We all struggle with the darkness of all types of sins.  My entire case for submitting the original overture is that the “public” announcement (like in Christianity Today) of constantly struggling with any particular sin disqualifies a man from holding office in the church.  The key word here is not the word “struggles” or even the word “sin,” but rather the word “public.”  What is public is a man’s reputation.  A man may fight privately with all types of sin which do not have dominion over him, but once he comes out of the closet and names those sins publicly to the whole world, he loses his eligibility to hold office. 

I appreciate the recent article in The Aquila Report, Clarity on Overture 15, by Ryan Biese.  It provided more precision in stating what Overture 15 actually says.  In this post, he takes issue with a public statement recently made by the PCA Stated Clerk summarizing the Overture as meaning that “the desire itself is disqualifying.” On the contrary, this Overture speaks of “men who describe themselves as homosexuals….” Mr. Biese is correct.  There is a big difference here.
Our Stated Clerk refers in this same public presentation to the fact that he had brought together in the same room those who are in opposition to each other on this issue.  Supposedly, this discussion produced a compromise resulting in Overtures 29 and 31. However, the Stated Clerk misjudged the PCA as a whole.  Overture 15 came out of nowhere like a misfired missile.
Well, I was not in the room! I have always been an outlier. Maybe I should have been in the room, since I was the originator of Overture 15 that came from Westminster Presbytery (in Southwest Virginia and Northeast Tennessee).  It originally came from the Session of my former Church who asked for my advice before they submitted this overture to our Presbytery several years ago.  The Overture was approved by our Presbytery, and then in good and proper parliamentary fashion disappeared at the 48th General Assembly in St. Louis.  This was what I call the first disappearance.
Early this year (2022) before the meeting of the General Assembly in Birmingham, I submitted the overture again to Westminster Presbytery, but it was lost when it was sent to a Committee. I think it was inadvertently lost in the transmission from the Clerk of Presbytery to the Chairman of the Committee. This was the second disappearance.
Because it was lost, I later reminded Presbytery that it had vanished.  I also reminded them that I had submitted it at the previous Presbytery meeting.  At this point I had finally made a decision to withdraw it altogether.  I was thinking that the Lord must have a purpose in what appeared to be some type of providential evaporation of this overture.  So, the overture was sent back to the same Presbytery committee to act upon my request to withdraw it from any further consideration. Later, a member of that Committee, representing the Committee as a whole, called me and asked that I not withdraw it, and that it be presented to Westminster Presbytery a third time.  I agreed, and it was adopted by Presbytery and sent to the General Assembly.  So, the “big one” (now Overture 15) almost did not make it to the General Assembly.  God works in mysterious ways. Just think—and we would never have heard the famous speech by Dr. Palmer Robertson!
As I have mentioned before (Overture 15 – The Tipping Point for a Split in the PCA? – July 18) in The Aquila Report, I expect BCO Changes in Overtures with numbers 29 and 31 to be to be adopted by 2/3 of the presbyteries and then pass by a majority vote at the next General Assembly.  Victory will be declared and everything will go on the same in the PCA, except there will be a few more churches leave our denomination.  From a statement that Greg Johnson made on the floor of the General Assembly this year, he appears to be able to live with these changes in the Book of Church Order, so that should tell you all you need to know about them.
Let me add a little more precision to the meaning of the original overture which was slightly edited by the Overtures Committee in Birmingham.  The word “Identify” was changed to “describe.”  Evidently, for some major reason, the word “identify” is a bad word in this context.  Better to speak of those who “describe themselves as homosexuals.” I don’t particularly like this change in wording, but the Overture belongs to the Church now and not to me.
My original intent in what has become Overture 15 was not to disqualify from office in the PCA anyone who struggles with sin, either homosexuality, incest, or even bestiality (or even theft or murder). Don’t be shocked about incest and bestiality, especially as some college students are now taking litterboxes with them to their classrooms.  This is not the reason I submitted the original overture.  I do believe that homosexuality, incest, or even bestiality are more heinous sins.  They are perversions of God’s created order. They are more specifically called abominations by God.  However, even this was not the reason I submitted the original overture.
