January 9, 2017 Show with Bill Shisko on “The Rise & Fall of Family Radio” & “The Rise of Redeemer Broadcasting”

Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister

George Norcross in downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,

Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, quote, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

Now here's our host, Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon,

Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and the rest of humanity who are living on the planet

Earth, listening via live streaming. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you all a happy Monday on this ninth day of January 2017, and before I introduce my topic and guest today and my cohost,

I want to remind you that this Thursday and Friday, the 12th and 13th of January, Iron Sharpens Iron is having two major events here in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

On Thursday, January 12th from 11 a .m. to 2 p .m., we have

Dr. Tony Costa, Professor of Apologetics at Toronto Baptist Seminary, coming all the way out here from Canada to be our keynote speaker at the

Iron Sharpens Iron Pastors Luncheon, and this is going to be held at the beautiful Carlisle Vault Catering Hall, which is a beautiful building.

It is a historic bank dating back to the early 19th century, hence the name

Vault, V -A -U -L -T, because they still have the gigantic vault door in the catering hall that is actually a doorway between different rooms in the venue there.

We are going to not only have Dr. Costa speaking but a delicious gourmet meal is going to be served by Chef Exclusive, who is doing this as their treat to the pastors, and every pastor is going to be leaving there with a bag containing between 20 and 30 brand new books that have been donated by generous

Christian publishers all over the United States and the United Kingdom. Nearly every major Christian publisher is donating and has been for a number of years donating books to this event so that every pastor leaves with between 20 and 30 books.

This is a tradition begun by my late wife going all the way back to the 1990s and a tradition

I am trying to keep alive after her going home to glory with Christ in eternity.

So this is always done in her honor and obviously first and foremost to the praise, honor, and glory of Jesus Christ.

I hope that as many of you who are men in ministry leadership as possible can attend, but please let me know no later than tomorrow by 12 noon if you plan on coming to this event.

You can email me at chrisarnzen at gmail dot com. C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail dot com.

Also, Friday the 13th, the very next night, Friday January 13th at 7 p .m.

at the historic Carlisle Theater, another gorgeous building that dates back to the early 20th century that has been restored to its original beauty and grandeur.

The 900 -seat Carlisle Theater is going to be our venue for the next

Iron Sharpens Iron Great Debate featuring the aforementioned Dr. Tony Costa of Toronto Baptist Seminary and Roman Catholic apologist

Robert Syngenis of Catholic Apologetics International. Their theme is going to be

Mary, Sinless Queen of Heaven or Sinner Saved by Grace. And that's 7 p .m.

Friday the 13th at the Carlisle Theater and tickets are $5 apiece for that and all are welcome from the general public to attend that, men, women, and children.

And for more details you can email me at chrisarnzen at gmail dot com. chrisarnzen at gmail dot com and put either luncheon or debate or both in the subject line.

For directions and parking information for either of these events you can go to carlislevolt dot com that's

C -A -R -L -I -S -L -E -V -A -U -L -T dot com or carlisletheater .org.

And Carlisle Theater, the theater part is spelt the old fashioned way R -E at the end not

E -R. So carlisletheater .org with an R -E at the end or the carlislevolt .com.

So we hope that as many of you as can make it to the debate attend that event as well.

And I'm so delighted to have back on my program today one of my favorite guests of all and also a very dear friend in Christ going back to the mid -1980s when

I first became a believer. He was one of the first Bible believing born again pastors that I had even met outside of my own pastor at the time as a new

Christian. And I thank God that he had saw fit to form a friendship between my guest and I that has lasted decades and has only grown stronger and I'm looking forward to what the

Lord has in store for us in the future. I'm speaking of Pastor Bill Shishko and Pastor Bill Shishko is currently hosting a program called

A Visit to the Pastor's Study which you can hear anywhere on the planet earth via live streaming at W -L -I -E 540 -A -M dot com.

That's a visit to the pastor's study every Saturday from 12 noon to 1 p .m. eastern time.

And we're also going to be hearing more about his ministry Reformation New York or Reformation Metro New York.

And today our theme is going to be the fall of family radio and the rise of Redeemer broadcasting and then we are going to spend the second hour focusing more on Pastor Bill's show,

A Visit to the Pastor's Study and Reformation Metro New York. But it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron, Pastor Bill Shishko.

Hey Chris, good to be back with you again. I wish I could be out in Carlisle to be at the pastor's dinner and the debate that you're going to have.

I've been part of those things here on Long Island but a little bit difficult to make that five hour trek out to Carlisle.

Yeah, well you know believe it or not we do have people coming out from Long Island though. In fact we have people coming from Long Island, Virginia, Washington D .C.,

Maryland, New Jersey and of course anybody who's going to look for an excuse to get out of New Jersey.

You don't have a radio program to do on Saturday the way I do. That's right. But we're looking forward to that and I want to introduce you once again this time on the air to our co -host today,

Charlie Liebert, founder of 6daycreation .com. Thank you Chris, it's good to be here.

Hey Charlie, good to be with you again. And today the Orthodox Presbyterians outnumber the

Reformed Baptists 2 to 1. But Pastor Bill, you know something, if you don't mind briefly, because I know this is not the main theme of our show, but if you could just tell our listeners something about in summary form your own personal journey to salvation, the providential things that our

Sovereign Lord brought about in your life that brought you to a saving knowledge of Him and also how you came to discover and embrace the doctrines of Sovereign Grace or Reformed Theology.

Yeah, well great question. I hope we have some time to talk about radio though, although actually my testimony is connected with it.

We had, I guess one of the reasons I love radio so much, I was brought up in northeastern Connecticut and during the 60s was part of the more pro -Marxist, atheist part of so -called counterculture.

The latter part of the 1960s I began working in radio when I was 15 years old and in my senior year in high school when everything was set for me to go into a pre -law program in a school up in New England.

Charlie, you'll appreciate this, even though I was an atheist, although by that time

I had become an agnostic, which is really an atheist without conviction, I could not wrap my hands around the theory of macroevolution.

Even as an atheist I could never, that didn't make any sense to me. I had been in debate in high school and then just kind of thought in a debate mode and even from that perspective could not, just couldn't grasp it.

Not that I couldn't grasp it, but it made no sense to me. And then in my senior year in high school two things came together in my first semester in high school.

One, my advanced biology teacher and I drove her up a wall with my questions about evolution and said, well, why don't you for your special project debate against the theory of evolution?

And that's what ended up having me intersecting with Christian materials about creation.

And at the same time the Lord brought about a profound, almost John Bunyan like conviction of my own sin.

And it was the third Sunday in February in 1970, I was working at a local secular radio station.

At that time, amazingly, they required three hours of religious broadcasting on the

Federal Communications Commission, required three hours of religious broadcasting on every station, how things have changed.

And one of the programs that I had to air was actually on a tape, I think, was the

People's Gospel Hour, which was done by a fundamentalist Arminian minister from Nova Scotia, Canada, Perry F.

Rockwood. And that third Sunday in February 1970, he did a...

I used to think the guy was a fruit cake when I'd listen to the thing. That's when I'd eat my breakfast and we'd just kind of make fun of him.

But that month he was dealing with creation, evolution, and the Bible.

And that Sunday he presented, basically presented the gospel in the context of the fall of man and the coming of Christ.

And that was the Sunday that I came to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. And Charlie, you'll appreciate this.

My first... There's two things out of that. One is I cannot sing from, and can it be, long my imprisoned spirit lay, fast bound in sin and nature's night.

Thine eye diffused the 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 was really very much my testimony. I can't sing that without breaking into tears.

But going out of the station that Sunday afternoon by that time, it had snowed. There was snow on a little tree near the public library.

And the liberating thing for me is I said, I can know the God who brought that snow and who made that tree.

I'd never lost that kind of one of those first sensations in my Christian life.

So that, my dear brother, is the account of my conversion. You want to talk about the doctrines of grace, too?

Yeah, I understand that today's gospel, authentic or synthetic, by Walt Chantry was somehow used by God to bring you into the doctrines of grace.

Yeah, it was. Yeah, very much so. That was my kind of entry level. Well, I guess in a real sense, the Bible was the entry level.

I'd ended up, amazing, amazing story in itself. Having graduated from high school, believe it or not,

I ended up at Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina. That's a story in itself. That's a whole other day.

And for me, that Christian military academy was really something I needed given my intellectual ill -discipline of the 1960s.

Anyway, it was there in my first year at the school, which was 70 to 71, one of the professors had spoken on the worst weed ever to grow in the garden patch of Christianity, tulip.

As I listened to this message, when he dealt with total depravity, and I thought, wow,

I don't have to be convinced of that. My own heart already told me that. Unconditional election, when he tried to knock that one down,

I thought, well, I'm not an idiot. I can read Ephesians 1. I do know the difference between a subject and an object.

And it doesn't say we chose him. It said he chose us in him. The atonement issue was not on my radar screen at that point, really.

Irresistible grace, again, I thought to myself, are you kidding me? I was running fast away from God, and he pursued me.

This was not some energy of my own will, unanimated by the

Holy Spirit that caused me to turn to the Lord. I think perseverance of the saints, I think he did believe that.

