Okay, you're actually going to have two speakers. The second one is in glory, so you're not going to hear his voice, but the first one will be giving a lot of echoes of the second one. Let me begin with the first one, which is this guy that you're going to be listening to and speaking with over the next couple of days. I was not brought up in a Christian home. In fact, I was baptized in a Greek Orthodox church, and when I came into the OPC in 1981, that was the one saving grace for my family, is at least I was back to Orthodoxy. But I was brought up, my mom was a widow, so I know what it is for a woman to be a single parent. And my teenage years were during the 1960s. The latter part of the 60s were my high school years. And that was toward the end of what was called the counterculture. The counterculture came on the back of the Elvis Presley generation in the 1950s. It was a decade, the 1960s, that was formed very much by the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and of Martin Luther King. and then a Bobby Kennedy. It was a time of the Vietnam War. It was a time of the invention of LSD and psychedelic drugs were popular. And all of those things came together beginning particularly in about 1964 with the student revolution and young people were rebelling against all of the standards with which they were brought up. And I wasn't so much a part of that counterculture. I was brought up, born and brought up in northeastern Connecticut, which was, interestingly, kind of a bastion for pro-Castro Marxism and Che Guevara, who was a guerrilla, G-U-E-R-I-L-L-A leader in South America. And during my high school years, I had, in succession, had gone through atheism, to an agnosticism, to a flirtation for a while with Eastern religions, and it was a very self-destructive time for me, I'll put it like that, more ways than one. People have said, if you hadn't become a Christian, where would you be today? I said, dead. So, and I don't go into the specifics, I'd rather not, but it was a tumultuous time. Back in, it was in 1969, the counterculture generation really had its back broken by Woodstock in 1969, which was a concert up in Woodstock, New York, and there were a lot of changes that came after that. The Jesus movement that was popularized by the movement, the Jesus revolution was beginning to grow, and the Lord was really converting a lot of us from the counterculture backgrounds. At that time, I was working in radio. I started working in radio at age 15. I love to tell people I have a face for radio. I'm not a big fan of television, but I enjoy radio. And that was a painful time for me. It was a time of very, very intense conviction of sin. And at the same time, interestingly, Even though, for a while, and I say this to my shame, I was a very vocal atheist, I could never buy the theory of evolution. It just made no sense to me. Birds, for example, I think about how on earth did birds evolve like this? In fact, I even tell people today when I deal with macroevolutionists, I say, you've got a lot more faith than I do. I don't have enough faith to believe that everything came into being from hydrogen. But anyway, that was, so I was convicted of my sin. I could not accept the theory of evolution. I'm working at the secular radio station at a time that mandated, the Federal Communications Commission mandated three hours of religious broadcasting on all stations. How things have changed. And I worked Sunday mornings when most of that programming was on. And for two or three years, I was treated to a Christian science program, a Seventh-day Adventist program, a Pentecostal program. I think it was a Lutheran program. And I just thought all of this was just off the wall. In fact, if you really want something that's off the wall, Christian science practitioners don't believe there's such a thing as illness. And I would listen to what was, we call it a vinyl now, a vinyl record of four or five people every week convincing themselves that they never got sick. And I thought to myself, wow, if this is what religion is, it doesn't deal with reality. February of 1970, that was a very miserable time for me in more ways than one. And one Sunday morning in the middle of February of 1970, one of the programs we aired was the People's Gospel Hour, which was a basic fundamentalist kind of a gospel program. And Perry F. Rockwood was the man that taught. And I just thought this guy was a fruitcake. But that week, he dealt with creation, the Fall, and redemption. And these things that I had learned in vacation Bible school about Good Friday and Easter in particular, the Lord, in what we call effectual calling, brought all that together. And that Sunday morning, in mid-February 1970, I came to faith in Christ. and I cannot sing long my imprisoned spirit lay fast bound in sin and nature's night thine eye diffused a quickening ray I woke the dungeon flamed with light my chains fell off my heart was free I rose went forth and followed thee that what that was very much my my testimony that Sunday that I was converted The next day at school, I'm a senior. I already had a four-year scholarship to go to a very liberal school up in New England. I was preparing to be a lawyer. That's all I had thought about was being a trial attorney. Debate was my forte. I spoke with the man who was the supervisor, whatever you called