As Session saw it, the Jonesboro 7 were in rebellion against the will of Christ. But had not told them how they were in rebellion against Christ. At the hearing the SJC Judges would later question how the men would be able to show proper evidence of repentance given the lack of specificity; one SJC judge asked whether proper repentance might seem to include having to vote for TE Wreyford. As the SJC would later point out, however, “Session had neither the responsibility nor authority to determine or direct who, if anyone, would stand for election as the pastor of the mission church upon its organization as a particular church.” Session had gravely transcended its authority.

Editorial Note: What follows will be controversial and disturbing as it deals with abuse. Reader discretion is advised. In preparing this series, official documents and public comments have been extensively used to compose the narrative. No attempt is made to assign motives to any of the parties in this case. Reference will be made to inferences drawn by the judges on the PCA’s Standing Judicial Commission as they carefully reviewed the case and noted the process was “abused” and offenses “imagined” by a Temporary Session of Elders against the Jonesboro 7. Any objection to the use of the term “abused” should be directed to the SJC Judges rather than the author of this series who simply reports the judgment of the PCA General Assembly regarding the actions of the Temporary Session in this case.
This is part three in a series. You can read Part One as well as Part Two. I have also written about this mater on PCA Polity.
Seven men from a small church plant in Jonesboro, Arkansas desired to see a distinctively Reformed and Presbyterian church planted in their city. Covenant Presbytery had called a church planter, TE Jeff Wreyford, to organize the work there. But the seven men, the Jonesboro 7, had a different ministerial philosophy than TE Wreyford and they had not perceived the cultivation of a distinctively Reformed and Presbyterian church to be a priority for him.
The seven men went to the Session of elders overseeing the work and stated that when the time came to consider extending a call to a permanent pastor, that they desired to consider other candidates rather than TE Wreyford. You can read more of that in part two.
The Session, of which TE Wreyford was moderator, eventually responded by indicting the Jonesboro 7. The Session wrote them claiming it was “fair to assume,” the Jonesboro 7 had broken the ninth commandment in arriving at their conclusions about TE Wreyford. It remains unclear why the Session believed that was a fair assumption.
These “dirt kickers” from Jonesboro, who attended a fledgling church plant of about 45 people, were summoned for a trial on July 12, 2021, however the wife of one of the Accused was pregnant and her due date was that same day. But despite the request of the Jonesboro 7 for the trial to be moved to the city where they worshiped and where the offenses were alleged to have taken place, the Session of Elders insisted it would be held at IPC Memphis, where most of them were on staff or already ruling elders.
We can only speculate as to how the added stress of allegations from Christ’s under-shepherds and ultimately an indictment would have impacted the young family as they awaited the arrival of their child.
The Session graciously accommodated the soon-to-be father by offering him a choice: choose to be absent from his own trial and represented by counsel or, if the delivery “providentially hindered” him, they would schedule a new hearing date for him. Mr Hurston ultimately chose to be near his wife on that date and was represented by one of the other Accused.1
A Curious Trial
The trial was held at IPC Memphis about 70 miles from the men’s homes and from the church where they were members. It was quite a contrast; IPC Memphis is an historic, wealthy, and influential congregation, which reported an average morning attendance of 952 in 2020 when the Jonesboro 7’s troubles began. Christ Redeemer PCA in Jonesboro, had about 45 people attending the church plant in 2020.
The men had little reason to be optimistic about their impending trial; at the end of May, the Session sent each of the Jonesboro 7 a letter asserting: “Scripture reminds us that if we fail to confess our sins, we cannot expect the Lord’s blessing…you are on a pathway that leads to Sheol and death. Return to your first love, Jesus Christ….”2
Readers may recall that earlier the Session had declined to tell the men how they had sinned. And when the men begged to know what their specific sin(s) were, these under-shepherds of Christ accused the men of being “disingenuous.”
As such, it is curious TE Ed Norton would sign a letter urging the men to “Confess [their] sins,” but continue to refuse to tell the men what their particular sins were (Cf. WCF 15:5). The SJC would call this more than curious; it was “unfair.”3
Nonetheless, the men were committed to the PCA and submitted to a trial, still not knowing what the Session believed they had done in violation of Christ’s Law.
TE Mike Malone, at the time also a pastor at IPC Memphis, served as the prosecutor in the case. It was his job to prove the Jonesboro 7 had broken the Fifth and Ninth Commandments.
