An old tract*

Just exactly where the Rev. John O. Schuring takes his readers in this old 1946 tract is not at all surprising.  What he's after is convincing his readers that that too much of American culture has been a-whoring after mammon and therefore neglecting the eternal truths of the Kingdom of Christ. Remove the specifics and the meditation's general theme could be preached almost anywhere today; but the specifics are worth a closer look.

"The gold rush is on," he says, in his opening line. It's not the gold rush of 1848, but the gold rush of 1946, "equally devastating in its results."  Why? "Skeletons of tragedy" lined the ancient trails of California's 1848 gold rush, he claims, but today things aren't much different, "school boards frantically searching for teachers, school houses deserted, classrooms empty, churches padlocked, hospitals and sanitariums understaffed, mission posts unmanned, social agencies neglected."  

Wow. What happened? "The post-war world finds men not interested in service but in salary."

If, in my lifetime, people ever look back at some "golden age" in American cultural history, it's the post-war boom, that great era when "our boys" returned from Europe and the South Pacific, had families, built homes, and created immense prosperity.  The Fifties will feel forever like Ozzie and Harriet, an innocent time when America ran on all of its cylinders, when respect and industry and goodness reigned, when America's immense losses during a long and horrifying war made peace itself heavenly. Make-America-great-again great.

But Rev. Schuring says post-war America has gone materialism mad, and he'd never even seen Mad Men. 

Someone sent me this tract, thought I'd like it for its historical value, and I do.  For years, it was stuck into the frame of my office bulletin board, something so familiar I didn't notice it until I cleaned up after all these years.

An asterisk claims this address was given over "a chain of radio stations" on July 21, 1946, just 11 months after VJ Day, part of a new broadcast ministry that called itself "The Back to God Hour." My parents listened to it religiously, as if it were there own--which it was. I don't doubt for a moment the my father, returning from the South Pacific would have agreed about all that materialism.

"Once this ideal ["seek first his Kingdom"] becomes the sole passion of our life we will insist that every part of life takes its proper place in striving for that goal."  That's the foundational ethic which stands--or stood--at the core of the faith with which I was raised.  "But all these spheres [the parts of life he talks about earlier] and those who make them must be reborn by the grace of God and then lined up for the victory march to the goal of realizing God's kingdom everywhere."

Vintage Kuyperian Calvinism. Not until I read it did I realize this yellowing tract tucked into the corner of my bulletin board was a calling card of the mission of the college where I taught. "Beg God that a new spiritual activity and power may grip us whereby one holy passion shall fill our frame, the seeking God's kingdom first, everywhere"--that's the way he preaches the line about "not one inch." 

See that line at the bottom of the cover? It urges readers to pass the sermon along, maybe even to a "local one in service" because "what is sent in love is read in eagerness."

I admire it.  It's not flowery-full of cheap grace, nor shy about the love of money dishonorable place in the register of human sin. Maybe it hectors a bit, but it knows what gospel it wants to bring to those who might, in fact, read it.  

It's rife with weakness as it is with strength, as silly, maybe, as it serious.  It speculates a ton, puts a finger in your face, but it's also full of truth.

Like us, I guess.  It tells our story and it is our story.  It's what we do--it may even be the very best of what we do, God helping us.

Sometimes it's downright amazing what kind of gold you can find an arm's length away.
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*First published May 15, 2012.