But anyway, that was what got me. That's when I first heard this term,

Calvinism. A fellow at school ended up giving me a copy of Chantry's book,

Today's Gospel, Authentic or Synthetic. I remember reading that the next summer, and that's when the lights went on about the doctrines of grace.

And then the next year at school, I ended up attending a church, which is now part of the

Presbyterian Church in America, and part of the Reformed Presbyterian Church of Evangelical Synod.

That's the first time I'd ever heard expository preaching in a church, and being in a church where they didn't have an altar call with 27 stanzas, just as I am at the end, that kind of thing.

So that's what kind of got me in the Reformed and Presbyterian world. Bill, which church was that in Greenville?

That was Shannon Forest Presbyterian Church. Terry and I lived there for two years, from 78 to 80, and we were in Mitchell Road with Dr.

Tom Cross. Yeah, Tom Cross was the founding pastor. He was my mentor for the first church that I pastored in South Carolina.

He's the one that discipled me, trained me as a deacon, and then trained me as an elder. Oh, interesting.

Yeah, it's amazing. Well, just to give you, very briefly, an example of how the altar call, since you brought that up, has been misused and become a very superstitious event in the life of many

Christians. In fact, it's become like a third ordinance or sacrament. But I bumped into this fundamentalist

Baptist couple in Cracker Barrel, and they were from a freewill -believing anti -Calvinist

King James Only fundamentalist group. And the wife said that the reason that she did not join

Grace Baptist Church when she visited it is that we don't have altar calls. And she said that she invited somebody that she knew to church who was not a

Christian, and the person went forward and got saved at an altar call at their church.

And she said, I am so glad that we had an altar call. Otherwise, my friend would not be saved today.

And I'm like, are you kidding me? You think God has his hands tied behind his back waiting for something that we do to manipulate people?

I mean, what kind of a God is that? I mean, that's just totally amazing to me. My usual line with people with that is, when you show me an altar call in the

Bible, we'll consider having one in church. Or if I want to be more blunt, I say, look, the Roman Catholic churches around here have altar calls all the time.

It's called a confessional. Yes, that's true. Well, we are going to be discussing as one of our major themes the fall of family radio before we get to the rise of Redeemer broadcasting.

But actually, why don't we talk a little bit about the rise of family radio so people even know what we're talking about.

That was at one time the go -to radio network globally for Reformed teaching.

And although Mr. Camping, the late Harold Camping, always had oddities, in my opinion, the radio network was a treasure trove of phenomenal preaching.

And in fact, their program, Conference Echoes, which was later shortened to Echoes, where they aired the sermons of Reformed pastors and preachers and evangelists, they got so accustomed to loving the tapes that I sent them,

Family Radio New Jersey, that as soon as they saw my name on the package, they said, OK, this is going on the air.

And I can hardly remember any tapes that I submitted to them that they did not play on Echoes.

And I know that you were on there a lot. And so why don't you tell us something about Family Radio and how it sadly and tragically spiraled into insanity?

Would you mind if I took about two minutes to just give a little background on church and Christianity and radio, period?

Oh, sure. Yeah, that's completely fine. I mean, obviously, because I was working in radio when I was 15,

I was converted to a radio ministry and have done radio things. And that's why, Chris, you and I are fellow lovers of radio.

Yeah, I think it's kind of give a framework for everything here. Radio, far more than television, radio is really the medium for a ministry of the

Word because it's Word -based. The usual line people will use about radio is they prefer radio to television because the pictures are better.

You know, the word is worth a thousand pictures. But I find it fascinating.

Radio broadcasting, as we know it, began on November 2nd, 1920.

And a little bit west of where you are, Chris and Charlie, it was it was W or then it was just KDKA at Pittsburgh.

And they broadcast the Harding Cox election returns on November 2nd, 1920.

The problem was nobody had receivers. You didn't have your AM, FM radios you could buy.

And so very few people could hear it. Of course, later, once the very fact that you could receive broadcast came in, then the sales of tabletop radios and so on became huge.

But it was literally two months later, January 2nd, 1921, when, believe it or not,

Westinghouse got the idea that you could use radio, they were thinking on Sundays, to broadcast worship services.

And they actually did a remote broadcast from Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh.

And it was interesting because they had to have the microphone, but this goes to show you the sense of worship, then there was concern that the equipment not detract from the worship service itself, people knew it was going to be broadcast and so on.

So what they did, the two technicians, and one of them was Jewish, and one of them was a

Roman Catholic, were outfitted with choir robes. And they were put in the choir with the microphones, so that nobody would see them, and that the minister would broadcast.

And actually, the first, the pastor, the original senior pastor, he was afraid of the medium.

He didn't like the idea of being broadcast. So the junior pastor, this guy named Lewis Whittemore, broadcast, and it really became a hit.

I mean, the fact that people could listen to a broadcast of a service. And so that program, actually, it's amazing, that program continued for 42 years.

Their service was broadcast from 1962. So to put it this way, religion, and particularly

Christianity, other religions have not used radio at all the way

Christians have. Why? Because we're word -based people. And then, well, we would have had our differences to do with some of the

Moody Bible Institute theology. You have to thank the Lord for what was done at Moody Bible Institute.

When evangelicals were skeptical about the use of radio, there was the fear that people would listen to radio broadcasts and not go to church, and that kind of thing.

Moody really forged ahead. I think, actually, they had the first radio network.

The pastor for some years, anyway, of the Moody Church, Paul Rader, really became the first national

Christian broadcaster. And so it was very much a Moody College -generated thing.

I don't know that this was Moody's network, but this fellow

Paul Rader, who was again the first national radio preacher, so to speak, started a station called

WJBT, where Jesus blesses thousands. And then it was in 1944 in Chicago area that the

National Religious Broadcasters began, and Chicago was really the hub of Christian broadcasting.

So I don't know. When did you get a commercial? I mean, I could go on and on, but I want to get to Family Radio, but tell me when I've got a break.

You have five minutes before we go to a break. Okay. Yeah, and then real quickly, maybe we'll get your break, and then we can start dealing with Family Radio.

We really need to be thankful for these two, really two denominations in particular, that really forged ahead with radio.

One was the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church, and they began the

Lutheran Hour in 1930, and I believe that was also in Chicago. Walter Mayer was the original broadcaster on the

Lutheran Hour, and that evangelical program, which is still around today, still emphasizes preaching, it still emphasizes the historic hymns, they have a time for questions and answers, and it really became the kind of a template for religious broadcasts.

And then the one that, I'll go back to this when we talk about Visit to the

Pastor's Study, it was in 1939 that the Christian Reformed Churches began the

Back to God Hour, and the Christian Reformed Churches were very concerned to use media to get out there, and in 1943 became the very famous radio preacher.

The first radio pastor, I think he was called, Dr. Peter Eldersveld, came on staff of the

Back to God Hour, and then in 1946 he became the radio preacher.

And I want to save some of that, because in doing some research for the program, I realized that that Reformed body, which was very solidly

Reformed, they really thought through the use of radio as a medium, and I was really thrilled to read, as I was reading about their history, that what

Dr. Eldersveld's view of radio was, and what mine is for my program, was the same.

So anyway, and then real quickly, because this is a name that, Chris, you're familiar with, it was in 1960 that Dr.

Joel Niederhood joined the staff of the Back to God Hour. Dr. Eldersveld died very suddenly in 1965, and then

Dr. Niederhood filled in and was radio pastor of the

Back to God Hour for some 35 years. And many of us still remember

Dr. Niederhood's 15 -minute Back to God Hour programs. There was a brief time that they got involved in television, in the 1980s,

FA20, although in 1977 Dr. Niederhood, I think it pretty much was himself the author of a report to the

Christian Reformed churches, kind of saying, hey, if we're going to use television, you've got to be aware of the implications of it.

And that FA20 program, which was very kind of human interest -oriented and inspirational, became essentially the pattern for other

Christian television programming down the line. So that's a huge framework for our talking about family radio, which we can do after your commercial break.

Yes, I had the honor and privilege to have Joel Niederhood as a guest on Iron Sharpens Iron, and he wrote a wonderful commendation for the program.

And I can recall not only listening to his radio program, but I remember when I would wake up early in the morning every week to make my commute to New Jersey when

I was working for Salem Communications, their affiliate out there, WMCA.

I remember when I was still getting my coffee and such in the house that I would have

Dr. Niederhood on my television for FA20. But we are going to go to our first break now.

If you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail dot com,

C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail dot com. And please include at least your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside the

USA. And by the way, I want to make sure that I give a shout out to a lovely young lady that I met today who is the assistant manager at Lifeway Christian Stores in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

It was quite a providential occurrence when I went to Harrisburg with a friend of mine who needed to return his cable vision equipment since he had moved to a different location.

And I'm sitting there in the parking lot and I see this gigantic Lifeway store there as I'm sitting in the parked car.

I said, hey, I'm going to bring some flyers for the debate and the luncheon into that store.

And I walk in there and the assistant manager, Elizabeth Nillowalkie, I believe her name is.

I'm looking at her name right now, but I don't know if I'm pronouncing it correctly. Nillowalkie. Well, Elizabeth, as we started to chat and she asked me what congregation

I was a member of, I told her Grace Baptist Church in Carlisle. And she said, you're kidding me. I'm a

Reformed Baptist too. And I was raised in that church. And I went to the church plant for a while in Chambersburg and now

I go to a different church, but I'm a Reformed Baptist and so are my parents and my family.

