Friday Church News Notes
Volume 19, Issue 11 - March 16, 2018
The Friday Church News Notes is designed for use in churches and is published by Way of Life Literature. Unless otherwise stated, the Notes are written by David Cloud. Of necessity we quote from a wide variety of sources, though this does not imply an endorsement.
Peter Ruckman (left) - Peter S. Ruckman, Jr. (right)
PETER RUCKMAN MURDERS SONS BEFORE TAKING HIS OWN LIFE (Friday Church News Notes, March 16, 2018, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - On February 28, Peter S. Ruckman, Jr., son of the late Pastor Peter Ruckman of Pensacola, Florida, murdered his two sons and then committed suicide at his home near Chicago (“Professor, 2 teenage sons shot to death,” Chicago Tribune, Mar. 5, 2018). Peter Jr., who was called P.S., was a professor of political science at Rock Valley College. The boys, Christopher and John, attended Rockford Christian Schools and were rock & roll musicians and video game enthusiasts. Chris was a rock guitar prodigy, and his father helped him get opportunities to perform with various blues bands. Ruckman’s wife filed for divorce in July last year and shared custody of the boys. Peter Ruckman, Jr.’s father, who died in 2016, was pastor of Bible Baptist Church in Pensacola and author of many books. He promoted the goofy heresy that the King James Bible is “advanced revelation” over the Greek and Hebrew from which it was translated. In January 1985, when I was a young missionary, I wrote to him and said that I believed that he had done a lot of damage to the cause of the King James Bible because of his “strange thinking, multiple divorces, angry spirit, arrogance, Alexandrian cult mentality, extremism regarding the KJV being advanced revelation, and bizarre private doctrines.” Ruckman said, “If all you have is the ‘original Greek,’ you lose light” (Manuscript Evidence, p. 336), and, “God slammed the door of revelation shut in 389 BC and slammed it shut again in 1611” (The Monarch of Books, p. 9). In 1972, Ruckman (whose first wife had divorced him) married the young divorced wife of a former Bible student. When one-third of his church members (Brent Baptist) voted in opposition of this marriage, he started Bible Baptist. In 1988, his second wife sued for divorce and he subsequently married a member of his church. Ruckman’s language was caustic, crude, vicious, even vile, some of it unquotable in a family publication. He claimed to have discovered truths that no one else in church history had discovered. These include the following: All female church-age saints will receive 33-year-old male bodies at the Rapture; when someone is born again, his soul is literally cut loose from the inside of his fleshly body; demons are winged creatures ranging in size from that of flies to eagles; the soul is an invisible bodily shape; in Christ’s kingdom 12 nations will populate outer space. (For more about this see What about Ruckman?, which is available as a free eBook from www.wayoflife.org.)
THE GETTYS TEAM UP WITH GRAHAM KENDRICK (Friday Church News Notes, March 16, 2018, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - Among all of the contemporary worship musicians, I consider Keith and Kristyn Getty perhaps the most dangerous, because what they are offering is wrapped in a package that is attractive to “fundamentalists” and Independent Baptists. They aren’t writing the typical CCM 7-11 music (7 words sung 11 times); their lyrics have scriptural substance. But that “conservative-appearing” package is a bridge to truly great spiritual danger. The Gettys represent the whole exceedingly dangerous world of contemporary worship music as definitely as does Darlene Zschech and Hillsong, and any bridges that Bible-believing churches build to the Gettys are bridges built to the one-world church and even to secular rock. We have mentioned the Gettys’ warm relationship with Roman Catholic musician Matt Maher. Most recently they have teamed up with Graham Kendrick for the song “My Worth Is Not in What I Own” on his new, yet untitled, album (“Graham Kendrick Teams Up with the Gettys,” www.hallels.com, Feb. 26, 2018). “My Worth” has been released as a single. Kendrick is one of the most prominent names in Contemporary Praise Music and one of his objectives is to break down denominational barriers and create ecumenical