A Long Ministry to the Glory of God, and Now a Centenarian!
by TE Bob Woodson and Wayne Sparkman

Harry G. Marshall is 100 years old today! He was born in Ilion, New York on January 11, 1918 to parents Floyd and Ruth (Goodale) Marshall. In 1937, at the age of 19, Harry first met Florence Weir when he began attending Columbia Bible College. Before Harry could finish his studies, the US Army drafted him in March, 1941.

Perhaps facing what might be ahead of him in war-time, Harry decided he could stand “the single estate” no longer, called Florence on the phone, asked the appropriate questions and got the desired “I do.” They were married April 26, 1942 just prior to Harry’s service as an assistant to a Division chaplain with the Fourth Infantry. That Division landed in France on D-Day, and saw some 20,000 casualties in almost continuous fighting up until V-E Day.

As an assistant to the Division Chaplain, he had numerous opportunities to witness for Christ. In later years, Harry liked to kid Florence during mission meetings. He would relate how the young and pretty French women welcomed him and all the G.I.s in the liberation of Paris, France, with kisses and bear-hugs. Florence would respond, “You never tire of telling that story, do you?,” and all their co-workers would laugh.

At war’s end, Harry returned to school at Columbia Bible College, graduating there with the B.A. degree in 1947 and the M.A. degree in 1948. He next prepared for the ministry at Faith Theological Seminary, earning the M.Div. degree in 1951.

He was ordained on May 25, 1952 and immediately entered the foreign mission field, working in Peru, initially under the auspices of the Independent Board for Presbyterian Foreign Missions. Later the Marshalls served with World Presbyterian Missions and finally with the PCA’s Mission to the World.

Harry and Florence served in Peru from 1953 to 1988. They had five children: Ruth, Lois, Colin, Verne and Nathan. Ruth later married Gerardo Gutierrez and they served under MTW in Chile and other areas of Latin America. Ruth passed away early in 2012. The Marshall’s son Verne is also serving with MTW, in Chile, and one of his daughters is also on the mission field in Latin America.

Harry was famous as a traveling evangelist in the mountains of Huanta and the jungle along the Apurimac River.

He was best known as an itinerant evangelist, often walking miles and miles and hours and hours to isolated villages. Yet he did much more than to share the Good News. He taught the believers to grow and helped them to organize into small groups which later became churches. He also taught in the summer camps and month-long Bible Institutes. He had the knack of keeping his teaching clear, direct, and true to the Scriptures, not weighed down with fancy terms and strange-sounding language.

During the meetings that they held, Florence played the pump organ and also taught the ladies and children how to sing the Quechua hymns and Spanish choruses. In addition, she used flannel graph materials to maintain the interest of her pupils and to drive home the lessons. Ladies were always welcomed to her home and she gave good answers to their many questions about life’s problems. She combined her many literacy lessons with how to cook simple and inexpensive meals.

In the years of their ministry in Peru, Harry led many to Christ and built them up in the faith. He was famous too for his jokes and taught as much at meal times as in formal teaching from the pulpit. In the courses offered at the Bible Institute, he taught sessions of one weekend, or one week or even as long as four weeks. He was beloved by the brethren. His co-worker, Bob Woodson says that he looked up to him for guidance and travelled some with him. Harry learned quite a bit of Quechua, but could not preach in it. He had a bookstore in his house to sell Bibles, hymnbooks, etc. and always sold some during his many trips.

Harry was honorably retired in 1985, and in the years after returning to the States, he served for a time as stated supply for the Manor Reformed Presbyterian Church, New Castle, Delaware. In 2012, Harry suffered not only the death of his daughter Ruth, in February, but Florence also passed away, in September of that year. He now resides in Wilmington, Delaware.

We praise God for those many years of ministry, and we thank the Lord for the blessing of this long life.

The Stuff of Operettas

There must be a shelf of books or more that have been written about the Beecher family. The Rev. Dr. Lyman Beecher, patriarch of this eccentric family, was born in 1775, studied theology with Dr. Timothy Dwight at Yale in preparation for the ministry, and served as pastor in East Hampton, Long Island, where he was blessed to see nearly three hundred added to the church. In 1826, he became pastor of the Hanover Church in Boston, MA.

Then in 1830, Beecher was named President and Professor of Theology at Lane Theological Seminary. So devoted were the people of Boston to him that nearly two years elapsed before arrangements were made, and he was able to move to Cincinnati, the location of the Seminary. The following spring, concurrent with his seminary duties, he was installed as the pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church of Cincinnati.