And so it was a small world. And she was kind enough to hang up some of the flyers in the store there.

So I just wanted to give a shout out to Elizabeth Nillowalkie and Lifeway Christian Stores in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

We'll go into a break right now and don't go away. We'll be right back after these messages with Pastor Bill Shishko of Reformation Metro, New York.

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Solid Ground Christian Books is honored to be a weekly sponsor of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. I'm Chris Arnzen, host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, and here's one of my favorite guests,

Todd Friel, to tell you about a conference he and I are going to. Hello, this is Todd Friel, host of Wretched Radio and Wretched TV and occasional guest on Chris' show,

Iron, Criticizing Iron. I think that's what it's called.

Hoping that you can join Chris and me at the G3 Conference in Atlanta, my new hometown.

It is going to be a bang -up conference called the G3 Conference, celebrating the 500th anniversary of the

Protestant Reformation with Paul Washer, Steve Lawson, D .A. Carson, Votie Baucom, Conrad and Bayway, Phil Johnson, James White, and a bunch of other people.

We hope to see you there. Learn more at g3conference .com, g3conference .com.

Thanks, Todd, I think. See you at the Iron Sharpens Iron Exhibitor's booth.

Hi, I'm Pastor Bill Shishko, inviting you to tune into A Visit to the Pastor's Study every

Saturday from 12 noon to 1 p .m. Eastern Time on WLIE Radio, www .wlie540am

.com. We bring biblically faithful pastoral ministry to you, and we invite you to visit the

Pastor's Study by calling in with your questions. Our time will be lively, useful, and I assure you, never dull.

Join us this Saturday at 12 noon Eastern Time for a visit to the Pastor's Study, because everyone needs a pastor.

Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzen with the man that you just heard, Pastor Bill Shishko of the

Orthodox Presbyterian denomination. He is the host of A Visit to the

Pastor's Study, as you just heard, and he is also involved in the founding of a ministry called

Reformation Metro New York that we'll be hearing more about. We are discussing right now the rise and fall of family radio, and we'll be getting around to discussing the rise of Redeemer broadcasting.

In the studio with me is my co -host, Charlie Liebert of 6daycreation .com.

If you care to join us, our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail dot com. Chrisarnzen at gmail dot com, and we do have a couple of people waiting to have their questions asked, but I will have you pick up where you left off for now,

Pastor Bill. Chris, what we'll talk about here is a tragic story.

It was 1958. There were three businessmen from out in the San Francisco Bay Area, one of whom was

Harold Camping. Harold Camping was a civil engineer, a very fine businessman, had his own construction company, was a member of the

Christian Reformed Churches, and they were quite burdened that there be a Christian radio station in the

San Francisco Bay Area. So they purchased a station, they got their license, they had their first broadcast of what would become

Family Radio in February of 1959, and they worked with Harold Camping, who became the president of Family Stations Incorporated.

They really had a tremendous idea. They worked with the Christian Reformed Churches in that area, they worked with Bible Baptist Churches in that area, other conservative

Baptist Churches, other conservative Evangelical Churches, period, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, and then there were some other conservative

Presbyterian Churches in that area as well. So they, right from the outset, really emphasized the

Bible as the Word of God, salvation by grace alone, through faith alone. They wanted to emphasize teaching historic

Christianity, the goals were wonderful for what was done. And of course, over the years, many

Reformed people latched onto Family Radio, because they were very, to say the least, very friendly toward the

Reformed faith, as Harold Camping developed on his open forum. I mean, he basically would say that anything else was not the gospel, and so on.

And his open forum, which began I think in the 1960s,

I'm not sure, but the open forum that would be on, I think it was a 10 to 1130 or something like that,

Eastern Time, that became a galvanizing point for Reformed people.

Harold Camping was clearly Calvinist, he was very, he was

Amillennial in his eschatology, that didn't set well with Fundamentalists, he was very much against the charismatic emphasis on tongues, their hymnody was very traditional.

I mean, they really, they had a definite appeal, Family Radio, Family Stations had a definite appeal to conservative evangelicals, and particularly

Reformed people, although Arminians really did not like the station, and they had other networks that they could work with.

Those of us who, I was, I didn't know any, I knew of Family Radio I guess when

I was in seminary in the late 70s, learned more about it up here, because WFME over in West Orange, New Jersey was one of their big stations, one of their largest audience stations.

And someone ended up sending some cassette tapes, I don't even know what those things are anymore, because of my cassette tapes to Family Radio, next thing

I know I'm on Conference Echoes, I still to this day don't know who sent the tapes to them, maybe it was Chris Arnett.

I think it may have been. I doubt it. That's a good point. And so the next thing

I know I'm invited to go to speak for the Family Radio conferences, one was in Florida, and then one was at the

Harvey Cedars Conference Grounds in the Chesapeake Bay area. And the experience, back in the 80s, with speaking at Harvey Cedars was,

I mean really, I have to tell you, it was really quite amazing. There were hundreds of people there on Sunday, for the evening sessions for the whole day, but for my evening sessions

I'm dealing with the subject of mortification of sin. And I think it was like six or seven nights of this.

And I mean this was not light teaching, this was heavy duty teaching and preaching, and I mean

I'd be up to like midnight talking with people who were really concerned about their souls, they wanted to follow the

Lord. It was really quite, it was a blessedly draining experience. Two things came up, or three things came up at that conference that I thought were kind of unusual.

One was, and I won't mention the name, but one of the people who was well -known through family radio asked me what

I thought of Harold Camping's views on allegorizing. Spiritualizing, as he called it, is allegorizing.

I said, well, allegorizing is one step away from liberalism, because what it does is it takes the words of the scriptures and makes each of them into some kind of a message in itself.

That's the allegorizing. And it really takes away from the grammatical, historical interpretation of the scriptures.

That, as I look at it, was prophetic small p, because I said that ends up really bringing about a decline in doctrine in this particular person who taught on Family Radio Express's agreement.

That was number one. Number two is I had mentioned in the conference the fact that if we, that we had to have in our

Christian lives, there had to be something that captivated us emotionally to capture our love.

It's called basically the expulsive power of a new affection. If we're going to really cast out sin, you know, you don't love the world, neither the things that are in the world.

If we love the world, the love of the Father is not in us, but it was dealing with our whole being, including our emotions, being caught up in this

God that saved us. And after that evening, one person tagged me and all, very serious, and he said to me, he said, you realize

Brother Camping doesn't believe in emotions, which I thought was kind of odd. And I said, well, what do you mean?

He said, well, he doesn't like any emphasis on emotions, so it doesn't make any difference what he believes. The scriptures are full of emotions.

You're supposed to rejoice in the Lord, there's lamentations. I thought that was queer. But the thing that really got me, and I don't want to belabor all this, but I think it gives a little window on what happened with Harold Camping's theology.

It was, though, last night, some of the people wanted to speak with me about these questions and answers, and Harold Camping had been going through Proverbs 31, 10 to 31, which

I didn't listen to. I was using my times in the morning to prepare. Anyway, one of the ladies said, well, do you agree with Brother Camping's interpretation of Proverbs?

She said, what do you think Proverbs 31, 10 to 31 is about? It's about the ideal wife.

It's not one particular woman, but it's kind of a composite picture of what a wife, what a godly wife is to be as a virtuous woman.

Kind of a standard, historic answer to this. Well, she looked at me, and it was kind of the arrogance here that got me, and his followers.

She said, well, Brother Camping does not believe that. And a part of me was,

I really don't care what Brother Camping says. It's a historic understanding. But here's the guru.

She said, that refers to Christ and the Church. So, you know, I said, well, it's certainly because marriage is a picture of Christ and the

Church, you can make that as an application. That's not the first one. And she was vehement, differently. So finally,

I said to her, let me ask you a question. She was single. I said, if you're a Christian wife, what does this text say to you?

She looked at me, and she said, it says absolutely nothing to me as a

Christian wife. I thought, whoa, wait a minute. This is really bad stuff.

If you want the technical word for it, it's Gnosticism. That the Bible is kind of a certain knowledge, the esoteric knowledge that you get that helps you, you know, that's how you really gain entry.

Okay, so that's kind of a window for your listeners. Harold Camping was an engineer. He treated, he went, he took words and kind of took them up in the stratosphere and related them to other words in the scriptures.

And that's how you understood this word really had gotten off the beam with his way of interpreting the scriptures.

Now, the thing that the initial thing that really started to alarm, even those who are close to him, even in his personal circle of close friends, was when he predicted the return of Christ and the end of the world in 1994.

Well, he predicted it before then, but wrote the book, I think,

I guess it was 1993, it came out, and it was called... 1992, his announcement. I remember,

Chris, where it was. In fact, you and I spoke about this shortly afterwards. I was, believe it or not, I can remember where I was.

I was driving back from a committee meeting or something. I was in Staten Island, and I tuned this in, and he mentions his book, 1994, question mark, was in August of 92.

And he starts talking about his prediction of Christ's return. I was floored with this stuff, as everybody else was, frankly.

But didn't mean to interrupt you, but yeah, that's when that happened. Yeah, and then after that did not come about.

