The Great Evangelical Disaster...Silence

By Reverend Mark Hunnemann

“The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.”  – Edmund Burke

“The only thing more dangerous than the spoken word is silence.”    – Anonymous

Some of you are familiar with the famous words of Burke – I counted a dozen different versions of them online! To be frank, I have always found them to be haunting.  Occasionally I wonder if there is some great evil in our midst which I am either unaware of or too fearful to speak out about.  Each generation of Christians is responsible before the Lord to detect and confront the evils of their own generation...I would recommend The Great Evangelical Disaster, by Dr. Francis Schaeffer, for an excellent, sobering discussion of this topic.  If I could, I would make it required reading for every Bible-believing pastor, but it is equally important for non-pastors. It is not often I recommend a book on here, but this is critical.

When you combine these two profound sayings (which I believe they are), then the common notion of how a culture unravels, well – unravels. It does not take everyone becoming personally very evil, as in the days of Noah (the lone exception), for evil to triumph and society to implode. The U.S. today still has tens of millions of morally decent and godly people, but still it is rapidly declining morally and spiritually.  Why?  Please note that “doing nothing” and “silence” are passive sins of omission. They don’t have the look and feel of sins of commission. Did we not learn anything from the churches during the Nazi regime? Of course they were not massacring the millions themselves, BUT MOST WERE SILENT regarding a holocaust they knew was happening.  Hence (and this is key) they accommodated the evil and allowed it to grow. If Christians had been doers of the word (James) then Hitler never would have come to power.  But like so many, the wallet was the ultimate criterion of determining who they voted for.  They, like we, lacked a Christian mind.  We don’t think with a Biblical worldview.  Hitler showed the danger of the spoken word, but German pastors revealed how silence is even more dangerous..

Since a great number of good people are doing nothing and remaining silent, then a great evil is triumphing in our culture.  In fact, it has turned into a global spiritual pandemic, but most pastors are not saying a word about it.  I am referring to the juggernaut known as spiritism or the belief in – and contact with – the dead.  If we don’t see this as a great evil then we simply don’t understand the Bible or reality.  Ghosts are either real or we are being demonically deceived on an unprecedented scale.  Once a person grasps the enormous scope of the deception, as well as the eternal and temporally significant ramifications of it, then it would be morally monstrous to be silent about it. Suppose you had the cure for a pandemic that was worse than the Black Plague, but most people ridiculed the notion of there even being a plague: what should you do?  Despite the criticism and being branded “negative” (horror of horrors today), silence simply would not be an option.  You would have a moral obligation before God to try to save as many lives as possible and educate people.  Today we are facing one of the worst spiritual pandemics in history.  That is precisely the passion that drove the writing of  Seeing Ghosts through God’s Eyes; to educate and equip folks to grasp the horror of great darkness that has befallen us.  I plead with you to winsomely discuss this with your pastor.  They are the key – please don’t let us repeat the failure of silence displayed by the German pastors and church during Hitler’s reign of terror.  In addition, there are opportunities that naturally arise for us to share with others regarding this pandemic. Please….do and say, do and say – or our grandchildren will be living in a howling wasteland due to OUR passivity.