Friday Church News Notes
October 16, 2026 - Volume 27, Issue 42
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.
IS EVANGELICAL SCHOLARSHIP TRUSTWORTHY? (Friday Church News Notes, October 16, 2026, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - We often hear of “good evangelical scholarship” as if it is a trustworthy field. For example, Mark Ward, who claims the King James Bible has become hopelessly antiquated, recommends the evangelical scholarship that produced the modern versions and the evangelicals themselves as “friends” and “not enemies” (“3 Ways to Graciously Engage KJV-Only Believers,” Gospel Coalition, July 26, 2018, cited from Bill Fortenberry, False Friends and True Enemies, p. 49). This is either naivety or willful ignorance. Evangelical scholarship has been deeply corrupted since the New Evangelical generation, led by men such as Harold Ockenga, “renounced separatism” and determined to associate with theological liberals instead of marking and avoiding them as the Word of God commands. Predictably, since evil communications corrupt good manners, the result has been disastrous. This has been documented by prominent evangelicals themselves, such as Harold Lindsell (The Battle for the Bible, 1976, and The Bible in the Balance, 1979), Charles Woodbridge (The New Evangelicalism, 1969), Francis Schaeffer (The Great Evangelical Disaster, 1984), David Wells (No Place for the Truth, 1993), John Armstrong (editor, The Coming Evangelical Crisis, 1997), and Iain Murray (Evangelicalism Divided: A Record of Crucial Change in the Years 1950-2000). Harold Lindsell was a close associate of Ockenga and participated in the renunciation, but he carefully and extensively documented the terrible fruit in his two explosive books. In 1985, Lindsell warned, “Evangelicalism today is in a sad state of disarray. ... It is clear that evangelicalism is now broader and shallower, and is becoming more so. Evangelicalism’s children are in the process of forsaking the faith of their fathers” (Christian News, Dec. 2, 1985). Evangelical scholarship has grown much more corrupt since then, but being enamored with evangelicalism’s bright lights, Mark Ward and many other fundamental baptist wanna-be (and on their way to being) evangelicals missed the memo. (For a description of evangelicalism’s corrupt scholarship and dangerous waters, see Evangelicalism and the Great Apostasy at the Books section of www.wayoflife.org. For the shocking liberalism that absolutely permeates the field of modern textual criticism itself, see The Modern Bible Version Hall of Shame at the same place.)
POPE PRAYS BEFORE IMAGE OF THE LYING MARY (Friday Church News Notes, October 16, 2026, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - “Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world” (1 John 4:1). On Sept. 26, 2026, Pope Leo XIV prayed before the image of “our Lady of Lourdes” in France. The image resides in a cave where a barely literate peasant girl named Bernadette Soubirous supposedly had a vision in March 1858 of a young woman who claimed to be “the Immaculate Conception.” This was three years after Pope Pius IX had officially proclaimed that Mary was conceived without sin. Yet Mary called God her Saviour (Luke 1:47), proving that she was not without sin. The only individual born without sin is the Lord Jesus Christ (Heb. 4:15; 7:26; 2 Co. 5:21; 1 Pe. 2:22; 1 Jo. 3:5). Not only did the vision lie about being immaculate and instruct people to pray the rosary, which includes a blasphemous prayer to Mary as Queen of Heaven, mother of mercy, full of grace, it taught works salvation. Bernadette was instructed to kiss the ground as “an act of penance for sinners.” There was no mention of the true gospel of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins. Rome declared Bernadette’s vision authentic in 1862, a statue was dedicated to the “immaculate” Mary in 1863, a cathedral was dedicated in 1876, and Bernadette was canonized as a saint in 1933. Pope John Paul II worshipped before the Lourdes statue in 1983 and attributed Mary’s intercession for his survival of an assassination attempt. Pope Benedict XVI placed a golden crown on the head of the Mary of Lourdes statue in Rome in 2007. The apostle Paul preached salvation by grace without works (Ephesians 2:8-10) and warned that anyone, even an angel from heaven, who preached a gospel different from the gospel of free grace was cursed (Galatians 1:6-9). Rome built three basilicas at Lourdes and has collected offerings and valuable gifts from the 200 million pilgrims who have sought blessing and healing there. Those who are associating with Rome are associating with gross spiritual darkness and deception in direct disobedience to 2 Corinthians 6:14-19.
