RED CHINESE COMMUNIST FLAG IN SANCTUARY

I recently attended Sunday service at a mammoth, super-growth church and observed prominently displayed in the sanctuary the Red Chinese Communist flag. It was among the flags of other nations, and had exactly the same prominence as the American Flag. I contacted the senior minister who responded by e-mail with a heated charge that I “…do not understand the philosophy of the church leadership”, and ordered me to cease all communications with him.

I asked various members of the congregation if they knew what nation the red flag with five yellow stars represents. Their answers were blank. “Go home and look it up on the internet,” I was told by the church librarian. I was stunned and incensed by the disarming impression the Red Chinese Communist flag must make on the church’s young people (the future guardians of our God-given freedoms), by giving it an implied legitimacy instead of exposing it for the blood and anguish of untold millions of Christians, past and present, who perished under it.

Supposedly, this and the other displayed flags represent the nations in which this church is sponsoring missionary efforts. Such logic could have as easily applied to the Nazi Swastika. What would the Lord have this church’s clergy do?

And do not participate in the unfruitful deeds of
darkness, but expose them. Ep. 5:11

Were it not for the fact that this is a modern “mega” church currently erecting new multi-million dollar facilities sponsored by thousands of members; a church with innumerable youth activities (except, evidently, the unpopular one of educating their young about how to survive and prevail in the life and death issues of our times), I might not be so concerned.

This “speak of no evil” positive-only philosophy is in reality a deadly cancer symbolic of what is afflicting countless churches throughout our country. The noted author of the great book, "Classical Apologetics", Dr. R. C. Sproul, capsulated it in these words as he referred to "the narcotic effect of ecclesiastical opium":

"The church is safe from vicious persecution at the hands of the secularist...so long as the church knows her place and remains quietly at peace on her modern reservation. Let the babes pray and sing and read their Bibles, continuing steadfast in their intellectual retardation; the church's extinction will come not by sword or pillory, but by the quiet death of irrelevance. It will pass away with a whimper not a bang."

The choice is ours. Here are three of Christ’s many action mandates to us:

(1) roll call: Who will stand up for me against the workers of iniquity? (Ps 94:16)

(2) Christ’s mission : The Son of God was manifested that he might destroy the works of the devil. (1 John 3:8)

(3) Stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage. (Gal.5:1).

These and many more of Christ's action mandates to America’s Christians are presented in the book AMERICA – A CALL TO GREATNESS.