Friday Church News Notes
Volume 24, Issue 43 - October 27, 2023
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.
STATES TAKING STEPS TO PROTECT CHILDREN FROM SOCIAL MEDIA (Friday Church News Notes, October 27, 2023, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - New York officials have introduced two bills to limit children’s access to addictive social media feeds and protect their mental health. The bills are supported by Governor Kathy Hochul and Attorney General Letitia James (“New York Introduce Bills,” PetaPixel, Oct. 12, 2023). The Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation for Kids Act (SAFE Act) “requires social media companies to restrict harmful and addictive features on their platforms.” It would “allow parents to opt their children out of getting feeds curated by an algorithm” and “ban social media companies from sending notification to minors between 12:00 and 06:00 without parental consent,” among other things. New York lawmakers said that “social media is a major factor behind the worsening mental health crisis among children.” Multiple states have filed lawsuits against TikTok and Meta (parent company of Facebook and Instagram) for “harming the mental health of children and teens” by “leveraging highly powerful algorithms and manipulative design features to entice young users to use the app.” Arkansas claims Meta “knowingly designed its social media apps to create addiction for its younger users” (“Arkansas Sues TikTok and Meta,” Petapixel, Mar. 29, 2023).
Other states are Utah, Texas, and Indiana. If the world sees great danger in social media, how much more should Bible-believing parents and churches! (See the book Spiritual Safety in the Facebook Age, www.wayoflife.org)
INTERVARSITY PRESS PROMOTING NEW AGE ENNEAGRAM (Friday Church News Notes, October 27, 2023, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from “InterVarsity Press Claims Success,” Lighthouse Trails, Oct. 12, 2023: “The InterVarsity Press news release announced the seven-year anniversary of the release of The Road Back to You by Ian Morgan Cron, a book about the Enneagram. ... The release goes on to claim that because of that book, over a million people have been introduced to the Enneagram. The release’s author says: ‘So, today I am celebrating that 1 million people have found a way to better understand their own motivations and move toward becoming their truest self.’ You see, contemplatives believe that we all have a ‘true self,’ which, they teach, is a good pure self, and through meditative practices, we can gain awareness of this true pure self. They believe this because they believe that within each person, there is divinity (God). ... In 2019, we published a booklet titled The Enneagram—An Enlightening Tool or an Enticing Deception? by Lois Putnam and the LT Editors. We believe it has more than ample evidence to show the erroneous and unbiblical nature of the Enneagram. And the real name behind the Enneagram is not Ian Morgan Cron but rather the Catholic mystic panentheist priest Richard Rohr ... [T]he Enneagram, a nine-pointed diagram [is] used to determine personality traits and character tendencies. While it may seem harmless and nothing more than a useful tool, the Enneagram is a seducing lure to deception and an example of what the Bible refers to as ‘the wiles of the devil.’ ... After Rohr learned about the Enneagram in the 1970s, he shared his Enneagram teaching on ten tapes, later writing his now classic best-selling book, Discovering the Enneagram: An Ancient Tool for a New Spiritual Journey (now titled The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective). In Rohr’s book, he explains that the underlying premise behind the Enneagram is that each person has a ‘true self’ and a ‘false self,’ and with the help of the Enneagram, we can identify our true selves, and thus having identified it, we can now be spiritually transformed to live in that true self. ... When Rohr, who is an outspoken panentheist, says ‘True Self in God,’ he is referring to his belief that the true self is the God within every human being.”
GEORGIA SUPREME COURT RULES ABORTION BAN CONSTITUTIONAL (Friday Church News Notes, October 27, 2023, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from “Georgia Supreme Court,” The Hill, Oct. 24, 2023: “Georgia’s ‘heartbeat’ abortion ban is constitutional and will remain in place for now, the state Supreme Court ruled Tuesday. The 6-1 ruling rejected a lower court’s reasoning that the six-week abortion ban was unconstitutional. ... The ruling means access to abortion in the state will continue to be restricted, and most abortions will remain illegal once a physician can detect fetal cardiac activity, which is usually around six weeks gestation, before many people know they are pregnant. The ruling was praised by anti-abortion groups, including Susan B. Anthony (SBA) Pro-Life America. ... The ruling is not the end of the legal fight over the state’s abortion ban. The case was remanded back to the trial court to rule on the remaining claims brought by the plaintiffs that the ban violates Georgians’ rights to privacy and equal protection under the state constitution. The abortion ban in Georgia was one of a wave of ‘trigger ban’ laws across the country that took effect shortly after Roe was overturned. The law includes some exceptions for rape and incest, as long as a police report is filed, and allows for later abortions when the mother’s life is at risk or a pregnancy is deemed ‘medically futile.’”
