What would Francis Schaeffer say to the evangelical church today?[1] To answer this question, I first must highlight two crucial aspects of Schaeffer’s life and ministry. First, the burden of his life was to teach that the message of Christianity isn’t primarily about “religious experiences,” but about “true Truth.” Second, in contending for the truth, Schaeffer sought to do so with gentleness and compassion, and by doing so to practice simultaneously the holiness and love of God. To uphold God’s holiness requires that we stand against falsehood and unrighteousness. To uphold God’s love requires that we stand for the truth while also remembering life’s brokenness, including our own, and to walk moment-by-moment with Christ as we seek to love and honor God more than any created thing.
Throughout his entire ministry, Schaeffer practiced these two crucial points. He not only personally believed the gospel, he also taught and demonstrated that Christianity’s truth claims were really true in contrast to non-Christian thought. As such, he was willing to stand against those who either denied the truth or compromised it, and especially against those who did so within the church. Schaeffer loved and trusted Scripture. His message was the same whether chatting to individuals or addressing crowds. Honor God and revere his Word; follow Christ and submit to Scripture. What mattered to him was the trustworthiness of God’s written Word, hence the reason why he contended tirelessly for Truth in a post-truth society. For Schaeffer, if one tampers with the Bible, all is lost. This explains his concern at the end of his life regarding the direction of evangelicalism. As Schaeffer warned in his last book, The Great Evangelical Disaster, some evangelicals were in danger of compromising the full authority of Scripture, and up until his last breath, he sought to call the evangelical church back to a full commitment to Scripture and the truth of the gospel.
With this in mind, we are now able to answer the question of what Schaeffer would say to today’s evangelical church, and also to discover his ongoing relevance for Evangelicals today. I will do so in two steps. First, I will answer the question of why Schaeffer’s commitment to truth and the full authority of Scripture is still relevant for evangelicals today despite the changes that have occurred in our culture since his death. Second, I will conclude with what I believe Schaeffer would say to us today.
Schaeffer’s Commitment to “True Truth”: Is it Relevant for Evangelicals Today?
Many evangelicals, I think, would be hesitant to answer yes. Why? So much has changed. For one thing Schaeffer died before Postmodernism took center stage. More specifically, his stress on antithesis and confrontation was a bone of contention even during his lifetime and the reaction to this would be stronger today: at best impractical, at worst offensive, unloving, and fractious. As a friend put it, why focus on Truth when people are interested only in experience, or why contend with falsehood when everyone just wants to be tolerant and accepting?
This attitude to Schaeffer’s alleged rationalism and commitment to “true Truth” is unfortunate because his opposition to the Enlightenment could not have been clearer. For example, Schaeffer argued strongly that, “the central ideas of the Enlightenment stand in complete antithesis to Christian truth. More than this, they are an attack on God himself and his character.”[2]
Nevertheless, some evangelicals have argued that his commitment to objective Truth reflects the Enlightenment more than the Bible: that he was wrong to talk of “propositional revelation;” that he emphasized the mind too much; that his view of inerrancy was too literalistic; that he was too dogmatic, etc. Their dislike of the Modernist tradition is intense. By contrast they favor the Postmodern approach. They see it as more congenial to faith, more accepting, more open, more attentive to the heart rather than the head. Those who think this way conspicuously overlook Schaeffer’s warnings back in 1974 when he spoke in Lausanne. His message was blunt: if the Enlightenment was bad the existential methodology is worse. In Schaeffer’s view its foundations are like shifting sand, its proposals like poison.
The irony here is striking. Despite Postmodernism’s dislike of Modernism, we must never forget that it is itself derived from Modernism. Once Descartes and the Empiricists started to work out the logic of their ideas, they ran into difficulty. David Hume realized that even causality (the sine qua non of science) was a problem: “Do I sense the cause in causality” he asked, “or do I merely observe two consecutive events? I see billiard ball number one strike billiard ball number two—but do I observe ‘cause?’” Evidently not. With his empirical foundation, he had no answer—even though he admitted he couldn’t operate like this when playing board-games with his friends! Immanuel Kant tried to respond, but it was a hopeless task. Knowledge, like everything else, requires a metaphysical source. As a result, Modernism gradually nose-dived into Existentialism, which in turn morphed into Postmodernism—but only because the original epistemology was inadequate. When the cracks started to appear, the philosophers should have acknowledged that they had taken the wrong turn. On this point, Schaeffer was entirely on point!
