A New History of the PCA’s First 50 Years
Written by David W. Hall |
Monday, July 17, 2023
What started as a grassroots denomination was still one—but some of that was giving way to bureaucratic impulses. The various proposals by the blue-ribbon Ad Interim Committee to revising church structure (1985-1989) were seldom embraced. However, the inertia of centralization, coupled with a desire for larger size, inevitably drove the PCA toward broadening.
Editor’s Note: What follows below is an excerpt (pp. 124-127) from Irony and the Presbyterian Church in America by Dr. David W. Hall (Covenant Foundation, 2023), the first published history of the PCA’s inaugural 50 years. Single copies are available for purchase from Amazon.com, and discount pricing is available on bulk orders from the author. In this excerpt, Dr. Hall summarizes the 17th General Assembly (1989), at which the Assembly formally constituted the Standing Judicial Commission (SJC) and made other significant centralizing changes to the denomination’s polity. He also here summarizes the first two decades (the 1970s and the 1980s) of the PCA’s development. Dr. Hall’s lucid and informative history of the first fifty years of the still-young denomination will – along with earlier histories – serve as a baseline for subsequent historical work on the PCA.
The 1989 (17th) Los Angeles Assembly: Turn Toward the Judiciary
The first PCA Assembly in the far West convened on June 15, 1989, reporting almost 1,000 churches and over 200,000 members. Thus, the PCA had quadrupled in 16 years. Such growth gave rise to understandable pride but would not be sustainable at those rates. For example, the meeting on the campus of Biola University had an attendance decline of about 25%. Ruling elder from Atlanta, John White, was elected Moderator from four nominees as the Assembly convened in the gymnasium of the college.
The opening worship service led by retiring Moderator D. James Kennedy, complete with an academic-robed processional from the newly formed Knox Theological Seminary, doubled as an infomercial for a new seminary at Dr. Kennedy’s campus. This Assembly would try a new format, beginning its meeting in midweek to allow commissioners to worship in a local church over Sunday; it would also, churches were told, lower airfare expenses. Housing was in the Biola dorms.
A new Stated Clerk, Paul Gilchrist, had been in office for nearly a year. Between assemblies, most amendments to the BCO passed easily. However, a few minor loose ends from prior years either did not pass or were found to be defective. For example, one amendment that changed the makeup of the AC (to double the committee side by adding representatives from the permanent committees) was not initially favored. But, upon later reconsideration, it passed 290-172 (Min17GA, 40). This was another of those centralizing initiatives rescued only by adroit use of reconsideration the following day after having been initially defeated on the floor of the Assembly. The same amendment also permitted Coordinators to attend and debate but not vote on the AC.
Several other proposed amendments were deferred to the following year (and likely would not have passed) when the new clerk reported that they had “substantive errors” that “could not be rectified.” (Min17GA, 44 and 48).
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The Normal is King
All of our hearts are shaped by the habits we’ve formed over years, for good or for ill. Consequently, it’s not the sudden, grand gestures of repentance and change that have the greatest impact. But the long, well worn, ordinary habits of weekly gathered worship, personal prayer and real engagement with the Bible that God uses to shape us. These are the habits God moulds our hearts with.
A post from Chris Roberts:
In the New Testament, there’s a significant word used in connection with Jesus Christ. We’re told about his ‘customs’ (ethos). The word describes an action prescribed by long standing patterns or law. In everyday language, we might talk about someone’s ‘habits’.
In the Gospels, we discover that Jesus was a man with very strong habits. Just as his earthly parents had followed the habit of going to the temple every year (Luke 2:42), Jesus was in the habit of going to the Mount of Olives in prayer (Luke 22:39), going to the Synagogue on the Sabbath day (Luke 4:16) and teaching (Mark 10:1). These were his established, personal customs. The disciples noticed what Jesus did and where he did it. They saw how Jesus engaged in life with die-hard regularity. These patterns, established over time, became synonymous with the person himself. Jesus didn’t just live in his world, he in-habited it.
It is useful to recognise Christ’s habits and then compare them with ours.
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The Basics: The Law and the Gospel
The content of the law does not change once we are justified through faith. Rather, it is our relationship to the law which changes. Before we were Christ’s, the law stood in judgment upon us, condemning us because we cannot keep it. The law inflicts its curse upon us. But once we trust in Christ as proclaimed in the gospel, we have died to the law and its curse, and suddenly we come alive to the commandments of God, which now reveal to us the will of God, and what we may do to please him (Psalm 1:1-2). This is why the old theologians were correct when they affirmed that the law is both the teacher of sin, and the rule of gratitude.
Often identified as a Lutheran distinctive, the law-gospel distinction is recognized by the Reformed tradition as well. Reformed theologians such as Zacharius Ursinus (the principle author of the Heidelberg Catechism) and Louis Berkhof (a distinguished Reformed theologian) have spoken of the Bible as containing two parts–the law and the gospel. Although people often assume that this means the Bible has two testaments (the Old Testament being identified with “law” while the New Testament is identified with “gospel”), this is mistaken. In making the law-gospel distinction, we mean that law and gospel are two distinct but intimately connected “words” from God found throughout both testaments.
