Jim Curran Admin 01/17/2021

What used to be vs: what is
I think it is important to note as we study Baptist History that what we can study from the past may not reflect the current condition. Sometimes we may look at an abandoned building and wonder what it used to be and what may have happened there in the past. God may have moved in a tremendous way, people were saved, and the Spirit of God moved. Yet today it is abandoned and rotting.
An even worse fate is that of a church that although its pews may be occupied and it’s pulpit filled yet the Spirit of God and the Word of God are no longer there. It has strayed far from its Biblical moorings and drifted off into the treacherous seas of modernism or charismaticism or on the jagged rocks of some other false doctrine far from where it started. So many historic Baptist Churches met this fate. The most liberal “church” in America is Riverside Church in NYC- now non-denominational and so liberal it would make a communist proud. Yet there was a day when it was pastored by none other than Thomas Armitage who wrote a voluminous Baptist History. What happened- they brought in a liberal- William Herbert Perry Faunce. He may have been polished and even president of a college- but he was a rank liberal and from that point on the church went in a theologically liberal direction. Let that be a lesson- every church is one pastor away
When we give the history of a church what they were does not mean that they are that now. To note their history is not to acknowledge their present state as right. So many have went down wrong paths and the pattern is only getting worse. The reason why this happened is because they did not obey the Scripture and disregarded their doctrine. They stand every bit as much a forlorn relic as does an abandoned building.