. The hero of the story is a young wizard who uses alleged good magic to make his way in the world and to overcome his enemies. Biblically speaking, there is no such thing as good magic or a good wizard, witch, or sorcerer. These are condemned in the strongest terms. “There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, Or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer. For all that do these things are an abomination unto the LORD: and because of these abominations the LORD thy God doth drive them out from before thee” (Deut. 18:9-12). God warns His people in the clearest terms, “… have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them” (Eph. 5:11), and, “Ye cannot drink the cup of the Lord, and the cup of devils” (1 Cor. 10:21).  

CHRONICLES OF NARNIA’S CHRISTIAN LINK DENIED. Friday Church News Notes, November 25, 2005 (David W. Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061-0368, fbns@wayoflife.org) - The cast and crew members of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe have downplayed the significance of Christian symbolism in the movie version of C.S. Lewis’s novel (“Narnia Christian Link Played Down,” BBC News, Nov. 16). Many claim that the Narnia novels are symbolic of Christian themes, with Aslan the lion supposedly representing Jesus Christ, and there is a push to use the movies as evangelistic tools. Yet director Andrew Adamson, who also directed the Shrek films, says the interpretation is “open to the audience” and that when he read the story as a child he “accepted it as a pure adventure.” Producer Mark Johnson concurs, saying, “When I first read it, it never occurred to me that Aslan was anything more than a great lion.” Actress Tilda Swinton, who plays the White Witch Jadis in the film, says the original book is more “spiritual” than religious and that “faith is in the eye of the beholder.” If the Chronicles of Narnia preached the Gospel of Jesus Christ plainly, the wicked Disney Corporation would not have touched it with a ten foot pole! C.S. Lewis was not a born again believer. He denied the sacrificial blood atonement of Jesus Christ, and it is impossible to be saved without faith in the Blood. Lewis was turning to the Catholic Church before his death. He believed in prayers for the dead and purgatory and confessed his sins regularly to a priest. He received the Catholic sacrament of last rites on July 16, 1963 (C.S. Lewis: A Biography, pp. 198, 301). Lewis believed in theistic evolution, rejected the Bible as the infallible Word of God, denied the total depravity of man, and believed that hell is a state of mind. Lewis was also a radical ecumenist. His book Mere Christianity seeks to boil the Christian faith down to its lowest common denominator in an effort to promote unity between Roman Catholics and Protestants. Chuck Colson admitted that C.S. Lewis was the major influence in the creation of the Evangelicals and Catholics Together movement (Evangelicals and Catholics Together: Working Towards a Common Mission, p. 36).

CONTINUING PERSECUTION OF CHRISTIANS BY MUSLIMS IN INDONESIA, PAKISTAN, AND SAUDI ARABIA. Friday Church News Notes, November 25, 2005 (David W. Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061-0368, fbns@wayoflife.org) - On November 19, a man and wife returning home from church were shot and wounded in the Indonesian province of Central Sulawesi. They were riding their motorcycle when attacked. A day earlier, three teenage Christian girls were shot, killing one of them. That same day a 22-year-old girl was wounded when she was struck in the neck by a machete. On November 12, about 450 Christians fled for their lives after an organized mob of 2,000 Muslims burned churches and homes in Pakistan. The mob, stirred up by Muslim clerics who falsely charged that a Christian had burned the Quran, was brought to the area in buses. “In fiery speeches, the leaders provoked the mob to set to fire each and every Christian place of worship” (WorldNetDaily, Nov. 13). They burned down a Presbyterian church, a Catholic church, and a Salvation Army church. Two pastors were shot by Muslim extremists in an earlier episode (BosNewsLife, Nov. 13). In Saudi Arabia a court sentenced a teacher to 40 months in prison and 750 lashes in a public flogging for discussing the Bible and praising Jews. “He was charged with promoting a ‘dubious ideology, mocking religion, saying the Jews were right, discussing the Gospel and preventing students from leaving class to wash for prayer’” (The Washington Times, Nov. 14).

LESBIAN SAYS DRESSES TOO FEMININE. Friday Church News Notes, November 25, 2005 (David W. Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061, 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org) - Lesbian author Virginia Mollenkott, in her book Omnigender: A Trans-religious Approach, describes her aversion to wearing dresses. “I feel myself to be female all right, but masculine at the same time, so that dresses and skirts feel rather ridiculous--and this despite the fact that as a child I was not allowed to wear overalls, shorts, or pants. [She grew up in a fundamentalist home.] . . . One of the greatest benefits of coming out publicly as lesbian was that I could go through my closets and give away all my dresses and skirts....” This lesbian’s admission that dresses are feminine reminds us that clothing is a form of language. We make social statements by our clothing choices. In Western society, pants have long been associated with masculinity and dresses with femininity. That was based on the biblical injunction that women and men are not to dress the same. Only in recent decades has this barrier been breached, and those at the forefront of the unisex fashion industry are in open and admitted rebellion against the Bible.

CONCLUSION: Friends in Christ, do not be discouraged by any of this. It is God’s will that we know the times (1 Ch. 12:32; Mat. 16:3) and that we be as wise as serpents and harmless as doves. These things remind us that the hour is very late, and we need to be ready for the coming of the Lord. Are you sure that you are born again? Are you living for Christ day by day? “And that, knowing the time, that now it is high time to awake out of sleep: for now is our salvation nearer than when we believed. The night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light. Let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof” (Rom. 13:11-14).