A Personal Visit
W. Carl Ketcherside
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As I write this I am aware that we are preparing to begin our 37th year of publication with the next issue. It will be our last year. One year from now the final number of MISSION MESSENGER will be deposited on the dock of the main post office in Saint Louis and I will return home without having to read proof for the next month. It does not mean the end of my articles. The editor of another journal has asked me to write the story of my uneventful life and it will appear in monthly installments for the next couple of years. More on that later. I hope to emphasize what made me change my views about fellowship.
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1. When I began to write on fellowship and to encourage the unity of all believers in Christ, I set certain goals and planned to attain certain objectives. I knew that peace would have to be waged as others wage war and this requires a strategy. The goals I set for my own editorial life have been reached and surpassed. I do not want to publish a paper merely for the sake of publishing. Nothing seems more useless than that. I refuse to clutter up the mails with a journal which has no purpose except to furnish entertaining reading for some brethren. The goals I now have will be better reached by writing books and by personal encounter, especially on the university campus. I am actually working on seven books!
2. There is a danger that editors will think of themselves and their journals as being indispensable. They wonder how God made it before they arrived on the scene, and how he will survive when they have crossed the Great Divide. I have no Messiah-complex. I desperately need the Father but he does not need me on earth, nor does he need MISSION MESSENGER. A lot of editors have rendered great service for a number of years and then grew older and wrecked all they had accomplished in a few remaining years of senility. They sometimes died ten years before they were buried. It was in that last ten years of editing they undid all the good of their former years. It seems to me that a wise man is one who knows when to step down and submit what he writes to other editors for their evaluation.
3. The burden of producing and processing the paper becomes ever greater. I have no secretarial help and have never had. I answer hundreds of letters every month. In addition, I fly multiplied thousands of miles annually to participate in all kinds of meetings. In the last year great new doors have been opened up which make it possible for me to share my witness in areas I never dreamed of penetrating. But Nell must work many hours each day of the week, including Saturday, just to keep abreast of things. We wrap, address, sort and prepare for mailing both books and papers in our own home. In less than a year we sent out more than 1500 copies of The Question Box and more than 500 copies of Thoughts on Unity, as a free gift to college and university students. Emily, our daughter-in-law helps wrap the single papers, and in recent months Ted and Pearle Ratliff have helped Nell sort and address the zip codes. As the number of subscribers increases the work becomes heavier and the financial problems greatly augmented.
4. History reveals that reformatory attempts have always ended in the creation of another party. When I began writing on fellowship after more than five years of wrestling in prayer with my own inner conviction I knew what I would say would demand a reform in all of our hostile factions. I prepared to avoid formation of another sect by refusing to make the two errors which had become characteristic of previous attempts at unity within the framework of our sadly fragmented groups.
First, I refused to leave the brethren with whom I had previously associated. I did not join another group. Today I am working with the same congregations of saints in the Saint Louis area with which I have always worked. There was no split and no division. All of us made changes in our thinking and are still doing so. But we have grown together. When I made the startling change from being a recognized debater for a faction to became the advocate of receiving and recognizing all of God's children regardless of their opinions, it created a trauma for
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Some of them, especially the older ones, regarded me as a traitor. I was called a renegade and a Benedict Arnold. Brethren who had stayed in our home and eaten at our table felt that I had sold out to Satan because I resolved to treat all of God's children as my brothers and sisters. They did their best to sow discord among the congregations with which I was associated and sought to divide the very brethren to whom I had previously introduced them.
I outlived some of them and outloved the others. I refused to engage in debates and harangues, or to be drawn into bitter written controversy. I simply printed what they wrote, replied to it lovingly, and let my readers form their own conclusions. I loved all of those brethren then and I love them now. They considered love as the most detrimental approach to division and I regarded it as the only dynamic to produce unity. We did not divide when problems arose. We divided when we quit loving one another. To restore unity we must recapture love.
