Written by Daniel P. Miller |
Thursday, April 4, 2024
Set your eyes on eternity. This is not a means of ignoring reality, but the only way of truly facing it. There is a day when all the pain you suffer from the presence of sin and Satan will vanish. Focus more on your future accounting before Christ than on those who fail you on earth. Above all, trust in the Lord who promises never to leave or forsake his children (Heb. 13:5). Local churches hurt people. Thankfully, the Lord of the church will one day wipe away every tear, including yours.

Dear Brother or Sister,
Local churches hurt people. People hurt people, of course, but since churches are people, churches have the capacity to inflict severe relational pain.
By God’s grace the reverse is also true. The local church is designed by Christ to function as a spring of encouragement and joy to its members. I hope that you have experienced the blessing of walking in fellowship with a body of believers that Jesus used, or is now using, to strengthen your faith and envelop you in covenantal love.
But despite Christ’s gracious provision, you may find yourself experiencing heartache in the context of a church for which Jesus died. Ironic, isn’t it? By grace alone the risen Christ is gathering out of the nations a people for his name (Acts 2:38–39). He forms us into a new humanity, uniting us to himself (Eph. 2:11–22; Gal. 2:20). We are adopted as his children and chosen as his holy bride (Rom. 8:14–17; Eph. 5:23–32; Rev. 19:6–8). He sovereignly places us in the body to complete one another (1 Cor. 12:12–27). How ironic, then, that relating to God’s people can result in such deep heartache.
Ironic, but not mysterious. The closer the human relationship, the more pain one suffers when that relationship falters. We routinely witness this in families. It’s why divorce, child rebellion, family feuds, neglect, and the like are such bitter heartaches. The closer the relationship, the greater the potential not only for joy but also for sorrow.
In the spiritual family of a local church, such heartache often stems from personal offense—one member wrongs another. At other times the problem is more corporate in nature—the departure of a leader, a change in policy, an altered ministry direction that seems to betray much of what you once loved about your church, and the like.
It’s not hard to identify the source of the pain we suffer in the context of a body of believers. It’s considerably harder to respond to that pain in God-honoring ways.
Don’t breeze past that “God-honoring” bit. Expressive Individualism programs us to feel our pain while avoiding hard questions about our responses to it. Hurt feelings are as natural as shivering from cold on a wintry day, we are assured by our therapeutic world. Therefore, how I feel about someone’s ill treatment of me or how I feel about a hurtful ministry change becomes not only my responsibility to own but everyone else’s obligation to affirm.
The Bible does not counsel us in this direction. Rather, it calls us to respond to such pain with a devotion to love others and glorify Christ in his church. This means that despite how terribly I may feel, Christ’s renown remains of supreme importance. Therefore my affections for his honor in the assembly must never fall below affections for my own. If they do I am likely to cause as much damage in the future as I’ve suffered in the past.
Our Redeemer is never surprised by sin, nor has he ever promised us a church that’s free of it. Every church family hurts people one way or another. What the Lord has done is to arm us with wise, Christ-honoring habits of response. While not an exhaustive list, consider the following disciplines.
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Members of the National Partnership: plainly speaking, you shot yourselves in the foot. Your secrecy aroused all kinds of paranoid speculation. You were authors of your own worst critiques. Going forward, open communication will serve you well in defending unfair characterizations of yourselves. I do not believe the National Partnership as an organization needs to cease to exist; it merely needs to be public and honest about what it is doing. My immediate maternal instinct may be to knock some heads together, but I do not believe you all to be vicious. Please pursue reconciliation with your brethren humbly and with contrition.