But that was precisely what the Postmodernists didn’t do. Instead of back-tracking to reconsider where they’d come from, namely, the Christian worldview, they carried European thought towards “the hermeneutic of suspicion.” All attempts to establish worldviews based on rationality, they said, are suspect. According to Jacques Derrida, for example, not even language works that way. “Nothing exists outside the text,” he said. In other words, everything is an interpretation. No definitive explanation of anything is possible because language itself is relative. Similarly, Jean-François Lyotard dismissed all metanarratives, all, that is, which claim to be true and therefore exclusive—especially Christianity. Overarching stories of what life is about and how best to live are valid, but only as stories, never as “Truth.” Michel Foucault undermined things further by arguing that language, like everything else in society, is just a power-game: powerful social groups dominating others—oppressors/their victims, men/women, rich/poor, white/black, Europeans/colonials and so on.
The net effect of the postmodern slide was catastrophic. Particularly in relation to that, sadly, many have failed to appreciate the importance of what Schaeffer said about “rationality” and “rationalism.” This goes a long way to identify Postmodernism’s essential flaws and to show how best to counteract them.
In the first place, he said, Christianity isn’t rationalistic because it rests upon the reality of creation. It doesn’t start with the human mind. That was Descartes’ mistake. When he said, “I think, therefore I am” his assertion raised an obvious question: where does the (knowing) “self” come from in the first place? No answer. He just assumed it. By comparison, the Bible starts further back: it says the individual is able to think only because he or she is a creature created by the triune personal God. Given this starting point, rational thought itself—the great stumbling block of modern secular philosophy—becomes intelligible. Christianity also deals with the problem of sin and insists humanity needs a supernatural Savior because guilt is real and has to be atoned. Only Christ can do this, because he is the divine Son of God. Human attempts to merit salvation are worthless. In short, the Bible is God-centered throughout.
The second distinction Schaeffer used a lot was between “true knowledge, but not exhaustive knowledge.” What he meant is that human knowledge is limited, of necessity, because all our experience is superficial. No one knows even the tiniest thing completely. We see bits and pieces only. In addition, each person is unique. No two people share the same background or have the same interests or gifts. Yet the human mind is adequate: it grasps truth adequately if not exhaustively. Its limitations don’t invalidate either rationality or communication. Our experiences, though individual, are reciprocal.
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In the church the right of the denomination to legislate or enforce qualifications for office has been met with the notion that individuals who feel called to ministry have a de facto right to it and that the church may not deny them that without unjustly depriving them; office is regarded as the property of the person who wants or holds it, not the property of the church that invests it with authority.

My Dear Madam,
I read your recent letter with both interest and sadness. We have heard much from your leaders, but little from Memorial’s members, so your brief missive gives a fresh testimony upon our current controversies. I confess I feel a certain reluctance to respond, for communication is difficult where the respective parties’ perspectives differ, and I fear that is the case here. I bid you remember that disagreement does not equal hatred, and that Scripture teaches it is our duty to warn others if we believe they err. If you can accept it, this letter is motivated by the conviction that “better is open rebuke than hidden love” (Prov. 27:5). I doubt neither your sincerity nor your honesty, but only that your statements present a sufficient consideration of the matter. As it is our duty to examine all things (1 Thess. 5:21), you will, I hope, permit me to do so now.
One thing I note is that your claims are not necessarily decisive proofs of godly motivation. For example, you speak of your pastors “living out their faith and ministry with integrity and humility.” That might be proof of Christian virtue, yes, but we do not have a monopoly upon humility and integrity. They are also manifestations of God’s common grace, and it could be said of many of other faiths that they minister with humility and integrity (and piety, zeal, etc.) – yet they are not thereby saved, and their works are not thereby made pleasing to God. Describing his fellow Jews, Paul says:
For I bear them witness that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge.  For, being ignorant of the righteousness of God, and seeking to establish their own, they did not submit to God’s righteousness (Rom. 10:2-3).