it, for the school newspaper, of which I was the editor. And I knew he was a minister. I didn't, you know, ministers. I knew there was a Roman Catholic Church. I knew Greek Orthodox. I knew there was something in the town in which I was brought up called the Baptist Church, because I was looking at it from the radio station where I worked. I knew there was a Jewish synagogue, and that was about it. I didn't know Protestant. That didn't mean anything evangelical. I don't think I'd ever heard the word. But I knew this man was a minister. And I went to him. His name was Mr. Hurdle. And I said, Mr. Hurdle, I think I was saved yesterday. And he said, you what? And I said, I said, and this is the school atheist. I said, I think I was, and he said, well, he said, you and I need to talk, but I can't do it here because then there were some issues about education or religion in the schools. So I want to make a long story short, about a month later, I met with him on a Sunday night, and he blitzed me with all these questions. You know, what happened to you? What do you believe? What sin? Who's Jesus? You know, what do you believe about the Bible? I didn't know the answers to these things. I didn't know what the Old and New Testament was. But I knew I was a sinner, and I knew that Jesus, Good Friday made sense. I thought, okay, He dealt with our sins in some way on the cross. And in the course of the conversation, he said, you really ought to consider going to a Christian college. I said, what's a Christian college? Because I'm all set to go to this Jewish school in Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. And he said, well, in the same way in the secular realm, you have different philosophies of education, different kinds of schools. He said, in the Christian world, there's different kinds of schools. And he said, you ought to be in one that believes the Bible. He wanted me to go to Wheaton, Illinois, you might as well have gone over to India for a kid brought up in New England. Anyway, long story short, I ended up in a fundamentalist southern school that I learned about, that accepted people in April or May of that year, and for six years was in a fundamentalist school. It really was a godsend to me because of the discipline, which I really, I needed that kind of academic discipline Because I was a real loose cannon to put it put it mildly But that's where I ran into and you'll see how this is going to fit with what we're dealing with something called separatism Now it's not separatism from unbelief, but this is being separated from worldly things like smoking and drinking and playing cards and women wearing slacks and that kind of thing and that was all foreign to me. And then it was also separation not just from unbelief but from those who weren't separated from unbelief, and from those who weren't separated from those who weren't separated from unbelief. And that just blew my mind. I just, I didn't know what that was. But, but the discipline and the grounding in the Scriptures was excellent. And that was, it was at that school, interestingly, that I came to the Reformed faith and became part of the Reformed Presbyterian Church Evangelical Synod, which is now part of the Presbyterian Church in America. They merged in the 1980s. And that's when I began to grow in the Reformed faith. G. I. Williamson was my spiritual father with the Westminster Confession. And through the church that I attended, and here I am planning to be a trial attorney, and my first year in graduate school, I went to graduate school there, I got engaged to Margaret, my wife Margaret, She was my wife then. I could have gone to the singles conference then, but I didn't know. I don't think we had a Machen conference center back then. And Margaret and I had been engaged for two weeks, and Margaret thought she was going to marry a lawyer who would eventually be a teacher. And that Sunday night in mid-November of 1975, the elders of the church that I was in wanted to meet with me. Now, most of you are Presbyterians. If you have to meet with the elders, I thought, what did I do wrong? I was meeting with the young people, and I hadn't done anything I knew was wrong. They said, no, no, no, it's good, but it might affect your plans. I thought, oh boy, what's this? that was when the elders urged me to go to seminary and to go into the ministry and you could have hit me with a bat and you could hit Margaret with a bat because you don't want to be a pastor's wife you can give you the reasons for that but I did end up going to Westminster Seminary from 76 to 79 of 1900s last millennium was called to a a church in McClellanville, South Carolina, which is in the Lowcountry, on the, like, midway between Charleston and Myrtle Beach. That was an interesting experience for me. While I'd been in the South, it was a rather large city, and this was very, very much almost antebellum South. And it was the first place that I had run into institutionalized racism. Do not talk to me about racism unless you're against it, and you better be. That's like putting red in front of a bull. I came to hate the looking down on any other race. And you'll see a little bit of this, not so much in that matter, but realizing you're dealing with people as the image of God. But the church was wonderful. It was great to be an organizing pastor for a group that