Dr. Robert Sumner passed away in December 2016. The Biblical Evangelist newspaper is no longer being published and the ministry of Biblical Evangelism has ceased operation.

The remaining inventory of his books and gospel tracts was transferred to The Baptist Tabernacle of Los Angeles and may be ordered here.

Off the Cuff - Part 3
Dr. Robert L. Sumner, Editor

CORRECTION/EXPLANATION

In our September-October 2010 issue, in the “Incidents & Illustrations” column, we had an item called “Be Sure Your Sin Will Find You Out … Eventually!” It related to a 15-year-old teen named Tina who was allegedly raped twice (once in the back seat of a car when he was teaching her how to drive and once at her home when her parents were absent) by a Baptist deacon, Ernest Willis. Both were members of an independent Baptist church in New Hampshire. The story was a major feature last year on ABC’s 20/20 program.

While we are not going to repeat all the gory details here (you can go back and read it for yourself if you wish) it was sad, tragic reading. The story seemed credible because it was, 20/20 claimed, based on official police records. We noted then the monster Willis had “finally been arrested and charged with four felonies, two of rape and two of having sex with a minor. He is currently out on $100,000 bail.”

Shortly after it appeared in our paper, the pastor of the church (Trinity Baptist in Concord), Rev. Charles Phelps (we did not name the other principal players then because they hadn’t been charged and we did not know what they knew) called me on the phone and said it was a bunch of lies based on a few facts – and he explained some of them (Willis was not a deacon – he held no office in the church; Tina was 16, not 15; she made all the decisions, not the pastor or her mother although both agreed with them, etc.). We told him if he would write his version of what happened, we would print it exactly as he wrote it in our paper (we have always made corrections when we felt we were in error; that is one reason readers trust us). He promised to do so.

That was all we heard until last April when 20/20 updated the story, adding other information and indicting all fundamental Baptist churches (called FBC in the story) with a blanket charge of cultism (irresponsible journalism on its face, connecting over a thousand churches in one swipe that have no internal connection, but are “independent” churches).

One of our subscribers, who is a member of Dr. Phelps’ current church (Colonial Hills Baptist in Indianapolis), called to say her pastor was being falsely accused by 20/20 and offering to send me his written statement answering the network’s charges. [CHBC was founded by Dr. Wendell Heller, a good man, and followed by Dr. Bob Taylor, a friend of ours, prior to Dr. Phelps taking the reins. Anyone Taylor (or Heller) trusts, we would trust.]

However, I told her I would not print anything she sent – explaining what I had offered Phelps last September – and saying since he had not kept his word, I would only print a statement if he sent it, asking her to tell him so for me. A few moments later the phone rang and he was on the line. He apologized for not sending me a statement earlier, explaining he acted on advice of his attorneys (Gibbs Law Firm is representing the believers involved). I can understand that since it is normal attorney advice, although since he had promised a statement I think he should have called or written to explain that fact to me. He did apologize on the phone for that inaction. Now the lawyers have okayed him talking.

He said that as soon as he got back to his office he would send a link and I could use anything on it. He did. That link had four major sections: Specific Answers to Some Statements, Difficult Questions Related to 20/20, According to Tina’s Mom, and What Is a Baptist Church? The latter apparently was included because ABC (no friend to any kind of evangelicalism) made so many silly, erroneous and untrue charges about fundamental Baptist churches. By the way, Tina’s mother, who suffers from multiple sclerosis, blames her daughter’s lies (or bad memory) on greed; i.e., she thinks she can make money on her story.

On ABC’s April broadcast (which I suffered through from another source for its seemingly unending length), it illustrated various points by the most ridiculous “shouting/yelling” by preachers it could find (services at First Baptist, Hammond, Indiana, was a favorite). It repeatedly offered as proof of its “cult” charges the claim FBC put down women as subservient to men.