Therein lays the essence of the question. Even if we grant your leaders’ humility and external integrity, many of us yet dispute that they are right in their teaching and actions.
Elsewhere you state your leaders “have made every effort to speak well of the brothers in the PCA who disagree.” That has not always been done: see here or Greg Johnson’s Aug. 16th tweet to potential attendees of Revoice 2022 (“Don’t let fear of the circumcision party hold you back”). I confess I am at a loss as to how accusing your critics of being in the same category as deniers of the gospel (Gal. 5:2-4; comp. 1:6-9; 3:10) is speaking well of them. But even if this were done reliably it would be no conclusive proof of Christian character. Some speak well of others, even privately, for reasons of self-advantage. One must then try to discern whether the motivation seems good or not, which can only be done by comparing the claim to more public statements. As above and elsewhere, such statements give occasion for concern.
Elsewhere you state “we also desire the peace and purity of the church.” Again, I don’t doubt your sincerity, but that statement could be made by any heretic as readily as by the pious. The real question is: what qualifies here as the peace and purity of the church? We seem to have very different notions of those concepts. From our standpoint it is a strange notion of desiring the peace and purity of the church that includes publishing books, articles, and interviews that attempt to normalize an abnormal experience and to make it acceptable to discuss publicly a matter Scripture says “must not even be named among you” (Eph. 5:3); to lend practical support to organizations (Revoice) that seek the same; to do the same with unbelievers who seek to glorify that which God abominates (“Transluminate 2020”); and to defend such practices vigorously at every turn. You desire peace and purity, but on your terms, not those of our constitution, Scripture, or much of the rest of the denomination.
We do the same, of course, but we think our terms are better, for they have the warrant of Scripture and the established practice of the church for two millennia. Those terms are, amongst others, that not merely errant behavior but also errant desires are sin, in that they are contrary to God’s preceptive will for human nature; that church officers must be above reproach (Titus 1:7) and examples of godly behavior (1 Pet. 5:3), known rather by their fidelity and good works (Titus 2:7) than by their public description of their private sexual desires; that perverse sexual desire in its various stripes does not occur in isolation, but appears in societies in which the reign and corruption of sin have proceeded far and issued as a rejection of God and many other heinous sins (Gen. 18:16-19:29; Eze. 16:49; Rom. 1:18-32); that giving intoxicating beverages to unbelievers who are using the Lord’s property for debauchery is not mercy or evangelism, but abetting revelry; that, subject to Scripture, the church has the right to determine whom it invests with office and on what grounds, and that it has a real right here against officers and candidates, who have no right to ordination by the church; and that responding to sincere concerns of wrongdoing with frequent, zealous, and emotional defenses and thus preoccupying the church with responding to faults rather than other matters is a strange notion of seeking her peace. (Please note I do not include the propriety of psychological counseling for those with perverse temptations in that list.)
I would gently remind you that such innovation of doctrine and practice and disruption of peace as has occurred in these matters has come from your party, who were under no obligation to host Revoice, publish articles at Living Out, etc. It is your party that has instigated this by attempting to import worldly notions (such as sexual desire being a result of an immutable, unwilled orientation rather than a matter of willful preference or a complex of hereditary and environmental causes); we but react in defense of the church’s traditional understanding.
Another thing I note in your letter is that your appeals are often highly emotional in nature. That is not objectionable as such—many of the New Testament epistles include strong emotional appeals—and it is understandable that, given your circumstances, you would feel strongly and speak in light of it. Let me reiterate: I do not doubt your sincerity or honesty, nor the strength of your feelings here, and I do not resent your sharing them. There are few things that are more reprehensible in our society than the tendency, common especially in politics, to exult at the suffering of our opponents. That is execrable and at odds with Scripture, and you will find none of that here.
