Carolyn Elias is a mature lady who loves Jesus, the Scripture as the Word of God, and her United Methodist Church. Passionate that her beloved denomination be true to the Bible as God’s revealed word, since the early 1980’s she has been an active and influential (and now a lifetime) member of the unofficial Good News Committee of the UMC. In this radio discussion Carolyn describes some of the positive contributions of the Good News group: holding Biblical positions on sexuality, marriage, homosexuality, abortion, Sunday School literature, and a reemphasis on evangelism and missions. She feels that these efforts have contributed to keeping the United Methodist Church from experiencing a “split” … which was a major objective of the Good News movement from its birth.
This direction of strengthening the UMC’s Biblical foundations has been greatly reinforced, she reports, by the rapidly growing United Methodists of Africa, strong advocates of the denomination’s Biblical foundation and the heritage provided by John Wesley.
While active in her denomination, Carolyn for years was a leader of several hundred women in the Explorers’ Bible Study, which met in the church that I pastored in Jacksonville, IL. It was during that time her larger family was surprised by worldwide attention. She and husband Barney’s son, Ed Elias, a young combat pilot shot down in Vietnam, was one of the first three Prisoners of War released by the North Vietnamese, signaling a beginning of the end of the war.
Even in the 2011 death of husband Barney Elias, his sense of humor was revealed in the memorabilia displayed at the time of his funeral. I picked up with interest a very impressive gold-edged book entitled: All I Know about Politics by Barney Elias. Opening it and thumbing through its many pages, I found every one was completely blank!
Carolyn’s prayers were dramatically answered in recent years in regard to her beloved Jewish husband. By faith, Barney received Jesus Christ the Messiah as his own personal Messiah, providing him forgiveness of all his sins, preparing him for death, and – according to the promises of Scripture — giving him eternal home in Heaven.
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