Along with Adams, I agree we should have a high view of worship. I am certain that I would enjoy worshiping at his church under his leadership. But within our PCA framework, I simply define high differently than he does at points. When different royal priests with various voices read the Word in worship, it commands my attention, lifts me to the heavenlies, and causes me to thank God for the love He has shown us and for the church He is building – all to the praise of His glorious grace.

Rev. Matthew Adams has written an article in reply to my paper, “Worship in the Household of God: a defense of the lay reading of Scripture in PCA churches.” I appreciate his gracious tone and detailed consideration of several of my arguments. This is the sort of dialog we need more of across the PCA as we sharpen one another in pursuit of truth (BCO Preliminary Principle 4), hoping for light rather than heat to do its work.
Adams1 is to be commended for plodding through my lengthy paper (written on study leave) and for writing his own substantial response. Adams makes a good case for his position, particularly given his understanding of what “high worship” requires. He offers substantive responses in several places (e.g. I Cor 14). In some others he appears to miss or sidestep the thrust of my arguments (e.g. worship as a family gathering, per Gaffin et al), in order to make his own. That said, I appreciated Adams’s exegetical contributions from various commentators and believe those are helpful to the discussion as sessions and presbyteries navigate the issue.
At the risk of starting a tract war of “bloody tenent made yet more bloody” proportions, I would like to offer a brief(ish) response on several points in the hopes of sharpening the discussion and discovering the real points of disagreement.
But before that, there are many things we agree on and these should not go unappreciated:

First, Scripture alone must be our final rule.
Second, neither side is crazy. All are attempting to follow the good and necessary inferences from Scripture as best we understand them.
Third, we believe in learning wisdom from our Reformed forefathers as well as our brothers in sister NAPARC churches. (After all, many of my arguments came from a report issued by the OPC.)2
Fourth, we believe in the doctrine of ordination and the general distinctions between the ruled and rulers – and that pastors are to lead in worship. But that still does not answer this particular question.3
Fifth, we should have a high view of worship that includes reading and hearing the Word of God with a “reverent esteem” (WLC 157). Some PCA churches (including mine at times) could do better at this.
Sixth, we agree that the PCA’s Directory of Worship has relevance and should be “taken seriously as the mind of the Church.”4
Seventh, there are limits as to who should be invited to read Scripture in worship. The question is the proper extent of those limits and why we each draw them where we do.

Finally, we agree that uniformity on this issue within the PCA most likely requires a Constitutional amendment process. Such a process would be lawful. The question is whether such amendments would be wise – and whether there is enough Biblical warrant for the effort, an effort which may well splinter the PCA, akin to the old school/new school split of the 19th century.
So here are a few responses to Adams’s article in the form of questions to help us formulate our thinking on this issue for the PCA. These are not every question we could ask, but several that Adams’s article helpfully raised:

We all agree that we must adhere to the Regulative Principle of Worship (RPW), and that reading Scripture is a required element of public worship (WCF 21). But is the reader integral to the element itself, or is the reader better understood as a form or circumstance of worship?5
Is reading qualitatively different than preaching? Can the average worshiper tell the difference or not?
If the reading of Scripture is infallibly authoritative in and of itself, what gives the reading that authority – the Word itself or the reader’s person or office?6
If the infallible authority is connected to the office of the reader, what happens to the Word’s authority outside of public worship? Is it somehow changed or lessened if a layperson reads it?
If one agrees that the read Word is its own authority, both in and outside of public worship, does it not then become a matter of good order – rather than unbending theological principle – of who may read Scripture in worship?
Is there enough Biblical evidence that limiting the reading of Scripture in worship to elders (and candidates) is not only “good” but a “necessary” inference from Scripture (WCF 1.6)? If so, what is that Biblical evidence?
Are there other reasonable interpretations of those same texts that raise enough doubts about the wisdom of requiring a denomination-wide conformity on this detail of worship?
How does a plain reading of I Timothy 4:14 preclude those other than Timothy from reading scripture in the worship services he led?
Did lay prophets and prophetesses in the New Testament churches undermine the creation order of gender roles? If not, how do lay readers undermine elders’ authority or the creation order today?