We all struggle with the darkness of all types of sins.  My entire case for submitting the original overture is that the “public” announcement (like in Christianity Today) of constantly struggling with any particular sin disqualifies a man from holding office in the church.  The key word here is not the word “struggles” or even the word “sin,” but rather the word “public.”  What is public is a man’s reputation.  A man may fight privately with all types of sin which do not have dominion over him, but once he comes out of the closet and names those sins publicly to the whole world, he loses his eligibility to hold office.  The biblical basis for this is that a man who holds office must be of “good repute with those outside of the church” (1 Tim. 3:7).  In a wicked society like today, this public announcement that a man is a homosexual may be viewed with admiration by those outside the church, but in the context of the biblical era, it was shameful. Letting people know that we struggle with sin in general is biblical (Rms. 7), but once we begin to name them particularly and talk about them all the time, then we move beyond the exemplar of the Bible.
Thus, I believe that a man may struggle constantly with homosexual desires and still hold office in the church.  As long as it is private and he keeps it private.  We all have private sinful thoughts and tendencies that are only known to us and to God.  However, if we have concluded that they do not have dominion over us, and by God’s grace we can handle them in a biblical fashion, then we may legitimately deduce that we are not disqualified from holding office.  There is no biblical requisite that we publicly broadcast our particular struggles. Once a man comes out of the closet, especially as he identifies himself with the genre of homosexuality in terms of dress and various other signals, he loses his reputation and the right to speak God’s Word authoritatively.
Contrary to the PCA Stated Clerk, the mere existence of the desire of homosexuality is not the issue.  The issue is neither self-identification (or self-description) as long as that self-identification is private.  However, public acknowledgement to the world is a whole different matter.  At least it was to the Apostle Paul.  My intent of the proposed amendment to the BCO was specifically about those who publicly describe themselves as homosexuals.  The publication of the existence of a man’s lust to those outside the church makes it very dangerous to the individual, to those who sit under his oversight, and to young people who are tempted to experiment with the unknown. It will definitely change the attitude of the next generation. It spreads like cancer, especially in a woke culture.  In addition, it hurts the reputation of the church.  It damages the gospel of Jesus Christ. It disqualifies a man from being an ordained representative of our Savior.
A generation known for humility and extreme privacy (such as the World War II generation) has produced a generation that appears to need public recognition, whether it be for righteousness or for sinfulness.  So, it is not a matter of temptation, sinful thoughts, or even private self-assessment. It’s a matter of the public reputation of a man who has been given the right by the visible church to speak publicly in the name of God.
Larry E. Ball is a retired minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and is now a CPA. He lives in Kingsport, Tenn.
Related Posts:

In a recent op-ed for the U.K. Sunday Times, Douglas Murray observed that the reason the wheels have come off the #MeToo movement is that it discredited itself by overstating its case and conflating unmistakable instances of abuse with messy adult entanglements. “The MeToo movement had some cases that were very clear-cut. Others were not,” he wrote. “And the insistence that a historic reckoning was occurring made the line between the two uncomfortably easy to breach.”
The same line-blurring could describe what is happening in the second-largest religious denomination in the U.S. (and the largest Protestant denomination). Known for its theological conservatism that includes reserving the pastorate for men, the nearly 15-million-member Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) is currently undergoing what many major media outlets are characterizing as a reckoning over sexual abuse.

Indeed, some go further, with ex-SBC leader Russell Moore calling it an “apocalypse” and evangelical pundit David French calling it a “horror,” proof the denomination does not merely contain some bad apples, but is, in fact, a “diseased” orchard.

While purple prose has been flowing freely in regards to the SBC, little of it has bothered to detail what the apocalypse looks like in hard statistical terms. That’s likely because, according to the recently released report generating all the coverage, a total of 409 accused abusers were found over the course of 21 years in approximately 47,000 SBC churches.
Bombshell
Lyman Stone, demographer at the Institute for Family Studies, told me the actual data contained in the abuse report, the result of an eight-month investigation by Guidepost Solutions, does not come close to meriting the hyperbolic terms that are peppering coverage in The Washington Post, The New York Times, and CNN.