WHEN DISCIPLINE DISAPPEARED FROM SOUTHERN BAPTIST CHURCHES (Friday Church News Notes, October 16, 2026, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - “Your glorying is not good. Know ye not that a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump? Purge out therefore the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, as ye are unleavened. For even Christ our passover is sacrificed for us: Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth” (1 Corinthians 5:6-8). A church without discipline is not a New Testament church, but discipline disappeared from Southern Baptist churches at the turn of the 20th century. The same thing is happening today among fundamental Baptists. “By the 1890s, Southern Baptist opposition to worldly amusements was mostly baying at the moon. ... Resolutions against amusements became plaintive cries of congregations that had lost the resolve to discipline” (Gregory Wills, Democratic Religion: Freedom, Authority, and Church Discipline in the Baptist South, p. 127). “By the 1920s, Southern Baptist church discipline had disappeared. Although a few isolated churches kept up the practice into the 1940s, the fate of Southern Baptist discipline had been sealed by 1900. Many Baptists knew it. In a report of the Western Association in 1910, pastor J. A. Bell lamented the loss: ‘When have you heard of a church vindicating her righteous claims by an effectual arraignment of her malicious or delinquent members? Church discipline, it seems, must be reckoned as a thing of the past, belonging to the fossil remains of bygone ages.’ In 1915, the Ebenezer Association confessed that ‘the matter of arraigning our disorderly members before the Church in Conference is very much a thing of the past. We have ceased to require our members to live, at least, a decent Christian life’” (Wills, p. 116). “[T]he churches became more permissive. They became uncertain about any discipline for worldly amusements. They thought worldly amusements evil, but they hesitated to address the evil by means of discipline. One difficulty was that young people were the main offenders. … Dancing and other amusements appealed primarily to the youth. … LaGrange Baptist Church recognized the dilemma: ‘The idea is so prevalent that if we enforce church discipline and exclude members they will be lost,’ and the churches balked at losing the youth” (Wills, p. 125).
ELON MUSK TO CONSTRUCT THE WORLD’S LARGEST BUILDING FOR WORLD’S LARGEST CHIP FACTORY (Friday Church News Notes, October 16, 2026, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - “But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased” (Daniel 12:4). The following is excerpted from “Elon Musk’s $119B Terafab,” Parametric, Aug. 26, 2026: “Few contemporary industrial projects challenge the conventional definition of architecture as dramatically as Terafab, Elon Musk’s proposed semiconductor megafactory in Texas. Conceived through the combined ambitions of Tesla, SpaceX, xAI and Intel, Terafab is not simply another factory designed to manufacture advanced chips. It represents a new model of industrial infrastructure in which semiconductor production, artificial intelligence, robotics, energy, logistics and eventually space-based computing are brought together at an unprecedented scale. The numbers alone are difficult to comprehend. The planned complex in Grimes County, Texas, is expected to occupy approximately 100 million square feet, or roughly 9.3 million square metres. Its initial investment has been reported at $16.8 billion, while future expansion could bring the total investment to approximately $119 billion. The facility is planned to employ at least 3,000 people and is intended to produce more than one terawatt of computing capacity annually. ... Terafab is essentially a vertically integrated semiconductor manufacturing complex. Rather than separating chip design, fabrication, memory production, advanced packaging and testing across different companies and locations, the project aims to consolidate major stages of production within one enormous industrial ecosystem. ... The motivation is straightforward ... Musk’s companies increasingly depend on enormous quantities of computing power. Tesla requires advanced chips for autonomous vehicles and Optimus humanoid robots, while SpaceX’s ambitions include increasingly sophisticated AI systems and space-based computing infrastructure. Musk has argued that chip manufacturing, data-centre infrastructure and power generation have become fundamental physical constraints on the expansion of AI. ... In architectural terms, this is no longer a conventional factory. It begins to resemble a city whose primary inhabitants are machines.”