But I do believe that you are mistaken on this point, and that your mistake lies in this: you make too much of emotion and put it in a central, commanding position rather than leaving it as a subordinate matter. Your letter is essentially a large emotional plea, and it is largely only an emotional plea. Again, it is not wrong, as such, to appeal from your feelings to ours; but in so doing you glide over the grave issues at hand and act as though your party has been needlessly and unjustly troubled. Again, that is historically doubtful—the initiative in stirring up the controversies lies with your leaders—and it gives insufficient space to revelation, which ought to guide all our considerations of such matters. You do allude to Eph. 4:4-5, but briefly and in the service of the emotional plea.
As near as I can tell, it is this preoccupation with emotion that characterizes much advocacy in matters of normalizing the experience of corrupt sexual desires. We are always hearing about the emotional experiences of those who have such temptations, and in both church and society it has often been implied that we who do not experience such desires are derelict in sympathizing with those that do, or that we have even injured them by not acknowledging, validating, and (in society at least) celebrating them in the midst of their emotional experiences. The formula has been the same in both church and society: elevate the autonomy, rights, and dignity of the individual self and of the individual person as representative of a minority group/distinctive class over those of the rights and authority of other groups and the institutions and larger bodies of which the individual is a part.
In civil society the duty and authority of the state to determine the qualifications for marriage was challenged by the plea that individuals’ rights to pursue happiness included the right to form sexual/social/familial relations according to their desires, not according to the needs or rules of the law, and that their rights on this point superseded those of the state and included the ‘right’ to have the state recognize and benefit those unions that they chose according to their personal dictates.
In the church the right of the denomination to legislate or enforce qualifications for office has been met with the notion that individuals who feel called to ministry have a de facto right to it and that the church may not deny them that without unjustly depriving them; office is regarded as the property of the person who wants or holds it, not the property of the church that invests it with authority. Central to every notion of the sacred, inviolable autonomy of the individual as a person or as a representative of a privileged class is the belief that happiness, emotional satisfaction, self-fulfillment, or whatever one wishes to call it, is the most important human need and right, and that it can only be had where that person is accepted and approved by the larger entity (society, church) and all its other members. In society, emotional experience and desire were elevated above nature and law; in the church, above Scripture and the authority of the church.
When you talk about “the toll [the controversy] has taken upon my leaders and the resources of our church—resources which should have been devoted to the care of the flock and the service of our community,” of how “the atmosphere in our church today is one of profound grief and fragility,” and of how the “charges against us feel unrelenting and disheartening,” you follow this same pattern. The emphasis is not upon how your leaders departed from sound doctrine and practice and troubled the church, but upon how those of us who have opposed their actions have made all of you feel. I admit my words here are pointed, but the truth is that your church’s present distress is attributable to your own leaders’ actions. They were under no obligation to host Revoice, etc., and could have desisted at any time—and still can now—but they persisted and now you find yourselves in your present plight. I take no pleasure in hearing of that plight, and I will not insult you by pretending that I personally or my party have been perfect in our demeanor in response; still, this is a bed of your own making, and it is not fair to the rest of us to imply it is our fault.
Third, I must politely demur from some of your practical suggestions. You say, “Those who criticize Memorial often do so from beyond our walls.” Yet as your errors have not been confined within your walls but have spread widely, it is permissible to criticize them from without, and practical considerations often mandate it. You say, “If we are in error, please come sit with us and help us understand our sin” and “please stop talking about us and come talk to us.” Time and again your leaders have been rebuked, and they have not listened but have hardened themselves, defended their actions, and suggested your critics were at fault.
You and some of your other congregants might desire dialogue, but I don’t see evidence that your leaders desire it or that it would lead to concord. Indeed, when you say that technology has allowed us “to distance ourselves from each other,” I fear you misdiagnose the reason for the distance. It is not the fault of the technology, but of your own leaders’ persistence in resisting rebuke.
Now in closing, I shall consider your final statements, but I must first warn you that they are, alas, quite somber, and that I write them with heaviness of heart. You bid us: “Remember that whether Memorial stays or leaves the PCA, we are still one body with one Lord” and that “You will still be our brothers and sisters in Christ.” We will of course not be one body in the visible sense of the church. You will have separated yourselves for reasons that we believe unjust (the avoidance of deserved discipline). As for the invisible church’s unity, it is a thing we have little ability to comment upon, its members being known only to God (1 Kgs. 8:39; comp. 1 Sam. 16:7; Prov. 16:2; 21:2; 2 Tim. 2:18-19); we humans must judge from external behavior.
