CHURCH AMUSEMENTS by St. Louis Christian Advocate

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Sep 9, 1889

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 15, No. 35.

CHURCH AMUSEMENTS.

By St. Louis Christian Advocate

ONE of the most insidious and deadly innovations on church activity and church life is the modern idea that the church must supply amusements for the people. Few things more thoroughly sap the foundations of a vigorous piety than this. It is deemed vital to the welfare of some churches that there be a large section of its active force devoted to this department, and very often the pulpit incorporates a phase of this pernicious adjunct into its most serious functions. That it draws, that it pleases, is its plea and defense. This plea is made in direct contravention to the apostle, who says emphatically he did not seek to please, and this deferring to itching ears he most solemnly declares is the foundation of apostasy; that by it the ears are turned away from the truth and turned unto fables. It is a confession on the part of the church of failure. It is the declaration of our unfaith. It is the sign and seal of weakness. Faith draws, prayer draws, the word of God draws, the Holy Spirit draws. All these divine agencies draw with saving power, and their drawing is not that of a little wheat in an immense amount of chaff; not a little of the Spirit in whole heaps of flesh; not a page of the Spirit lost in volumes of the flesh; not a little conviction whiffed away by a stiff breeze of grins and laughter; but these draw to save. They root and ground in the profound principles of a reverent and holy piety. We abandon the divine methods because we have not faith to work them. We abandon them because they require too much self-surrender and flesh-denying to work them. We forsake the divine plan because we have not religion enough to work Christ's religion after Christ's way.—St. Louis Christian Advocate.