People amazingly, still tenaciously clung to him as a modern -day prophet, not in the sense of, in the

Pentecostal sense or in the Old Testament sense, but they viewed him as the man that had the truth for the last days.

And he really spiraled even deeper into heresy by then claiming that the church had become so corrupt that Christ had become an enemy of the church, and that if anyone was a member of any congregation, that they were enemies of Christ, and their salvation was very questionable, to put it mildly.

I think that he, when really challenged on it, refrained from knowing with certainty that somebody was damned if they were a member of a church.

But it was very clear in his rhetoric from the radio that he believed that, and that is when our mutual friend

Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries wrote a book on this, challenging

Mr. Camping. And in fact, he liked the title that I came up with for the book,

Dangerous Airwaves, Harold Camping Refuted and Christ Church Defended, and I actually had the honor of doing the artwork for the cover of that book, because I was an art major, and Dr.

White really appreciated the cover that I came up with. And then, a very historic moment was when

I had Mr. Camping agree to debate Dr. White on my radio program,

Iron Sharpens Iron, when we were broadcasting at a WNYG radio there in Babylon, Long Island.

The first day of the debate was a debate, but then obviously people told him, people from his own network told him, what you've got to do is ignore everything that Dr.

White is saying to you, and when it's your turn to speak, just pick up where you left off and continue to speak.

So basically, it really devolved into Dr. White trying to debate

Mr. Camping, and Mr. Camping just giving speeches. Yeah, well, apropos of that,

Chris, one of your former pastors and Dr.

Robert Cameron and I had actually met with Harold Camping in New Jersey when they had their Day in the

Word conference. We had a three -hour meeting with him in January of 1993, a few months after he made the announcement about this book coming out.

The book had come out by then, I think the book came out in September, October of 1992.

Chris had read it and been through it. We did a couple classes in Franklin Square explaining to people where things were, but we met with him for three hours, and I want to say this respectfully, the man has departed now, but you did not speak with him.

You could speak to the wall, and it would have been more responsive if he had isolated himself from listening to anybody.

And you had three ministers here who were begging him to repent for writing the book, and hoping he would.

And I remember we got this line of, well, even if Christ doesn't come back on, and that, of course, the projection was sometime in mid -September of 1994, think of all the good that will have been done.

We were floored, Chris. I mean, this kind of pragmatic reasoning.

The fact of the matter is, there were people who, over the three predictions that he made, what was it?

It was 1994, and then it was, I don't know, when the other one was supposed to be, and then I think it was one in 2011 or something like that.

But people gave their whole life savings to promote this stuff. I mean,

I was in Uganda, and I saw a sign in Uganda promoting his 1994 book.

I mean, this is how rabid people became, in their support of this heretical teaching.

And, of course, it did incalculable harm. Any of us who pastored people who were under the camping spell knows what that was like.

I mean, we're not even talking about what happened with Family Radio, but I mean, and Harold Camping, toward the end of his life,

I mean, he did not believe in the free offer of the Gospel. That went down the tubes.

And then also, I believe he denied the doctrine of eternal conscious punishment.

So, I mean, it's heresy, and just kind of a bigger picture here. Anyone who is going to be a teacher of the

Word of God, and Harold Camping was not an ordained minister. There's no doubt he knew his Bible, but he knew it wrongly.

But if you're going to be a teacher of the Word of God, you've got to be willing to listen to other people.

Harold Camping did not listen to other people, period. And even within his own family, one of his sons -in -law is an

Orthodox Presbyterian minister, and pleaded with his father -in -law that he wouldn't listen.

So that's kind of the big lesson we all ought to learn. Just about this personally.

Yeah, in fact, while he was still alive, I had a conversation with Gabriel Ortero, who told me that Mr.

Camping, even after telling Dr. Ortero that he believed he was damned, he still would call him for the definition or the explanation of certain

Greek terms and things. He still contacted him for advice on Greek, and even though he believed he was contacting a lost person.

But he even not only renounced Calvinism, in many aspects, he really also had a very aberrant view of the

Trinity, which I don't know how long he really held to this, but he really had a more of a modalist understanding when he described the

Trinity, and even had a concept of patripassionism. It was really strange things.

In fact, when I had him on my radio program, before I even knew this,

I didn't even know ahead of time what his view was. I thought that he was teaching still that a belief in Christ was essential for salvation.

I said to him, well, you believe that the end of the world is coming in a matter of weeks.

And I said, you know, in the book of Revelation, the church is comprised of people from out of every tribe and tongue and people and nation.

And there are missionaries who have informed me that there are still un -evangelized tribes in the world that have never heard the gospel.

How can there be people there represented in the book of Revelation from those tribes if we're going to be, the world is coming to an end in a very short period of time?

And he actually said on my program, well, you don't need to believe in Jesus to be saved.

The Old Testament saints didn't believe in Jesus, and neither do we need—you just need to cry out to God.

And so that was an astonishing development that had unraveled on my program.

Yeah, somebody—I mean, I don't know that it would really be worth the time and paper to do it, but somebody should probably work through the, you know, the

Harold Camping systematic anti -theology, I guess would be better, because there were so many aberrant views there.

I know there is a book, I don't know if it's come out yet, but a couple of sociologists on the West Coast are actually writing a book about sort of the camping phenomenon in relation to cults, and it really is quite a study.

I think, you know, we can—you want to deal with Redeemer, and I'd like to—I guess I'd rather begin the top of the hour on that upbeat instead of this, but it's just kind of a

P .S. on the—although really, the family radio saga is not ended yet.

It's amazing to me that after 1994, the September 1994 date, when

Christ did not come back, and that was before camping had this depart -out teaching.

It's very important, and I'll mention that in a moment. After 1994 came and went, and Christ did not come, family radio—the giving to family radio really, really began to decline, and there's all kinds of speculation as to why this happened, but that's—it was after that time that Harold Camping, in revamping his date for Christ's return—actually, at the end of the 1994 question mark book, he did say there were two or three other alternate dates, so he left the door open for—but anyway, he began to emphasize this depart -out teaching.

You cannot—you cannot be saved if you're part of the Church, and people have speculated that because of what a

Church elder board said or what the Synod of the Reformed Church of the

U .S. I mean, this is a Reformed Church body that, as a Synod, addressed Harold Camping, calling him to repentance.

Our elders did. A number of his ministers did, I mean, and communicating with the board.

There was a lot that went on with this. The speculation is that when Camping experienced this barrage of opposition, that was when he came to the conclusion that the

Spirit had left the Churches. Prior to that point, he would recommend Reformed Churches and nothing else, and it was

Reformed ministers who were, by and large, in churches, who were begging him to repent.

And so the speculation, for what it's worth, is when, as Camping thought of it, the very churches that he had promoted were opposing him, that's when he came to this utterly audacious view that you can't be saved and be part of the

Church. There have actually been articles written about this that people are interested in.

But in fact, here's what happened. After that, between 1994 and 2009, the giving to family radio grew by topsy, and they purchased far more stations.

They purchased television stations. By 2008, this is, what, 14 years after Camping predicted

Christ was going to return in 1994. Actually, yeah, 14 years. Their total giving, just contributions to family radio, was $15 million.

So there's a case study in all of this. What happened to Camping was he got his own group to support him.

They were petrified of supporting churches and ended up giving their support to family radio. Of course, then later,

P .S. in the dates, was it May 2011? I guess it was. And then later, in October 2011, he predicted the return of Christ.

Of course, that didn't happen. And I think by then, people were realizing, I mean, this isn't one of these fads.

Sadly, Harold Camping had a stroke in 2011, and you've got to wonder if, to some extent, this must have been connected with the pressure that was on him.

He died on December 15th of, I think it was 2013. But as of right now, family radio, most of its programming is in -house.

There'll be no emphasis on the church at all. They still use historic hymns and so on. I don't know what they do with hymns about the church.

But they're still existing and hanging on. But it is really a tragic, tragic story of what happens when a

Christian medium that has been so used of God removes itself from accountability to Christ's church.

Amen. And lest anyone think that this is some kind of a logical, consistent fruit of Reformed theology, nothing could be farther from the truth.

Because in spite of many of his Orthodox beliefs that he previously held to for decades, he was, even earlier on, when

I first became a believer and I first met him, he had an anti -confessional bent to him.

Oh, exactly. Even though he was a member of confessionally Reformed churches, he had a very aberrant view of sola scriptura,

Bible alone, where it was ironic where he would say, don't read books and commentaries, just read the

Bible. And of course, then he wrote his own books. Yeah, exactly. Exactly right.

Yeah. He had their little button at the Bible alone. Well, sola scriptura, because that's been dealt with on your show, sola scriptura does not mean we only read the

Bible, but our final authority and faith in life is the Bible, as the Bible rightly interpreted. But yeah, you're exactly right,

Chris. When people talk about Harold Camping's Reformed convictions, at least at the end of his life, they look, don't associate that with Calvinism at all.

It's not on the same ballpark. Yeah. Well, he even openly said that he had come to reject much of Calvinism by the end of his life.

And by the way, I hope I wasn't misunderstood that sola scriptura is aberrant. I mean, it meant his twisting of it.