“Statistically speaking,” he said, “there were not that many cases. This is not actually that common of a problem in this church body.”
Stone went on to estimate that there are about 100,000 to 150,000 staffers in SBC churches, but many thousands more volunteer in their ministries. Of all the allegations that Guidepost investigators reviewed, they found only two  that appear to involve current SBC workers.
“If you wanted to argue that based on this report, executives of the SBC mismanaged the cases that were brought to them, then fine,” Stone said. “But if you want to say this shows that [the SBC] is corrupt, hypocritical, and rife with sexual abuse — the report doesn’t demonstrate that.”
Stone added that he was shocked that Guidepost investigators only found two current cases, given how many exist in the general population. “I mean, if I had been betting beforehand, I would have bet for a couple of hundred,” he said. “Because if you’re talking about 100,000 to 150,000 people who are disproportionately men, just your baseline rate of sex offenders tells you, you should have gotten a couple thousand sex offenders in there just by random chance.”
He concluded that while the report may show the need for reforms in responding to allegations, it does not show an endemic problem of sexual abuse, adding, “It is important to distinguish these.”
Corroboration
Advocates like attorney and Larry Nassar victim Rachael Denhollander have argued that misconduct within the SBC isn’t just a question of numbers. They also take issue with the executive committee’s resistance to creating a public database of the “credibly accused,” assembled by third-party investigators like Guidepost. But a deep dive into how Guidepost handled the most prominent allegation of abuse in its SBC report should set off alarm bells for anyone interested in maintaining a biblical standard of justice.
From the broad outlines of Jennifer Lyell’s story, it’s easy to understand why the members of the executive committee might have felt some hesitation to unquestioningly label her as a victim of abuse.
In 2004, Lyell was a 26-year-old master of divinity student when she met cultural anthropology professor David Sills, who is 23 years her senior, on the Louisville campus of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Shortly after, she became close with the entire Sills family, including David’s wife, Mary, as well as his college-age son and teenage daughter. She alleges that it was on a mission trip with Sills and his daughter that Sills first “sexually acted” against her.
That incident, she says, began a pattern of abuse that lasted 12 years until she was 38, continuing even as she moved to Chicago in 2006 and, later, Nashville, to further her career in publishing. During the time that Lyell was a publishing executive, she often worked with Sills, contracting with him for books, and, arguably, holding more power over his career than he did over hers.
In essence, Lyell was claiming that Sills was able to continue committing acts of sexual abuse against her even after she’d left the state because she would return to visit the family.
In 2018, at the height of the #MeToo movement and two years after her contact with Sills had ended, Lyell told her boss, Eric Geiger, at the Christian publisher Lifeway of the allegedly abusive relationship. Geiger, in turn, arranged a meeting with Southern Seminary’s president, Dr. Albert Mohler. In short order, Sills’ employment was terminated. A year then passed before Lyell provided her account to the Baptist Press for an article she hoped would present her as Sills’ victim.
As the house media organ of the SBC, the Baptist Press (BP) falls under the authority of the executive committee. When committee members read Lyell’s account, which did not contain any concrete description of violent behavior, in a March 2019 BP draft, they had doubts about framing it as she wanted, in part because they feared Sills might sue. They asked BP editors to replace the word “abuse” with “morally inappropriate relationship,” though the story retained a quote wherein Lyell accuses Sills of “grooming and taking advantage” of her. The editors informed Lyell of the change shortly before going to print.
Once the story was published, commenters on BP’s Facebook page criticized the fact that Sills had lost his job while Lyell had not, prompting her to demand BP restore the term “abuse” to the article or link to a statement from her rebutting their word choice.
Months of sporadic back-and-forth communications followed, in which committee members weighed options for coming to terms with Lyell. Then, at an October 2019 SBC conference on sexual abuse, Denhollander recounted Lyell’s story from the stage, identifying Sills by name and calling Lyell a “survivor of horrific predatory abuse” who was “cast away” by BP editors and the executive committee. Almost immediately after, Denhollander threatened the executive committee with a defamation suit on Lyell’s behalf.
