3) A Brief History of Bible Based Ministries
In 1992 my second book was published: The Pagan Festivals of Christmas and Easter. It was printed in the U.S. This book documents the fact that these festivals are of pagan and Popish origin: a fact which was once well known to Protestants, but which is no longer the case. This too continues to be widely distributed, and has helped many to see the unbiblical nature of these festivals, and to reject them as their Protestant forebears in the faith once did.
And as we continued to send out our materials, not only to professing Christians but to Papists as well, we received many interesting letters. Many were favourable, and we always rejoiced when one told of the Lord’s work in his or her heart as a result of reading the literature or listening to the sermons. From time to time, of course, as we continued to send Gospel tracts to priests, monks and nuns, we received angry and hate-filled responses. Once, for example, a priest of Rome sent two of our tracts back to us, with his comments scrawled all over them. Some of his comments were: “God bless our Pope. The Great! The Good!” “Ride on to Hell!” “You Idiot! Try and study the Faith before you judge!” “You are a poor fool. Leave our Church alone! Only fools act the way you do.” “You turn away from your rubbish. Poor fool!” And this one, scrawled next to a paragraph in the tract describing Rome’s massacres of Christians: “Good” (and people believe Rome has changed, and is sweet and kind today, loving the Protestants and sorry for what it did to them in the past?).
A prominent Roman Catholic priest called me on the phone, branding the tracts “filth”, full of “half-truths”, etc.; and yet, when asked if he could tell us what, precisely, was incorrect in the literature, he then replied that he had never read them!
In 1993 we again visited the United States. During this trip I was interviewed on radio in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, about the events taking place in South Africa, and how they would affect the Christian Church. And in the “Ministry Report” in the magazine after our U.S. sojourn, I wrote, “We have returned to a South Africa in the throes of a violent revolution and on the brink of a Communist takeover”. Indeed we were just a few short months away from the 1994 election which brought the Communists to power. Nearer the time I wrote, “In a matter of weeks now, an election will be held in South Africa which (unless the Lord is pleased to intervene) will see the Communist-controlled African National Congress come to power; and a great, prosperous, free country will be in the hands of men bent on an absolute dictatorship, and the eradication of biblical Christianity.”
In the 1980s, more than ever before, South Africa became the centre of a worldwide assault, and everywhere priests of Rome, and so-called “Protestant” ministers, were supporting the South African Communist Party and its partner, the African National Congress (ANC). The diabolical doctrine of liberation theology (religious Communism) was in full swing. It thus became an important part of the work of Bible Based Ministries to expose the role of the Vatican, the World Council of Churches and the South African Council of Churches, in supporting the Communist revolution against South Africa. The country was at war; and it was a war that it was losing. In 1987 I wrote in our newsletter: “South Africa is the focus of the world right now. As in other African lands, the Roman Catholic Institution is using Liberation Theology to gain control over South Africa and her people, traditionally a nominally ‘Protestant’ country (and for that reason a target of the Vatican). Shouting its mouth off about ‘human rights violations’ in South Africa, the greatest violator of ‘human rights’ in the history of mankind has plans of her own for this country – and Marxism is the muscle she is using to achieve her purposes.”
Today we live in the very Communist country for which the Vatican and the WCC worked so hard. The world forces arrayed against South Africa were ultimately successful: in 1994 the Communist-controlled ANC took power, via a rigged election and after a brutal revolution that left over 50 000 people dead. The lead article of the April-May 1994 issue of the Bible Based Ministries Magazine was, “South Africa Now Under Communist Domination!”
The world rejoiced and viewed the ANC’s victory as a “victory for democracy”, but in reality it was an immense tragedy. Ever since then, the country has been in freefall in every possible way: politically, economically, morally. Under ANC rule, law and order collapsed: South Africa became a violent and increasingly lawless country, with the highest murder rate in the world; health care and education deteriorated rapidly; and most ominous of all for believers, there were increasing signs of growing intolerance towards biblical Christianity, as the ecumenical and multifaith movements were encouraged by the government, and laws were implemented which in essence made it illegal to preach the Gospel of the grace of God freely.