Sure. That's right. And then, of course, we cannot leave out his numerology, which really heightened a

Gnostic approach to understanding the Bible, where only he could really unlock the keys, the hidden keys to what the

Bible meant. Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And of course, they're the fallacies. Don't read other books.

But you not only read his books, but you listen to him all the time. And he became the guru. It was very much like the magisterium of the

Roman Catholic Church, in which you look to them for your teaching. He just did it on, he was a pope on an individual level.

Right. Well, we're going to another break right now, and we will get to the couple of you who are waiting to have your questions asked and answered as soon as possible.

But if anybody else would like to join them with your own question, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

chrisarnson at gmail .com. Don't go away, we'll be right back with Pastor Bill Shishko, host of A Visit to the

Pastor's Study, right after these messages, God willing. Chris Arnson here, and I can't wait to head down to Atlanta, Georgia.

And here's my friend, Dr. James White, to tell you why. Hi, I'm James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries.

I hope you join me at the G3 conference hosted by Pastor Josh Bice and Praise Mill Baptist Church at the

Georgia International Convention Center in Atlanta, January 19th through the 21st, in celebration of the 500th anniversary of the

Protestant Reformation. I'll be joined by Paul Washer, Steve Lawson, D .A. Carson, Vody Baucom, Conrad M.

Bayway, Phil Johnson, Rosaria Butterfield, Todd Friel, and a host of other speakers who are dedicated to the pillars of what

G3 stands for, gospel, grace, and glory. For more details, go to g3conference .com.

That's g3conference .com. Thanks, James. Make sure you greet me at the

Iron Sharpens Iron exhibit booth while you're there. Paul wrote to the church at Galatia, For am

I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man,

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We strive to reflect Paul's mindset to be much more concerned with how God views what we say and what we do, than how men view these things.

That's not the best recipe for popularity, but since that wasn't the apostles' priority, it must not be ours either.

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Hi, I'm Pastor Bill Shishko, inviting you to tune in to a visit to the pastor's study every

Saturday from 12 noon to 1 pm eastern time on WLIE radio, www .wlie540am

.com. We bring biblically faithful pastoral ministry to you, and we invite you to visit the pastor's study by calling in with your questions.

Our time will be lively, useful, and I assure you, never dull. Join us this Saturday at 12 noon eastern time for a visit to the pastor's study, because everyone needs a pastor.

Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzen with the man that you just heard speaking, Pastor Bill Shishko of the

Orthodox Presbyterian Church Denomination, and he is now hosting a visit to the pastor's study program heard every

Saturday, as you just heard, on wlie540am .com.

And we have been talking about the Rise and Fall of Family Radio, and now we're going to be talking about the

Rise of Redeemer Broadcasting, and then, of course, we're going to hear more about Reformation Metro New York and a visit to the pastor's study.

And let me just ask a question from Christopher in Suffolk County, New York, who wants to know,

Pastor Bill Shishko, is there any reason to have confidence that our brother,

Mr. Camping, is in heaven right now, knowing what he has taught before he departed this earth?

No. That's a very honest answer there. Real quick story on this,

Chris, and I say this painfully. I really do. If you're going to go by what the Word of God says, the answer is no.

Matthew 18, 15 through 17, is in the Bible. I had gotten afterwind to get in the middle of this whole camping thing.

I remember I got a call from a Christianity Today reporter, this kind of jocular guy that just sort of drives you up a wall.

He was, you know, because I don't, this is serious stuff, I mean, that we're dealing with. And he was asking me about camping and, you know, the problems we've had with camping followers and blah blah.

And finally, he said to me, he said, I forgot what the thing was.

You know, he referred him as a Christian teacher, basically. I said, well, wait a minute, wait a minute. I said, you're talking about a

Christian teacher. This man is not to be regarded as a Christian teacher.

He's a heretic, and he was paused a bit. And he said, well, what do you mean by that? And I said, are you familiar with Matthew 18?

I'm from New York, you know, you don't put up with too much folly here. I said, have you read

Matthew 18, 15 through 17? You know what it is? He said, yeah, I think so. I said, let me refresh you. And I went through your brother's sins.

You go to him personally. If he doesn't hear you, you take another one with you. If not, you tell it to the church.

There's a lot in that. But I explained to this fellow, I said, you have to realize this man has been approached by individuals, by family, by his family, within his own family, other ministers, other friends.

He's been approached by churches, and he will not listen. What does the

Bible say? How do you regard a person like that? He says, well, you tell me. I said, Gentile and a tax gatherer is an unbeliever.

Now, if I'm going to take that seriously, and I do, that's what we have to say with Harold Campion.

I say it with grief, but what else do you conclude from all of this? If the

Bible means anything, it means that this is a man who, because he would not listen to others and really would not repent of his sin, has to be regarded as an unbeliever, let alone the fact that there's all the warnings in the

Scriptures about false teaching. So I don't like answering the question that way, but to be faithful to the

Word of God, I have to. And of course, I think that judging from your answer,

Christopher in Suffolk County needs to have something he had in his question corrected. You would not consider him our brother,

Mr. Campion. No, I would not. You can't. I mean, heretics, and again,

I hate to say this, because the way the Lord used the man over the years, but I mean, the Lord used even

King Saul for a time, and look what happened at his time. You've got Demas, who having loved the present world, has forsaken me.

I mean, you know, these things happen. Apostasy is a real thing in the Christian life, and so is heresy.

And so rather than seeing Harold Campion as kind of a model of this wonderful Christian teacher who maybe didn't do everything quite right, it's a model of what heresy does.

Yes, and the way that people blindly followed him above the

Scriptures, I can still remember a man who was a disciple of Mr.

Campion. He used to, in the days when Mr. Campion used to encourage people to go to church, he would, as most

Campionites, as they became known, he would bounce from church to church to church only really to condemn what they were doing and saying.

And this, I met this person in the narthex of the church. This is actually after having met him several times and experiencing his venom about what we were teaching there at Grace Reformed Baptist Church of Long Island.

And I remember him saying to me after the service was over, you know what I don't like about your pastor?

And I said, what's that? And he said, I keep hearing him quoting men like Charles Spurgeon and Jonathan Edwards and Martin Luther and John Calvin and George Whitfield.

Why doesn't he just stick to the Bible and Mr. Campion? I said, did you hear what you just said? I said, what part of the canon did

Mr. Campion write? But people, they can really, I mean, I think it's healthy to have heroes in the faith, but when they become idols, this is a very dangerous thing, isn't it?

Yeah, exactly. It was, and it was cultic. I actually did kind of a search to see if this book on the sociological perspective on camping had come up, and I couldn't find it, but I mean, people, if they're interested in this, should watch.

There are books that are, that will be coming out that deal with this phenomenon, but I would much rather. You said you had another question.

Did you want to deal with that one too? I'll deal with whatever you would like to, brother.

Yeah, deal with the question. I do want to talk about Redeemer, but I'm interested what your patient listeners have asked.

Okay, let's see, we have Harrison in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, who wants to know, do you agree that Mr.

Campion was way off base and unbiblical when he said that people who were divorced, who could never, if they remarried, have normal marital relations with their new spouses?

Yeah, Harold Campion was off on the marriage -divorce issue. I mean, that's for another day.

The exclusionary clause, it's given in Matthew 19, that says except for fornication, makes an allowance for sexual activity by one partner married to another, makes, the word is porneia, makes that physical sexual activity of one married partner with someone else, does make that a ground permitting divorce, doesn't command it, but it permits it, and at the same time, that clause, as it's used in Matthew 19 and in Matthew 6, or 5, rather, it applies as well in remarriage, when there has been biblical grounds for divorce, which are basically the desertion of an unbeliever, 1

Corinthians 7, or sexual unfaithfulness, breaking the marriage bonds and a person's permission, that party is then free to remarry, and one of the things that I'm just struck with,

Chris, in this whole issue, which we can discuss on another day, is that the scriptures say it isn't good for a person, a man, to be alone, and when you consign a divorced person to say you can never get married again, let alone if you get married, for some reason you can't have conjugal relations, which is idiotic, it's inhuman.

That's a massive question, but now Campion was off base on that, it was another one of these areas where, quite frankly, he followed up his followers incredibly.

I'd like to assert a question here. Okay, great. One of the things, we've talked a lot about heresy today, one of the things

I wanted to ask you to comment on is, how important is it for a church, and the evangelical church in the

U .S. lacks this a lot, to have some form of confession or structure in which to define its doctrine?

Oh, absolutely, yeah, great question, Charlie. I always tell people, every church has a confession. The thing is, do they write it down, or is it what the preacher happens to believe that week?

Because in the nature of the case, every minister, or every body of church governors, is going to have a belief system out of which he or they work.

And what we tell people, which is very up front with our commitment to the Westminster Confession of Faith, is adopted by the

Orthodox Presbyterian Church and the larger and shorter catechism, but it's very important.

It's a testimony to the world, it's a reminder for us, so that we keep our own integrity, and it's also a statement that we're not lone rangers, we are connected with the church of the past.

Yeah, to me, that's extremely important, when a person belongs to a church, that they ask for, what is the structure, what's the structure or doctrine this church believes?

Because we could go London 6 to 89, or Westminster, or Dort, or Heidelberg, but all of those are important, because without a systematic theology, you don't really understand

Scripture. Yeah, and when you have a church that's right up front about its commitments, then you really do have fellowship together.