FROM UNISEX FASHION TO DRAG QUEENS (Friday Church News Notes, October 27, 2023, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The contemporary worship band Caedmon’s Call was formed in 1993 with six founding members (Cliff Young, Danielle Glenn, Todd Bragg, Cari Harris, Doug Elmore, and Aaron Tate). Derek Webb joined early on and wrote many of the group’s songs. Webb left in 2003 to pursue a solo career, and he has been on and off with the band since then (2007-2011, 2022). As with the vast majority of contemporary worship groups, there was always a unisex emphasis in Caedmon’s Call (founded 1993). It is one of the many ways that they are conformed to the world in direct disobedience to God’s Word (Romans 12:2). Some of the men wear earrings and long hair, while the female of the group wears pants. This unisex theme has been taken to its logical conclusion by Derek Webb, who now wears dresses, makeup, and wigs. Unisex fashion is not innocent. Scripture says God made man “male and female” (Ge. 1:27), and this distinction is to be maintained in dress. “The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the LORD thy God” (De. 22:5). “Doth not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him? But if a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her: for her hair is given her for a covering” (1 Co. 11:14-15). Mary Quant and other fashion designers of the 1960s understood the revolutionary nature of unisex dress. In 2019, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London had a major exhibit on Quant, who put women in men’s attire: pants, ties, suit jackets, and short hair. One display, entitled “Boys Will Be Girls,” says that Quant “subverted menswear.” Another display said, “Trousers are considered inappropriate for women [but] Quant wears them anywhere she wants.” Mary Quant knew that trousers on women is not an issue merely of comfort and freedom of movement. There is a direct path from unisex fashion to the homosexual-transsexual movement. In 2023, Derek Webb published the song “Boys Will Be Girls,” which presents transsexualism as something Jesus would support. This is exactly how Victoria & Albert Museum described Mary Quant’s fashion revolution. On Twitter, Oct. 13, 2023, Webb promoted the sale of a cup bearing an image of him in a dress (drag queen attire) and the slogan “but i say unto you, you’re beautiful and free” from his song “God in Drag.” Webb presumptuously uses the words of Jesus (“But I say unto you”) from the Gospels to claim Christ’s support for homosexuality.
THE BATTLE FOR THE BIBLE VIDEO SERIES (Friday Church News Notes, October 27, 2023, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The Battle for the Bible by Brian Snider is a timely, well-researched, 12-part multi-media video series on one of the most important subjects of our day. Every Christian home and church needs continual education on this issue. “The first seven lessons are an overview of the attack on Scripture from apostolic times. We show that during the last 2,000 years, the Bible has had two main enemies. Before the Reformation, the greatest enemy of Scripture was the Roman Catholic Church. After the Reformation, the greatest enemy has been unbelieving Bible scholarship. In the last five lessons, we review modern Bibles compared to the KJV and see that they are dramatically different in the kind of scholarship that was used to produce them.” Taught in 2023 at Madison Baptist Church, Madison, Alabama, the series has graciously been made available by Pastor Mike Allison and Brian Snider for free viewing and download. https://madisonbaptist.com/kjv.html
DOES TIME WORK MIRACLES? (Friday Church News Notes, November 3, 2023, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is from CreationMoments.com, September 29, 2023: “It has been said that if you take a frog and turn it into a man by adding a kiss, you have a fairy tale. But if you take a frog and turn it into a man by adding millions of years, you have science. It seems that many people think if you add millions of years, the impossible becomes possible. Even the most committed evolutionists admit that our knowledge of how things work makes it hard to explain how life could develop all by itself from nonliving stuff. The late George Wald, who taught biology at Harvard, said just this in an article in Scientific American. He was marveling at life and all of its complex systems when he penned some of the most famous words ever offered by an evolutionist. He wrote: ‘The time with which we have to deal here is of the order of 2 billion years. What we regard as impossible on the basis of human experience is meaningless here. Given so much time, the impossible becomes possible, the possible becomes probable, and the probable becomes virtually certain. One has only to wait, time itself performs the miracles.’ Notice how Professor Wald admits the need for miracles to produce life. Will huge amounts of time—time we know didn’t exist—create these miracles? Not at all. A fundamental law tells us that if something won’t happen by itself in a short period of time, it is virtually certain that it will not happen over a long period of time. It’s true. If you reject Almighty God as your Creator, you will find another false god to work miracles. For many evolutionists, that false god is time. REF: Wald, George. “The Origin of Life,” Scientific American, Aug. 1954, pp. 45-53.”
