The Phoenix and Olive Branch
The Message, when you’re in it, can feel like an island. You might think every popular idea and every tenet by which Message believers live came directly from the prophet, William Branham. That just isn’t the case.
In the Message, materials like Nancy Campbell’s Above Rubies magazine and Vision Forum’s Beautiful Girlhood are very popular. When I was growing up, Josh Harris’s I Kissed Dating Goodbye was all the rage. In this way, Message believers are very much a part of the evangelical/fundamentalist subculture in America, even though they do tend to believe the non-Message evangelicals are not part of the Bride of Christ and thus lesser in the Kingdom of God. They are separatist, but not wholly isolationist.
My friend Libby Anne has made a blog to compile various perspectives combating the influence of Vision Forum in particular. You can find the blog here:
Vision Forum is an idea factory for gender roles and Christian Reconstructionist thinking. They churn out literature, lesson plans, workbooks and even toys on a large scale, which are sold at homeschool conventions and other religious venues. If you were a girl in the Message and read Beautiful Girlhood or the Elsie Dinsmore book series, chances are your family patronized Vision Forum. This is just as relevant for Message folks as for “mainstream” evangelicals, and I encourage you to check out some of what the contributors have written.
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