› Above, right: Portrait of Dr. Lyman Beecher, standing, with his son Henry, seated.

Having given twenty years of his life to Lane Seminary, Dr. Beecher ended his public labors in 1852, when he returned to Boston and later to Brooklyn, where he lived near the home of his son, the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, and the church that Henry pastored. For some ten years he resided there and was “an honored landmark of a former generation,” before passing to his eternal rest on January 10, 1863.

In one of the better known biographical accounts of the Beecher family, Milton Rugoff gives in interesting glimpse into the lives of the Beechers. He writes:

Toward the end of his years in Cincinnati, Lyman Beecher would occasionally try to put his papers—a lifetime of sermons, lectures and records, many of them yellow with age—in order, but they would soon be scattered around his study again. Then, in the summer of 1851, after he and Lydia had moved in temporarily with the Stowes in their big house in Maine, he began, with the help of one of Lydia’s daughters, to prepare his writings for publication: selected sermons, lectures on atheism, temperance, dueling and such, together with his Views in Theology. Despite the fact that Harriet was already working on installments of Uncle Tom’s Cabin for the National Era, her father and his assistant took over the kitchen table while Harriet sat on the back steps with her writing portfolio on her lap.

Theology had never been Dr. Beecher’s strong point, and now many of his writings seemed only echoes of bygone issues and controversies. In print, without his vital presence and verve, they were lusterless and lacking in urgency. They would have received little attention had they not begun to appear not long after the sensational  publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and shortly before Edward Beecher’s The Conflict of the Ages stirred the church world. How strange it must have seemed to Lyman Beecher to be increasingly identified as the father of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Edward Beecher—not to speak of Henry Ward Beecher. Lyman hardly knew what to make of the astonishing success of Harriet’s novel, but his opinion of Edward’s book he packed into one pungent sentence: “Edward, you’ve destroyed the Calvinist barns, but I hope you don’t delude yourself that the animals are going into your little theological hencoop!”

[excerpted from The Beechers: An American Family in the Nineteenth Century, by Milton Rugoff. New York: Harper & Row, 1981, pg. 293.]

Words to Live By: Caution keeps one from being too critical about Dr. Beecher and his family. They certainly had their problems, but our own lives are often equally messy. But that one comment, that “theology had never been Dr. Beecher’s strong point,” is a telling one [and ironic, given his post at the seminary], and perhaps it serves well to point out just how much we need the strong mooring of good theology. Good theology, after all, is nothing more than a right understanding of what Scripture teaches. And good theology is well taught in the Westminster Shorter Catechism. Which is why we have been careful to include it as part of our daily blog. We hope you are making good use of it.

Note: Our Through the Scriptures and Through the Standards sections have now been replaced by RSS feeds which appear at the top of right-hand column.

Image source: Clipping from an undetermined source which appears to have been part of a promotional advertisement for a work on the life of Dr. Beecher. Scanned by the staff of the PCA Historical Center.

A Young Pastor Caught in the Middle

The Old School/New School division of the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A.  officially took place in 1837. But the controversy had been roiling along for many years prior, and by the time that  Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia was organized, in 1829, the controversy was really coming to the fore. The first pastor of the church was Thomas A. McAuley, a New School man who managed to steer the new church into the only New School Presbytery within the Synod of Philadelphia, all to the dismay of the Rev. Ashbel Green and the other Old School men in Philadelphia, who had such hopes for the new church.

But Rev. McAuley only stayed for four years before leaving for greener fields (he went on to found Union Theological Seminary in New York). And in God’s providence, Henry Augustus Boardman was graduating from Princeton right about that same time. Boardman had been born in Troy, New York on January 9, 1808, graduated from Yale and then Princeton, but thought he would prefer being the pastor of a rural church. Instead, he was urged to supply the vacant pulpit at Tenth, and despite some misgivings on his part, finally accepted the call to serve there as pastor.

In a published history of Tenth Presbyterian Church, Allen Guelzo tells the story of the challenges that immediately confronted Boardman as he became the new pastor of the church :

—
Not that all the qualms in Boardman’s stomach were thereby stilled. There remained the unsettling business of Tenth’s attachment to the New School Second Presbytery. That business was made even more unsettling when on the eve of his ordination and installation the Synod of Philadelphia finally lost its patience with the New Schoolers and ordered the Second Presbytery dissolved. Since this drastic action could not be made final until the General Assembly met the following May, the New Schoolers held onto a brief stay of execution. But that left Boardman in the unhappy predicament of having to seek ordination at the hands of a presbytery that was virtually an outlaw organization; nor could he wait until the following May to see where the chips would fall, since his ordination and installation had been set for November 8, 1833.