You know where the other one stands on things, you could speak with them, otherwise you're dealing with moving targets.

Exactly. And it's kind of humorous when you read a church bulletin at a specific congregation that will have a long list of things that they do or do not do, and then one of them will be, this church believes in no creed but the

Bible. And you're holding their creed in your hand, the bulletin. Exactly.

We have RJ in White Plains, New York, who wants to know, what has become of many of these people who disassociated themselves from the church to follow

Mr. Camping, and what has become of Family Radio? Do any of their affiliates still exist?

Yeah, they still have Family Radio, still. They've sold a number of their stations. They sold

WMCA, I'm sorry, they sold WFME in West Orange, New Jersey, because frankly, they needed the money.

To a country station, right? Yeah, to a country station. Now, they've subsequently purchased another station in the

New York area that they have. I think it's called WFME, if I'm not mistaken, they changed the call letters.

I think it's an AM station. But anyway, they still have stations, they still have the religious programming, they have the old -time hymns, they have some of the

Bible reading programs. But most of it, I think about 90 to 95 % of that programming is in -house.

Of course, they don't use camping stuff anymore because it's a real embarrassment. At least, I don't think they use much of it anymore.

But yeah, they're still around. And it's kind of a generally evangelical

Bible -believing programming. But do they actually have sermons by pastors? No, I don't think so.

I don't know, Chris, I don't follow up with it, so I doubt it. Certainly, they're going to expunge anything connected with the church.

As far as what happened to their followers, some of them became utterly disillusioned.

They're not in any church life at all, they're still licking their wounds because they gave up so much money for this fighting with windmills with respect to the return of the

Lord. I don't know if many have returned to the church and are repentant.

That's an interesting question, because there was fear instilled in them that if they became a member of the church, they could not be saved.

And when you have that kind of dangerous error pressing on your conscience, who knows what it's going to do to you.

Yeah, I'm not obviously going to identify the person, but I had a close friend who was my best friend, the friend that I spent most time with when

I was a brand new Christian and a young single man, and he was one of the most godly people

I knew. And he unfortunately got sucked into the heresies of herald camping, and to this day he does not belong to a church.

I would think that's pretty common. I mean, that would be my surprise. One of the things we had to deal with over the years is the fallout in the families of people who were influenced by this.

I think their parents sucked up in this stuff, and I think their parents are lunatics. And then you try to work with that.

So again, this was the equivalent, at least within the generally reformed community, of dropping the bomb on Hiroshima.

I mean, it was devastating, and we're still having to clean up the fallout from it.

Well, thank you, R .J. in White Plains, New York. Keep listening to Iron Sharpens Iron and spreading the word about it there.

And I don't believe he is very far from the OPC in Westchester, correct?

Isn't that right? Mount Vernon, yeah. West Sydney Avenue and Mount Vernon, yeah. So let's talk about now the rise of Redeemer Broadcasting and also obviously the

Reformation Metro New York ministry that you are the founder of. I am very happy to do that because I'm a strong believer in lighting candles rather than cursing darkness.

I don't know the exact dates, and I really tried to get my dear brother Dan Elmendorf on the show, but he is blessedly swamped with his work with Redeemer Broadcasting.

So I said, well, let me pinch hit for you today. I can't do it as well as he did. It was the early part of the 2000s.

It was clear that family radio was not going to change. By that time, there had been board member defections, and some people had left.

I mean, it was sad. And Dan Elmendorf, who remains a ruling elder in the

Presbyterian Church in America, he lives outside of the Kingston, New York area. Dan became very burdened to have an alternative to family radio, and he drew his pastor,

John Vance, and me into this and a few others that he trusted, people who would work with family radio.

And Dan, over the series of months, because Dan has worked with IBM, he had done work with family radio, he knows the technical end of radio inside and out.

You know, Chris, you and I, we're production guys, right? But we know that there's whole other world of technicians, and they make what we do get out on the radio.

Dan's that type of guy. He's a techie, and a good one. Anyway, so Dan gets counsel and decides to go ahead and start a radio network that was structured exactly like family radio.

Same time frames, the same end times for programs where you have your advertisements and so on.

Because family stations is a non -commercial Christian station, and you're not supposed to advertise for -profit things, but you do have breaks to promote, as you do,

Chris, not -for -profit things. Anyway, so Dan has essentially a seven -day -a -week replacement for family radio, and it was designed so that if you had a station on Long Island, and it was a family radio affiliate, and you say, hey, we don't want to pump this heresy into the airwaves anymore, you could separate from family radio, however that was done, and within about a day, you would have a complete replacement of programming with Redeemer Broadcasting.

Again, it was always biblically faithful programming, and what Dan was committed to and is today in Redeemer Broadcasting, they're committed to historic biblical

Christianity. Like family radio, they want to have a blend of teaching and music, they're big on listener interaction, they support the church and the family, and the huge thing is they are committed to the

Reformed confessions. Charlie, apropos of your comment, they want all of their programming to be faithful to one of the confessions that grew out of the

Protestant Reformation. That is one of the reasons why I love Redeemer Broadcasting.

So this is all set up, it comes over a period of time.

What happened, though, is things were set up so it really became very difficult for affiliates of family radio to leave.

The board of family radio, I think, basically said, we're not going to sell our stations to other

Christian organizations. Hence, you have WFME, that's now a country station.

There are reports of even some very bizarre stuff that happens selling their shortwave stations. But that sort of pulled the carpet out from Dan.

Dan really thought there was going to be a number of stations. I mean, by this time, you had dozens of family stations across the country, and Dan was thinking that at least a good proportion of these would associate with Redeemer Broadcasting, and that did not happen.

So, Redeemer Broadcasting, and your audience can get the website, RedeemerBroadcasting .org,

it's a not -for -profit corporation, and you can just go to RedeemerBroadcasting .org

and from the first page, you'll get some of their programming and so on. So they've developed their programming, and now they have sort of the mother station, which is in the

Kingston, New York area. They have a number of translators, which basically brings Redeemer Broadcasting to other parts of the

Hudson Valley corridor, midway between New York City and Albany.

What's very interesting is there's a number of prisons up in that area, and of course, they're able to pick up Redeemer Broadcasting, and the impact of Redeemer Broadcasting in those prisons has been really quite remarkable, because it's biblically faithful material.

And then since then, and now you can go on and ask questions, they have a station in the south of Washington, D .C.

area, a terrestrial station, as we call it, and they also now have a station which is in Wayne, New Jersey, that is under the auspices of a

United Reformed Churches of North America congregation. And Dan works with other

Christian stations that may kind of borrow some of the material from Redeemer, even though they don't have all the programming there.

But for your audience, Redeemer Broadcasting is meant to be the alternative, the biblically faithful alternative to family radio.

And once again, if anybody would like to find out more about Redeemer Broadcasting, go to redeemerbroadcasting .org,

redeemerbroadcasting .org. And a mutual friend of Pastor Bill and Charlie Liebert, from a

Redeemer Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Carlisle, Arthur, reminded me that Robertson is involved in the debate this

Friday. He is taking the Roman Catholic position in the debate on Mary, sinless queen of heaven or sinner saved by grace.

Robert St. Genes was once a host of a program on family radio when he was a professing

Protestant. That's right. One thing your audience would be interested in, family radio,

Redeemer Broadcasting does good work in dealing with applying the scriptures to different political issues and so on, although it is not a political station.

But on Saturdays, they have a program called Holding All Things Together, otherwise known as HAT, Holding All Things Together, a half -hour program, and they have commentary basically on the weekly events.

That's actually where my visit to the pastor's study was revived, so to speak, was on a two -and -a -half -minute thing that I do on Holding All Things Together each week.

But I really urge your listeners to check out the RedeemerBroadcasting .org website.

They'll have the full schedule of programming there, and then, of course, you can live stream.

There's the information there, so you can live stream through all the different gadgets, Windows Media Player and TuneIn Radio and Winamp and iTunes and all that.

You've got to get your platform set for that, but you can do that. Or if you have an internet radio, which we have, we have an internet radio, and you can pick up any live streaming that you can get on your computer, you can get on an internet radio.

So your audience really should be familiar with those mechanisms. And by the way,

Arthur, since you are a first -time, well, I wouldn't call you a questioner, because you actually made a comment, but since this is the first time that you ever, that I know of, that I can remember, anyway, contributed to the

Iron Sharpens Iron broadcast with your own thoughts on something, you are getting a free

New American Standard Bible, compliments of the publishers of the NASB, which will be shipped to you by our friends at Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, CVBBS .com

in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. So please give us your full mailing address, Arthur, so we can have that shipped out to you as soon as possible.

We're going to our final break right now. If anybody else would like to join us on the air with a question, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com,

chrisarnson at gmail .com, and please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the

USA. Don't go away, we'll be right back with Pastor Bill Shishko of a visit to the pastor's study right after these messages.

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Again, 717 -254 -6433. Chris Arnzen here, and I can't wait to head down to Atlanta, Georgia, and here's my friend

Dr. James White to tell you why. Hi, I'm James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries. I hope you join me at the

G3 conference hosted by Pastor Josh Weiss and Praise Mill Baptist Church at the

Georgia International Convention Center in Atlanta, January 19th through the 21st, in celebration of the 500th anniversary of the

Protestant Reformation. I'll be joined by Paul Washer, Steve Lawson, D .A. Carson, Vody Balcombe, Conrad M.