THE COMPLEXITY OF A SINGLE CELL (Friday Church News Notes, October 16, 2026, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is from CreationMoments.com, October 6, 2026: “It wasn’t until 1839 that cell theory was first described by Theodore Schwann in basically its modern form. By 1858, researcher Rudolf Virchow had learned enough about the cell to conclude that every cell must come from a preexisting cell. But Charles Darwin wasn’t paying attention. The very next year he published a book, On the Origin of Species, which theorized that the first cell was formed from non-living matter. In Darwin’s day, the cell was thought to be just a simple sac filled with jellied carbon. This concept is the origin of the term protoplasm. However, nearly 150 years of cell research has shown us that even protozoan and fungi cells are hugely complex. Today we know that even the simplest of these cells, prokaryotes, has an estimated 100,000 parts. Many thousands of different operations are taking place continuously within each of the cell’s many parts, called organelles. Furthermore, the cell cannot live until all these parts are working properly. Even the simple E. coli bacterium has 4,000 genes. If we were able to magnify the DNA of the E. coli to the thickness of a clothesline, it would be five miles long! There is no such thing as a ‘simple cell.’ The fact that a cell cannot live without all these thousands of parts shows that cells were created in their finished form, just as the Bible says. Even bacteria declare the glory of our Creator! Psalm 96:3 ‘Declare his glory among the heathen, his wonders among all people.’ REF.: CRSQ, ‘The Putative Evolution of the Animal Eukaryote Cell Ultrastructure.’”
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; Mt. 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” (Ro. 13:11-14).
POPE PRAYS BEFORE IMAGE OF THE LYING MARY (Friday Church News Notes, October 16, 2026, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - “Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world” (1 John 4:1). On Sept. 26, 2026, Pope Leo XIV prayed before the image of “our Lady of Lourdes” in France. The image resides in a cave where a barely literate peasant girl named Bernadette Soubirous supposedly had a vision in March 1858 of a young woman who claimed to be “the Immaculate Conception.” This was three years after Pope Pius IX had officially proclaimed that Mary was conceived without sin. Yet Mary called God her Saviour (Luke 1:47), proving that she was not without sin. The only individual born without sin is the Lord Jesus Christ (Heb. 4:15; 7:26; 2 Co. 5:21; 1 Pe. 2:22; 1 Jo. 3:5). Not only did the vision lie about being immaculate and instruct people to pray the rosary, which includes a blasphemous prayer to Mary as Queen of Heaven, mother of mercy, full of grace, it taught works salvation. Bernadette was instructed to kiss the ground as “an act of penance for sinners.” There was no mention of the true gospel of the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins. Rome declared Bernadette’s vision authentic in 1862, a statue was dedicated to the “immaculate” Mary in 1863, a cathedral was dedicated in 1876, and Bernadette was canonized as a saint in 1933. Pope John Paul II worshipped before the Lourdes statue in 1983 and attributed Mary’s intercession for his survival of an assassination attempt. Pope Benedict XVI placed a golden crown on the head of the Mary of Lourdes statue in Rome in 2007. The apostle Paul preached salvation by grace without works (Ephesians 2:8-10) and warned that anyone, even an angel from heaven, who preached a gospel different from the gospel of free grace was cursed (Galatians 1:6-9). Rome built three basilicas at Lourdes and has collected offerings and valuable gifts from the 200 million pilgrims who have sought blessing and healing there. Those who are associating with Rome are associating with gross spiritual darkness and deception in direct disobedience to 2 Corinthians 6:14-19.
WHEN DISCIPLINE DISAPPEARED FROM SOUTHERN BAPTIST CHURCHES (Friday Church News Notes, October 16, 2026, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - “Your glorying is not good. Know ye not that a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump? Purge out therefore the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, as ye are unleavened. For even Christ our passover is sacrificed for us: Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth” (1 Corinthians 5:6-8). A church without discipline is not a New Testament church, but discipline disappeared from Southern Baptist churches at the turn of the 20th century. The same thing is happening today among fundamental Baptists. “By the 1890s, Southern Baptist opposition to worldly amusements was mostly baying at the moon. ... Resolutions against amusements became plaintive cries of congregations that had lost the resolve to discipline” (Gregory Wills, Democratic Religion: Freedom, Authority, and Church Discipline in the Baptist South, p. 127). “By the 1920s, Southern Baptist church discipline had disappeared. Although a few isolated churches kept up the practice into the 1940s, the fate of Southern Baptist discipline had been sealed by 1900. Many Baptists knew it. In a report of the Western Association in 1910, pastor J. A. Bell lamented the loss: ‘When have you heard of a church vindicating her righteous claims by an effectual arraignment of her malicious or delinquent members? Church discipline, it seems, must be reckoned as a thing of the past, belonging to the fossil remains of bygone ages.’ In 1915, the Ebenezer Association confessed that ‘the matter of arraigning our disorderly members before the Church in Conference is very much a thing of the past. We have ceased to require our members to live, at least, a decent Christian life’” (Wills, p. 116). “[T]he churches became more permissive. They became uncertain about any discipline for worldly amusements. They thought worldly amusements evil, but they hesitated to address the evil by means of discipline. One difficulty was that young people were the main offenders. … Dancing and other amusements appealed primarily to the youth. … LaGrange Baptist Church recognized the dilemma: ‘The idea is so prevalent that if we enforce church discipline and exclude members they will be lost,’ and the churches balked at losing the youth” (Wills, p. 125).