That charge would make the second largest – Roman Catholicism is the largest since every time a baby is born in a RC family in America, it is placed on the rolls of the church – religious group in America, the Southern Baptist Convention, a cult. The SBC adopted a statement a few years back saying wives should graciously submit to their husbands’ biblical authority.

We would believe ABC’s sincerity if it would now do a number on the Roman Catholic Church saying that because of all the sex offenders (pedophiles) in it, the RCC is a cult. That will happen the next time there is a blue moon twice in the same month. (Yes, Virginia, there are blue moons!)

Another proof ABC offered to prove that FBC is cultic is its claim (again, indicting over a thousand independent churches with the same brush) babies should be spanked at two weeks. We suggest the network top that one for foolishness/lies/nonsense (choose one) by a 20/20 broadcast ‘proving’ Obama’s cabinet is stacked with aliens from other planets.

We think we know where the baby spanking one started – having heard the brother say it several times, although with a different number of weeks for boy and girl babies – and he always told it jokingly, and the resultant laughs indicated his hearers so understood it. Perhaps some conjectural ministers who repeated it (preachers will steal anything of another’s if it got enough laughs) forgot to explain the ‘joke’ part. Although, frankly, we have never heard others repeat it.

Dr. Phelps and I agreed that rather than use all the space in this paper it would take to reprint the substance of all his links, it would be better to just give the link and let the interested make his or her own connection. That link is: www.drchuckphelps.com.

We’ll end this item with the same sentence we ended the original: “Yes, sin is a serious, serious business and it eventually finds you out! Believe me!”

THIS & THAT . . .

Good News: If you would be interested in a copy autographed by coauthor John Whitcomb of THE GENESIS FLOOD, and a list of related publications, contact Whitcomb Ministries, Inc., 6147 Hythe Road, Indianapolis, IN 46220; jcwhitcomb@juno.com, or www.whitcombministries.org.

Obama's own budget deficit projections through 2011 total $7.205 trillion. That is an average shortfall of $720 billion per year. This is fiscal insanity no matter how you cut it…

Gas prices are shooting through the roof and heading for outer space, but loony tunes in the United States, where much of the world’s oil is located, oppose most or all drilling. But, as another has noted, “when it comes to drilling in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Indonesia, Mexico, offshore Cuba, Venezuela, Brazil, Libya, Russia, China, etc.,” they voice no opposition. Maybe it’s not an environmental issue after all. Suppose?...

A simple definition of public employee unions (thanks to Michael Barone): a mechanism by which every taxpayer is forced to fund the Democratic Party...

Attention all “share the wealthers” (socialists): if at midnight on December 31, 2011, the wealth of the world was suddenly shared equally with all the peoples of the world, within a decade you would have millionaires, billionaires … and slums. It’s the nature of the beast (man)…

President Obama vowed to do everything possible to protect our border patrol. So what does he do? He orders some of them to be armed with – get this – bean bags. I kid you not! That is how Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was armed when he was killed in a skirmish with ‘migrants’ recently…

The 14th of this month (June) is the 236th anniversary of the establishment of the United States Army and the 234th anniversary of the adoption of our flag, which has been carried into every battle since. We salute both!...

Linda Meek, age 63, a former Tulsa (OK) abortion clinic director, tried to get herself a little publicity and make pro-life look bad, by planting a fake bomb in a trash can and then made a fake bomb call to police. She only got “five years of probation” for her stupidity…

With gas prices hitting an all-time high, not only is our government refusing to permit drilling where we have super pits of oil, but the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement is refusing to act on 103 drilling permit requests in the Gulf…

If you want to break bread with the ungodly, go to the Pacific Northwest. While the 2000 U.S. census reported four of 10 Americans (no doubt more over a decade later) have no formal religious affiliation, in the PN it is over half (6 of 10)…

Indiana State Treasurer Richard Mourdock has announced he will run in the Republican primary against longtime United States Senator Dick Lugar. At one time, we thought Lugar was a great conservative. He let us down totally. I wish Mourdock well…

There are two sports folks in Iowa like: basketball and wrestling. In the latter state tournament, 16-year-old Joel Northrup (35-4 record) found he was paired with a girl, Cassy Herkelman. Rather than wrestle the opposite sex, he forfeited and was ruled out of contention. We salute him. What in the world are Iowa’s state athletic leaders thinking with coed wrestling, of all things? Maybe they find candidates by looking in parked cars? Maybe they should just have a ‘making out’ event...

