Dear sir: Just a few lines in answer to your last in regard to your experience with the Christian Convention Sect. It is all very typical of the procedure that started with William Irvine in 1899. He was one of the worst characters that any respectable person could come in contact with and become a victim of his influence. Although he has long passed away, the same procedure continues and has been the means of blighting the lives of thousands of honest people and continues up to date to do so.
We do feel very sorry for many of the people who have not taken time to go into detail in regards to the origination of this vicious hostile sect, registered and documented in Washington, D.C. It was hard to take or believe on account of what we had heard in the beginning, about the years 1914 and 15 from Willie Jamieson and his companion, Henry Hanson. My wife and I accepted what Jamieson preached without any reservation. On the face, it looked like what was right and we did as best we knew how to be faithful and to bring our then young family up in fellowship within that way.
Once in a conversation with Jamieson, I asked him about the origination of his ministry. He told me about William Irvine, what a wonderful preacher he was and how through him he had accepted the gospel and went to preach because he wanted to be able to preach like him. I told Jamieson I would like very much to meet William Irvine. He told me it was not possible because he was recuperating from over-work and not in good health.
I found out later this was a made-up lie by him and others of his brethren to keep people from knowing the truth. William Irvine was excommunicated out of the ministry and fellowship by Jack Carroll and others and had taken up his abode in Jerusalem as he claimed to be the second witness spoken of in Revelations. Jamieson continued to resurrect this man and bring him to the platform with him at conventions and many other places. He ought to be ashamed of any remembrance of Irvine. But the old saying is true: “Birds of a feather flock together.”
A few years ago, Jamieson came to our home and stayed overnight. He seemed badly disturbed about many things that were taking place. I asked him where these things originated and he said in the ministry. So I told him it was better to settle it with the ministry and not bring it into the churches. I was then an elder and the church had been in our home from the time we professed, almost forty years at that time. After relating to us all these wrongs in the lives of others, before he retired, he went to his grip and produced a bottle of whiskey, helped himself to a large quantity of it and told me if his friends knew he imbibed in such stuff they would not have any faith in him. So dear friends, this is not hearsay. It is personal experience. So you see it is a pure case of the blind leading the blind.
We could no longer go along with the inconsistencies. Jamieson removed the meeting from our home and expected us to go to another home. We said no, if we were not worthy of meeting in our home we would not be worthy to go to someone else’s home. So friends, that has been the end of our fellowship with the Christian Convention group and will continue to be so. I know from past experiences, if you will stay out of the Christian Convention group you will enjoy more of the presence of God and His Christ in your lives. Jamieson has proven to us that he and many of his associates have never gotten any victory over the flesh.
Because we were friendly to Ron Campbell, he asked me to renounce Ron and I told him I would not do that to anybody who had never done me any harm. Since then I have learned he was asking me to renounce the wrong man. It has all turned out to be a blessing from God to be free from bondage to such a source.
He thought that because we were his converts, we would not expose him and we were living in fear of being taken out of fellowship. He found out he was very badly mistaken. I exposed him plenty, but he denied it all and made some of his friends believe it. Some people are so much in bondage and fear they believe anything that is told them by a worker, regardless.
In Jeremiah 5:30-31: “A wonderful and horrible thing is committed in the land; the prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests bear rule by their means; and my people love to have it so; and what will ye do in the end thereof?”
This is the very condition that existed between them and many of their friends; lies, falsehoods, alibis, covering up their faults and failures, blind leaders of the blind, blind to what they are going to have to face in the end. I could keep on writing many pages of my past experiences but we were never discouraged, just disappointed in men. The promises of God are sure to those that learn to love and honor His Son and no power on earth can separate us from it.
Christ, and He only, is the author and finisher of our faith. As Paul says, “I planted and Apollos watered, but God gave the increase. Neither he that planted or he that watered are anything.”
Some years ago a friend of ours who professed in the same meetings we did, decided to get more tales in regards to both sides. So we wrote to William Irvine in Jerusalem and got an answer to our letter which my friend still has in his possession. Irvine at that time still believed in an exaggerated form of the old opinion of an inner illumination and regarded the Bible as simply a dead book. He wrote and preached that God made him the Head of the Church, ignoring the scripture that Christ was the one and only Head.
So evidently at the close of Irvine’s life, he realized he had left a dirty trail across the European and American continents and was convicted in his conscience. He stated in his letters it was all just an experiment when he claimed to be the second witness spoken of in Revelations and that he belonged in Jerusalem. Jack Carroll and others encouraged him to do so. He realized these fellows did it to get his mantle and for no other good reason as their lives were no exception to his. Or in other words, were doing the same things he himself was guilty of. He admitted his own faults and failures and that is more than they ever did, only behind closed doors. So we can see now, and have for a number of years that they were never based upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets and have never complied with the commission given to the twelve apostles or the seventy.
These men know that they have not the faith that would enable them to exist to do so. That is the reason Irvine and Cooney adopted the system of conventions and they got the idea from the Faith Mission. Irvine said we must look to Keswick. It will get our people together and we will get finance to continue on and that is just what it has materialized into today—the financial lifeline.
You and I can plainly see that what they claim to have is from their own beginning and has absolutely no marks of that which was planned of God through His well-beloved son in his beginning. There is a transformation—Satan is also transformed into an angel of light and his ministers as the ministers of righteousness.
So dear friends, it is not with any hatred or rebellion in our hearts that I write these things as our experiences in the past has been a blessing. And it helps us to see how easily many people can be deceived to think that they are walking in the light of Christ and are not.
Will close for now and hope this answer to you will not make you weary.
Greetings, Your friends in His name and Way and no other,
A. & H. Singleton and Family
September 30, 1962
[Former Elder of 2×2 Church]