And that behavior has not been good. Only one further example do I mention. Scripture says, “If anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, this person’s religion is worthless” (Jas. 1:26); and “The evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks” (Lk. 6:45b). A correspondent sent me an article where your senior pastor used foul language in quoting an obvious heretic (Francis Spufford)’s alternative to the doctrine of sin, “The human propensity to [expletive subtracted].” That is not being above reproach or acting in a manner worthy of our calling. It is writing in a manner that would get one fired by many unbelieving bosses. And yet this is what qualifies as Christian ministry among you! All of which is to say that many of us suspect that it might be said of at least some of you that:
They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out, that it might become plain that they all are not of us (1 Jn. 2:19).
A grim prospect, surely, the writing of which is unpleasant. Yet Scripture can scarcely allow us to come to any other conclusion. When you then say that “we will still share the same table each Sunday,” I fear it might prove otherwise. Scripture is clear that not all that is meant to be communion truly is (1 Cor. 11:20), and it has been the long experience of the church that many retain the form without the right doctrine or the true relationship with Christ that sanctifies the form. In conclusion, whether Memorial stays or leaves you would do well to find a church whose leaders conduct themselves other than Memorial’s have; for “bad company ruins good morals” (1 Cor. 15:33). Now may God grant you every grace in Christ and give you understanding in this and every matter, that you might discern his will aright and act in a manner pleasing to him.
Tom Hervey is a member, Woodruff Road Presbyterian Church, Simpsonville, SC. The statements made in this article are the personal opinions of the author alone, and do not necessarily reflect the views of his church or its leadership or other members.
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We, as Jesus’s followers, may be perceived even by those in our own families as “having lost our minds.” Why follow a Jewish carpenter who was crucified two millennia ago? Why forego a comfortable life, forsake the American dream, and choose deprivation and suffering for his cause? By the world’s standards, we’re out of our minds.

Jesus entered a house, and the crowd gathered again so that they were not even able to eat. When his family heard this, they set out to restrain him, because they said, “He’s out of his mind.” (Mark 3:20–22 CSB)
The Professor and the Madman
In his bestselling novel, Simon Winchester tells the harrowing tale of The Professor and the Madman. The professor, James Murray, served as the longtime editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. The “madman,” William Chester Minor, was a prolific contributor to the work. Minor, a medical doctor who had fought in the Civil War but was plagued by a severe mental illness. He had murdered an innocent man in a case of mistaken identity that led to Minor’s incarceration.
Confined to a lunatic asylum, Minor found meaning in immersing himself in linguistic research, sending copious notes to Murray. For the longest time, Murray was unaware of the background of the lexicographic prodigy. The mystery man preferred to remain in obscurity until Murray eventually tracked him down. To his amazement, he discovered that Minor was, quite literally, out of his mind. As the fascinating story of the professor and the madman illustrates, at times the line between erudition and lunacy can be fine indeed.
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It might be seven minutes a day as you cuddle your little one to sleep and talk to her about the goodness of God and his lovingkindness for us made flesh—Christ. It’s possible. And by relying on God’s grace (not our own strength), we can teach God’s word diligently to our children to help them face a post-Christian world in which moral norms are no longer Christian norms. 

To be a parent, you apparently need to be a theologian if you want to be able to answer the questions your kids have. Because as it turns out the faith of a child is a faith that asks every difficult theological question possible.
Dad, why did God create Satan if he knew Satan would turn out evil?
That’s a question I’ve been asked. And they don’t get easier.
As parents, we need to know theology and Scripture to guide the minds and hearts of our children.
Lest I am misunderstood, no, parents do not need a theology degree or be to a church theologian with all the traditional implications. What I mean is that we need to think about who God is, who we are, and what the Bible says about both, so that we can help our children love God with their minds and hearts.
As I talk to or hear younger people communicate, I see people who want to know more about God, about Christianity, and about what it all means. And in a world in which Christian norms are no longer the norm, we need to justify, explain, and contemplate the reasons and purposes of almost everything.