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).
Other states are Utah, Texas, and Indiana. If the world sees great danger in social media, how much more should Bible-believing parents and churches! (See the book Spiritual Safety in the Facebook Age, www.wayoflife.org)
INTERVARSITY PRESS PROMOTING NEW AGE ENNEAGRAM (Friday Church News Notes, October 27, 2023, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from “InterVarsity Press Claims Success,” Lighthouse Trails, Oct. 12, 2023: “The InterVarsity Press news release announced the seven-year anniversary of the release of The Road Back to You by Ian Morgan Cron, a book about the Enneagram. ... The release goes on to claim that because of that book, over a million people have been introduced to the Enneagram. The release’s author says: ‘So, today I am celebrating that 1 million people have found a way to better understand their own motivations and move toward becoming their truest self.’ You see, contemplatives believe that we all have a ‘true self,’ which, they teach, is a good pure self, and through meditative practices, we can gain awareness of this true pure self. They believe this because they believe that within each person, there is divinity (God). ... In 2019, we published a booklet titled The Enneagram—An Enlightening Tool or an Enticing Deception? by Lois Putnam and the LT Editors. We believe it has more than ample evidence to show the erroneous and unbiblical nature of the Enneagram. And the real name behind the Enneagram is not Ian Morgan Cron but rather the Catholic mystic panentheist priest Richard Rohr ... [T]he Enneagram, a nine-pointed diagram [is] used to determine personality traits and character tendencies. While it may seem harmless and nothing more than a useful tool, the Enneagram is a seducing lure to deception and an example of what the Bible refers to as ‘the wiles of the devil.’ ... After Rohr learned about the Enneagram in the 1970s, he shared his Enneagram teaching on ten tapes, later writing his now classic best-selling book, Discovering the Enneagram: An Ancient Tool for a New Spiritual Journey (now titled The Enneagram: A Christian Perspective). In Rohr’s book, he explains that the underlying premise behind the Enneagram is that each person has a ‘true self’ and a ‘false self,’ and with the help of the Enneagram, we can identify our true selves, and thus having identified it, we can now be spiritually transformed to live in that true self. ... When Rohr, who is an outspoken panentheist, says ‘True Self in God,’ he is referring to his belief that the true self is the God within every human being.”
GEORGIA SUPREME COURT RULES ABORTION BAN CONSTITUTIONAL (Friday Church News Notes, October 27, 2023, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is excerpted from “Georgia Supreme Court,” The Hill, Oct. 24, 2023: “Georgia’s ‘heartbeat’ abortion ban is constitutional and will remain in place for now, the state Supreme Court ruled Tuesday. The 6-1 ruling rejected a lower court’s reasoning that the six-week abortion ban was unconstitutional. ... The ruling means access to abortion in the state will continue to be restricted, and most abortions will remain illegal once a physician can detect fetal cardiac activity, which is usually around six weeks gestation, before many people know they are pregnant. The ruling was praised by anti-abortion groups, including Susan B. Anthony (SBA) Pro-Life America. ... The ruling is not the end of the legal fight over the state’s abortion ban. The case was remanded back to the trial court to rule on the remaining claims brought by the plaintiffs that the ban violates Georgians’ rights to privacy and equal protection under the state constitution. The abortion ban in Georgia was one of a wave of ‘trigger ban’ laws across the country that took effect shortly after Roe was overturned. The law includes some exceptions for rape and incest, as long as a police report is filed, and allows for later abortions when the mother’s life is at risk or a pregnancy is deemed ‘medically futile.’”