unity. He was co-founder of the ecumenical March for Jesus, which has brought together every type of denomination and cult including Roman Catholic and Mormon. A biography at Kendrick’s web site says: “Crossing international and denominational barriers, his songs, like the popular Shine Jesus Shine, have been used by countless small church events to major festivals--including Promise Keeper rallies, Billy Graham crusades and a four million-strong open air CATHOLIC MASS in the Philippines capital Manila, where THE POPE ‘SWUNG HIS CANE IN TIME TO THE MUSIC’” (“Shine Jesus Shine,” GrahamKendrick.co.uk). Kendrick is a charismatic of the most radical sort and promotes the “kingdom now” and Word-Faith heresies. In the 1970s, he was a member of the Ichthus Christian Fellowship which welcomed the so-called Toronto Blessing with its meaningless gibberish, spirit slaying, hysterical laughing, barking, braying, rolling. Kendrick claims that he was “baptized with the Holy Spirit” in 1971 after attending a charismatic meeting. He says, “It was later that night when I was cleaning my teeth ready to go to bed that I was filled with the Holy Spirit! ... and I remember lying at last in my bed, the fixed grin still on my face, praising and thanking God, and gingerly trying out a new spiritual language that had presented itself to my tongue with no regard at all for the objections thrown up by my incredulous brain! ... That was a real watershed in my Christian experience” (Nigel Smyth, “What Are We All Singing About?” www.freedomministries.org.uk/ccm/nsmyth1.shtml). To bypass one’s thinking and to refuse to test everything by Bible doctrine is blind mysticism, which is always a recipe for spiritual delusion. Instead of yoking together in music ministry with such people, the Gettys should be warning about them. Majesty Music and Bob Jones University have been promoting the Gettys’ contemporary hymns by toning down the rhythm, and this bridge will bring dramatic changes within the next 10 years. (For documentation see “The Gettys: Pied Pipers of Contemporary Worship Music,” www.wayoflife.org.)
MALE PROSTITUTION AT THE VATICAN (Friday Church News Notes, March 16, 2018, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from “Male Prostitution Big Business at Vatican,” PulpitandPen.org, Mar. 6, 2018: “The world is shocked upon hearing that there is a seedy world of priests at the Vatican who pay for sex with other males. But given the history of the Roman Catholic Church and its tragic celibacy policy, homosexuality, pedophilia and even bestiality are all-too-common among the priesthood. Forbidding to marry or to engage in the holy sexual union of marriage is a sign of works-righteousness and pagan religion (1 Timothy 4:3). The consequences of demanding celibacy have been terrible and are regularly read about in the daily newspaper. A male escort named Francesco Mangiacapra compiled a 1200 page dossier identifying more than 34 actively gay priests and six gay seminarians at the Vatican. How did he know who they were? Personal…experience. Cardinal Cresenzio Sepe of the Archdiocese of Naples forwarded the dossier to the Vatican, even though none of the priests identified were in Naples, because he felt that the corruption near and in the Vatican City should be exposed. The dossier compiled by the male prostitute mostly contains conversations and evidence produced by gay ‘hookup’ apps like WhatsApp, Grindr and Telegram, where the priests would arrange for sexual encounters with the gigolo. Information provided from social media platforms like Facebook was provided as well. A book was printed on the subject of the gay priest subculture of the Vatican last March, but it was largely ignored by the Romanists. So then, the male prostitute compiled the raw data into the dossier and began to send it to people whom he felt would expose it. He did so, he says, because he could no longer stand the hypocrisy of the church. Just as it is in America, the religious press wouldn’t publish the material because it would be viewed as damning, and so the secular press had to do it for them. ... When Pope Francis argued that the Romanist church should be more welcoming to homosexuals, it seems that it was an unnecessary gesture. See Jonathan Merritt, ‘This Vatican adviser is moving Catholics toward LGBT inclusion,’ ReligionNews.com, Jun. 6, 2017.”