What is sex? What is gender? What is good? Are phones good? Are all sexual acts good? Are we given our purpose in life, or do we find it? Do we discover or create our purpose? Why does the sun rise? Or actually, should we say instead that the earth rotates and it only appears like the sun rises? What is abortion? Is it wrong? Is it right? When? How?
What is evil? Why is there so much sexual malfeasance? Why do churches sometimes rule over people as tyrants; why do other churches make you feel the presence of the Spirit of Jesus?
Parents must know not only the answer to these questions but the reasons why we answer in the way we do and the purpose of all these things—what is sex for, just to ask one question.
Let me cite an example to explain why this is so important. We laugh at the virtue of chastity.
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Rufo ends this revealing article with the smart and hopeful observation that such deception will ultimately reveal itself, as great evil always does. “When parents, voters, and political leaders understand the true nature of Drag Queen Story Hour and the ideology that drives it, they will work quickly to restore the limits that have been temporarily – and recklessly – abandoned.” Thankfully, members of Congress have introduced an important bill to stop our tax dollars from going to these truly dangerous events in schools and community libraries. This is a very good first step.

We have all heard of Drag Queen Story Hour being featured in public and school libraries across the nation and wondered why any sensible librarian, regardless of their politics, would ever say to her or himself, “Yes, men dressed as cartoonish women dancing provocatively is exactly what we should provide for the young patrons of our library!”
That question is even more disturbing when one digs into the true intentions of those who founded and are pushing Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH) around our nation and the world. That is exactly what Christopher F. Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, did in a very important exposé in the most recent issue of City Journal. (He also published an abridged version at Foxnews.com)
Rufo explains, “The drag queen might appear as a comic figure, but he carries an utterly serious message: the deconstruction of sex, the reconstruction of child sexuality, and the subversion of middle-class family life.”
He adds, “By excavating the foundations of this ideology and sifting through the literature of its activists, parents and citizens can finally understand the new sexual politics and formulate a strategy for resisting it.”
And resist it we must!
DQSH is certainly not harmless fun, nor is it “family friendly” as its promoters happily claim. Rufo uncovers a much darker, sinister story, “The ideology that drives this movement was born in the sex dungeons of San Francisco and incubated in the academy.”
What is now manifesting itself in our children’s innocence started in the academic and wholly subversive, unscientific bowels of “queer theory.” It celebrates any and everything that challenges and overturns the fundamental human reality of what male and female are and how they both come together to create the family and the next generation of humanity through marriage and the family.
Rufo meticulously details the poisonous contribution of these academic theorists, but his article becomes most interesting to Daily Citizen readers when he explores the very recent writings of the founders and promoters of Drag Queen Story Hour itself, as drag went from an aberrant undercurrent in society to “good old-fashioned, glamorous American fun” with the likes of prime-time cable entertainers like RuPaul. Rufo explains, “Television producers packaged this new form of drag as reality programming, softening the image of the drag queen and assimilating the genre into mass media and consumer culture.”
This created an opportunity in which a “genderqueer” college professor and drag queen named Harris Kornstein, aka, Lil Miss Hot Mess, began to exploit.
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An identity founded upon identifiers is an extremely fragile, vulnerable, and fickle foundation. My marriage, as amazing as it is, cannot be my identity because it will inevitably change. My profession, as much as I love it, will not happen in heaven. My relationships and responsibilities uniquely contribute to my identifiers but make a poor identity. 

Emile Ratelband wants to be identified as a forty-nine-year-old male. The problem is that he was born sixty-nine years ago. Emile not only wants to personally define his identity so he can have more prospects on dating apps like Tinder, he is also taking it a step further and asking the Netherlands to legally change his birthday. As ridiculous as this may seem, it may be considered a logical outcome of a world that now views identity as self-declared and self-developed.
The question of identity is not limited to age however—sexual and gender identity are currently hot-button issues at the forefront of our conversations.  As we consider this cultural shift in our thinking, we must confront our own questions in relation to identity: Does God have anything to say about personal identity? Who am I? What’s my deepest personal identity?
