Aroused Interest in Missions Very gratifying is the tremendous in terest being shown by Christians every where, in the report of his survey of the mission fields which Dr. Louis T. Talbot is making on Sunday afternoons in the Church of the Open Door in Los An geles, and on week nights in large audi toriums in adjacent cities. The 4,300 seats in the Church of the Open Door have been filled each Sunday and hun dreds have been turned away. Dr. Talbot visited Japan, Malaya, Borneo, Java, India, Trans-Jordania, Palestine, Egypt, and many islands of the Pacific. He found that God was working in a mighty way in the hearts of the natives, especially in Indonesia and Japan. In a personal interview, General MacArthur told Dr. Talbot that he was asking for 3,000 missionaries and 10,000,000 Bibles for Japan this year. As a result of their defeat in the war, the Japanese are disillusioned and confused. For hundreds of years they believed their emperor to be a god and their ancestors their guardian angels. They were taught that their destiny as a nation was world dominion. They are now realizing that their philosophy, both religious and political, was false. The emperor announced publicly that he was not a god. Consequently, they are turn ing from Shintoism and Buddhism, which leaves only a vacuum in their hearts. Will this be filled with Christ or Communism? If the church of Christ does not arise to this, its greatest op portunity, the results will be tragic. Through the addresses Dr. Talbot has been giving, many young men in the Bible Institute and elsewhere are catch ing the vision of devoting their lives to preaching the gospel to those who have never heard. Beginning in April or May, Dr. Talbot will deliver these messages in the larger cities along the Pacific Coast. Television and Morals The Southern California Association for Better Radio and Television has lodged a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission against six Los Angeles television stations giving the breakdown of the observation of one week’s video programs. The following component parts -were noted: “Ninety- one murders, seven holdups, three kid- napings, ten thefts, four burglaries, two cases of arson, two jail breaks, one mur der by explosion, two suicides and one case of blackmail. Many cases of assault and battery, also cases of attempted mur der. Much of the action takes place in saloons; brawls too numerous to men tion, also drunkenness, crooked judges, crooked sheriffs, crooked juries.” There is no doubt that television is here to stay, and Christian people will have to ponder deeply their participation in it.
school programs and today’s churches provide for broader recreational and so cial activities. A feature of this building program is that floor plans must provide many more rooms for various activities other than the rooms for worship. Lost Dog According to the Los Angeles Herald- Express, a couple have mortgaged their home, spent their .savings, borrowed on their salary and traveled 8,000 miles through five states, all to find a ter rier dog lost four months previously. The couple protest that they can’t give up looking no matter what it costs, because it is like losing one’s own child. As well as searching themselves, they have spent many nights making posters advertising the lost dog, written to newspapers, radio stations, dog societies and humane so cieties, but so far without a single lead. If sources of information are correct, it is our understanding that there are almost countless children needing homes in this land and in many other lands —j children with lives before them and eter nal souls at stake as well. Switching O.E. Mr. Norman E. Holden, commissioner of the Los Angeles Juvenile Court, who describes himself as a practical psy chologist, says among other things that he believes “ a good stinging switching aimed for corrective purposes and with out malice can do wonders. Hemmed in by laws unknown 50 years ago, parents have forgotten that they have a right to help curb delinquency. Dozens of fathers and mothers have told me they thought, physical punishment illegal and so haven’t used it. But this is illegal only when brutality is practiced on a youngster.” All of which is quite in line with what Scripture has to say about rearing chil dren, namely: that those who hate their child withhold the rod, and obedience is to be strictly demanded in love by the parents of the child. The book of Prov erbs is an excellent commentary on this question.
One Out of Ten According to Lee W. Simmons, Asso ciate Professor of Sociology at Yale University, one out of every ten per sons in the United States is afflicted with mental illness. Professor Simmons cites figures indicating that one out of twenty persons at some time during his life will enter a psychiatric hospital, while another one out of twenty will be too ill to work for a time because of mental illness. The pace in today’s world bringing these astounding figures is ter rific. Christian people are not unaffected and need to remember the spiritual ad vice given in Isaiah 26:3, “ Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed' on thee: because he trusteth in thee.” Bumper Crop The 1949 crop of babies in the United States was close to 3,700,000, a figure unprecedented in the nation’s history. Already the impact of these growing children is being felt on the school sys tems throughout our land, with crowded conditions and the necessity for a great ly enlarged building program. Pastors, Christian Education leaders and Sunday school teachers need to con sider these statistics as well if the church is to live up to the opportunity of reach ing the children for Christ. Plans for auditoriums should be scrutinized care fully to allow funds to be used for ade quate educational facilities. Billions for Churches Protestant churches throughout the United States are now engaged in their greatest building program of history. New churches or improvements under way or on architects’ drawing boards are figured at $1,000,000. Part of the reason for this is to be seen in the greater daily usefulness that is made of church build ings today. Many Protestant churches have entered into week-day parochial
Page Five
M A R C H , I 9 5 0
Made with FlippingBook - Online catalogs