DISNEY’S CONTINUED DESCENT INTO MORAL PERVERSION (Friday Church News Notes, March 16, 2018, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from “Elsa Coming Out as a Lesbian?” CBN.com, Mar. 1, 2018: “A sequel to the hit-film [Frozen] is set to release in November 2019, and now an interview with the film’s writer and co-director, Jennifer Lee, in the Huffington Post raises the possibility that Elsa could be getting a girlfriend. The movement started when fans and LGBTQ activists grabbed a hold of the film's hit song ‘Let It Go’ as their ‘coming out anthem’ -- and once a sequel was announced, social media became flooded with the hashtag ‘GiveElsaAGirlfriend.’ Petitions even circulated to give the character a female love interest. When Lee was asked about whether or not she was going to officially inaugurate Elsa into the LGBTQ community, she said the film’s team has been discussing the possibility. ‘I love everything people are saying and people are thinking about with our film,’ she told the Post. ‘That it’s creating dialogue, that Elsa is this wonderful character that speaks to so many people.’ Disney added an openly gay tween to the hit series Andi Mack, and the Disney series Doc McStuffins targeted preschoolers with a pro-lesbian message in the ‘2 Moms” episode.’”
EVOLVING COMPUTER CODE (Friday Church News Notes, March 16, 2018, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is from CreationMoments.com, January 31, 2018: “Some years ago, a major international software company took out some commercials on British television. The theme of the commercials was that their software was now better than it had ever been because it had evolved. The commercials showed images of dinosaurs and so-called primitive animals as they evolved into more modern, up-to-date varieties. As I said, the object of the commercials was to convince the public that the software applications they were selling were better and more sophisticated than their products had been previously. Darwin’s theory of evolution, and its neo-Darwinian variants, suggests that organisms have gradually got more complex by the spontaneous appearance of new DNA code. There is, of course, an analogy between computer programming code and the arrangement of information in DNA--except that DNA information is a great deal more complex than a computer app. If I had been one of the programmers of these software apps, I think I might have felt a little insulted. Granted, the new software versions were much better than the previous generations, having more and more useful routines. But each of these sophisticated features had been designed, planned and coded by software engineers. No information was introduced randomly by blind evolution. All new information was the result of highly intelligent design. This reasoning, incidentally, is just one of many reasons why evolution is impossible. New DNA code has even less chance of appearing by itself than a new programmed feature has of appearing in these software applications.”
CONCLUSION: The Friday Church News Notes is designed for use in churches and is published by Way of Life Literature’s Fundamental Baptist Information Service. Unless otherwise stated, the Notes are written by David Cloud. Of necessity we quote from a wide variety of sources, but this obviously does not imply an endorsement. We trust that our readers will not be discouraged. 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. The News Notes remind us that the hour is very late, and we need to be ready for the Lord’s coming. Are you sure that you are born again? Are you living for Christ? “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).