wanted to start a Reformed and Presbyterian church. But I was not a Southerner, although I very much appreciate the South. I even today learn to appreciate boiled peanuts. which I never really appreciated until today. But anyway, but the Cajun ones you could have. So, in the Lord's providence, wonderful providence, I was called to an Orthodox Presbyterian church in Long Island, in New York. As you see, you think of New York City, there's five boroughs. You usually think of Manhattan Island, there's Staten Island, which most people don't think about, and then you have the Bronx, and then you have, as you're going out to the east, you have Brooklyn, and you have Queens. Just as you get out of Queens, about three miles past Belmont Racetrack is a place called Franklin Square, and I've had the privilege of being called there in 1981 and pastoring there from March of 1981 until I was called to serve as a regional home missionary in 2016. But that work as a pastor was such a delight to me. It's saddening for me when younger ministers retire. There is nothing to me, and this, what a change. And incidentally, Margaret's thrilled to be the wife of a pastor. But to be involved with denominational committees, I learned to see the OPC from the, as you have, from the, from that's kind of the chassis up, so to speak, and at General Assembly to serve on the, I think I served on every committee but foreign missions. And but then we had four mission trips where I learned the importance of a local church being involved as much as it can be beyond the local level. And then we had the privilege of starting about eight different mission churches over the time I was in Franklin Square in New York. And it was a delight, and then also teaching pastoral theology at Greenville Seminary, and also for the Ministerial Training Institute of the OPC, really cultivated that love. So I thought, wow, what a sense of humor. God took this man that was bent on being a lawyer and made him a pastor. And when I'm at a conference like this, I love the speaking, but I frankly enjoy getting to know each of you individually as well, and look forward to that. And then in 2016, I was called as a regional home missionary to work in our presbytery, which is Connecticut and southern New York, and also to do a radio program called a visit to the pastor's study. But I really miss the pastorate. And again, in God's wonderful providence, a group of people in Suffolk County, Long Island is Nassau County, which is about 15 miles in length, and then Suffolk County, which is two forks that go out, but in the western part of Suffolk County there was a group of people that wanted to start a mission church, and they wanted an older pastor that they could trust. Most of them had come from some pretty heartbreaking church situations. That's where the name The Haven came from. We had a list of different names and it was unanimous in the group. They said, we want a church that really is a haven for people where they can come and learn about Jesus and there not be hidden agendas for things and so forth. So, and praise the Lord, even as a small church, we went through the pandemic, all right? And we were able last year to purchase our own church building up in Comac, which is, as you're looking at Nassau or Suffolk County, it's up in the northwestern pocket. And God wonderfully provided a building on almost two acres of prize real estate on a highway in which 50,000 cars travel every day. And we were able to get this church facility with an apartment connected with it, almost two acres of land for $425,000, which is absolutely unheard of. And through the OPC loan fund, we got a loan. So anyway, it's our boys, we have six children. We're blessed with five boys and one daughter. And our boys who are, one is a pastor, but the other four are business people, and they said, Dad, what you're doing is totally counterintuitive. I'm a little bit younger than Ken, but not much. But should be slowing down, but it's a joy to be doing a mission work. So this is the guy that's going to be speaking with you over the next few days. Now, what about this series? In 1912, in Germantown, Pennsylvania, a man named Francis Schaeffer was born. I don't know much about his early background. What I do know, and it was fascinating as I read about his life, although I'm not Francis Schaeffer, so many similarities. It was at age 18 that he was converted. He came to faith in Christ. He ended up going to Hampton-Sydney College, which is south of here someplace. has quite a distinguished history, graduated magna cum laude, which I did not from the school that I went to. He ended up going to Westminster Seminary in 1935 and that was, Westminster was the, how can I put it, Princeton Seminary was up until the late 1920s, that was the seminary Presbyterian ministers in the East went to if they wanted the best theological education. The story of how Princeton Seminary was taken over by those who didn't even believe the historic Christian faith will bring tears to your eyes. In 1929, led by Dr. J. Gresson Machen, Westminster Seminary was formed and in 1935 Francis Schaeffer enrolled there. The Orthodox Presbyterian Church began in 1936. Part of Francis Schaeffer's history, and he basically destroyed most of his records from that, he regretted it so much, was being part of the rancor, the