At trial, TE Malone alleged the men were in sin to oppose TE Wreyford being offered as candidate for pastor; TE Malone asserted:
The session has continued to voice its support of [TE Wreyford] and believes without hesitation that he should be offered to the congregation as a candidate to serve as its pastor. That’s our job. That’s our responsibility as a provisional session.
The PCA Standing Judicial Commission quotes other arguments from TE Malone’s prosecution in which he alleged the Jonesboro 7 had sinned against the authority the Session “presumed” to have:
“The persistent insistence that [TE Wreyford’s] name be removed as a candidate to be pastor of this church reflects a fundamental unwillingness to fulfill membership vow number five, and is disruptive of the peace of the church.”4
Numerous witnesses were summoned against the accused. But none of them offered any evidence of the guilt of the accused, as the SJC would later point out (see the forthcoming Part Five).
One of the witnesses was TE Clint Wilcke who serves as the “Coordinator/Catalyst for the Mid-South Church Planting Network.” TE Wilcke’s testimony featured some memorable exchanges.
In one exchange, TE Clint Wilcke corrected a defendant for addressing him as “Mr Wilcke,” and instead insisted he be addressed as Reverend Wilcke.
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There is also the problem that when allegations of abuse are made, those who see abuse as endemic in that community tend to automatically assume that the allegations are automatically true, and view even a reasonable defense of the accused as the community corruptly attempting to protect guilty members of “the tribe.”

At a time when the number of Conservative Evangelical Christian men committed to the church, orthodox doctrine, and their families, have never been lower; and when higher percentages of men NEVER attend church than attend once a week (35% vs. 31% according to Pew); I’m seeing an increasing stream of internet articles attacking them from other professing members of Reformed denominations—in which they are made out to be a huge pool of sexual predators, misogynists, spiritual abusers and basically the greatest threat to Christian women in America.
Most of these articles are being written by people who grew up in or around Conservative churches, and therefore these churches represented an outsized influence in the childhood and adult life of the authors. It’s important to remember that while these communities were effectively the world of the authors of these articles, the actual size of that world is tiny when compared to the overall population of the country.
For instance, only 22% of Americans attend church every week (and that’s self-reporting so there is inevitably the “halo effect” inflating the actual number) and Evangelicals represent a shrinking and aging portion of that community. So while White American Evangelical protestants make up 26% of the church-going community in the 65 and older demographic, that proportion shrinks to 8% in the 18-29 demographic; and if we quantify for Reformed Evangelicals the stats dip even lower. The authors have an outsized perception of the size of their community because their friend groups are made up of people who also grew up in it or (increasingly) have left it. However, if you go to a major US city or the community I grew up in (Northern NJ/NYC), you’ll find it is quite possible to live one’s entire life around thousands and thousands of people without ever actually meeting a Conservative, Evangelical Christian.
Additionally, if everyone the authors of these articles knew was a member of their small religious community, then if they encountered abuse, the abusers were usually members of this community and therefore they would forever associate that abuse with the community itself and on leaving it assume that the non-religious community was not subject to the same kind of abuses even though an objective perusal of the news would show that to be a demonstrably false impression.
The problem is that in the postmodern world one’s “lived experience” often becomes the arbiter of reality while actual statistics become a tool of the oppressor in silencing victims. Similar perceptions can be found among people who grew up in other small Conservative religious communities like the Amish or Orthodox Jewish communities and encountered some form of abuse.
There is also the problem that when allegations of abuse are made, those who see abuse as endemic in that community tend to automatically assume that the allegations are automatically true, and view even a reasonable defense of the accused as the community corruptly attempting to protect guilty members of “the tribe.” And even when the discipline process results in the conviction of the accused, it is often alleged that the process itself was too difficult and traumatizing for the accuser, even when the practical result was the destruction of the reputation and/or ministry of the accused.
This kind of attitude became evident when writers such as Aimee Byrd complained in articles like, “Who Is Valued In The OPC?” that the ordinary OPC church discipline process, when applied to Elders accused of spiritual abuse, would lead to women, “continuing to be harmed by the process.” Again and again, in articles like this one, there was an assumption that the court itself was misogynistic and that they should repent of their misogyny by taking the side (and even the worldview) of the woman accusing the male member, elder, or pastor of spiritual abuse and heavily curtail the right of accused to speak in their own defense. The fact that this would create a hopelessly jaundiced trial and make it virtually impossible to acquit the defendant, who would have to prove he was innocent under a worldview that presumes he is an abuser by nature, didn’t seem to matter much.