ELON MUSK TO CONSTRUCT THE WORLD’S LARGEST BUILDING FOR WORLD’S LARGEST CHIP FACTORY (Friday Church News Notes, October 16, 2026, www.wayoflife.org fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - “But thou, O Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book, even to the time of the end: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased” (Daniel 12:4). The following is excerpted from “Elon Musk’s $119B Terafab,” Parametric, Aug. 26, 2026: “Few contemporary industrial projects challenge the conventional definition of architecture as dramatically as Terafab, Elon Musk’s proposed semiconductor megafactory in Texas. Conceived through the combined ambitions of Tesla, SpaceX, xAI and Intel, Terafab is not simply another factory designed to manufacture advanced chips. It represents a new model of industrial infrastructure in which semiconductor production, artificial intelligence, robotics, energy, logistics and eventually space-based computing are brought together at an unprecedented scale. The numbers alone are difficult to comprehend. The planned complex in Grimes County, Texas, is expected to occupy approximately 100 million square feet, or roughly 9.3 million square metres. Its initial investment has been reported at $16.8 billion, while future expansion could bring the total investment to approximately $119 billion. The facility is planned to employ at least 3,000 people and is intended to produce more than one terawatt of computing capacity annually. ... Terafab is essentially a vertically integrated semiconductor manufacturing complex. Rather than separating chip design, fabrication, memory production, advanced packaging and testing across different companies and locations, the project aims to consolidate major stages of production within one enormous industrial ecosystem. ... The motivation is straightforward ... Musk’s companies increasingly depend on enormous quantities of computing power. Tesla requires advanced chips for autonomous vehicles and Optimus humanoid robots, while SpaceX’s ambitions include increasingly sophisticated AI systems and space-based computing infrastructure. Musk has argued that chip manufacturing, data-centre infrastructure and power generation have become fundamental physical constraints on the expansion of AI. ... In architectural terms, this is no longer a conventional factory. It begins to resemble a city whose primary inhabitants are machines.”
THE COMPLEXITY OF A SINGLE CELL (Friday Church News Notes, October 16, 2026, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - The following is from CreationMoments.com, October 6, 2026: “It wasn’t until 1839 that cell theory was first described by Theodore Schwann in basically its modern form. By 1858, researcher Rudolf Virchow had learned enough about the cell to conclude that every cell must come from a preexisting cell. But Charles Darwin wasn’t paying attention. The very next year he published a book, On the Origin of Species, which theorized that the first cell was formed from non-living matter. In Darwin’s day, the cell was thought to be just a simple sac filled with jellied carbon. This concept is the origin of the term protoplasm. However, nearly 150 years of cell research has shown us that even protozoan and fungi cells are hugely complex. Today we know that even the simplest of these cells, prokaryotes, has an estimated 100,000 parts. Many thousands of different operations are taking place continuously within each of the cell’s many parts, called organelles. Furthermore, the cell cannot live until all these parts are working properly. Even the simple E. coli bacterium has 4,000 genes. If we were able to magnify the DNA of the E. coli to the thickness of a clothesline, it would be five miles long! There is no such thing as a ‘simple cell.’ The fact that a cell cannot live without all these thousands of parts shows that cells were created in their finished form, just as the Bible says. Even bacteria declare the glory of our Creator! Psalm 96:3 ‘Declare his glory among the heathen, his wonders among all people.’ REF.: CRSQ, ‘The Putative Evolution of the Animal Eukaryote Cell Ultrastructure.’”
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; Mt. 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” (Ro. 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, BUT 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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