division, and the strife that would come between the leader of what was then called the Bible Presbyterian Church, which had separated from the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. And Dr. Schaeffer had, he wasn't a doctor at the time, but Francis Schaeffer had quite a position in the Bible Presbyterian Church. He had three pastorates. He went over to Europe to represent the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions, which actually Dr. Machen had founded. In 1951, Francis Schaeffer went through a major crisis in his faith. He had seen leaders in the church body of which he was a part just basically fighting, not physically fighting, but intellectual fighting and whatever, other believers. And he also saw it, sadly, with response from many in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. And so for a couple of months, Dr. Schaeffer went through a real crisis in which he almost threw off his whole Christian faith. But he couldn't, because he realized that you're denying reality if you turn away from the Christian faith. He went through quite a change in his life, rethinking things, and four years later, in 1955, he left his position with the Independent Board of Presbyterian Foreign Missions. He'd settled in Switzerland, eventually in a place called Weimar. And that began his second stage of his ministry. It's called the Bohemian Schaeffer, maybe a little bit of an overstatement, but he began working with counterculture people. People would make their way to Huemaz in a place called Labri, the shelter, just because they were wrestling with questions about the Christian faith. And Dr. Schaeffer didn't write them off. because they'd had problems with drugs, or because they smoked and drank, or because their hair as men went down to their waist, or because they dressed in many ways the way other people did not dress. He took people for what they were, and he and others began to deal with their real solid questions. It's hard to believe, but there was not a ministry like that back then. There's a lot more of that now, worldview ministries and so on. But Dr. Schaeffer was an evangelist, and he just intersected with people. And so from 1955 until Dr. Schaeffer's death from lymphoma in 1984, he was associated with Labrie and bringing the gospel to young people who, sad to say, in many cases weren't welcome in evangelical churches. In the 1970s, actually it was 1970, Dr. Schaeffer produced a 10-part film series called How Should We Then Live? and made tours in a number of cities. Again, it's hard to believe, but there was really very little like this, a treatment of all of church history right up to the present, from the perspective of the Word of God, what we call today worldview. There's nothing like that. And it really helped evangelical Christians and Reformed Christians to realize we need to understand our culture. Now, what did that mean? There was a term called the evangelical ghetto, which meant this. What's church life? Well, we meet on Sunday for church, and we get together as Christians. And we have gatherings at the church, in many cases almost every night of the week. And we had the prayer meeting on Wednesday night, and we ministered to one another, when in many cases little or nothing was done to reach out to other people. There was a contentment with subculture. And Dr. Schaefer and others rightly challenged that, and said that this is a world that needs the Gospel. And how should we then live really helped to get Christians thinking about the world? I mean, it was really a transforming series. And then four years later, with Dr. C. Everett Koop, who would become a Surgeon General of the United States, they did a series called, Whatever Happened to the Human Race? And Dr. Schaeffer drew attention, and Everett Koop, drew attention to the infanticide of abortion. 1973, Roe v. Wade decision, and they came out with a series that really got evangelicals, thankfully, involved in the pro-life movement. Dr. Schaeffer, at the end of his life, was not a fan of American evangelicalism. He saw there was a capitulation with the culture in so many things and a softness on the final authority of Scripture. So his last few books, The Great Evangelical Disaster and The Christian Manifesto, were powerful statements. He prophetically, small p, Dr. Schaeffer almost could see our day when Christians in certain fields just have to say no. As a Christian, I cannot participate in these types of surgical procedures, or I can't capitulate to a culture that neuters even the meaning of gender on a campus. But I didn't so much anticipate that as the other. Anyway, why the two together? When I was in that fundamentalist school, for which I'm still very thankful, By my second year, I was trying to figure out how this school that was committed to the Scriptures, where incidentally I learned about Dr. J. Gresson Machen and Cornelius Van Til, interestingly enough. even though they didn't agree with Dr. Machen's, they would have agreed with Dr. Machen was the leader of the so-called fundamentalist movement, defending the basics of the final authority of the Bible, the correctness, the historical correctness of the miracles and the scriptures. the necessity of a blood atonement, the bodily resurrection of Christ. These and others are the fundamentals of the faith. So that school, like