(Upon leaving the conference today and heading north to the entrance ramp to 290 E toward Chicago, I went through the drive-thru at Portillos and ordered their large Italian beef sandwich "wet," meaning they're supposed to dunk the sandwich in a vat of "gravy" before wrapping it up. Well, when I pulled the sandwich out about an hour into my trip it was DRY! I should have known it wasn't right by the light weight of the bag that was handed to me. Big bummer but I have to say the wetless Beef was still super delightful.
The best part of the first segment of my trip home from the Elmhurst conference site was driving inbound on the Eisenhower, something I hadn't done in at least seven years! I totally went back in my head to all the million times I made that evening commute on 290 E back to Chicago's Northside from my job as a feature reporter and columnist at the Naperville Sun newspaper in the early to mid-90s. You talk about a grand finale to my Chicago trip! It was amazing how it seemed like just yesterday and yet for me to think how many years and life events have passed!
Like I said yesterday, I will have conference notes starting tomorrow. Right now as I write I;m forced to wrap my head around the reality that my vacation is officially over and I am returning to work tomorrow--yikes!. . . Oh, by the way, there were big-time wildfire smells in eastern Indiana and southwestern Ohio, including in my driveway bringing luggage in earlier this evening)
(new article tomorrow)
“Paul didn’t go into the mountains and the country; he went where the people were, the population centers. I’ve said for years, one of the greatest tragedies in fundamental evangelical Christianity in America in the 20th Century is, in the middle of the century, the great host of evangelical Bible-preaching ministries fled the cities to the suburbs because it was easier to live in the suburbs than it was to live in the turmoil developing in the cities. ‘The flowery beds of ease,’ as the song says.
"When fundamentalist Believers fled, they left an absence of truth. For Chicago, since the latter part of the last century, it has been so tightly under the grip of Romanism," explains Richard Jordan.
“Where the people are is where the problems are. Where the problems are, people are going to solve the problems. If truth leaves, what’s the church? The pillar and ground of the truth. The problems will be solved with error, but the problems will get solved because the nature of man is he has to have that order. That’s the way God structured man and his society to function.
“If you go back to the 1920s, ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s, Chicago was the citadel of fundamentalism in America. The pastor of Moody Church in the ‘40s, Harry Ironside was called the Archbishop of Fundamentalism.
“Pastor O’Hair of North Shore Church, our ministry, was right there are on the north shore of Chicago and reached out around the world from there, but it had the gospel-preaching center.
“One of the first radio stations in the country preaching the gospel was built in the bell tower of North Shore Church at Wilson Avenue and Sheridan Road in 1926. Chicago was a hub for fundamental Bible-preaching Christianity. New York City’s Isaac Haldeman of First Baptist Church. Philadelphia. These they were great centers of fundamental, Bible-believing, Scofield dispensationalism; they were recovering these truths.
“Historically, missionaries would go to a foreign country and they didn’t go to the cities; they’d go to the mountains and then get a following. Take pictures and come back home and show pictures of little babies and people in need and raise money.
“The first 300 years after Paul were the greatest years of evangelism, outreach, expanding the Body of Christ in all of church history. We’re going into a culture right now—our country is falling back into the culture that the world has been in for 2,000 years.
“You’re going to live to see in the next decade a world in America that is just almost exactly like the world Paul lived in, but remember what God did in that world for the Body of Christ because all the distractions were taken away and they just had truth."