Written by C. Fredric Marcinak |
Wednesday, January 24, 2024
Ruling elders, support your ministers, guard your ministers, pray for your ministers. Seek out those who are called to preach and encourage them. And protect God’s people from those who would lead them astray. In so doing, you will ensure that the preaching of the Word of God remains the Word of God.

The confession penned by Sixteenth Century Swiss Reformer Heinrich Bullinger famously proclaims: “The preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God.” For those of us trained on principles of “Sola Scriptura” and the attendant doctrines of inspiration, infallibility, and inerrancy, Bullinger’s statement is striking. But this high view of the preaching of God’s Word was embraced by Luther, Calvin, and the other Reformers. Bryan Chapell makes the point in more modern terms when he writes, “We do not merely speak about Jesus to his people; we speak as Jesus speaks to His people.” The point is clear: the expounding of His Word is the primary means God uses to speak to the hearts of men—to convert the lost, to sanctify believers.
I am thankful for those faithful preachers who week in and week out labor to speak as God’s mouthpiece to His people. Of course, as a ruling elder, I am not called to preach. But all elders—teaching and ruling—are equally responsible for the right preaching of the Word. Indeed, we know that we will one day give account for how we handle this weighty responsibility. So, how can ruling elders ensure that the Word if faithfully preached?
Encouraging the Fruitful Ministry of the Word in the Church
There are at least three ways that ruling elders are to encourage a fruitful ministry of the Word in the church. These are all positive, or explicitly constructive, aspects of a ruling elder’s ministry in relation to the public reading and preaching of the Word.
Search
First, ruling elders are to take the lead whenever a church needs to conduct a search for a new pastor. It is the session that calls the congregational meeting at which a search committee is elected. Frequently, a congregation will appoint its session to serve as the search committee (BCO 20-2), but even if a group of people other than the session is elected to a search committee, ruling elders have a critically important role to play. The session must clearly communicate to the search committee the central place of the ministry of the Word in the local church and the high biblical standards that exist for any prospective candidates to the ministry. At the end of a search process, it is the session that calls the congregational meeting at which the search committee presents its recommended candidate to the congregation.
Pastoral searches should not be frequent occurrences in the normal life of a healthy and stable church. However, there is another sense by which ruling elders should take the lead in searching for future pastors. It is incumbent upon ruling elders to think intentionally and seriously about the ministry potential and prospects of men in the church who show potential for future gospel ministry. More than anyone else in the church, ruling elders should be energized to develop the next generation of gospel ministers.
In shepherding the families of our church over the years, I have noticed a pattern: when a young man loves the Lord and shows some aptitude for serving in the church, people start to say he should be a deacon. Now, deacons are vitally important and I am thankful for those men called to that office. But ruling elders should work with men to help define their sense of call—what is the nature of the call? What is the nature of the spiritual gifts? If the man is more clearly gifted for the ministry of Word and prayer, the elders should explore those gifts and, if warranted, encourage the man to pursue his call to the ministry. We should regularly search for those called to the ministry and encourage them in that direction—with the expectation that God will raise up ministers for his church.
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Written by R. Scott Clark |
Wednesday, November 3, 2021
For us Christians, let vaccines be vaccines and not sacraments. Let science be science and not a new religion. If something may not be questioned, however, it is a religion and not science.

John Calvin (1509–64) famously wrote that the human heart is a “perpetual factory of idols” (Institutes 1.11.18).
What he meant is that since human beings are irrevocably and naturally religious and, after the fall, profoundly corrupted by sin, our religious inclinations do not disappear but are misdirected. The question is not whether humans will be religious but how? Yesterday on Twitter Jules Diner posted a quotation from a certain Thomas Sheridan, a writer hitherto unknown to me:
The ‘Pandemic’ has been a kind of religious event for most people. For the first time in [their] entire existences they had something meaningful to live for. It gave them rituals, fear of damnation, and hope for redemption and salvation with the vaccine[s] being the keys to ‘the kingdom of heaven.’ They could point fingers at heretics and unbelievers like their ancestors did back in the Middle Ages. [Ed. note: revised for punctuation and grammar]
I do not know if this is an original analysis but it seems true. There is a religious quality to some responses to the pandemic (and to other crises too). Consider the global cooling [1970s]/global warming [1980s–90s]/climate change [2000s] crisis. There are reasonable grounds for questioning the claims being made about anthropogenic [man-made] climate change but increasingly debate on this issue is being silenced. By definition science operates on the principle of doubt not trust. Anyone who knows just a little about the history of science or even its most basic principles knows that it operates on doubt, questions, discussion, and even debate. When scientists publish their results the first thing that happens is that other scientists try to replicate their methods and results to verify them. Science does not trust. It doubts and tests. Anyone who tells us to “trust the science” is advocating a dogmatic, unreasoning religion not science. Christianity, by contrast, has dogmas to be sure but it is not unreasoning. It is grounded in historical claims. We claim that the bodily resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth is a historical event the evidence of which (i.e., Jesus of Nazareth) was witnessed by hundreds of people. We have written accounts, produced by sane, reasonable people of these historical events. Further, we claim that there is more evidence to come: Jesus will return bodily and there will be more bodily resurrections.
It has been observed that lab-coated scientists are the priests of Modernity. They are the clerics who diagnose the ills of our bodies (e.g., medicine) and souls (e.g., pyschiatry) and it is they who prescribe the cure of bodies and souls. Steadily through the Modern period their pronouncements have become unquestionable and dogmatic. So, the turn of the culture, during the pandemic, to lab-coated priests is understandable. It is interesting that Dr Fauci’s NIH staff photo shows him in a lab coat. The lab coat, of course, is the vestment for the new priesthood and Fauci is arguably the new pope of the new priesthood. Consider why Dr Fauci would have his lab coat on for his staff photo? It is not because he had just stepped out of the lab for the photo. He has been an administrator for years. His actual working uniform is a business suit not a lab coat. My grandfather, who was a farmer, did not wear his overalls for the family photo. Fauci wore his lab coat for his staff photo for the same reason a priest wears his vestments for a photo: to signify his office.
Yesterday afternoon my better half was remarking on the comments she was reading below a story in the New York Times about the airline strikes and the vaccine mandates. As she described the tenor and language of the comments I was struck by how much they reminded me of the angriest of witch-hunting medieval mobs. This is quite striking because I imagine that the subscribers of the NYT think of themselves as enlightened and tolerant but there was precious little of either evident in the comment box.
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We are told to “follow the science”. What we have witnessed far too often over the past four years is “follow the money”. Be it corrupt politicians, Big Pharma, medicos with vested interests, or globalist bodies seeking to control us all, we have seen how quickly and easily science and medicine can be corrupted and hijacked for nefarious ends.

