The Conditionalist Faith of Our Fathers, vol. 2

II. Fellowship’s “Psychic Knock at Church’s Door”

Further confirmation of the growing interpenetration of the churches with the psychic appeared in a syndicated Associated Church Press article, released July 15, 1962. Written by a successful “writer-editor in religious education,” Frances Dunlap Heron, the article is revealingly titled, “Psychic Knock at Church’s Door.” It attests the growing conviction concerning the “immortality” of the “human spirit.” The author became fully persuaded through friends on both sides of the Atlantic, but chiefly through the Spiritual Frontiers Fellowship, that her 19-year-old deceased son, Don, “is alive!” ³³ CFF2 1237.2

The focal point of this widespread group study by clergymen and laymen in the churches, with its “thousands of seekers,” is frankly “psychic research.” Such groups have come to look upon the Bible as “a record of man-and-God communion” through extrasensory perception (ESP), and hold that a great many with spiritual aptitudes “can become ‘mediums’ or ‘sensitives,’ capable of communication with ‘discarnates.’” ³⁴ Telltale terms like “precognition,” “clairvoyance,” “clairaudience,” and “telepathy” punctuate the article. The press, Mrs. Heron states, has moved from exposing “mediums” to “interviewing a sensitive,” like Arthur Ford, or Peter Hurkos, the psychometrist. ³⁵ Big-name publishers are producing books on the psychic, ³⁶ which are sedulously studied in these circles. And all this is outside the distinct Spiritualist organization. CFF2 1237.3

1. FROM PSYCHIC SOCIETIES TO CHURCH PENETRATIONS

Mrs. Heron declares that the “Church itself was born at Pentecost in a rush of wind and flame and Spirit-filled utterances.” ³⁷ She reminds us that Queen Victoria’s belief in “spirit communication” was established “through trance medium Robert James Lees.” She then rehearses the founding of the British Society for Psychical Research in 1882, by Cambridge scholar F. W. H. Myers, who held that human personality survives bodily death, and how men like Sir William Crookes, Sir Oliver Lodge, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle became fullfledged believers in spirit communication. Then came the American Society for Psychical Research, in 1888. Shortly after, J. B. Rhine, of Duke University, was “exploring human survival after death.” ³⁸ CFF2 1238.1

But the climax is reached with the formation of the Spiritual Frontiers Fellowship in 1956, constituting the “psychic knock” at the “churches’ Door.” The Fellowship seeks to sponsor and explore this “mystical experience within the church, wherever these experiences relate to... personal survival” and all that such involves. It has already passed the fifteen-hundred-member mark, and is established within all major denominations. Mrs. Heron gives a listing of certain leading members-nationally and often internationally known men, such as Sherwood Eddy, Marcus Bach, Hornell Hart, Henry Leiper, Harmon Bro, and Roy Burkhart, together with the internationally known psychic medium, or “sensitive,” Rev. Arthur Ford, whom she praises as the “spiritual-awareness apostle to the churches.” ³⁹ CFF2 1238.2

His “control personality,” named Fletcher, “takes over his body and voice and transmits messages between discarnates and earth dwellers”—with the “psychic gift” referred to as “the breath of God in each person.” ⁴⁰ As to “how” the communication “takes place,” it is an “out-of-the-body process.” Mrs. Heron asserts: CFF2 1239.1

“Telepathy, on which the psychic door hinges, holds the key.” ⁴¹ CFF2 1239.2

Then the question is posed:
“If, as Jesus demonstrated, the personality survives physical death, then cannot there be communication between a personality in our world and one in the spirit world?” ⁴² CFF2 1239.3

Her answer is an unequivocal Yes. CFF2 1239.4

2. CONTACTS BETWEEN TWO WORLDS ESTABLISHED

Referring to the “physical body” and the “spiritual body,” the one interpenetrated by the other, and “vibrations” and “auraradiations,” ⁴³ Mrs. Heron asserts, using Ford as an example:
“When the physical body dies, the spirit is believed to inhabit the etheric body, dwelling in a spirit world that interpenetrates our physical field of consciousness, on higher rates of vibration than are normally perceptible to our senses. Arthur Ford, in trance, projects with his spiritual body and makes contact with the invisible.” ⁴⁴ CFF2 1239.5

She refers to “hunger for faith based on knowledge,” in this field, as being “far more widespread than is commonly publicized,” and illustrates it by telling of how- CFF2 1239.6

“in Greenwood, South Carolina, recently 174 men turned out for a 7 A.m. breakfast to hear Arthur Ford speak on psychic phenomena and religion. In that Bible Belt town every Protestant minister and the Roman Catholic priest were present!” ⁴⁵ CFF2 1239.7

Such, Mrs. Heron says, is its “revitalizing influence.” CFF2 1239.8

3. PERSUADED PERSONALLY THROUGH FORD “SITTINGS.”

Mrs. Heron asserts that “only an open-minded attitude” will “speed the progress of psychic research within the churches.” She tells how personal “sittings with Arthur Ford, corroborated by two gracious Christian women sensitives in Britain, have proved that our son is still a living personality.” ⁴⁶ And she adds, “In Ford’s daylit room our Don joins us with loving, unselfish concern.” ⁴⁷ There “he” admonishes them, “Don’t ever think of me [Don] as being in a cemetery.” ⁴⁹ And he further counsels them to learn to “communicate directly” with him, without having to use Ford. And he urges Mrs. Heron to “tell people there’s life after death. Everything before is preliminary.... I’ll be here to wait for you.” And, “Don” says significantly, on the broader aspect: “Some of us [in the spirit world] are bombarding the minds of the UN delegates. It’s easier to get through to the Africans than to some of the Europeans.” CFF2 1240.1

That too is significant-not only church but state contacts. It is actual, but thinly veiled Spiritualism-Spiritualism’s trojan horse. CFF2 1240.2

Such are some of Spiritualism’s successful current procedures and penetrations under the sponsorship of the Spiritual Frontiers Fellowship. Revolutionary changes are obviously taking place within the churches, of which most Christians are scarcely aware. The far-reaching significance of these current developments must not be overlooked. Spiritualism is farther advanced toward its goal of universal penetration and persuasion than most of us realize. We are in an hour of fateful transition. The coming crisis, which we have already surveyed, impends. It constitutes a call to awaken to a realization of its bearing on earth’s last events. It is a summons to recognize, repudiate, and expose Spiritualism in all its forms. CFF2 1240.3