FROM UNISEX FASHION TO DRAG QUEENS (Friday Church News Notes, October 27, 2023, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The contemporary worship band Caedmon’s Call was formed in 1993 with six founding members (Cliff Young, Danielle Glenn, Todd Bragg, Cari Harris, Doug Elmore, and Aaron Tate). Derek Webb joined early on and wrote many of the group’s songs. Webb left in 2003 to pursue a solo career, and he has been on and off with the band since then (2007-2011, 2022). As with the vast majority of contemporary worship groups, there was always a unisex emphasis in Caedmon’s Call (founded 1993). It is one of the many ways that they are conformed to the world in direct disobedience to God’s Word (Romans 12:2). Some of the men wear earrings and long hair, while the female of the group wears pants. This unisex theme has been taken to its logical conclusion by Derek Webb, who now wears dresses, makeup, and wigs. Unisex fashion is not innocent. Scripture says God made man “male and female” (Ge. 1:27), and this distinction is to be maintained in dress. “The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the LORD thy God” (De. 22:5). “Doth not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him? But if a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her: for her hair is given her for a covering” (1 Co. 11:14-15). Mary Quant and other fashion designers of the 1960s understood the revolutionary nature of unisex dress. In 2019, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London had a major exhibit on Quant, who put women in men’s attire: pants, ties, suit jackets, and short hair. One display, entitled “Boys Will Be Girls,” says that Quant “subverted menswear.” Another display said, “Trousers are considered inappropriate for women [but] Quant wears them anywhere she wants.” Mary Quant knew that trousers on women is not an issue merely of comfort and freedom of movement. There is a direct path from unisex fashion to the homosexual-transsexual movement. In 2023, Derek Webb published the song “Boys Will Be Girls,” which presents transsexualism as something Jesus would support. This is exactly how Victoria & Albert Museum described Mary Quant’s fashion revolution. On Twitter, Oct. 13, 2023, Webb promoted the sale of a cup bearing an image of him in a dress (drag queen attire) and the slogan “but i say unto you, you’re beautiful and free” from his song “God in Drag.” Webb presumptuously uses the words of Jesus (“But I say unto you”) from the Gospels to claim Christ’s support for homosexuality.
THE BATTLE FOR THE BIBLE VIDEO SERIES (Friday Church News Notes, October 27, 2023, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The Battle for the Bible by Brian Snider is a timely, well-researched, 12-part multi-media video series on one of the most important subjects of our day. Every Christian home and church needs continual education on this issue. “The first seven lessons are an overview of the attack on Scripture from apostolic times. We show that during the last 2,000 years, the Bible has had two main enemies. Before the Reformation, the greatest enemy of Scripture was the Roman Catholic Church. After the Reformation, the greatest enemy has been unbelieving Bible scholarship. In the last five lessons, we review modern Bibles compared to the KJV and see that they are dramatically different in the kind of scholarship that was used to produce them.” Taught in 2023 at Madison Baptist Church, Madison, Alabama, the series has graciously been made available by Pastor Mike Allison and Brian Snider for free viewing and download. https://madisonbaptist.com/kjv.html
DOES TIME WORK MIRACLES? (Friday Church News Notes, November 3, 2023, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is from CreationMoments.com, September 29, 2023: “It has been said that if you take a frog and turn it into a man by adding a kiss, you have a fairy tale. But if you take a frog and turn it into a man by adding millions of years, you have science. It seems that many people think if you add millions of years, the impossible becomes possible. Even the most committed evolutionists admit that our knowledge of how things work makes it hard to explain how life could develop all by itself from nonliving stuff. The late George Wald, who taught biology at Harvard, said just this in an article in Scientific American. He was marveling at life and all of its complex systems when he penned some of the most famous words ever offered by an evolutionist. He wrote: ‘The time with which we have to deal here is of the order of 2 billion years. What we regard as impossible on the basis of human experience is meaningless here. Given so much time, the impossible becomes possible, the possible becomes probable, and the probable becomes virtually certain. One has only to wait, time itself performs the miracles.’ Notice how Professor Wald admits the need for miracles to produce life. Will huge amounts of time—time we know didn’t exist—create these miracles? Not at all. A fundamental law tells us that if something won’t happen by itself in a short period of time, it is virtually certain that it will not happen over a long period of time. It’s true. If you reject Almighty God as your Creator, you will find another false god to work miracles. For many evolutionists, that false god is time. REF: Wald, George. “The Origin of Life,” Scientific American, Aug. 1954, pp. 45-53.”
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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