Shall We Go For Entertainment?

Among pastors lately I hear a deep concern for the future of Fundamentalism and of the local church as we have known it. The old patterns do not seem to be working. The growth in numbers of churches in the General Association of Regular Baptists appears to have ended about five years ago, and we seem now to be in a period of negative growth. Of the churches, it is hard to know just what is happening among them, when a third of them do not send in annual reports, but nationwide the average local church seems to be numerically small.

Historic Marks of Fundamentalism

Fundamentalism began in the later nineteenth century as a concerned response to the rise of higher criticism and doctrinal deviation and also as a response to the worldly drift among God’s people. How far back does the movement go? Surely not before the Believers’ Meeting held in Chicago, 1875, with their concerns about prophecy and German theology. Some have dated it from 1909, with the publication of The Fundamentals and the first edition of The Scofield Reference Bible. Surely it dates no later than the 1920 Northern Baptist Convention, when Curtis Lee Laws coined the term Fundamentalist.