Younger brethren in all of our factions have not generally exhibited the fierce and inflexible attitude toward sincere saints who honestly differ with them. It is my feeling that better days lie ahead of us when these brethren become leaders of thought among us. The death of some of our factional leaders and editors will herald a lessening of tension and the gradual dissipation of that form of hatred which has too long screened itself behind a facade which brethren call "love." The grave has swallowed up a lot of bitterness.
Secondly, I urged brethren to remain where they were when they learned new truths or gained new insights. This is a difficult thing to do. But to pull out and join a faction whose members already advocate the new truth, is to leave where that truth is needed and go where it is not. That is like taking the yeast out of the dough and huddling the yeast cakes together on the top shelf of the refrigerator. If one cannot love all of his brethren from where he is, he will probably not be able to love them from somewhere else. One is not factional because he is in a faction. He is not sectarian because he is in a sect, any more than he is a Russian because he is in Russia. One is sectarian because of his attitude toward truth and toward those who are not in his faction or sect.
I do not think one leaves people that he really loves. Of course if he loves only those who agree with him, every time he learns a new truth, he will have to love a new group, and hate the ones with whom he has been affiliated. But if one becomes convinced that instrumental music is not justified by the scriptures I see no reason why he should join an anti-instrument party and start assailing and attacking the brethren who put him through school and endured his ignorance until he learned better. If a young man becomes convinced that the division over the support of the Herald of Truth propaganda medium is artificial, ill-advised and unscriptural, he neither has to join the Herald of Truth staff, nor start bitterly attacking his former teachers and professors. One can still believe a thing is without scriptural warrant and oppose forming a faction or sect over it. I think this is the position of a lot of perceptive young people in our generation. God has delivered me from the factional spirit and made it possible for me to belong only to Jesus. This is wonderful because I no longer have to persuade anyone to leave his faction and line up with one I am in. All I need to do is to lead people to Jesus. He is my everything! That is not true of any faction or segment among us.
There is always some wag who jumps up in an open forum and declares that he cannot see how I am going to promote unity by encouraging everyone to stay where he is. You certainly are not going to do it by trying to get them to come out and band together and start a "loyal church." The quickest way to fill the earth with "unfaithful churches" is to summon the brethren to come out and start "faith-
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What such a "logician" overlooks is that we are already divided. We must remedy an existing situation. We simply cannot continue to divide over every opinion, for we will divide ourselves out of existence as we have already divided ourselves out of influence in many communities. Our plea for unity of believers is a big joke to our contemporaries. We must stop dividing somewhere. But we cannot correct a situation overnight which has developed over 150 years. There are too many emotional angles connected with it. We cannot look at the matter rationally because our emotions get in the way!
I propose that we freeze our division by refusing to form another party. I have promised my God that I will never promote another party or faction. I want to be blessed and to do so I must make peace and not pieces of the body. By staying where we are and loving brethren who differ with us we will learn something we have not learned before, that is, how to maintain unity in diversity. This is the only kind of unity available to people who think. It is the only kind available to people who don't think, but because they don't think, they don't think so! The only way to have unity in conformity is for everyone to check his brains at the door and be subject to a pope. If there is no pope present, the local preacher will do in such an emergency.
But if we all stay put and love even those who do not love us, this will erode away our factions and decrease their number. Not one of the things which divide us could ever have done so until it was argued and debated into a prominence it did not deserve. For instance, it is silly for children of God, ransomed and redeemed by the blood of God's dear Son, to be split into hostile parties over the method of financing a television or radio program. They would never have become so divided if champions had not arisen, flung out challenges, devised clever and intricate schemes of legalistic argumentation, and come to regard each other as enemies of all righteousness. When the leaven of love remains in both factions, they will be tempered by it and the hostility will be abrogated so that brethren can work together in many areas even when they cannot do so in all.