In terms of what constitutes “high” worship, has there been enough attention paid to the differences between Old and New Covenants (cf. WCF 7.6)?
How much of what we understand to be a “high” view of worship is culturally conditioned rather than Biblically informed?
If we require a positive warrant for each form of each element in worship from the New Testament, what positive warrant is there for other common PCA practices such as instrumentation, choirs and robes? In other words, is it possible that we might be inconsistently “biblicist” on some issues, but not others?
What are we to make of the evident existence of an unordained “office” of reader in the early church (and in Reformation Scotland)? What can PCA churches which allow for lay readers learn from this “office” and the care with which it was handled?
Given his understanding of the RPW, Adams contends that missionaries should share in the Sunday School hour rather than worship.7 That is reasonable, but is he then willing to legislate that across the PCA, changing this common practice? If not, why legislate who may read Scripture but not other such violations of the RPW? Where are the amendments forbidding choirs or soloists since those are nowhere found in New Testament worship?
Whatever our view, as our Constitution now stands, may our courts require our pastors and churches to hold to a narrow view of WLC 156, a view that in effect requires subscription to words that are not actually in the text?

Those are some of the technical questions that I believe are worth exploring together. When I joined the PCA and worked towards ordination in the early 1990’s, these were the sorts of intramural debates and discussions that were encouraged among candidates and elders.
My rather old-school polity professor, T. David Gordon, took several exceptions to the Confession himself, and taught us that presbyteries should make sure that men were sincerely reformed, committed to the unity of the church, and could make substantive Biblical defenses of where they may differ with our tradition (my words).8
We understood that most debates for greater purity and better order should be done within the church – not by trying to push one side out by pursuing unseasonable reform through continual legislation. One of my mentors, Terry Johnson, made much the same argument about a decade ago when he wrote an article about “both sides” of the PCA (more reformed and more evangelistic) needing one another.9
It may be true that on the subject of worship the PCA is a 50-year experiment and that the experiment is now fraying, at least on the edges. But am I the only one observing that those “edges” are growing larger and beginning to crowd out many of us simple means-of-grace guys in the middle – those who wish to major on the grace rather than the means?
What has happened to our majoring on the majors of the Good News the Reformed faith famously champions? To speak plainly, and perhaps inappropriately, is the alliance between the Redeemer NYC network of folks and the Twin Lakes Fellowship men done? Or has its voice simply been more muted in the midst of others?10
Meanwhile, along with Adams, I agree we should have a high view of worship. I am certain that I would enjoy worshiping at his church under his leadership. But within our PCA framework, I simply define high differently than he does at points. When different royal priests with various voices read the Word in worship, it commands my attention, lifts me to the heavenlies, and causes me to thank God for the love He has shown us and for the church He is building – all to the praise of His glorious grace.
Christopher Hutchinson is Senior Pastor of Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Blacksburg, VA and the author of Rediscovering Humility: Why the Way Up is Down (New Growth Press, 2018). He has been ordained in the PCA since 1998. This article is used with permission.

1 I appreciate the honorific “Rev.” but will resort to the more standard reference of last name only. I mean no disrepect to either one of us!
2 I think it is unhelpful to raise the issue of pride regarding the PCA’s variety on this issue. One might equally (and unhelpfully) ask if it is prideful to learn only from Reformed giants. Even giants might get things wrong. While good to be introspective, it is better to lay aside such suggestions of pride in others and look at the exegesis and theology itself with as fair a mind we can muster, willing to yield wherever we find greater wisdom than our own.
3 Adams appears to make the fallacy of the excluded middle when discussing family worship as an analogy. It does not follow that if a father is to lead his family in worship that he cannot on occasion ask other members of the family to read the Bible. This does not mean that he is no longer head of household or leading the proceedings.
4 Adams misreads my paper when he writes, “Another misguided aspect of Rev. Hutchinson’s paper is his statement that our BCO’s Directory of Worship has no ‘constitutional relevance.’” This is simply incorrect on his part. The footnoted quote comes from page 22 of my paper in which I am discussing the Westminster Directory for Public Worship from 1645, not the PCA’s BCO.
