The Society Expands
We do not need a preacher placement agency for the churches. We do not need a publication agency for the churches. We do not need a preacher preparation agency for the churches. We do not need a church building and loan agency. And, tied in with all these, we do not need an agency for receiving the contributions from the churches. Besides being wrong in its very purpose and existence, these are the abuses which further make it wrong to have anything to do with the missionary society. But, call it by any other name, you still have the same thing, the same errors. These abuses, if not the very purpose of their existence, characterize the schools among the liberal minded brethren.
The latest affront to the fullness and completeness of the church is the announcement by J. D. Thomas that the Lectureship Office of Abilene Christian College will be glad to render the service of liaison between churches and preachers. He says that the office has assumed that responsibility. To be sure, it was assumed, because the Lord certainly did not give them that position. This advertisement was in three or four of the liberal teaching papers in November.
These brethren have tried to evade the force of the comparison between some of their church related organizations and the missionary societies by stating that the missionary society was not wrong within itself but that only the abuses were wrong. Then when they have been shown that not only is such a societies wrong in its very existence but that brethren in their church related organizations practicing the same things which they admit to-be-abuses in the missionary society, they try to evade by the circumlocution that they do not have a society, and that we are only trying to prejudice minds by using the term. Thus they are trying to have the society as well as its practices by calling it some other name.
Several years ago the schools among us began to emphasize our responsibility in supporting them by announcing that they were a great help if not an indispensability to the church. They pointed with pride to the great number of preachers which they had turned out. They emphasized the potential enhancement of the leadership within the congregations by virtue of their training in the schools. This is the kind of abuse in practice which fed the fires of Sommer's. It is hard indeed to keep from making a church school out of a privately operated school. Just look at what happened. This is why the society claimed to be a necessity for the churches.
About the same time they began to receive contributions from churches for their operation and to announce that they were thus receiving them. O, no, they would not say that they were soliciting congregational funds, but they were not sending back the funds which congregations sent them. That is the same kind of thing which the lawyer and doctor does; instead of soliciting patients and clients in plain terms, he merely announces that he is open for practice. A few of the schools have in an unguarded moment appealed for church funds, but it just was not ethical to do it that way. This is another practice of the society which is vitally essential to its existence.
While receiving these church funds, the schools are becoming producers of religious literature. This is one of the functions of the missionary societies. What makes one an abuse, and not the other?
Some of them have departments for making loans, the income from which is used for the operation of the school, the principle for the loan partially made possible through contributions from churches. One such fund was announced as being available for church buildings. One of the branches of the missionary society carries out this function. Who can say without any hypocrisy whatsoever that this practice of the missionary society is to be condemned while that of the school is praised?
The whole organizational system, including this new effort on the part of the preacher placing department of Abilene Christian College, will result in directing and controlling the churches and their affairs. The missionary society is wrong because it is set up as an organization for doing that which is the work and function of the churches. The school has the right to exist when it stays in the field of education. But when it leaves that design and begins to do that which is the work and function of the churches it is equally as sinful as the missionary society.
Many times school officials and those engaged in publication of literature have been called upon to recommend preachers. If they know preachers, a personal commendation and contact is scripturally in order.
But when a school or paper can itself become so religiously important that it assumes the right to recommend and place preachers, it has stepped out of its proper bounds and encroached upon the functions of the church. Further than that, even when an individual reaches the point that he feels that he is capable of announcing that he will act as a clearing and placing agency for churches and preachers, he has become the one-man-missionary society, which was shown to be 'as bad as the full fledged organization few years ago.
— Springfield, Missouri