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That's G3conference .com. Thanks, James. Make sure you greet me at the

Iron Sharpens Iron exhibit booth while you're there. Hi, I'm Pastor Bill Shishko, inviting you to tune in to A Visit to the

Pastors Study every Saturday from 12 noon to 1 p .m. Eastern Time on WLIE Radio, www .wlie540am

.com. We bring biblically faithful pastoral ministry to you, and we invite you to visit the

Pastors Study by calling in with your questions. Our time will be lively, useful, and I assure you, never dull.

Join us this Saturday at 12 noon Eastern Time for a visit to the Pastors Study, because everyone needs a pastor.

Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzin on the air with that man that you just heard, Pastor Bill Shishko of the

Orthodox Presbyterian Church denomination, faithfully served as the pastor of the

Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Franklin Square for decades, going back to the 1980s, I believe, and recently launched the

Reformation Metro New York ministry that we will be discussing now.

And he is now, as I have been repeating it, as you just heard in that commercial, he is hosting

A Visit to the Pastors Study every Saturday on wlie540am .com.

But it's great to be a part in some way of that new broadcast that you have,

Pastor Bill, and I'm very excited about it. Well, we are too, Chris. Of course, you and I have worked together for lots of years, and I can't thank you enough for all the help that you rendered in linking us up with WLIE.

More than one person has quipped those are interesting call letters for a Christian station. Well, I appreciate the time,

Chris. Reformation Metro New York is an agency of what we call our

Presbytery of Connecticut and Southern New York of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. We're a regional group of churches in Connecticut and Southern New York, and this is a way, actually, of enabling us to focus on media.

It is also a way we get word out. We've let people know we need to raise funds because it's so expensive to do church planting here in metropolitan

New York, and it seems that every church body that wants to do church planting in New York has some way of some agency by which you can raise funds for this area.

But anyway, ours is Reformation Metro New York, which is a not -for -profit corporation.

And what we're doing is, the organization was formed in 2015, but my labors as a regional home missionary and with Reformation Metro New York really didn't begin until September of this last year, 2016.

And it has been thrilling to see what the Lord has done. You, Chris, of course, were very much a part of this.

Our Presbytery was very concerned. We do work with Redeemer Broadcasting Network, but the

Presbytery was concerned that we have a terrestrial station with which we could work that broadcast within the bounds of our

Presbytery, our regional group of churches. And God's amazing providence,

Chris, you were the one that introduced us to WLIE. I'd say during the day it's a 10 ,000 watt station,

Christian station, largely a Hispanic station, very fine facility in Ronkonkoma.

But what's striking is that their broadcast range is exactly the area of our

Presbytery and beyond in these winter months. I don't know, Chris, if I mentioned this to you, but one of our ministers was driving to western

Pennsylvania and could get WLIE all the way through New Jersey.

So there's a little bit of a respite when you're driving through New Jersey and all the way into Pennsylvania. So that station in itself was an answer to prayer, let alone the fact that that station was the premier telephone talk program station on Long Island.

And they have all the facilities for a talk program, which was what I wanted to do, because one of the things that was said when

I was in the seeking counsel stage about the program that's become a visit to the pastor's study is you're going to have to have a studio with a facility to not only receive the calls, but also you have a, when it's live programming, you have to have a delay system in case something untoward happens.

And WLIE's got all of that. Their engineers are terrific. I mean, I cannot thank

God enough for the people that are there at that station and the help that they've rendered.

And we just had a ball with them. The other piece, the first piece was, of course, my being called as a regional home missionary and the

Presbytery authorizing me to do this. So it's a call. It's a call to be, I'm just not bound to one particular church.

The second was the provision for WLIE. And the third was the provision, a fascinating story in itself, of a donor who happens to own a number of pharmacies here on Long Island and elsewhere, very fine, wonderfully fine, committed

Christian. And on God's providence, I've gotten to know him. And he basically,

I had offered to him, you had arranged an hour and a half program. I said,

I, you know, if you'd be willing to do the commercials, I'll do the program. And you do the, and you do the, and I'll do the commercials for you.

And he very graciously said, look, keep your program. One hour, I'll pay for one hour, just pay up front for that for a year.

And we'll take the other 30 minutes and you can promote my pharmacies on this program, which is

HealthWise. So another wonderful answer to prayer, we have what is basically a 55 -minute program, 12 noon to 1255.

And we, I'm actually right now looking at the boxes that came in today with the equipment so that we can simulcast a visit to the pastor's study from WLIE through the

Redeemer Broadcasting Network. And of course the program will be streamed through both areas.

So that is, I mean, I could tell you more about specifics, but that's an amazing answer to prayer in providing what really ends up being a radio voice for the

Orthodox Presbyterian churches and for other churches in what we call NAPARC, the

North American Presbyterian Reform Council. Yes. And I am just so thrilled because there seems to be few and far between really solidly reformed ministries on the radio, especially when you're talking about local ministries.

And it's just a sad thing that the airwaves are dominated by people who are sometimes vehemently opposed to what we believe and sometimes just pathetically shallow and wishy -washy.

And you might as well be listening to Dr. Phil or some secular self -help guru.

I mean, it's pathetic, the state of the media. Well, what's interesting, and this kind of gets as far afield, but when you start studying

Christian radio from say, oh, I don't know, the late 1970s or so,

Christian radio is music. It all has to do with contemporary Christian music and so on.

And there's very little that actually deals with the preaching, the broadcasting, and so on.

We're a minority in a minority when it comes to Christian radio. We have

B .B. in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, who wants to know, is your live call -in show open to any question regarding the

Christian faith at all? Yeah, the answer is yes. We don't have an open forum kind of thing yet where people can just call in about anything.

We just got started on Saturday, November 26th. Here's the basic format. I give a brief monologue on the topic of choice.

We've dealt with shepherds after a pastor's heart, shepherds after God's own heart.

We've dealt with getting the church beyond the church walls. We've talked about holding to the changeless and a changing world.

And it's your program, Chris, is very doctrinal oriented, it's controversial, and so on.

This is really what it says. The studio is the pastor's study, and we deal with the kinds of things that you would deal with when you're talking with a pastor.

I've had guest pastors with me, some local men, including my own son who's a minister in Queens.

And part of what I'm trying to do is get ministers comfortable with using radio.

I've worked with three men locally who are just gems with this. But to answer your friend's question, yes, what

I would urge you to do is you listen to the program on W -L -I -E, just Google it,

W -L -I -E 540 AM, and you'll find out how you can program.

And so your callers know the live call -in number is 631 -955 -5400, 631 -955 -5400.

What we're going to do, this is just as of last week, I mean, Chris, you and I haven't had a chance to chat about this.

Of course, funds came in so we could purchase these ZIP -1, Telus ZIP -1

IP Codex, which is real fancy lingo for saying a couple of electronic boxes that talk to one another.

One will be from W -L -I -E and the other will be at the Redeemer headquarters up there outside of Kingston, New York, and that will enable us to simulcast.

So anybody getting Redeemer stations or either terrestrial or streaming or W -L -I -E or at stream, they'll be able to get the program, they can call in.

But I would really urge your listener to listen Saturday. The topic that we're dealing with this week, interestingly, is the

Christian politics. I have Dr. David Ennis from the King's, Professor of Political Science at the

King's College as my guest, and we're looking ahead to the inauguration of President Trump the

Friday after the program, so we're going to be talking about that. But I've been told there isn't a program like this.

In fact, Chris, I don't really think there's another program like yours in that there are men who, you know, they'll have their sermons edited and then they put them on the radio or they just kind of talk for 15 minutes or something, but there is precious little interaction on the radio.

You have Hank Hanegraaff, the Bible Answer Man, and some others dealing with particular topics, but very, very little that includes call -in as we do dealing with issues.

So this is kind of a niche that we have, and I'm looking forward to seeing how the Lord will use that.

CJ from Lindenhurst, Long Island, New York wants to know, are you making sure that the local pastor and the local church are not being overlooked by listeners?

Sometimes in the past of media, and obviously today, we have people who are members of congregations giving what should be their gift to their local church to radio and TV ministries, and looking upon the radio and TV minister as primarily their source of nourishment biblically rather than their own church, isn't this a dangerous thing?

Yeah, I appreciate CJ's question. One of the lines I use every week is, look, we're about the church, and we are, of course, this is somewhat against the backdrop of the herald camping heretical stuff, but it's also against the backdrop of individuals who just want to promote their own personal ministry, fill in the blank with the name.

That is absolutely not what we're doing. I make it clear in there that we are about the church, we're about biblically faithful churches.

Of course, we mention the Orthodox Presbyterian churches, because this is their ministry to this area, but when people contact me,

I will try to find out faithful Reformed churches in their area and link them up with that, but it's a great question, and we're exactly the opposite of wanting to detract from the local church.

The fact is, we want to promote the local church, but we want to promote faithful local churches and faithful pastors.