Some of us were quite sceptical of what was being done to us in the name of Covid from very early on in the piece. Things did not seem to add up, and the hysterical media alarmism, coupled with Statist overkill via lockdowns and all the rest certainly made us wonder.
And many of us wondered out loud. We got absolutely hammered and hated on for daring to ask hard questions and query the official narrative. For simply expressing our concerns we were turned into despised pariahs and treated as the scum of the earth.
Yet increasingly we are being vindicated. Barely a day goes by when we do not learn even more about just how wrong so much of the “science” was, how dictatorial and totalitarian our governments were, and how much medical fascism was allowed to take place. Simply considering all the injuries and deaths so far with rushed and improperly tested medicines should wake us up.
All this, coupled with the clearly stated aims of individuals and groups like Schwab, Harari, Gates, the World Economic Forum and the Great Reset mob, makes it clear that we whistle-blowers and questioners were absolutely right to stick our necks out and dare to look closer at what was – and is – happening.
There are now innumerable articles and videos and plenty of books on all this. Last year I offered this list of titles.
Four recent articles that have appeared on these matters are worth drawing your attention to. The first one speaks about slodderwetenschap (the Dutch term for ‘sloppy science’). The authors say this especially occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic:
We had front-row seats to witness the media reporting claims of a breakthrough made one day, then dismissed the next. It’s one of the first occasions the public has been able to clearly see how messy the scientific process can be – when it’s done sloppily.
One of the more public facets in the swirling whirl of COVID-19 misinformation was the continuing role of Dr Anthony Fauci, the Chief Medical Officer to the President of the USA. Fauci insisted that his pronouncements of the moment, such as suggesting it would only take 15 days to slow the spread of the virus or that masks were ‘unnecessary’, were ‘science’ and as such not to be questioned. Yet, the main method of science is to question. Fauci was abusing his claims of expertise and in the process helping to erode the public’s trust in science itself.
The researchers argue that one of the drivers of sloppy science is that people find it hard to accept results that are a work in progress; they much prefer the neatness and superficial completeness that often comes with incorrect work. It can mean that shortcuts are taken – and alternatives are ignored because they cause disruption.
Results that are desired are often declared correct due to political and financial pressures or even fears. This culture involves accepting storylines that are presented without further examination (eg, Fauci’s ‘I am Science’). Naïve acceptance can cause real harm – especially when the initial claims need to be qualified or are disproved. What arose during the COVID-19 pandemic was the increasing proliferation of unsound science, which meant policy leaders – misled by misinformation – made terrible decisions with devastating ramifications. The debate about the longevity of lockdowns as a means of dealing with COVID-19 and the seemingly deliberate suppression of the role of natural immunity post-infection stand out as two prominent examples.
They close their piece by outlining seven critical mistakes where sloppy science can creep into the scientific process:
1. Jumping straight into giving explanations for unexpected observations. The impulse to be the first to obtain results makes shortcuts tempting.2. Disregarding variables that could be of importance to the research. Selecting suitable variables is critical for good science – it’s a process that should not be rushed.3. Not correctly considering the context of the experiment. For example, how the research relates to the real world.4. Inflexible modelling. For example, only using a single model instead of an open-ended model to determine outcomes.5. Making bad sampling assertions. Like applying statistical functions across populations as a whole – when they may only apply to specific subsets.6. The overuse of labelling and categorisation.
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