5 This is probably the key question within the PCA, and one it seems to me good men may disagree on without disparaging the one side as legalistic or the other as violating the RPW. Even if one argues (as I do) that the reader is a form or circumstance, this does not mean “anything goes.” Forms and circumstances must still be suitable, wise and God-honoring. For the distinction between Elements, Forms and Circumstances of worship, and the need for both wisdom and liberty on the latter two, see this helpful lecture by Ligon Duncan.
6 So Adams: “Through the Word of God read and preached, we have God speaking. Both are authoritative actions, and yet only one of those actions is infallible. The infallible act is the reading of the Word. Therefore, shouldn’t we be even more careful with who should read the Scriptures in the Public Worship of God? In the art of prophesying, these go hand-in-hand. Through the Word of God being read, the Holy Spirit penetrates the hearts of the hearers so they might be sanctified (Jn. 17:17). That is the effect of Scripture, which flows from its very nature:  the Word of God’s perfection, purity, and eternality.”
7 I largely agreed with this section and appreciated its wisdom. In our worship services, we always ask visiting missionaries only to share prayer requests in worship so that we may pray for them. We believe prayer is an element of worship. Reports (and fundraising) are not.
8 On this specific issue, Gordon believes that only ministers should read Scripture in worship. But that also helps make my point. See his article on legislating change within the PCA as opposed to patient persuasion.
9 As referenced by Rick Philips at Reformation 21. Rev. Johnson, of course, is well known for advocating traditional Reformed worship and more uniformity in worship across the PCA. As a former member of Independent Presbyterian, my own preferences are for the styles he advocates. But, of course, I try to carefully distinquish between my own preferences and what I can prove from Scripture.
10 Here I do not think it is inappropriate to list the names of the people who authored the PCA’s (non-binding) 2017 Women in Ministry report cited in my paper: TE Leon Brown (Advisory), TE William Castro (Advisory), TE Jeffrey Choi, TE Dan Doriani (Advisory), TE Ligon Duncan, TE Irwyn Ince, Mrs. Lani Jones (Advisory), Mrs. Kathy Keller, Mrs. Mary Beth McGreevy, TE Bruce O’Neil, TE Harry Reeder, TE Roy Taylor (Advisory).
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Humans have limits, and the Great Society did not acknowledge those limits. It did not look evil. But in fact, arrogance that denies limits is deeply evil.

Like you, I’m busy. I’m a pastor with a sermon to write and a flock to tend. Why did I read a 400-page book about the history of 1960s America? Shouldn’t I read, instead, about our own turbulent times?
My answer to that question might not lead you to read Amity Shlaes’s Great Society: A New History.[1] However, I hope it will inspire you to become more familiar with the vision of some of our fellow Americans during this period, a vision that they dubbed “The Great Society”—a program, like so many other grand schemes, that failed to live up to its name. Some truly great legislation came from this era, but enmeshed within them came much damaging legislation as well.[2] As Shlaes reminds us, “Nothing is new, just forgotten.”[3] Or as Solomon put it, “There’s nothing new under the sun” (Eccl. 1:9).
So, what was The Great Society? Why did it fail? And what must we learn from it? That is the question that this review essay attempts to answer as it follows and interacts with the story Shlaes tells of this epoch. It is a tornado siren for our own day. Those who care deeply about justice in our day will care deeply about the weather conditions that caused so much systemic wreckage for the precious people with whom justice is concerned.
Truly, Shlaes offers a cautionary tale for our compassionate nation.
This essay is a Christian exercise in stewarding history’s lessons in love for neighbor. This is a pastoral exercise in guarding the church from faulty visions of both humanity and heaven. It’s long, but only because this is a long-neglected subject. We have heard much over the last decade—from politicians and pastors alike—about the legacy of slavery in the form of a straight line from American’s founding to Jim Crow to the present as an explanation for real problems in America. Americans at our best are concerned to get our history right for the sake of doing right by our neighbors today. But what about that period we call “The Sixties” that was filled with programs and projects designed to eradicate poverty and racism? And why do we hear so little about these dramatic political efforts and their outcomes? Why is this so, especially given that their aims are the aims of modern justice movers and shakers today?
If you care about justice, about the poor, and about the lingering effects of slavery, then come with me on this journey into our country’s more recent history.
The Legacy of Slavery or the Legacy of Liberalism?