Now, while we shouldn’t take a stance that abuse in any community regardless of the size is not a problem, nor should we foolishly assume there is no abuse going on in the Reformed community (especially because we believe in the doctrine of Total Depravity), the idea that there is an outsized abuse problem among Reformed Evangelicals simply isn’t true, and the only major study available that quantified sexual abusers by religious affiliation done in 2006 indicated that the two largest groups were Catholics (28%) and Anglicans (27%), followed by NO religious affiliation (24%). Most sexual and physical abusers in the USA are not Reformed or even Evangelical, and Roman Catholics and Anglicans cannot be reasonably quantified as “Fundamentalist” either.
I grew up in a non-religious community and date rape and child abuse were certainly more prevalent there than they were in the Conservative Reformed community. The fact is anecdotal evidence and personal experience (even though they are one’s own “lived experience”) does not a trend make. In the same way, just because someone had an abusive marriage, or was raised in a spiritually abusive church, doesn’t mean ALL marriages and churches, or even MOST, are abusive. Neither is there a discernable line from Conservative theology to abuse. I’ve been counseling in the Conservative Reformed community for over 20 years, and yet I can tell you that most of the people I’ve counseled who suffered abuse, suffered it outside the Reformed community and often in theologically Liberal environments.
The idea that Conservatives are abusers may be popular among political and theological Liberals (and social Libertarians), but that’s largely a result of believing their own propaganda regarding people they view as evil. This is incredibly commonplace among leftist tribes today because of their overarching Oppressed/Oppressor dialectic. If you are a Feminist, every male is usually either an abuser, a potential abuser, or a friend or member of your family (and therefore excluded from the sample) and every woman is a victim of abuse who needs to be freed from an abusive, patriarchal culture. If you are a Communist, every business owner is a greedy, employee-abusing capitalist, and every worker is an oppressed, saintly martyr who must have his chains broken. The fact that most of the most verifiably abusive and sexually abusive communities on earth, such as the American porn and sex-trafficking communities; or the security forces of the Chinese Communist Party, are either non or anti-religious, and definitely inclined towards the left; or the slew of #Metoo allegations made against celebrities who identify as Liberal and Feminist, should be enough to cause one to at least question if leftists are indeed less likely to abuse than Conservatives.
But to even consider that would be to betray one’s tribe and to open the door to the possibility that all people are subject to a natural tendency towards depravity since birth and that the answer to the problem is not to be found by reordering society, smashing the patriarchy, eliminating privilege, redistributing wealth, or any of the Marxist answers to the problem of human sin.
From my perspective, the saddest part of all of this is that the only solution to the problem of human sin, the Biblical Gospel, is being identified as part of the root of the problem of abuse, and the more faithful one is to the Bible, the more likely one is to be perceived as an abuser. In fact, a bizarre redefinition of ‘Christian’ is occurring in which it is asserted that the more willing you are to reject Biblical solutions to the problem of abuse and embrace Feminist and Marxist solutions the more authentically compassionate and Christian you are. We are told that the same Jesus who answered the devil and His own human opponents from Scripture would reject people who got their answers from the same source and would instead compliment people who found their answers in a modern dialectical materialist philosophy derived from the writings of atheists.
Needless to say, I don’t think this is true, and I will conclude by issuing the same warning that Paul issued to people who were tempted to find their answers to the problems of life in the popular philosophies of their own day:
“Beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy and empty deceit, according to the tradition of men, according to the basic principles of the world, and not according to Christ.” (Col. 2:8)
Andrew Webb is a Minister in the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church and is pastor of Providence ARP in Fayetteville, N.C.
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If politicians and public health officials want more people to trust them, they would do better to try to refute opposing arguments rather than arrogantly dismiss them as “misinformation.” In spite of concerted efforts by civil leaders, public health officials, big media, and big tech to silence dissent during this pandemic, there have been a number of scientists who have contended that the prolonged use of government-imposed NPIs in a pandemic does far more harm than good. 

Framing Everything in Life as a Matter of Empirical Science Disregards the Immaterial and Transcendent Aspects of Human Existence, Succumbs to the Illusion of Control, Enthrones Experts, and Leads to Tyranny.

