Catholic Chicago once citadel, hub of truth

“Paul didn’t go into the mountains and the country; he went where the people are, the population centers. I’ve said for years, one of the greatest tragedies in fundamental evangelical Christianity in America in the 20^th 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."

(another post this evening)