THE GETTYS TEAM UP WITH GRAHAM KENDRICK (Friday Church News Notes, March 16, 2018, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - Among all of the contemporary worship musicians, I consider Keith and Kristyn Getty perhaps the most dangerous, because what they are offering is wrapped in a package that is attractive to “fundamentalists” and Independent Baptists. They aren’t writing the typical CCM 7-11 music (7 words sung 11 times); their lyrics have scriptural substance. But that “conservative-appearing” package is a bridge to truly great spiritual danger. The Gettys represent the whole exceedingly dangerous world of contemporary worship music as definitely as does Darlene Zschech and Hillsong, and any bridges that Bible-believing churches build to the Gettys are bridges built to the one-world church and even to secular rock. We have mentioned the Gettys’ warm relationship with Roman Catholic musician Matt Maher. Most recently they have teamed up with Graham Kendrick for the song “My Worth Is Not in What I Own” on his new, yet untitled, album (“Graham Kendrick Teams Up with the Gettys,” www.hallels.com, Feb. 26, 2018). “My Worth” has been released as a single. Kendrick is one of the most prominent names in Contemporary Praise Music and one of his objectives is to break down denominational barriers and create ecumenical unity. He was co-founder of the ecumenical March for Jesus, which has brought together every type of denomination and cult including Roman Catholic and Mormon. A biography at Kendrick’s web site says: “Crossing international and denominational barriers, his songs, like the popular Shine Jesus Shine, have been used by countless small church events to major festivals--including Promise Keeper rallies, Billy Graham crusades and a four million-strong open air CATHOLIC MASS in the Philippines capital Manila, where THE POPE ‘SWUNG HIS CANE IN TIME TO THE MUSIC’” (“Shine Jesus Shine,” GrahamKendrick.co.uk). Kendrick is a charismatic of the most radical sort and promotes the “kingdom now” and Word-Faith heresies. In the 1970s, he was a member of the Ichthus Christian Fellowship which welcomed the so-called Toronto Blessing with its meaningless gibberish, spirit slaying, hysterical laughing, barking, braying, rolling. Kendrick claims that he was “baptized with the Holy Spirit” in 1971 after attending a charismatic meeting. He says, “It was later that night when I was cleaning my teeth ready to go to bed that I was filled with the Holy Spirit! ... and I remember lying at last in my bed, the fixed grin still on my face, praising and thanking God, and gingerly trying out a new spiritual language that had presented itself to my tongue with no regard at all for the objections thrown up by my incredulous brain! ... That was a real watershed in my Christian experience” (Nigel Smyth, “What Are We All Singing About?” www.freedomministries.org.uk/ccm/nsmyth1.shtml). To bypass one’s thinking and to refuse to test everything by Bible doctrine is blind mysticism, which is always a recipe for spiritual delusion. Instead of yoking together in music ministry with such people, the Gettys should be warning about them. Majesty Music and Bob Jones University have been promoting the Gettys’ contemporary hymns by toning down the rhythm, and this bridge will bring dramatic changes within the next 10 years. (For documentation see “The Gettys: Pied Pipers of Contemporary Worship Music,” www.wayoflife.org.)
MALE PROSTITUTION AT THE VATICAN (Friday Church News Notes, March 16, 2018, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from “Male Prostitution Big Business at Vatican,” PulpitandPen.org, Mar. 6, 2018: “The world is shocked upon hearing that there is a seedy world of priests at the Vatican who pay for sex with other males. But given the history of the Roman Catholic Church and its tragic celibacy policy, homosexuality, pedophilia and even bestiality are all-too-common among the priesthood. Forbidding to marry or to engage in the holy sexual union of marriage is a sign of works-righteousness and pagan religion (1 Timothy 4:3). The consequences of demanding celibacy have been terrible and are regularly read about in the daily newspaper. A male escort named Francesco Mangiacapra compiled a 1200 page dossier identifying more than 34 actively gay priests and six gay seminarians at the Vatican. How did he know who they were? Personal…experience. Cardinal Cresenzio Sepe of the Archdiocese of Naples forwarded the dossier to the Vatican, even though none of the priests identified were in Naples, because he felt that the corruption near and in the Vatican City should be exposed. The dossier compiled by the male prostitute mostly contains conversations and evidence produced by gay ‘hookup’ apps like WhatsApp, Grindr and Telegram, where the priests would arrange for sexual encounters with the gigolo. Information provided from social media platforms like Facebook was provided as well. A book was printed on the subject of the gay priest subculture of the Vatican last March, but it was largely ignored by the Romanists. So then, the male prostitute compiled the raw data into the dossier and began to send it to people whom he felt would expose it. He did so, he says, because he could no longer stand the hypocrisy of the church. Just as it is in America, the religious press wouldn’t publish the material because it would be viewed as damning, and so the secular press had to do it for them. ... When Pope Francis argued that the Romanist church should be more welcoming to homosexuals, it seems that it was an unnecessary gesture. See Jonathan Merritt, ‘This Vatican adviser is moving Catholics toward LGBT inclusion,’ ReligionNews.com, Jun. 6, 2017.”
