No victors in church vs. church

A friend handed me a grocery bag full of accusations, suspicion and indignation last week. Having purchased a home that long had been empty he discovered a dresser filled with old church bulletins and religious tracts. Cramming the musty, gritty and yellowed stash of brittle paper into a bag he offered these 50-year-old artifacts to me, certain that a man with a religious background might find them interesting.

My inventory revealed a theological mishmash: hand-copied prayers and hymns, articles written by bishops, church bulletins and devotional material representing various groups, denomination and theologies.

Much of material represented a battle cry against godless apostasy: conservatives versus liberals and Protestants versus Catholics, the World Council of Churches being infiltrated by communist Russian Orthodox priests, the National Council of Churches trying to take over America, whether the ecumenical movement is Satanic as prophesied in the book of Revelation and whether or not the Revised Standard Version of the Bible was translated by communists or whether the Catholics were trying to sneak taxpayers