Did you see the patriots rioting in the streets in those mid-eastern countries? While government troops were mowing them down, did you note no guns by the patriots? The government confiscated them long ago. That is why the second amendment to the Constitution insists the “right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." And why some want to remove it…

Did you read about that  yacht, The Quest, owned by Scott and Jean Adam from California, traveling with a couple of friends, that was attacked and hijacked by pirates off the coast of Somali? The ship was loaded with Bibles! The Adams were missionaries and had been distributing Bibles in the area since 2004. The pirates killed them...

Dr. Graham Scroggie noted: “Prophecy and miracle constitute the two great defenses of the Christian religion. Prophecy gives proof of the supernatural in WORDS. Miracle gives proof of it in WORKS”…

Leave it to Ann Coulter to quote Obama on this: “We are the nation that put cars in driveways and computers in offices; the nation of Edison and the Wright brothers; of Google and Facebook.” And then the government outlawed Edison's great invention, made the Wright brothers' air travel insufferable, filed anti-trust charges against Microsoft and made cars too expensive to drive by prohibiting oil exploration, and right now – at this very minute – is desperately trying to regulate the Internet”...

Why does Planned Parenthood call its clinics “Health Centers” when its primary business is to kill little babies in their mothers’ wombs?...

Okay, pastors, are all the back rooms in your church tidy? The Liberty Assembly of God in Concord (NH) is about to lose its tax exemption. Why? According to Kathryn Temchack (director of real estate assessments there), because some of its rooms were cluttered. Really? Well, maybe not; the whole stink started when the church started feeding the poor and housing the homeless. Civic leaders didn’t like the class of folks it was attracting. But isn’t helping the poor part of a church’s calling? And doesn’t it get some off Concord’s welfare rolls? Perhaps Sister Temchack just doesn’t like religion…

Tennessee Temple Academy, a K-12 school that was the first school launched by the late Dr. Lee Roberson and the Highland Park Baptist Church some sixty years ago, will close for good at the end of this academic year in May. Previously they sold off the radio station, closed Camp Joy, and enrollment of on campus students at the university is less than 300. Finances and enrollment have both “gone south” the past few years. It is sad…

Anyone recall when Ma Bell got divided into yo-yo parts because Uncle Sam said it was too big? Now AT&T says it is going to buy rival cell-phone provider T-Mobile from Deutsche Telekom for $39 billion. That will make AT&T about 40% of that industry with Verizon 40% – and everyone else in the dust…

In Obama’s heralded speech to the Better Business Bureau (after polite introductory and closing applause, members basically sat on their hands), he told the group (really), "I didn't raise taxes once." According to The Heritage Foundation he raised them 18 times that will cost us $503 billion between 2010 and 2019. No wonder they didn’t applaud…

Thomas Jefferson is said to have visited a Baptist church to see for himself “true democracy” in action. He wouldn’t see much attending a Baptist church today with most of the business handled by deacons and/or elders ahead of time…

American humorist Will Rogers (1879-1935): "Ain't it funny how many hundreds of thousands of soldiers we can recruit with nerve. But we just can't find one politician in a million with backbone”…

Thomas Jefferson noted that a "wise and frugal government ... shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government." I bet you thought good government was a nanny state, taking care of you from cradle to the grave, didn’t you? I hope not!...

