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T H E K I N G ' S B U S I N E S S
May, 1936
How to WIN AND HOLD Children By ETHEL S. U )W Modesto, California
M y sub ject is a big one: “How to Win and Hold Children.” I am going to start out with present con ditions. Let us look them over fairly and squarely. I have some facts here. With some of them you may not agree. First, only about one-half of the children of America ever have any religious training whatever. Only about one-half of this number have any religious training that could pos sibly be called Christian when we are very charitable. About seventy-five per cent—you may not agree with this —of the so-called Christian education i s 'worthless, ab solutely worthless and worse than worthless. I wonder how many of you people know anything about your Sunday-school literature. (I am not going to say nice things ; I want to stir you up.) I wonder how many of you know what your children in your Sunday-schools are study ing. I venture to say that ninety-nine per cent are not studying the Bible, but quarterlies or various Sunday-school helps. How many of you know what is in those helps ? A few months ago, a woman came to me and said, “I want you to read this paper.” It represented a great de nomination, with the stamp of that denomination on it. It was a paper for teen-age young people. In that publication there Was a continued story on Soviet Russia. Soviet Russian life was pictured as beautiful and wonderful, and this Russian youth movement was set forth as being just these dear young people’s search for the Lord. I know that some of you belong to the denomination that issued this literature. Do you know what is being distributed ? That sample of reading matter is a part of so-called Christian education. Here is something else with which you may not agree. In so-called Christian education, about seventy-five per cent of that twenty-five per cent that is orthodox is worth less because it is powerless. It is orthodox, but the ortho doxy is dead. U n b elief T hroughout t h e P ublic S chools Our public schools are antichristian. I do not know about public schools on the Eastern seaboard, but I do know that California public schools are antichristian from the *An address, stenographically reported, delivered at the Confer ence on Evangelism at the Bible Institute of Los Angeles. Under Biola’s auspices, Mrs. Low is available for speaking appointments and the conducting of Sunday-school institutes. She may be addressed at the Institute: 558 So. Hope St., Los Angeles, Calif.
kindergarten to the university. I have had some children’s classes, and when I started to teach boys and girls about th creation, one boy said, “But what about the cave man ? When did the cave men live?” Do you realize that your babies are taught about the cave men and the tree dwellers and all those theories—as facts ? When some one comes to tell them the story of creation, their minds are filled already with this other teaching. This influence goes right on throughout the school curriculum. I am thinking of a girl who was in the elementary grades. At school her teachers asked her what she was going to be, and she said, “A mis sionary.” The cynical reply was, “Oh, never mind, you’ll get out of that foolishness before you’re grown.” How many mothers have come to me with the same sad story! The outline is pathetically similar: “My girl was an active, devout Christian until she went to such-and-such a college, a Christian college supported by Christian people supposedly. When she came home—well, she and her col lege chums didn’t believe any of the miracles, they didn’t believe the Genesis story of creation, and consequently they have lost their Christianity entirely.” I wonder how many of you know that right at the door of your public schools in many cities the young communists are giving out to children invitations to communistic meet ings right at the school. Atheism, communism, paganism —they are all the legitimate children of unbelief. It is not a very good picture, is it? Evidently we are not winning and holding our boys and girls. Now, why are we not? W ha t H a ppen s W h e n C h r ist ia n s S leep You remember that Christ said: “The kingdom of heaven is likened unto a man which sowed good seed in his field: But while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat, and went his way” (Matt. 13:24, 25). Oh, children of God, it was our field in which Satan sowed tares. And today we are beginning to see the harvest. “While men slept”— and the tragic thing about it is that about ninety per cent of our Christian people have not awakened yet! They are still asleep. They do not know any thing about this catastrophe, and it is the hardest thing to make some of them believe. When I was in a northern state, a young woman, a Biola graduate, asked me to talk with a girl in a neighbor-
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