TESTIMONY ABOUT THE EFFECTS OF FREEMASON SUBVERSION IN CHURCHES
LETTER TO THE EDITOR OF LIGHTHOUSE TRAILS RESEARCH:
republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, and research purposes:
Dear Lighthouse Trails:I have just read the excellent booklet that you generously provided in your recent newsletter by Carl Teichrib; FREEMASONRY: A Revealing Look at the Spiritual Side.
Back in the early 1990s, my family was able to relocate to a small town in the beautiful mountains of North Carolina. We had previously been members of an independent Bible church in Florida. Among our first priorities after settling in was to find a similar church that preached the Word and was focused on missions. We found a very small Christian and Missionary Alliance Church that at the time had only about 30 members with a very young pastor that had just graduated from seminary. This was a wonderful answer to prayer. The church was already starting to sponsor several missionaries, and the pastor and I began a close friendship. Soon after the pastor asked me if I would consider being an elder. I had been a deacon at the church in Florida, and having been a Christian for only 5 years at this point, I really thought I might not qualify to be an elder. After much prayer about this, I humbly accepted the position. Part of my decision was based on the certainty that the Lord had given me the gift of discernment soon after I was born again . . . (but that is a whole other story).
The building we rented for our services was very small, seating maybe 35-40. Soon we began to look for a larger building to suit our growing congregation. We found a beautiful piece of land just on the edge of town that had previously been occupied by a Jehovah’s Witness group. After praying that the Lord would cleanse the building, we started much needed work on the sanctuary and the small other building that would be for a nursery.
At this time, a man suddenly started coming to our church and put himself right away to the business of woodworking and painting. He had skills in construction that none of us possessed so his help was greatly appreciated. I soon found out that he was a Freemason. Of the 5 elders in the congregation, only I and one other (that had left masonry after becoming a Christian) knew the ramifications of this man’s intention of becoming a member of the congregation. I looked at our By-Laws and could not find anything prohibiting a member of a secret society from becoming a member. So I got busy getting together materials to discuss with the pastor and elders that dealt with Freemasonry. At the time, I had a book by John Ankerberg that I used to highlight all the reasons a Freemason could not be a true Christian (or at the very least, would be a compromising one) being that he would be serving two masters.
Since
this man had asked to be a member, we elders had a meeting with him
after the elders had educated themselves about the serious spiritual
ramifications of his joining the membership. We gently but firmly
talked to this man about the biblical reasons that this secret society
could not coexist with Christianity. He claimed he went to a
“Christian Lodge,” and he did not seem to understand what we were
talking about. The man and his wife met with the pastor and said he
was offended by what we were implying. It was his view that we were
saying he was not a Christian, which we had never said in the first
meeting. The next few weeks the man did not come to church. I had the
church vote on a by-law that would not allow a member of a secret
society to become a member of the church. Several weeks later the man
called the pastor and told him that he owned a parcel of land
adjoining our small plot of land. He said he would sell it to us if
only he could become a member of the church and that if the elders and
especially me would apologize to him and his wife based on Matthew
18:15 where a brother sins against another brother!Much to my surprise (and horror), the pastor (and my friend) wanted me to ignore the new by-law and personally apologize to this man solely for the reason of obtaining this parcel of land from him that he was offering at a great discount!
This was a very agonizing time for me and my wife. We earnestly prayed about what to do. I could not in good faith apologize to this man when I had only tried to show him the errors of his way using Scripture and resources to back up what I was saying. I felt betrayed by the pastor. Some of the elders (except for one) did not even know what all the fuss was about! For these reasons, we reluctantly left that church that we had so dearly come to love. My wife had started a Pioneer Club for the children and I had taught adult Sunday school there.
Soon afterwards, a CMA higher up came and discussed church growth, and the man in question sold the parcel to the church.
This is an example of how Satan ruins a good thing when discernment is nearly absent from a local congregation.
By the way, the other elder that was a mason before he became saved also left that CMA church soon after I did based on his convictions that very few of the elders and pastor had any discernment and also because of the new blueprints that the CMA leader had come up with for church growth. Basically, that plan was to be a seeker-friendly church that added members that wanted to join whomever they may be (saved or unsaved).
After we left the CMA church, we looked for a new church and settled on the big First Baptist church in town (Southern Baptist). My youngest son accepted Christ as his Savior there and was baptized, and we were happy they had a nice youth group. About two years later, the youth pastor left, and they replaced him with a Rick Warren fan. Several of the parents wanted to have a meeting with him and the deacons to discuss our concerns. It was not only the fact that all he talked about was Rick Warren, but my son said that unlike with the previous youth pastor, this young man was teaching them things that had nothing to do about the Bible. My son showed me his notes: it was all man’s wisdom and philosophies that he was espousing. The meeting was very tense. The youth pastor again accused us of not coming to him in private first and citing . . . you guessed it: Matthew 18 again! The deacons were all Masons, and they were not sympathetic to our concerns.
Before moving back to Florida, we started up a small congregation of about 12 families; most of them the parents of the youth group at the big Baptist church. About this same time, I was reading a book by a former Mason-turned-Christian that mentioned that a tactic that the local lodges used was infiltrating the local churches and reporting back to their lodge on the church’s activities. That really creeped me out.
Maranatha!
A believer in Florida