Former presidential contender Mike Huckabee on the Middle East, speaking of the West Bank: “I think we ought to be more concerned about Iran building bombs than Israelis building bedrooms"…

United States District Judge Roger Vinson in Florida ruled that ObamaCare is unconstitutional; he was ruling on a suit instituted by over half of our states (26 of 50) to overthrow it. The White House immediately called the ruling “a plain case of judicial overreaching.” You mean like legalizing abortion on a so-called “privacy” right in the constitution no one but a Philadelphia lawyer can find? Or like a lone Sodomite judge in California overturning a vote of millions of citizens about marriage? What’s even scarier is that it is going to wind up in the Supreme Court where most of the nine justices will rule on their “wishes” about it, not the Constitution...

Interesting statement from the judge’s ruling: It is difficult to imagine that a nation which began, at least in part, as the result of opposition to a British mandate giving the East India Company a monopoly and imposing a nominal tax on all tea sold in America would have set out to create a government with the power to force people to buy tea in the first place.

Also interesting, Judge Vinson used Barack Obama’s own words against him in a footnote: “I note that in 2008, then-Senator Obama supported a health care reform proposal that did not include an individual mandate because he was at that time strongly opposed to the idea, stating that, ‘If a mandate was the solution, we can try that to solve homelessness by mandating everybody to buy a house’”…

Well, Chicago, you asked for it! By a 55% vote over five opponents, Rahm Emanuel was elected mayor of the Windy City. He follows ‘forever’ years by the Daleys, father and son. Okay, Chicago, you made your bed, now lie in it!...

Every year folks look forward to the Super Bowl commercials. Some folk tune in to the game just to see them. Not this year. Brett Maragni, a Jacksonville (FL) pastor, in a Baptist Press editorial described this year's crop as "embarrassing." Why? He said, "a display of inappropriate innuendo and at least one use of obscene language." And with women and children watching. Unbelievable!...

Virginians want proof its workers are citizens. In February the Virginia House of Representatives passed an e-verify bill by a 75-24 margin. Yes, we want legal jobholders to do our work…

The director of our Congressional Budget Office, Doug Elmendorf, told Congress he estimated ObamaCare will cost our labor force 800,000 jobs. Can we afford that? Or, if the courts don’t void it as unconstitutional, should Congress repeal it?...

Ah, that death tax! Do you know what it costs to die in New Jersey? The government takes a 54.1 percent off the top of your estate for its services, thank you. In Maryland, which boasts of being “tax free” (no income or sales tax), it takes over half (50.9 percent). In fact, in 20 states “kicking the bucket” costs the deceased’s estate over forty percent…

A study by one state found that in “estate free” tax states (during 2004-2007) jobs doubled and new ones also doubled – growing 50% more quickly than those with estate taxes…

When Obama was a candidate for president a CNN clip showed him saying his father served in World War II. No one in the media challenged it. His father, who was born on March 4, 1936, was five when that war started and less than ten when it ended. His stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, was about a year younger. Is his memory that bad or is he a pathological liar? He comes by his nickname Liar-in-Chief justly…

Perhaps he meant his white grandfather who raised him, Stanley Armour Dunham, who did serve honorably in World War II, but not in Germany…

Lafayette F. Keaton was collecting Social Security under the name of his long-deceased brother, Jerome (who departed this world in 1989). It totaled $87,734. An equal opportunity fraud, he voted in his own name, his brother’s, and a dead son. He was also using the departed dead to get food stamps (totaling $51,327) – plus a driver’s license. The last we heard he was substituting support from the government by fraud for support from the government by punishment (in the slammer)…

Question: when is inflation going to really set in? Answer: it already has! It is impossible for the government to spend the country into trillions of dollars of debt and avoid devaluing the dollar…

Think about it: “For example, our nation went from 1787 to 1979 and during that interval produced some of the world's most highly educated people without a Department of Education. Since the department's creation, American primary and secondary education has become a joke among industrialized nations”...