An exchange between columnists back in 2014 piqued my interest in this period. Nicholas Kristof, in his New York Times piece titled “When Whites Just Don’t Get It,” writes the following: “The presumption on the part of so many well-meaning white Americans [is] that racism is a historical artifact. They don’t appreciate the overwhelming evidence that centuries of racial subjugation still shape inequity in the 21st century.”[4] Racists have existed and do exist. No problem with this claim. But Kristof says more: that present inequities are shaped by the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, by past and enduring racism, both personal and systemic.
Thomas Sowell sees the same situation differently: “If we wanted to be serious about evidence, we might compare where blacks stood a hundred years after the end of slavery with where they stood after 30 years of the liberal welfare state.”[5] The title of his piece was his thesis, “A Legacy of Liberalism.” According to Sowell, “Despite the grand myth that black economic progress began or accelerated with the passage of the civil rights laws and ‘war on poverty’ programs of the 1960s, the cold fact is that the poverty rate among blacks fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent by 1960. This was before any of those programs began . . . from the laws and policies of the 1960s, nothing comparable happened economically. And there were serious retrogressions socially.”[6]
This resonated with me.
Cabrini-Green Homes, the public housing project just outside my window in downtown Chicago when I was a college student in the late nineties, was by then notorious for crime and violence. “The Projects”—Whose idea was that? And what precisely did they expect to achieve by building these inner city monoliths?
My father, then a district manager for a retail chain in St. Louis, was awakened many nights by the police due to break-ins at his stores in East St. Louis. What was the backstory for that “bad part of town”? Later, when I sold cell phones to fund my years as a seminary student, I encountered different cultures in different stores, each with their own admirable qualities and predictable sins. Upper-middle-class folks worked hard but frequently asked to split their accounts following a divorce. Rural folks frequently needed new phones for a child returning from Afghanistan or else for a man in the home who lost his phone in another drunken fishing incident. Then there were the black urban poor, many lovely individuals and loving mothers. In this community, however, few were married, “baby daddies” were a daily thing, and there was a refrain in the context of selling: “I’m waiting on my check,” that is, a government check. This was a cultural norm. More than the rest, this part of town felt stuck, trapped, downtrodden.
As statistics will show, not all blacks are stuck. Not hardly. The community I encountered does not characterize the whole of blacks in America, an important clarification. Today 82% of black Americans are above the poverty line despite only 30% being married.[7] 94% of black married couples are above the poverty line.[8] That we hear so much about black poverty is owing more to political rhetoric that exploits poor urban blacks, painting this subculture as the state of blacks as a whole. The dynamics I explore in this essay apply equally to whites and blacks, a point Shlaes makes.[9] The difference is that one group’s poor are exploited for political and social gain and the other are not.
For that downtrodden part of town in my sales experience, it did seem that something structural was going on—something systemic that shaped cultures and the precious individuals embedded within them. But I did not resonate with Kristof’s take in the New York Times.
What were these “war on poverty” programs Sowell wrote of, and how were they related to the passage of the civil rights laws of the 1960s? What were these “serious retrogressions,” and what might they have to do with “the liberal welfare state,” as Sowell claims? Sowell’s own body of work has been helpful on these questions, especially in the realm of researched statistics.[10]
But what is the story behind these stats, these policies? Who were the personalities involved in them? Why did the American public embrace them? What might all of this have to do with the “legacy of slavery” and the various disparities we see today?
Shlaes’s book Great Society tells that story.
This is the story not of cruel people, but in Shlaes’s words, “lovable people who, despite themselves, hurt those they loved.”[11]
At the start of the 1960s the country was affluent. That’s the first word that describes America at the start of the decade. The post-war American industries stood head and shoulders above those of other countries. The sharpest contrast was in the automotive industry. That a small Japanese company like Toyota could ever be competitive in the US was not on even the shrewdest industry leader’s mind. The American middle class thrived, work was in demand, and jobs paid well. If you weren’t skilled, a company would train you and then employ you. Young people growing up at this time had a different perspective than their parents who grew up during the Great Depression. Poverty was the exception rather than the rule. Add to this America’s recent industrial and managerial achievements in the Second World War and you have a generation marked by a second word: confidence. This was an optimistic generation. America could do anything and in particular, the United States government could do anything. Trust in government was high and so were hopes in the possibilities of government. We hear it in Kennedy’s words at Rice University on the Nation’s space effort in 1962: “We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”[12] This affluence and confidence made for a generation intrigued with socialism. Sound familiar?