A definition or two is helpful at this point. The law is that which God demands of us (Genesis 2:17; Exodus 20:1-18), while the gospel is the good news that in Jesus Christ, God freely and graciously gives to us everything which he demands of us under the law (Romans 5:9; 2 Corinthians 5:17-21). The content of the law is that which God revealed first to Adam in Eden, and then published in the covenant God made with Israel at Mount Sinai when the Ten Commandments were written down on two tablets of stone and given to the people of God (Exodus 24).
The gospel is the message of what God has done in Jesus Christ to save us from our sins. It is good news which is declared to us from the Word of God. The revelation of this gospel begins in Genesis 3:15 when God promises to rescue Adam from the curse pronounced upon him after he rebelled against his creator and brought our race under condemnation. God promised to crush Satan under the heel of a redeemer, and ensures Adam that one day no longer will there be any curse (Revelation 22:3). The law is what God commands of us. The gospel is what God has done for us in Jesus Christ. The law says “do.” The gospel announces to us what has been “done.”
The importance of this distinction becomes clear when we survey the course of biblical history. When God created Adam and placed him in Eden, Adam was created in a covenant relationship with God (the so-called covenant of works). Adam had the natural ability to obey all of God’s commands, which are written upon the hearts of all of Adam’s descendants because we are divine image bearers (Romans 2:12-16). These commandments are not published until God gives them to Israel at Mount Sinai. In the contents of the Sinaitic covenant, we see that both law and gospel are found together in the Old Testament.
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The Pastor’s Private Prayer
Prayer, as Calvin puts it, is our chief expression of faith. Prayer is how faith is manifested and expressed. If you don’t believe there is a God or that you need God, then you don’t pray. But if you do believe there is a God who hears, if you believe that you need Him, then the way you express that belief is through prayer.
So far in this series on pastoral character, we’ve considered the role of the pastor’s piety and the pastor’s holiness upon his ministry. Those articles have largely been cautionary, warning pastors against the particular temptations that come in ministry. But what should a pastor cultivate positively in order to grow in pastoral character? Spurgeon’s first answer would likely be the importance of cultivating communion with Christ, expressed in the pastor’s private prayer.
The Problem: Ministerialism
One of the greatest dangers that the minister faces is the danger of what Spurgeon calls formalism or officialism or ministerialism. Listen to his description:
The worst [snare a minister can face] is the temptation to ministerialism — the tendency to read our Bibles as ministers, to pray as ministers, to get into doing the whole of our religion as not ourselves personally, but only relatively concerned in it. To lose the personality of repentance and faith is a loss indeed…
I hate ministerialism, yet I often find it creeping upon me. One gets inside a pulpit, and begins to feel that he is not as other men are; but I like, if I can, to preach as a sinner to sinners; as one saved by grace to tell the love which Christ had towards me, the chief of sinners, and “less than the least of all saints.” I do not doubt that, as soon as you get out your little book to take with you, you feel like a missionary, and not simply like a sinner saved by grace. But, I pray you, do not feel like a missionary; feel like a sinner who has been washed in the precious blood of Jesus. You will never do good if you go to your work simply because of your office, [rather than] because of your soul being in it, because your heart yearns toward sinners, because you must have them saved. Strive not against any habits that are good; but against that evil tendency which, somehow or other, Satan, who is exceedingly crafty, manages to cast over our very best habits.
In other words, even as we pursue holiness and fight sin, we have to keep the gospel central. We have to cultivate a deep awareness and sorrow over our personal sin and the temptations of our hearts. We have to live in dependence on God’s grace in Christ. And then we speak as sinners saved by grace. This is how our holiness becomes warm and attractive.
Apart from our own personal grasp of the gospel, all our efforts at piety and holiness will become a stumbling block to our own sanctification and ministry. The strange thing is that people don’t always notice ministerialism in their pastor. The unspiritual people in the congregation won’t mind that their pastor doesn’t demonstrate any spiritual life before them. Even while the minister is just keeping up appearances, a church can have a growing budget and the congregation can be entertained. But in the end, as far as the pastor is concerned, it’s all external rituals and no spiritual life.
Spurgeon describes one such situation:
I read the other day, that no phase of evil presented so marvelous a power for destruction, as the unconverted minister of a parish, with a £1200 organ, a choir of ungodly singers, and an aristocratic congregation. It was the opinion of the writer, that there could be no greater instrument for damnation out of hell than that. People go to their place of worship and sit down comfortably, and think they must be Christians, when all the time all that their religion consists in, is listening to an orator, having their ears tickled with music, and perhaps their eyes amused with graceful action and fashionable manners; the whole being no better than what they hear and see at the opera — not so good, perhaps, in point of aesthetic beauty, and not an atom more spiritual. Thousands are congratulating themselves, and even blessing God that they are devout worshippers, when at the same time they are living in an unregenerate Christless state, having the form of godliness, but denying the power thereof. He who presides over a system which aims at nothing higher than formalism, is far more a servant of the devil than a minister of God.
May such words never be said of our ministries.
The Answer: Private Prayer
So what’s the solution? How do we fight against formalism? We fight by cultivating our private prayer lives, our communion with God. And Spurgeon particularly emphasizes prayer… Not just Bible reading, but prayer, i.e. communion with Christ.
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