DISNEY’S CONTINUED DESCENT INTO MORAL PERVERSION (Friday Church News Notes, March 16, 2018, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from “Elsa Coming Out as a Lesbian?” CBN.com, Mar. 1, 2018: “A sequel to the hit-film [Frozen] is set to release in November 2019, and now an interview with the film’s writer and co-director, Jennifer Lee, in the Huffington Post raises the possibility that Elsa could be getting a girlfriend. The movement started when fans and LGBTQ activists grabbed a hold of the film's hit song ‘Let It Go’ as their ‘coming out anthem’ -- and once a sequel was announced, social media became flooded with the hashtag ‘GiveElsaAGirlfriend.’ Petitions even circulated to give the character a female love interest. When Lee was asked about whether or not she was going to officially inaugurate Elsa into the LGBTQ community, she said the film’s team has been discussing the possibility. ‘I love everything people are saying and people are thinking about with our film,’ she told the Post. ‘That it’s creating dialogue, that Elsa is this wonderful character that speaks to so many people.’ Disney added an openly gay tween to the hit series Andi Mack, and the Disney series Doc McStuffins targeted preschoolers with a pro-lesbian message in the ‘2 Moms” episode.’”
EVOLVING COMPUTER CODE (Friday Church News Notes, March 16, 2018, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is from CreationMoments.com, January 31, 2018: “Some years ago, a major international software company took out some commercials on British television. The theme of the commercials was that their software was now better than it had ever been because it had evolved. The commercials showed images of dinosaurs and so-called primitive animals as they evolved into more modern, up-to-date varieties. As I said, the object of the commercials was to convince the public that the software applications they were selling were better and more sophisticated than their products had been previously. Darwin’s theory of evolution, and its neo-Darwinian variants, suggests that organisms have gradually got more complex by the spontaneous appearance of new DNA code. There is, of course, an analogy between computer programming code and the arrangement of information in DNA--except that DNA information is a great deal more complex than a computer app. If I had been one of the programmers of these software apps, I think I might have felt a little insulted. Granted, the new software versions were much better than the previous generations, having more and more useful routines. But each of these sophisticated features had been designed, planned and coded by software engineers. No information was introduced randomly by blind evolution. All new information was the result of highly intelligent design. This reasoning, incidentally, is just one of many reasons why evolution is impossible. New DNA code has even less chance of appearing by itself than a new programmed feature has of appearing in these software applications.”
CONCLUSION: The Friday Church News Notes is designed for use in churches and is published by Way of Life Literature’s Fundamental Baptist Information Service. Unless otherwise stated, the Notes are written by David Cloud. Of necessity we quote from a wide variety of sources, but this obviously does not imply an endorsement. We trust that our readers will not be discouraged. 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. The News Notes remind us that the hour is very late, and we need to be ready for the Lord’s coming. Are you sure that you are born again? Are you living for Christ? “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).
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Distributed by Way of Life Literature., publisher of Bible Study Materials and reports for Fundamental Baptists and other fundamentalist, Bible-believing Christians. Established in 1974, Way of Life Literature is a fundamental Baptist preaching and publishing ministry based in Bethel Baptist Church, London, Ontario, of which Wilbert Unger is the founding Pastor. Brother Cloud lives in South Asia where he has been a church planting missionary since 1979. OUR GOAL IN THIS PARTICULAR ASPECT OF OUR MINISTRY (REPORTS AND FRIDAY NEWS) IS NOT DEVOTIONAL. IS TO PROVIDE INFORMATION TO ASSIST PREACHERS IN THE PROTECTION OF THE CHURCHES IN THIS APOSTATE HOUR.
David Cloud, Way of Life Literature, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061, 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org
The Way of Life Literature preaching and publishing ministry is based at Bethel Baptist Church, London, Ontario, of which Wilbert Unger is the founding Pastor. A mail stop is maintained in Port Huron, Michigan.
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