Don Wildmon
AFA/AFR founder
January 2004 – A friend in North Carolina sent me a letter recently. Included in his envelope was a packet of material he was passing out at his local church and to pastors, men’s clubs, prayer groups and mid-week Bible studies in his area. He is trying to get them involved in the great cultural war that is raging in our country.
Perhaps the most telling sentence in all the material he sent me was what he wrote about his pastor. “I believe our pastor is on your membership list,” he wrote. “Although he is a good Bible preaching minister, he – like so many – doesn’t speak to the cultural issues from the pulpit.”
Wow! What an indictment! To have a cure for the cancer eating away at our society, and to refuse to offer that cure! I wonder if the pastor had a cure for physical cancer, would he offer it? I bet he would. He would shout it from the rooftops!
Journalist David Aikman, former Beijing Bureau chief for Time magazine, said that just before China’s former President Jiang Jemin left office he made a statement that if he could he would officially decree that China be a Christian nation.
Jemin isn’t a Christian and wasn’t trying to convert anyone. He was saying that pragmatically, Christianity is good for China.
Aikman says studies have shown what Jemin and other Chinese leaders have learned: that predominantly “Christianized” areas in China have lower crime rates, less family breakup, fewer incidents of juvenile delinquency, and higher productivity rates.
Isn’t that what we need? To have a cure, and to hide that cure under a basket is a sin.
In our nation, we are headed in the opposite direction. In Fountain Valley, California, students were informed that they could not wear clothing expressing religious messages such as “Happy Birthday, Jesus.” During the past Christmas season, public school administrators in Georgia instructed employees that they could not have any Christmas activities such as making Christmas decorations or reading from Christmas books.
In Michigan, public school officials removed all religious books dealing with Christmas and Hanukkah and put them in a separate room, out of sight of the students.
In New York, the city schools would not allow Christmas displays, but gladly allowed Jewish menorahs and the Muslim star and crescent during their holidays.
We are now involved in a battle to define the very basic unit in our society – marriage. I wonder how many pastors will address the issue from the pulpit, applying Biblical concepts? And I wonder how many members will demand leadership in the battle against the assault on marriage?
We have a cure for what ails us, but it will never do anyone any good as long as we keep it confined inside the four walls of our church buildings.
In my high school typing class, we had one sentence we typed over and over for practice. “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.”
Indeed it is. 