Dr. Machen... Dr. Van Til is a different story, but that's another story. Anyway, by my second year, I was so grieved by, quite frankly, the hatred expressed toward other Christians in that school. And it did not connect. And I don't know, to this day, how I got the book. But someone put in my hands the book, The Mark of the Christian, by Francis Schaeffer. And I'll mention that in the series. Basically, the point he makes in there is there's two main marks of a Christian. And he was a Reformed man, incidentally. But he said, at the end of the day, it's holiness and observable love. I got done that little book, and I wept. I bawled. I thought, Lord, thank you that somebody is saying what I felt in my own gut. And from that point on, I read whatever I could get from Dr. Schaefer. Actually, his books began to come out in the 1960s and 70s. I was in school in the 70s. And the two that really impacted me, well, they all did, but The Church Before the Watching World, which was about the necessity of commitment to the final authority of Scripture in a culture that was moving away from it. And then the church at the end of the 20th century which was basically saying to evangelical churches there are areas under the final authority of Scripture that we need to be changing so we can reach out and minister to people. And when I was asked to speak for this, my burden was, and still is, could I go back to those books and basically give kind of an update of those things? And as I went through those and some other things, it really had been years since I had read Francis Schaeffer's material, I was bowled over by how those things I had read 40 years ago, In many ways, it stuck with me and helped to form my years of ministry. So what you're going to get over the next couple of days, and I am very burdened for this material, is going to be five messages based on Romans chapter 12, 1 and 2, in which at certain points I'll be using Dr. Schaeffer, and others, in most cases, I'll be building on it. But I do it for two reasons. Number one, you folks are the future of the churches of which you're a part. And I'm hoping that this series will help you know how to go back to the churches of which you're a part and be positive forces for good. Not that you don't want to do that. I know that you do. But I'm hoping we could put some meat on the bones for that. And at my age, one of the reasons that's a joy is I don't know how many more years the Lord's going to give me for this. But I do know we've got an upcoming generation like you, and I'm hoping that these things will help form you, and so that you will be useful, as Dr. Schaefer was, and those that followed him in his day. The second is this, and this is going to surprise you, because tomorrow, first message, we're going to be dealing with the idols of our age, and I promise you, it will not be an encouraging message at all. But, I want you to leave this conference encouraged as you go out into what Carl Truman calls strange new world, and it is. One of your challenges, and I don't want to jump ahead, but one of your challenges, and I'll call you young folks, I don't mean it in a condescending way, but you are younger than I am. To put it bluntly, you're going to have to cultivate your own way of saying to people in this culture, you hold to a lot of absolutely insane ideas. And you have to learn to say that without being regarded as an arrogant, and I could put a term at the end, but I won't, without being arrogant. But you're going to have to learn to do that. And you'll find out why in the text tomorrow night. Why, though, will it be encouraging? I am absolutely convinced that you will see the kind of change that I did back in the 1960s. Like this generation, for the early part of that time, and really from the 1950s on, we were bent on doing what we wanted to do. All we, like sheep, have gone astray. We've turned everyone to his own way. And the older generation was saying in the 1960s what the older generation is saying now. This generation's going to hell in a handbasket. And humanly speaking, we were. After three assassinations of three major political figures in the United States, and a war, and economic difficulties, you really wondered if this country was even going to continue. And God brought revival in the 1960s. And I'm absolutely convinced He's going to do it again, and you will see it. Here's the reason, and then we'll break for tonight. Society is always history is a pendulum. Okay, and So the pendulum one way there's the influence of Christianity There's the influence of a kind of a basic morality and standards and so on that's one side of the pendulum The other side of the pendulum is the opposite the overthrowing of standards, the emphasis on the autonomy, the self-government of the individual, and basically, excuse the expression, I'm going to do what I damn well please, and nobody's going to tell me any different. No culture can live like that for very long. And it's the fallout from that that you will be living in and ministering to, okay? And I'm hoping that this series is going to help you be prepared for how you do that as part of the church before the modern watching world, okay? So that's a little bit about me, a little bit about Dr. Schaefer, and as I talk with you, I don't want to talk about me, I want to find out about you, okay?