WESTERN RECORDER, 1932
By V. I. MastersThe Western Recorder has always existed and labored to extend the Kingdom of Christ. Relatively it does not have much to say about the Kingdom. It speaks and renders its service in terms of the needs and aspirations of the church. It does this for the reason that the Apostles, whom our Lord Himself taught concerning the things of the Kingdom, after Pentecost went forth and gave their entire lives to building the churches.
To extend the Kingdom of Christ in this present world, our Lord has set us in the churches to preach and teach salvatiou through his shed blood. The Kingdom has no material body or organization, but the church has. For it we pray and labor. Through nurturing it and building it, we ourselves are built for the Kingdom of Christ.
The Recorder serves the church and the home and the denomination. In serving these it is closer to no other group who labor for the Lord in the churches than to our Baptist women, with whom we are able to co-operate both in sustaining the W. M. U. page and in fostering the great purposes that engage their hearts in every good work and word.
If I may be permitted I would briefly dwell upon the value and need of the paper in our Christian homes, without conserving which the life and work of the churches for missions cannot prosper. Evil influences are working to destroy the American home. More than 20,000,000 automobiles invite the family to spend every available hour away from home. Another 20,000,000 Americans nightly attend moving picture shows. For that sensuous caricature of life they spend a billion dollars yearly. Within the home millions of radio receiving sets confuse the mind and demand that the American shall have no opportunity to meditate or think even by his own fireside.
What do Americans read? Superficially they seem to be great readers. The Bible is still the best seller. But there are evidences it is not much read by the average Christian, and still less studied and digested. We are newspaper-minded. Twenty-five hundred daily newspapers have a circulation of 31,000,000 while the weekly circulation totals 50,000,000. The circulation of sex and crime magazines is 15,000,000 copies monthly. It is fearful to consider that, if three persons read each magazine, nearly half of the population is saturating its mind with such unspeakable filth.
A great American journalist was asked: "What does it take to make a great newspaper man?" He gave this shocking reply: "The instinct to know where hell will break loose next." We shrink from quoting such words, but our sensitive feelings are misplaced. We should direct them to the hard and cruel implications of this sinister philosophy of publicists whose presses feed a ceaseless turbid flood
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of sin and sensation to the sensitive, innocent and impressionable minds of defenseless children in our homes.A mother found her young daughter devouring the lurid details of a sordid crime in the daily paper. She told the child she must not read it. After crying a bit, the little one timidly approached her and said, "Please mother, if I promise not to read any more of that hell stuff, may I read the rest?" That mother had enough. The paper was forbidden the home as an enemy of priceless childhood innocence and a religious paper substituted. Another parent, a Christian father, said: "I have five good reasons for taking the Baptist paper." Asked to name them, he drew from an inner pocket a leather case and took out a photograph. It was the picture of his five lovely children. "These," he said, "are my five reasons." No other reasons could be half so convincing.
The Woman's Missionary Union, through prayer and study, does a beautiful work in the churches, unequalled by any other group, to bring the churches to understand and love and obey the Commission of our Lord to send the Gospel of Salvation to the lost of this earth. As scarcely any other group, they understand the necessity of preparing for this noble superstructive by building right foundations. Only as our children are taught, first by protecting them from the searing blasts of sin that would wither their purity and innocence even within the sacred portals of the home, Second, by providing clean, wholesome and truthful reading matter that will open up to them the life which is in Christ, and the service of love in which it finds its prorper expression, can the Woman's Missionary Society do its own fullest work by providing new members to carry forward its Christly work and fashioning in the homes young lives to build the church of Christ, rather than be caught within the mighty tug of worldliness and sin.
So the Western Recorder, with all modesty and yet with deep earnestness, offers itself to the consideration of the women of the W. M. U. as a fellow-helper to labor for values priceless beyond words, values that center in the sacred intimacies of the home, and also take hold upon the greatest work ever committed to human hands, that of sending the Good News of Salvation to the lost of the earth.
A pastor recently told me that he had discovered that the way to get the Baptist paper into the homes is to place it on the hearts of the women in the Woman's Missionary Society. He said he tried it, and that it succeeded. Personally, I am entirely convinced that, if a true Baptist paper and the true women who make up the Missionary Societies in our churches can be brought to full mutual understanding as to what it is all about, a power will be released both for the circulation and larger service of the paper and for the high quality of its work which has not hitherto been equalled.
The Editor needs and covets the prayers of our women at all times and especially asks for them during the Week of Prayer.
[From He Shall Reign in Kentucky, (a pb booklet), 1932, pp. 30-31; via SBTS Archives, Adam Winters, Archivist. Scanned and formatted by Jim Duvall.]
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