Once again, he began to question whether he ought to join a presbytery under such suspicion and when he had such little sympathy with its tenets. “Unquestionably,” wrote Boardman, “it was a controversy which involved both the purity of our faith and the integrity of our ecclesiastical polity. Two incompatible systems of doctrine and two no less irreconcilable theories of ecclesiastical authority and policy” were at stake. In Boardman’s mind, there was no hope of compromise “between those who training had made them decided and earnest Presbyterians and others who had adopted our standards in a loose and general way.” Nor was it, he observed, “a mere war of words, It took hold upon the central truths of the Gospel, such as original sin, the atonement, regeneration and justification.”[1]  Nevertheless, Boardman decided to go ahead with the ordination, a move that was to set a precedent for later pastors of Tenth Church who found themselves with similarly difficult choices. In time, his decision proved wise. Boardman was able to sever Tenth’s connections with the New School Presbytery, and in 1837 the General Assembly removed the thorn of New School Presbyterianism from Boardman’s side by moving to lop all New School Presbyteries off its rolls. Not until 1869 were Old School and New School Presbyterians reunited.

[1] Boardman, Henry A., Two Sermons Preached on the Twenty-fifth and Fortieth Anniversaries of the Author’s Pastorate. Philadelphia: Inquirer Book and Job Print, 1873, p. 31.
—
[Excerpted from Making God’s Word Plain: Tenth Presbyterian Church, 150 Years (1829-1979).   Philadelphia, PA: Tenth Presbyterian Church, 1979, pp. 45-46.]

Words to Live By: Scripture does not promise an easy path in life for the Christian. If anything, we are promised conflict (2 Tim. 3:12). But we also have clear promises of God’s wisdom, as well as the charge to be at peace with all men, so far as we are able. (Rom. 12:18). Through diligent study of the Bible, godly counsel, and prayerful trust in God, we can find our way through life’s challenges.

Note: Our Through the Scriptures and Through the Standards sections have now been replaced by RSS feeds which appear at the top of right-hand column, and also at the bottom of each blog age.

Prestigious Congregation Votes into the Presbyterian Church in America
by Rev. David T. Myers

Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church has had a remarkable history.  The Fort Lauderdale, Florida congregation began in an elementary school cafeteria in 1959 with forty seven people under the ministry of D. James Kennedy. 

Graduating class at Columbia Theological Seminary, 1959.
From left to right Masaya Hibino, Seth Q. Shaver, Sam B. Laine,
David B. Pedersen, Clarence D. Weaver, Jr. and D. James Kennedy.

Preaching his first year of ministry in what he claimed were the fifty-two best sermons ever heard by an American congregation, the attendance dropped from forty seven to seventeen!  Upon receiving an invitation from a rural pastor in Georgia to come and preach a week of evangelistic meetings, he gladly accepted, anything  to get away from the fiasco then in the making in Florida.  Upon arriving in Georgia, the rural pastor, Kennedy Smartt, informed him that in addition to the public proclamation of the Word, Jim Kennedy would be going door to door in the area to personally present the gospel.  This badly scared Jim Kennedy. He used to tell people that he couldn’t do personal evangelism because of a “back problem.” If pressed, the “back problem” was a yellow streak down the back.

After a bungled attempt at the first “cold” door, the young minister then watched Pastor Smartt lead the person to a profession of faith.  In fact, over the next week, he watched Kennedy Smartt lead soul after soul to Christ.  What he didn’t know at the time was that the two rural congregations had prayed for the salvation of specific people for two years.  Further, just prior to the evangelistic meetings, a young banker has dropped dead.  That fact, plus the prayers, made the diagnostic question which began with “Suppose you were to die today,” suddenly real to every citizen in the area.  D. James Kennedy would return to his young dying congregation with a new emphasis in soul-winning.

Using the method and later making it his thesis for his Ph.D. degree from New York University, the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church became the fastest growing church in the Presbyterian Church in the United States, with 8000 in attendance at the dedication of their new building in 1973.

[» Construction of the stainless steel spire, with cross being hoisted in place »]

All was not well however with their membership in the Presbyterian Church, U.S. Theological liberalism was gaining ground, despite the best efforts of conservatives to win the battle for the Bible.  After years of seeking to reclaim the denomination back to its historic stance of biblical faithfulness, on January 8, 1978, the church voted to throw its support to the Presbyterian Church in America.