I think while I clean. I know that most normal people come up with good ideas in the shower, or mentally process through problems with a strong cup of coffee or after a good run. Alternatively, I find I do my best deep thinking while cleaning grout or scrubbing baseboards, which means that this past week I have deep-cleaned window sills, wiped down walls, vacuumed behind washing machines, and inordinately terrified my dog with the steam mop. What has transpired over the last couple of weeks in my denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America, has weighed down my spirit and occupied my scarce mental bandwidth. Why would elders in the church purposefully deceive one another? If there was no wrong-doing, why was there such secrecy? How did anyone think this was a good idea? Who leaked the information? Was it ethical to do so? Who, if anyone, is in the right? How am I supposed to submit to leadership which seems to have no moral compass? My heart was heavy as I pondered this convoluted mess. As a result, my house is now immaculate, my head hurts, and my dog has been hiding under the end table for three hours.
The recent e-mail dump containing nine years’ worth of confidential National Partnership business has been dubbed #PresbyLeaks, which hilariously sounds like a terrible geriatric condition. A very well-organized clandestine political wing of our denomination has been exposed for being exactly what it is, despite many of us having been assured time and time again that the National Partnership was merely an exclusive fellowship organization akin to a type of pastors’ support group. I have seen many men betrayed, slandered, lied to, and lash out in anger on both sides this week and last. The situation is a colossal dumpster fire. I certainly am not shocked, but I am disappointed and a bit confused. The same question keeps repeating in my head: “Brothers, are we not Presbyterian?”
Earlier this year, James Kessler wrote an article entitled, “A PCA Worth Having.” Mr. Kessler opened his argument by stating,
“As the founder of the National Partnership, I’ve been careful to avoid the sense that I was creating a tribe in the PCA.”
I wonder, did it start out rather innocuously? Was it a group of friends who got together to enjoy their own comradery over a drink, who attracted others until the group grew past the confines of a room? Conversation moved to online groups where excitement brimmed, plans were made, emails were launched, and the National Partnership was formed. More were added to their number, and slots on various committees were filled to the extent that they could refer to whole presbyteries as NP presbyteries.
But something started happening. Amidst the calls to action to steer the ship, Kessler started warning against playing two-party politics, keeping one’s tone gracious, and spending too much time on empty rhetoric battles at the mic. There were some exceedingly pastoral warnings given against characterizations of the other side, and Kessler tried to gently discourage the proclivity to enter the black hole that is the endless back and forth of blog posts, Facebook comment sections, or Assembly floor speech duels. And yet, something of a tribe mentality had already set in. Men frustrated with their more conservative brethren started referring to the other side as “the fundamentalists” and “the unhealthy wing of the denomination.” A few choice examples show the level of partisanship that had been formed:
“The PCA gets plenty of things wrong, but I’m increasingly convinced that if there’s a group most capable of getting it right, it’s this group.“
“Riding the wave of culture-war, fear has created a strong voting block that has not only stilted our voice as an Assembly but helped to repopulate some of our committees, like the SJC, with less healthy expressions of our denominational body.”
“The last four years the GRN has worked, in my opinion, to amplify the volume not of the most vulnerable in our society but the most vocal anxieties in our denomination.“
 “They will take every inch we give them and then keep coming at us and trying to push us out. Our good will has been used against us for years. This will not stop now. They have hammered us three years in a row, all while we try to play nice and meet in the middle.”
Even David Cassidy, while publicly responding to the National Partnership email leak, lumped a large majority of our denomination into a group he labeled, “that other side” – of whom he was deeply suspicious and assigned sinful motives rather freely:
“My colleague and friend who coordinated this email list of other friends was wounded by this betrayal – and make no mistake about it, a betrayal is exactly what took place. It was sinful. It was also unethical. It’s also, given what I’ve come to know about some of the men who are part of that ‘other side’, hardly unexpected.”
Ouch.
So how did we get here? The short answer is simple: Presbyterians rarely like to act like Presbyterians. But the fact that we are Presbyterians generally means that we prefer long answers, so let’s get to it, shall we?
The first item which desperately needs to be addressed is the ethical nightmare of the entire situation. This is where I will likely have the charming experience of making all parties equally enraged. All emails were subject to a confidentiality agreement. One could quibble about the lack of legal efficacy if the receiving parties had not signed a non-disclosure agreement, but we are speaking about pastors here, and ethics should not have to be litigated to exist.
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Don’t underestimate your children by assuming they can’t serve others. They can and they should. Expect it. Model it. Don’t overestimate your children by assuming they’ll want to serve. They probably won’t unless their parents teach them how or their father convinces them it’s cool. Then you’ll have a hard time getting them to sit still.

We have eight children 14 years old and under.
Over the years, a number of people have remarked to me and my wife that our children are unusually interested in helping others.
If a lady is carrying a heavy bag, they often run to carry it for her. If a man is changing a tire, they walk over (unsolicited) to hand him the tools. If congregants need song sheets, they rush to assist. When the meal is over, they’re pretty good about clearing the table quickly and washing the dishes so the adults can talk.
“Show us the secret,” they say. The secret is really no secret at all. You can find the answers in the Bible. We believe in the sufficiency of Scripture. The Bible is all we need. This doesn’t mean that Scripture will teach us how to remove stitches or win at horse shoes or pass the chemistry exam. It’s not sufficient in that way. The Bible is sufficient for faith and practice. This means that the Bible teaches us, either directly or indirectly, everything we need to know about salvation and sanctification.
In other words, if you want to know how to draw blood, you go to nursing school. But if you want to know how to live a good life, you go to the Bible. This includes teaching your kids how to serve others.
Here are five tips:
1. Show Them Serving is Christian
Serving others is to Christianity what ivy is to the outfield wall at Wrigley Field. When you look at Christians, you’re really looking at servants. The word “servant” is found well over 250 times in the New Testament. Paul had a hard time introducing himself without calling himself a doulos. “Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus…” (Rm. 1:1).
This is totally foreign to our narcissistic world. Some years ago, Tim Tebow said that the girl of his dreams would have a “servant’s heart”. Though this is standard Christian parlance, much of the media lost their minds. The wife, servile? Yes, and not just the wife but the husband and all the kids too, all in an effort to serve just like Jesus. The Master said: “The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many (Mt. 20:28).
“Service” should be a major theme in your family. It should be to your home what ugly Christmas sweaters are to your uncle’s year end party. Everyone that enters your house should expect the kids will be on their toes to serve. This is only weird to goats. To sheep, it’s normal. Their Shepherd said so. “The greatest among you shall be your servant” (Mt. 23:11).
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