Think again: “From our founding in 1787 to 1965, our nation went from a Third World status to building the world's mightiest first-class cities such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit and Philadelphia without the benefit of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). After HUD was created in 1965, many of our formerly great cities are in decline”…

Both of the above two quotes are from Walter E. Williams, economics professor at George Mason University. Do you just suppose we have too much government control?…

All the fancy dancing and tossing money by the government at the housing crisis obviously did not work. A whopping 11% of all homes in the United States remain vacant – as in empty! The answer? Jobs! Getting folks back to work – which probably won’t happen until the government gets out of the workplace, trying to ‘fix’ it…

According to Chris Chmielenski of NumbersUSA, the number of jobs held nationally by illegal aliens remains steady at 8 million. And don’t give me that jazz about them holding jobs Americans won’t touch…

The ink was hardly dry on our report that Park 51 co-founder Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf was booted and replaced by Shaykh Abdallah Adhami before the latter suddenly resigned to devote more time on his book about the Quran. Did news reports of the imam’s views on sodomy have anything to do with it? Who knows the minds of Muslims? Developer Sharif El-Gamal says he hopes Adhami will lead prayers at the facility from time to time…

The Senate’s vote on ObamaCare repeal: 51 “nay,” 47 “yea”; no Democrat voted for repeal and no Republican voted against it…

The euthanasia state (Oregon) set a new record last year for physician-assisted murders/suicides (65), making a total of 525 “known” deaths since its Death With(Out) Dignity Act was approved in late 1997. There may have been more, however, since there is no information on 15 folks who received “death prescriptions” in 2010. The Physicians for Compassionate Care Education Foundation (PCCEF) noted exactly one had a psychological or psychiatric referral…

Proof that the rest of the world is smarter than the folks in Oregon: France voted against legalizing such killing 170-142. The European Court of Human Rights ruled unanimously there is no right to government-sanctioned assisted suicide.

Pain at the pump? Bobby Eberle of GOPUSA expressed it: “Here we go again. As if massive spending, out-of-control debt, and high unemployment are not bad enough, now we can add rising gas prices to the mix of ‘change we can believe in.’ That's right ... with all the uncertainty in the Middle East and Barack Obama's complete lack of leadership, prices at the pump are heading up, up, and up”...

A good cartoon showing the difference of a half-century: Panel One, John Kennedy: “ASK NOT what your country can do for you” (1961). Panel Two, union thug in Wisconsin, “DEMAND what your country can do for you,” holding up a sign “Entitlements” (2011)…

Chrysler, the auto maker so broke it had its neck saved by billions of taxpayer money, handed out $750 bonuses to UAW union members as “performance awards,” so admitted CEO Sergio Marchionne…

The Mormon-owned giant Marriott says it will phase out pornography availability at its hotels. It's about time! Is it because Marriott suddenly got religion, or because such business is declining and revenue is falling? Glenn Haussman, editor-in-chief of HotelInteractive.com, observed, "Marriott sees porn as a rapidly declining source of income, so they figure they might as well get ahead of the competition and make this a good PR message"...

Liberalism on the death of Christ: “Bible Lessons for Adults,” a Methodist Sunday school quarterly, dealing with “The Purpose of Jesus’ Death,” declared: “Jesus paid the cost of His own salvation on the cross. He showed us the way to live the Christian life. Our own salvation comes by a long process of cross bearings for the things Jesus did and taught.” Obviously, the writer offered no Scripture to back up the teaching, because there is none!...

Communism has been replaced as the Number One persecutor of Christians. The new leader? The crowd President Obama calls “the religion of peace,” Islam!...

A coalition of Southern Baptists, Catholics, Mormons and Jews – among others (18 altogether) – filed a 31-page friend of the court brief in a lawsuit responding to Judge Joseph L. Tauro voiding part of the Defense of Marriage Act. Its gist was the importance of male-female figures in a home. If the First Circuit Court of Appeals upholds the ban it would become the law of the land…

The North Dakota House of Representatives passed a Defense of Human Life Act, 68-25, that "recognizes all human beings at every stage of development, including while they are in the womb, are persons with the right to life." Representative Dan Ruby, who introduced the bill, said it was "just common sense"...

