Spiritual Pioneers

W. Carl Ketcherside

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     The spirit of adventure! This is the thing which Christians have often lost in our day. It is this loss which reduces our lives to a treadmill existence, which makes us heavy and stodgy. This is what contributes to a mere "treading of the courts" by weary, bored and apathetic worshippers. There are no frontiers to conquer, no forts to storm. The dream of world conquest has faded. The vision of the King before whom the celestial princes cast down their crowns has blended with and become lost in the murky haze of the passing centuries.

     It does not need to be so. There are greater dragons breathing destructive fire in our day than were ever conjured up by fertile imaginations in the bygone days of myth and chivalry. And ours are real! There are giants stalking through our land wearing seven-league boots and threatening to crush all that we hold dear and revere. But we have allowed ourselves to become blindfolded with the rags of tradition and of the status quo until our imagination has drained away and our will to fight has been washed down the drain.

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     There is little courage required to drive to the "church parking lot" on Sunday morning and enter the educational building to discuss the lesson of the day as set forth in a quarterly so designed as to offend no one. Nor does one have to be especially brave to sit in a cushioned pew designed for his bodily ease while watching a presentation in which the chief actor must manicure his lines so as to start evacuating the clock-watchers promptly at the stroke of twelve.

     This kind of thing is called "Christianity" by millions in our day. And it has produced a smug, complacent, lukewarm institution which makes even God want to vomit. There is the soul-warping pride in property and real estate holdings, the glory in the glamor of bricks and concrete, the shameful boasting in temples made with men's hands, despite the plain statement that God is not worshipped in such. And there is often the even more detestable sin of influence peddling, of political wirepulling, of base maneuvering for positions of power by clerical aspirants, who are not honest enough to admit they are a special clergy. We earnestly wish that such language could be proven extreme, that someone could show indisputably that the conditions we have mentioned simply do not exist. It would cheer our hearts to know that we are wrong. But our hope lies not in the apathetic mass. Rather it is found in the lives of the venturesome few, the spiritual vikings who dare to turn the prows of their boats into uncharted seas. I know some of these pioneers.

     There are missionaries who are sick of being mere forerunners of a sect, and who have dared to cut themselves loose from the financial apron strings which bound them to the alma mater which we have fashioned. They are setting their faces toward strange cities and forbidding jungles, going only to tell men of the resurrected Lord of life, and to lead them into a vital relationship with Him, unfettered by American ways and culture.

     There are the schoolteachers who are turning their backs on plush positions in suburban educational plants, and by deliberate choice going into the fetid, stinking ghettos, to teach the hopeless and deprived human spawn, gasping to hold their heads up and to swim in a slimy sea of despondency and desperation.

     There are the college young people turning a deaf ear to the enticing offers of great industrial complexes to open up "talk shops" and "coffee houses" in the inner city where dope-pushers, pimps and prostitutes ply their devious trades and sell living human flesh as nonchalantly as dead animals are peddled in meat markets. These young Christians are literally trying to throw out the lifeline to sinking mariners battered and buffeted by waves of passion and storms of hate.

     There are the university students who dare to challenge the smut-merchants and obscenity-hawkers, and who bring a witness to bear where secularism has planted her inglorious standard. These trust in God and in the power of His might and refuse to be deterred from their dedicated service to Him whose name they bear.

     There are the fathers and mothers who maintain unswerving discipline motivated by love, the men and women in shops and offices who refuse to lower their ethical standards, the neighbors who dare to be different from a decadent society, and others who have heard the clear ring of the trumpet on distant heights and who would plant their feet on higher ground.

     All of these are bold followers of Him who ran the gauntlet of men's passions and sins, and fearlessly faced the foes wherever He met them. The spirit of daring is not dead. There are still those who stand athwart the path and battle evil without flinching. To them the Way is not one of cold indifference or calculated neutrality. And these will be the vanguard on that day "when the saints go marching in."

     In the meantime they must cut their way through our own labyrinth of red tape and meet the opposition which resents taking the battle to the streets and market-places for fear that it will besmirch our image. We must maintain at all costs our clean-cut suburban look

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so that an affluent society will compliment us for our community spirit even while they resist the Holy Spirit. It would be wonderful if we could entice the forces of Satan to come to our vantage points where we could anesthetize them instead of battling them. Since they will not do so we hail those who have the courage to go where the action is. Too many of us confuse the vineyard with the storage shed and spend a lifetime "picking over" the same grapes.