Amid the coronavirus pandemic, one of the many repeated mantras has been that we need to “follow the science” when determining the public policy response to this highly infectious disease. While many have welcomed this assertion, it has not been without its critics. For example, one writer points out the danger to such an approach by noting the following:
As President Dwight Eisenhower said in his 1961 farewell address, public policy can ‘become the captive of a scientific-technological elite,’ which by nature lacks the temperament and broad thinking necessary to steer a democratic society. Instead, this elite’s conceptual blindspots and ignorance of broader human and spiritual concerns mean it is likely to steer us into the ditch of never-ending lockdown cycles to ‘slow the spread’ of a virus that is demonstrably uncontainable by governments and their edicts.
Similarly, former Bureau of Justice Statistics director Jeffrey Anderson argues that, while public health officials now play a prominent role in our governance, such people do not make for good rulers because “it is in the nature of their art to focus on the body in lieu of higher concerns,” and because they “are naturally enthusiastic about public health interventions.”
He adds,
Their guiding light is the avoidance of risk — narrowly defined as the risk of becoming sick or dying. The risk of stifling, enervating, or devitalizing human society is not even part of their calculation. Under their influence, America has been conducting an experiment in mask-wearing based largely on unsupported scientific claims and an impoverished understanding of human existence.
(For data on mask-wearing, see this, this, this, this, this, and this. It is important to remember that the controversy over masks is not whether people should be able to wear them without being given a hard time. Of course they should. Rather, the controversy pertains to whether some people should be allowed to force other people to wear masks against their will.)
“Experiment” is the proper word to describe much of what has been done in response to this pandemic. One wonders why previous generations did not respond to their pandemics by employing the strategies that have been implemented during the COVID-19 outbreak. After all, it is not as though there is anything technologically advanced about non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) like stay at home orders, closures, compulsory mask-wearing, gathering restrictions, contact tracing, and physical distancing mandates. People had a basic knowledge of the way infectious diseases spread during the pandemics that took place in the late 1950s and late 1960s.
Why weren’t those pandemics dealt with in the way we have dealt with this one? What is it that has made so many people see the COVID response as reasonable even though the data has shown for some time that the virus is not deadly for the vast majority of those who contract it?
While there are surely a variety of factors that have contributed to what has happened with COVID-19, one of them may be connected with the fact that our society is significantly more secularized today than it was in earlier eras. That is, the widespread acceptance of prolonged, government-imposed NPIs that radically disrupt ordinary life and suppress civil and religious liberties is due in part to the waning influence of the notion that human life has a transcendent meaning, along with the increasing acceptance of a scientism that is focused entirely on controlling the material world.
C.S. Lewis had some important things to say about the threat of scientism. This does not mean that he was anti-science, though he knew that charge would be leveled against him. In a letter written in response to such criticism, he defined scientism as “the belief that the supreme moral end is the perpetuation of our own species, and this is to be pursued even if, in the process of being fitted for survival, our species has to be stripped of all those things for which we value it — of pity, of happiness, and of freedom.” One writer aptly summarizes Lewis’s concerns about scientism by saying that he “feared what might be done to all nature and especially to mankind if scientific knowledge were to be applied by the power of government without the restraints of traditional values.”
Lewis’s most focused treatments of scientism are found in his brief nonfiction work The Abolition of Man and in his fictional Space Trilogy. In the first volume of the trilogy, the scientist-villain (Weston) justifies his mistreatment of the hero (Ransom) by telling him:
I admit that we have had to infringe your rights. My only defense is that small claims must give way to great. As far as we know, we are doing what has never been done in the history of the universe… You cannot be so small-minded as to think that the rights or the life of an individual or of a million individuals are of the slightest importance in comparison with this.[1]
In the last volume of the trilogy, the plot revolves around how an organization called the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (NICE) “follows the science” in its social planning efforts, with ruthless disregard for both animal and human life. At one point in the story, the narrator makes this observation:
The physical sciences, good and innocent in themselves, had already, even in Ransom’s own time, begun to be warped, had been subtly maneuvered in a certain direction. Despair of objective truth had been increasingly insinuated into the scientists; indifference to it, and a concentration upon mere power, had been the result.[2]
This is what Lewis sets his sights upon in The Abolition of Man, the main thesis of which is summed up in this quote: “When all that says ‘it is good’ has been debunked, what says ‘I want’ remains.”[3] Michael Aeschliman unpacks this assertion as follows:
Without a doctrine of objective validity, only subjective, individual desire remains as a standard to determine action. In the hands of an empowered elite, the capacity to reorder society with the techniques of a vastly powerful and unchecked science is virtually limitless and, of course, open to monstrous misuses.[4]
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