The New Deal era programs of the 1930s failed to address the economic depression, leading to a truly Great Depression.[13] The Second World War pulled the country out of its economic plight. But those failures had faded just enough for a renewed optimism in big-government solutions.
The 60s were also dominated by ambition, a third word for the era that stirred popular intrigue with socialism to political action. This was a moral ambition, ambition for a cause, ambition with “a fierce urgency of now.”[14] The Great Depression era had its great crisis to overcome, and the World War II generation accomplished a truly great feat overseas. What great achievement might this generation undertake? If that wasn’t on the mind of average Americans, it was certainly on the mind of their political leaders. President Lyndon B. Johnson answered that question with what he called “The Great Society.”
What Was the Great Society?
We can answer that question from six angles: legal, historical, religious, political, sociological, and economic. This is not the outline for Shlaes’s book, which works across the sixties chronologically. Her story dramatizes the events of this period and humanizes its many characters. I commend it to you. This here is my attempt to synthesize what I learned from her narrative account.
1. Legally, the Great Society was Lyndon Johnson’s sweeping domestic legislative agenda to eliminate poverty and racial disparities.
Yes, that’s exactly what it was. This was in an era before the loss of trust in the government that makes that kind of legislative ambition sound hollow. In fact, it was in part the great failure of these promises that explains our present cynicism. But make no mistake: this is what they set out to do by legislation.
This package of legislative initiatives created new federal programs and whole agencies to help Americans in nearly every area of life: education, housing, medical care, urban problems, rural poverty, and transportation, including bussing for school integration.
In her narrative history, Shlaes spends most of her volume tracing the personalities around the President during this time—aids, fed chairmen, famed economists, and union bosses. The mingling of genuine altruistic motives and blinding political ambition—often in the same characters—is a study of human nature and the nature of government. Among this cast of characters, President Johnson, as one of his aids put it, “made laws the way other men eat chocolate chip cookies.”[15] That was his expertise from the Senate. That’s what he became famous for in the White House. The sheer amount of legislation passed during this period was unparalleled.
2. Historically, the Great Society was an ambitious moniker reflecting that period’s mindset: confidence in what government could do and should do.
“Let’s not alleviate poverty; let’s cure it,”[16] President Johnson stridently and repeatedly insisted. He meant it. America after the Second World War was confident in its federal government. So too were government officials. Lyndon Johnson wanted to expand government in a way that eclipsed Roosevelt’s transformative presidency, but Johnson did not have Roosevelt’s crises: economic depression and war. Johnson, rather, had affluence. Things were not just going well for Americans, but exceptionally well. Johnson’s challenge, then, was to generate a sense of urgency for America to see it go well for everyone—literally.[17] His legacy as president—and the legacy of those whose careers were bound to his presidency—depended on such grand plans.
A “good society” would not do. He rejected that suggestion.[18] He insisted, rather, on a “Great Society,” and this became his rallying cry. America had already organized itself to finish a war overseas. Winning the war on poverty, it was said, would be a “mopping up action.”[19] This war, like any war, would be a job for the federal government. They were not sloganeering. They really were that optimistic in the power and precision of government planning.
3. Religiously, the Great Society was the expression of the nation’s collective human and religious—even Christian-informed—impulse to do something good for those who are hurting.
This legislative vision did not emerge in a vacuum. Johnson’s vision was a continuation of what President Kennedy pursued before him, in part, and what President Nixon continued after him. In his own time, it was marketable as the political expression of the human desire to help those in need, a good desire shaped by America’s Christian roots.
It was President Kennedy who by executive order established the Peace Corps, headed by Yale-grad and decorated officer Sargent Shriver. Shriver became President Johnson’s poverty czar, the principal architect of his “War on Poverty,” and head of the Office for Economic Opportunity. Along with many Americans, Shriver believed that what the church already did for the poor, the federal government could and should do through its programs.[20] To a national conscience informed by its Christian heritage, this just seemed right.