Yeah, well, you said something very key there, faithful local churches and faithful pastors, because sadly, not everybody listening to a quality radio program like yours is going to be in a biblically faithful church, and sometimes that is the place where they're getting their primary nourishment, because they're not getting it from their own pulpit, and obviously you would be challenging them to find a biblically faithful church.

Yeah, we make it clear at the end, I'll kind of give teasers about what that is, and then urge people, they can use my email for the program, it's visitpastorbill, all one word, visitpastorbill at gmail .com,

or they can call me, my study number is 516 -593 -1507, 516 -593 -1507, and or you can just use my w shishko at gmail .com,

but people contact me, and I try to field their questions, and either by email or by phone call, and try to steer them to a faithful church.

And as far as guests and a schedule going into the near future, do you have a topic, and I know you already mentioned

David Innis, but other than David? Dr. Innis, and then we're actually on the 21st of this month, because I'm going to be away at a

Presbytery meeting appropriately, we're going to be replaying the first program, which is our pilot program on Shepherds After God's Own Heart, which in a real sense

I guess is kind of a kind of a heartthrob of the whole program. Pastor Mike Ploughman was my guest for that from the

OPC in Bohemia, New York, and then on the 28th, we have, I'm really,

Charles, this is Charlie, this is apropos of your comment, I have Dr. Reverend Jim Campbell, who is an ordained minister in the

OPC and a teacher up in our congregation in Hamden, Connecticut, and Jim and I are planning on kind of second phase of Reformation Metro New York work, which are going to be 10 -minute interactive introductions to, we'll begin with the

Westminster Confession of Faith, try to do that over a three -year period for what we're calling Reformation Seminary of the

Air, but Jim Campbell is going to be my guest on the 28th, and we're going to be dealing with creeds and confessions, and the same topic,

Charlie, that you'd mentioned, and then once we kick into February, without belaboring all the dates, that's our

Missions Month, and we're going to be dealing with lessons, with the challenges of church planting in North America in the 21st century, we're going to have one fascinating one with a man who was a missionary in Africa for years and is now working with home missions in the

United States, and the lessons from foreign missions for home missions in the

United States are really quite interesting, then we're going to be dealing with some short -term missionaries for a program on the 18th and what that entails, and then

I have one of the programs that we've got scheduled coming up, I think the next month, is going to be with Evangelism in March, a couple of public school teachers who are

Christians talking about their work in the public schools, so these are the things upcoming, and it really gives people a window on what church ministry is all about, the different facets of it.

I'm greatly encouraged by that, because I move in a lot of Christian circles here, where I'm in Carlisle, also when

I was in North Carolina, and one of the things that is very obvious is, so many Christians are just barren of doctrine.

Yeah, that's exactly. When I was getting counsel about the program,

I spoke with a lot of people about essentially the way the program should be structured, what we do, and so on, and the manager of a

Christian station up in Connecticut, Mark Shannon of WYHS, who's a gem of a guy, he said, and I don't know that he would share our reform convictions, but he has a very responsible evangelical view, and he said basically, he said there is an absolute poverty of good biblical content in radio programming, and good doctrinal content, and this is, and interestingly, that's when family radio started in 1959, that was what they wanted to do.

They wanted to promote historic biblical Christianity through the airwaves, of course they're not doing that now, so I think a lot,

Chris, of what you're doing, what Redeemer Broadcasting is doing, what we're wanting to do with Reformation Metro New York is exactly that, and it is a crying need in our day.

Yes, one of the things that you hear a lot of today, and you've been hearing about it for actually probably well over a decade, is doctrine divides, and the battle cry of these modern -day ecumenists basically is let's just lift up Jesus, but the problem with that is is that which

Jesus? And also, isn't division very appropriate?

I mean, unity is not the end all or the highest goal of our mission as Christians, is it?

Yeah, well, Chris, you and I are wired the same way. First Corinthians chapter 11, the Apostle Paul says, there must, there must, it is necessary that there be divisions among you, that those who are approved might be known by all, and this is one of these dark dynamics in the

Christian life. We don't like to think about it, but it's true. Faithfulness to biblical doctrine is, it may well divide people.

People show their true colors when it comes to adherence to biblical doctrine.

I hate to keep resurrecting the camping thing, but there's an example of it. I mean, this man showed he was not in the orbit of historic

Christianity by the way he promoted doctrine that was in error. So yeah, yeah, so if doctrine divides, sure it divides.

The gospel divides. There's darkness and light, there's truth and error, there's right and wrong, so you know, yes, the answer is yes, doctrine does divide.

We just need to do it without being necessarily divisive. Right, and obviously we both know of ultra -hyper -separatists within predominantly fundamentalist groups, but there are even reformed groups that are the same way who really are condemning brothers in Christ for whom

Jesus died, and they're condemning them and assigning them to hell because of minor differences or comparatively minor issues.

Well I think that's why, Chris, what you're doing is such a testimony, because you and I differ. You're a Baptist and I'm a

Presbyterian, but on the doctrines of grace we're one, and the issue is the gospel.

The issue isn't church government or baptism or your view of the Lord's Supper. Those have their place, but the big place is

Christ and the gospel, and that's why, you know, you get into the issue, as I appreciate you do, is

Arminianism as a system? Is it the gospel? The answer is no, it's not. Does that mean that Arminians are not

Christians? No, we're not saying that, but as a system, anything that pivots salvation on the work of man, frankly, it's blasphemous.

Now, that's not what Arminian friends intend, but for programs like yours, draw out the implications of these things and point out what historic

Christianity is and bring more of it on. Well, I'd like you to wrap up the program in the next four minutes with what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners.

Wow, what I want etched most in the hearts and the minds of listeners is Jesus Christ and Him crucified and resurrected and raised.

He's alive and at work and He saves. I don't need to take four minutes for that. You want me to talk about Reformation Metro New York?

Yeah, that's what I actually meant. That's great. That's great. Yeah. Okay. I'd love the folks to contact me.

How does that make it real easy about Reformation Metro New York? If you're interested in missions that are faithfully reformed, working through the broadcast media,

Reformation Metro New York should be on your radar screen. Probably the best thing is to email me at wshi .shko

.com or you can call me if you want.

You'll get my voicemail, but I'll call you back. My study number is 516 -593 -1507.

I've had people say, go a little bit slower giving the numbers. I can't stand these commercials where they give a phone number eight times in one minute.

516 -593 -1507. Contact me. If you send me your address,

I'll send you some of the promotional material for Reformation Metro New York. Certainly pray for us. Any church planting endeavor in the

New York City area, Metropolitan New York is a big challenge. We're not a mission field singular.

We are mission fields plural. Whether it's on Long Island or in Queens or up in Westchester County or Southern Connecticut or anywhere in between, we're all facing the challenge of what's called post -secularism, if you want to figure that out.

Anyway, Reformation Metro New York. I'd love to have your listeners, because you're not on Saturday at 12 to 1, right?

No, I am not. Oh, well, then we'll borrow some of your listeners. We won't steal yours, and you won't steal ours either.

WLIE 540 AM. You can google that in.

You'll get the station, and it'll show you how to stream. It's real easy. The program is a visit to the pastor's study.

It is at 12 o 'clock noon, really till 1255 on Saturday.

I'd love to have your listeners listen. They can actually call Chris. They're going to be put on hold, but I can speak with them, and they can say, hey,

I'm a real Chris Arnzen fan. Do you mind if I take a few seconds to promote Iron Sharp and Zion?

And I'll say, sure, go ahead and do it. See that, Chris? Symbiotic relationships are good, too, but I'd love to have your people listen to a visit to the pastor's study, because I tell everyone, everyone needs a pastor.

All right. Well, definitely, I'm urging, in fact, I have, even when you're not on my program, I've urged my listeners to call you with a question, and also to let you know that they heard about a visit to the pastor's study from Iron Sharp and Zion Radio.

Well, I want to remind everybody that this Thursday, we have the pastor's luncheon for any man in ministry leadership, whether you're a pastor, elder, deacon, a leader in a parachurch organization.

Please let us know by 12 noon tomorrow if you are planning to come to the Carlisle Vault, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, this

Thursday with our keynote speaker, Dr. Tony Costa from Toronto Baptist Seminary, and everything is free.

The food is free, and you are going to be leaving with hundreds of dollars worth of free books donated by major Christian publishers all over the

United States and the United Kingdom. So email me at chrisarnsen at gmail .com

if you intend to come. Also, we are looking for two volunteers that could be men, women, or teenagers to assist the chef in serving food at the pastor's luncheon.

And last but not least, of course, don't forget about the Great Debate at the

Carlisle Theatre. This is at 7 p .m. Friday the 13th, featuring Dr.

Tony Costa and Roman Catholic theologian Robertson Jennis on Mary, Sinless Queen of Heaven or Sinner Saved by Grace.

This is a ticketed event that requires a five -dollar ticket, and for more details email me at chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

chrisarnsen at gmail .com, and put either luncheon, debate, or both in the subject line.

We look forward to seeing many of you there, God willing, and I look forward to meeting many of you also in Atlanta, Georgia next week at the

G3 Conference. I want all of you to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater

Savior than you are a sinner. We look forward to hearing from you and your questions for our guests tomorrow on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

God bless. Oh, by the way, let's not forget Charlie Liebert, sixdaycreation .com, sixdaycreation .com,