I do not want MISSION MESSENGER to stay around long enough so that it comes to be regarded as a mouthpiece for a "school of thought." I do not belong to such a school. I intend to do my own thinking and I intend to let all of my brethren do theirs. I expect to answer to God for what I think and not to any person on earth. I am afraid of schools of thought because they attract too many who do not think. So we will gently chloroform the paper at the apex of its strength and let it expire gently in the arms of those who gave it birth and nurtured it through good times and bad.
We have been beseiged by brethren who want the paper to continue. Several have volunteered to "take it off our hands" if we will give it to them. A few have offered to buy it. It will not be given away and it will not be sold. I guess I have never really thought of it as a paper. It is more like an extension of the life of Nell and myself. When we began, our children were still at home. We gathered around the dining room table and addressed the two hundred copies by hand, dividing the task between the four of us. Now we have three grandchildren in university and another finishing high school, and their grandmother addresses more than eight thousand copies every month on an Elliott System addressing machine. And we still feel as close to our readers as we did when there was a mere handful of them.
The paper is just not for sale, and neither is the mailing list. It is a great one, containing names of brethren in every segment of the restoration movement at home and abroad, and scores of names of avid readers in other religious
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We will face our greatest financial crisis this year. The paper must be mailed out every month but there will be little income since most subscriptions will have been paid in advance. It would frighten some of you to know how much it costs to print and mail the paper each month. But we are going to keep the rate at one dollar per year. I want to finish the thirty-seventh year knowing we have never raised the price of the paper.
One dollar does not even begin to pay for getting the paper to a subscriber for a year. It has not done so for several years. But we have never ended a year in debt. As I write this all of our bills have been paid and we are ready to enter 1975 without owing a cent. This results from regular and occasional sharing of saints who believe in what we are doing. They contribute generously to share with us. We never print their names. They are known only to the Father in heaven and to Nell and myself on earth. I fervently pray that their generosity will be rewarded by the God of all grace. Without their assistance we could never have survived.
We have never taken one cent of subscription money for our own use. We employ surplus funds to send free books to college and university students. In the past few years we have mailed out more than 2500 such volumes, even paying for the wrapping and mailing costs. It is our hope that after we are gone, men and women will be able to take down from their library shelves the books we gave them when they were in school, and recall that they were sent as a token of our love.
If your subscription will expire before next December we hope you will send a dollar now and guarantee that it will continue to the end. We will not be able to notify you of expiration dates as in the past because it is too costly a process. If you send a dollar now you will have no worry. If you send more than that we will seek to use it to the glory of God. It might be a good idea to put your children and grandchildren on the reading list for the last year of the paper. Perhaps you'd like to subscribe for a group of brethren at a dollar per year. If God allows us to live we guarantee that you'll receive the paper for twelve months, although it is understood that if either Nell or I depart to be with the Lord, the paper will cease. Neither of us could publish it without the other!
The subject for 1975 will be One in Christ. At the end of the year all of the issues will be bound together in a beautiful clothbound volume under that title. There will only be two thousand copies of the book available and they will not last long. We do not know what the price will be but we promise you it will be as low as we can make it. It you want to reserve one or more copies in advance you may do so and we will enclose an invoice with the books. We urgently suggest that you not wait too long to make your reservation, for these books will become more valuable as time goes on.
It is my intention to write on unity and fellowship with a sense of urgency and destiny. In a fragmented brotherhood this is imperative. You need not concur with what I write to be revered and loved as a brother or sister in Him "whom having not seen we love." But I do hope you will read what I say. I will write honestly and freely. I will love you whether you can concur or not. I am convinced that what I shall write is true. Some day the partisan spirit will be dissipated. What we are saying now will be generally accepted then. I am content to leave the verdict to history.
We are deeply grateful to those who have held up our hands in the year
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In a very few weeks the book Pure Speech containing every issue of the paper for 1974 will be ready for mailing. If you have not ordered yours we trust you will do so now. As soon as it is ready we will mail your copy and you can then return the enclosed invoice with your check. A good many brethren feel that what was said about the clergy system is worth reading again.