Executive committee sources who agreed to speak with me anonymously say that the SBC’s insurance agency did not want to settle with Lyell, believing she did not have a strong case. But already facing bad press over Denhollander’s conference comments, committee members feared further fallout from dragging the issue out. In May 2020, the same sources say the committee paid Lyell just over $1 million, thinking that would be the end of the matter. It wasn’t.
When Guidepost issued its report on May 22, Lyell was by far the foremost accuser in it.
Again and again in the 35-plus pages that feature her case, Guidepost investigators claim Lyell’s version of events is “corroborated.” What that would mean in a police investigation is that witnesses offered other evidence against Sills. What it appears to have meant to Guidepost is that Lyell told her story to Geiger and Mohler, and both men said they believed it, according to the Baptist Press. In fact, Geiger, the first person to whom Lyell revealed the alleged abuse, told me Guidepost never even asked him to provide statements or evidence.
The report does briefly mention testimony from unnamed employees at Sills’ missions agency and his former pastor — referring to Dr. Bill Cook — but both Guidepost and the task force refused numerous requests to provide me with the agency staffers’ specific comments. And Dr. Cook told me that in his case, once again, all “corroborate” means is that he found Lyell’s story credible, not that he had any additional evidence to offer.
Guidepost defends its choice to refer to Sills as an “abuser” rather than an “alleged abuser” by noting that they didn’t find any evidence that “indicated that the interactions between Ms. Lyell and Professor Sills was anything but sexual abuse.”
Perhaps that’s because they weren’t looking very hard.
Read More

Christian heroism virtually never looks like a lone ranger standing for truth. Most stories that are told that way are, in fact, not grounded in real history. It takes the whole body of Christ. And a heroic tweet, blog post, or the like often amount to tilting at windmills, an imaginary stand often aimed at an imaginary enemy. It appeals to the base, but it will be forgotten next week. 

A colleague recently compared (so-called) heroic stands of faith to Don Quixote. Someone thinks they will change the world by a controversial tweet or blog post. They think themselves to be like Athanasius, contra Mundum—against the whole world! Never mind that Athanasius never stood as an individual against the world, but worked with whole teams of peoples and congregations across the Roman World.
But here the facts do not matter. The point is the heroic stand. And the kind of heroic stand I am talking about often ends up with a knight tilting at windmills, thinking himself to be slaying a giant when he in reality has done nothing at all. Worse, he might have even hurt the cause which he putatively aims to support. 
Heroic Stands
Over the years, Christians have mocked or attacked trivial things as man buns and the length of hair on men. Too bad for Hudson Taylor, who styled his hair into something akin to a ponytail, or Samson, whose hair flowed long because of his Nazirite vow (Judges 13:5), or John Owen, whose flowing locks border on the comical.
Such foolhardy statements flow, I fear, from a heart desperate to be the hero of the story. In some circles, the only way to be a hero is to be against something or someone. How else can you galvanize a community, if not by being against some hated person or entity?
This againstness becomes a self-made trap. To gain followers and remain the hero, one must constantly find new dragons to slay. If the dragons die, then the story of the heroic knight dies too. No more book sales, no more conferences, no more internet fame. How can you get the amens from the congregation, unless you attack the enemy everyone already despises?
I wonder how we might survive an encounter with Jesus, who once said that “if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles” (Matt 5:41). As historian Michael Haykin recently explained:
This text is grounded in the brutal military tactics of the tyrannical regime of the Roman Empire. The Roman army, with its ubiquitous and endless need for transport, would often force citizens to carry equipment etc. It was a vicious and an ever-present reminder of the brutality of Roman rule, or pax Romana, as the Roman ruling elite called it (did the ordinary citizen experience it as such?).
Western Christians, raised on a pervasive diet of rights, etc., react to this saying, if they truly understand it, with disbelief. Surely, Jesus, the Son of the Lord of the Jewish people who commanded the slaying of tyrannical rulers, would command a different path?
Read More