Iowa house's human resources committee voted 2-1 in favor of a personhood bill similar to North Dakota’s. Neither, of course, has become law yet but both are on the right road…

Since the election debacle last November, a total of 24 state senators and representatives in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas have quit the Donkey party and joined the Elephants. Emory University political science professor Merle Black feels the motivation is "the increased liberalization of the Democratic Party"…

Some states have “medical exception” laws about marijuana (classified Schedule 3 drug in Oregon). These laws, as we predicted, are simply excuses for any pot promoter to get his weed. One doctor in Oregon has written med authorizations for 8,760 people. Unbelievable!…

Oregonians originally voted for the program to help cancer patients. Out of the 41,420 or so “card holders” cashing in on it, only about 1,000 are cancer victims. Most use it for “pain” (probably associated with coming down from a high)…

Hey, business is business (isn’t it?). Oregon, with 246 marijuana dispensaries, has expanded its pot availability to out-of-state folks! While Sheriff Tom Bergin (also vice-president of the Oregon State Sheriffs’ Association) calls the action “ludicrous and absurd,” others call it a tourist attraction!...

Andrew McCarthy of National Review observed, "Never in the history of the United States have our wartime enemies been invited into our civilian courts, clothed in the majesty of our Constitution, enabled by our due process rules to comb through our intelligence files, and given a platform to put our government, our troops, and our society on trial. Unless and until we devise a new system for prosecuting enemy combatant terrorists, military commissions remain the appropriate vehicle for war crimes trials. This is not a departure from the rule of law, it is the rule of law during wartime"…

Never in history had it been done, that is, until Obama brought the 9-11 thug Ahmed Ghailani to New York City and, in civilian court, lost the case in overwhelming fashion (not guilty on 224 counts; guilty on only one)…

The gamble the Democrats lost! They were in total control of the White House, the House of Representatives, and the Senate yet they did not pass a 2011 budget. Apparently it had too much spending, increasing our debt, etc., to where they wanted to wait until after the 2010 elections. They lost the gamble. They were blown out of the water in 2010. The budget they wanted didn’t get passed (the Senate hadn’t passed one in over 18 months). No problem. They are now blaming Republicans for not getting it done…

Listen to the Gipper, former president Ronald Reagan: “No nation in history has ever survived a tax burden that reached a third of its national income”…

Larry Elder’s summary of Obama’s 2012 budget proposal: “Obama's '12 budget – and its 10-year projection – adds nearly $9 trillion in new spending over the next decade. It nearly doubles our national debt from the current $13.5 trillion to more than $26 trillion by 2021. It imposes nearly $2 trillion in additional taxes. It leaves untouched the three major entitlements – Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid – that account for nearly half the budget. After 10 years, it leaves an annual budget deficit of some $700 billion, or nearly 50 percent more than President George W. Bush's 2008 budget – and even that assumes rosy scenarios on GDP growth and tax revenues. Only in the area of non-defense discretionary spending did Obama propose the most inconsequential of cuts”…

Was it just a coincidence that at the same time Barack Hussein Obama announced his re-election bid (which was primarily a fund raiser), the United States Treasury Department announced (without fanfare) that during the previous month the government spent 8.2 times its net revenue?...

You don’t think this country is in danger from within? The exchange value of the U.S. dollar has fallen about 13% in the last year (since June 2010). And its rate of decline is rapidly growing...

The judicial election in Wisconsin was supposed to be a referendum on Governor Walker’s action with the unions. If so, most are with him. The conservative in the race, Justice David Prosser (an ex-GOP legislator), overwhelmingly defeated liberal JoAnne Kloppenburg, supported by the unions – who invested millions in the campaign…

You’ve heard much about the Muslim “Sikhs” overseas, but did you know there are about 500,000 right here in the United States?...