4. Politically, the Great Society was a political project with all the incentives and complexities intrinsic to politics.
Political motivations and incentives abounded. Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society vision was curious on the heels of Kennedy’s death. Lyndon Johnson to that point was known for his opposition to civil rights legislation.[21] Johnson wanted to exceed the accomplishments of his predecessor, President Kennedy. This was something of a political imperative given that the House and the Senate went to Democrats following Kennedy’s assassination. He must do more. But he also wanted to best his intellectual and political father, President Roosevelt, and his New Deal. What Roosevelt did in creating infrastructure jobs to supposedly energize the economy, Johnson intended to do with the influx of cash to impoverished communities. Johnson expected these communities to begin to work, to contribute, and to join the rest of their American peers in their share of affluence. Without the crisis of a depression, Johnson leveraged the crisis of Kennedy’s death to move on this apparent political opportunity.[22] He forwarded this vision on a wave of empathy and optimism. As they said, Roosevelt had his “New Deal,” and Johnson had his “Fast Deal.” But had it, he did.[23]
A lawmaker by trade, Johnson was more attentive to legislative inputs and intentions than he was to results. Laws—and the promises they held out—were the goal. The more the better. Not so much the outcomes. As the war in Vietnam became complicated and politically costly, neither Johnson nor his successor, Richard Nixon, could afford politically to go back on these promises. The Great Society had to move forward no matter the results. The priority of winning elections consumed and compromised even the most principled economists and advisors at the time to such an embarrassing extent that many later acknowledged their complicity.[24]
5. Sociologically, the Great Society institutionalized America’s commitment to a desegregated society.
The Great Society was an expansive vision that merged ambitions and political visions beyond an interest in helping the poor. In one of his famous speeches, Johnson, who was fashioned as the “Great Emancipator” of the twentieth century, said, “We’ve got to find a way to let Negroes get what most white folks already have.” He continued, “Freedom is not enough. You do not take a person who has been hobbled by chains and put him at the starting line of a race and say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others.’” What the nation needed was, “equality as a fact and equality as a result.”[25]
Thomas Sowell, a young economist at the time, disagreed: “To expect civil rights to solve our economic and social problems was barking up the wrong tree.”[26] Blacks, for all the gains they had remarkably made, were nevertheless underdeveloped and, for that reason, genuinely and understandably discouraged.[27] Much to the embarrassment of whites and blacks, reading scores were significantly lower among blacks. From Sowell’s perspective, the black community should have turned away from counting on political leaders to change their circumstances and toward an investment in “our own self-development as a people.”[28] As Sowell has demonstrated in his own research, this is how any formerly-oppressed group rises out of the developmental consequences of their oppression.
In this attempt to compensate the black community, Johnson went further than the vision to which Martin Luther King Jr. rallied a generation in his early speeches. He went further than the call for equal treatment before the law, further than seeing that the children of the civil rights era were treated “according to the content of their character.”[29] Instead, Johnson wanted a policy of redistribution to make up for what was lost in the black community’s development under oppressive laws. Not only was school segregation outlawed—a good thing—but mandated school integration required that students be bussed from one part of town to another, a bad decision, as we’ll see.
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 Indeed, now that Christ has taken upon Himself the curse of the law for us, the great dread of the commandments has been removed. We are now entirely free to obey out of love and delight, rather than out of fearing the consequences. We no longer look at the commandments as if they were an impossibly steep mountain to climb; instead, we now see them as the loving rules of our Father.

for I find my delight in your commandments,which I love.
Psalm 119:47 ESV

As is common to stanza waw, this verse is a continuation of the previous verse, in which the psalmist declared that he would speak of the testimonies of God before kings without shame. Of course, that verse too was rooted particularly in verses 44–45, where he declared his resolve to keep God’s commands. Now the psalmist unveils why he will devote his life to keeping God’s commandments and unashamedly speak God’s Word before kings: for I find my delight in your commandments, which I love.
Delight is nothing new to this psalm, for the psalmist has already expressed his delight in the testimonies of God and in the path of God’s commandments, and the writer still has more to say on the topic! The theme of delight is recurrent in Psalm 119 for good reason.
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