Words to Live By: “The visible church is a society made up of all such as . . . do profess the true religion, and of their children.”  (L.C. 62)  This answer centers around the phrase “the true religion.” Suppose a denomination with a great past of faithfulness to the true religion slowly but surely turns away from the faith of their spiritual fathers.  Suppose that any and all attempts to turn it back fails.  There is only one remedy, and that is to leave it for a denomination which still proclaims the whole counsel of God.  And that is what this congregation, and countless others, did back in 1973. Praise God for the Presbyterian Church in America.

STUDIES IN THE WESTMINSTER SHORTER CATECHISM
by Rev. Leonard T. Van Horn

Q. 45. Which is the first commandment?

A. The first commandment is, Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

Q. 46. What is required in the first commandment?

A. The first commandment requireth us to know and acknowledge God to be the only true God, and our God, and to worship and glorify him accordingly.

Scripture References: Exod. 20:3; I Chron. 28:9; Deut. 26:7; Matt. 4:10; Ps. 95:6; Ps. 29:2

Questions:

1. What are the three duties chiefly required in the first commandment?

The three duties are: (1) To know God. (2) To acknowledge God. (3) To worship and glorify God.

2. What is it we are to know regarding God?

We are to know that God is, or that there is a God. In addition we are to know God by acknowledging Him as the only true God as He is presented in His Word.

3. How are we to worship God?

We are to worship God by making Him the object of our desire and our delight.

4. How are we to glorify God?

We are to glorify God by first recognizing, in our heart, Christ as our Saviour and Lord and then living so that every action is aimed at the advancement of His glory and honor here on earth.

5. What are some practical ways by which we worship and glorify God?

We glorify God by putting nothing before Him in our thoughts, words, actions. By loving anything more than God, whether it is pleasure, our bodies, our loved ones, we would not be glorifying God.

6. Can we glorify God both inwardly and outwardly?

Yes, we can glorify God inwardly by trusting, by hoping, by delighting in Him, by thinking and meditating upon Him, by being filled with grief when we sin against Him. We can glorify God outwardly by praying, by praising, by being zealous to walk in the Spirit, by showing forth humility, and by seeking to do His will as expressed in His word. The Bible says, “Delight thyself in the Lord.” (Ps. 37:4). “Trust ye in the Lord forever.” Isa. 26 :4). “This thlng commanded I them, Obey my voice, and walk ye in all the ways I have commanded.” (Jer. 7:23),

THE DEAREST IDOL I HAVE KNOWN

When the Christian reads the first commandment and meditates upon it, a good commentary on it to be noted is one verse of the hymn entitled, “O For a Closer Walk With God”. This particular verse reads:

“The dearest idol I have known,
Whate’er that idol be,
Help me to tear it from Thy throne,
And worship only Thee.”

In order for the Christian to know, acknowledge, worship and glorify God it is certainly of foremost importance that the Christian know Christ as Saviour. This is indeed the foundation stone. But upon that rock-like foundation there must be added the gold, silver and precious stones of good works. This means a self discipline on the part of the Christian and has a lot to do with the Christian not putting other gods before the Almighty, Sovereign God.

Paul uses an interesting approach to this in 2 Cor. 5:9. “Wherefore we labour, that, whether present or absent, we may be accepted of him.” Or, as one translator puts it, “. . . we may be well pleasing to Him.” But it is so easy to put other things before this living solely to the glory of God, even things that seem, in themselves, right and proper. For example, the winning of souls or the leading in great revivals or the establishment of church or so many other things that could be mentioned. But our aim in life as born again believers is to do things purely to the glory of God. If we do otherwise we can be guilty of having little idols built up that become other gods. And such things trespass the first commandment.

Paul approaches the same question in another way: “But I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection: lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway (disapproved).” Not that he is in danger of losing his salvation, but that he is in danger of losing approval by God, of not living to the glory of God. This means approaching our daily life with an attitude of disciplining ourselves, the disciplining of our thoughts. words, deeds. This means that we must, moment by moment, “mortify” (make dead) those things of the flesh that would not please God. This means that daily we must die to these things and never let them become idols to us. It does not take much for them to reach that state. Satan will see to that if we relax our discipline. May God help us to tear such from ourselves that we have no other gods before Him!

Published By: The SHIELD and SWORD, INC.
Vol. 4 No. 44 (August 1964)
Rev. Leonard T. Van Horn, Editor