Not only does God care about your identity far more than you can hope or imagine, but he has gone through the greatest pain to give his children an entirely different identity. Despite our disobedience, Christians have the distinct honor of being a people belonging to God, hidden with Christ in God (1 Pet. 2:9; Col. 3:1–4).
Unfortunately, the gospel narrative isn’t the only storyline being told about personal identity. Culture is telling—nay, shouting—a narrative of false identity. As the light of the world (Matt. 5:14) it’s vital that people know the difference. When I sit down for coffee with neighbors and even members at our church, I use the following three widely believed fallacies to help point them to the freedom of the gospel narrative regarding identity.
Fallacy #1: Your personal identity comes from within. The world says that your identity is based on mainly one person: you. You define you. You declare who you are. The mantra of our day could be summed up in a line from William Ernest Henley’s poem Invictus: “I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.” Emile Ratelband’s desire to officially become a forty-nine-year-old is the natural outworking of the hyper individual and false sense of freedom of our day. “Nowadays, we are all free people and we have a free will to change things,” Ratelband declared, “So I want to change my age. I feel I am about forty to forty-five.”
The challenge is that self can never carry the weight of self. You were not made to be enough for you. While we most assuredly experience external brokenness, the greatest cause of most of the brokenness we experience is ourselves. You have wronged yourself, lied to yourself, and led yourself astray more than anyone else.
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Our witness before our neighbours matters. That is not just walking with integrity before them personally (though that surely matters too). But it means walking in such a way that we inevitably do good to them because of the gospel. It means serving our neighbours in real and practical ways so that, when they see the good works we do, we can point them to the gospel and they may give thanks to the true and living God who, because of his Son and in the power of his Spirit, we are compelled to do them.

Let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven. – Matthew 5:16

I have argued before that the current context in which we broadly find ourselves in the Western World means that the church can no longer rely on being seen as an inherently good thing. Time was, people thought the church was inherently good, even if they themselves weren’t overly interested in it. They might send their kids for a bit of good morals, or spiritual formation, because the church was essentially alright, just not of interest to them in particular.
That clearly is not the situation we are in anymore. These days, we are not seen as a basically good thing. Indeed, we are no longer even seen as an essentially harmless thing. Now we are broadly seen as a bad, problematic thing. The world now sees itself as the good and the church as opposing what it stands for. We are, at best, viewed with a large degree of scepticism by many.
I say that not in any sort of despairing way. Just as a point of fact. Most people don’t actively hate us, they broadly nothing us. But what they do know about us, or think they know about us, is often not positive. Which means we are starting from behind with many people. They aren’t chomping at the bit to hear our gospel message of salvation. Some think they’ve heard it all before (but we know they haven’t) or think they know what we’re about already and aren’t that keen.
This matters because, if we are starting from behind and cannot assume people will view us as an unmitigated community good, we have to show them before they engage with us that it is so. I am minded to think many churches who sit in their buildings and do very little in their communities but run the occasional outreach event are rightly viewed as not being much of a community good.
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Item 6 proposes a change that would better bring the rights of the various parties into balance by requiring a 2/3 vote to suspend the rights of someone who has been accused, but not yet found guilty. Item 11, on the other hand, would have the opposite effect. Requiring a 2/3 vote to suspend someone from the Lord’s Table and/or from official functions gives too much weight to the rights of the appellant, and it overlooks the rights of the court and the rights of the Church as a whole.

The Presbyteries of the PCA are currently voting on two Book of Church Order (BCO) amendments that are very similar: Item 6 (Overture 2021-20) and Item 11 (Overture 2021-21). In their final forms, both seek to require a 2/3 vote to suspend the official functions of an officer, or to suspend someone from the Lord’s Table, but in two different settings. Item 6 deals with suspending someone’s rights before the completion of his judicial process. Item 11 deals with suspending someone’s rights after the completion of his judicial process in the lower court, but while the decision is under appeal.
In my opinion, Presbyteries should support Item 6 but oppose Item 11. My reasons for differentiating between the two proposals have to do with the balance of the various rights within a judicial setting. In church polity, we are always dealing with questions about how to balance different rights, values, and needs. Robert’s Rules of Order, Newly Revised (RONR) captures this goal well:
The rules of parliamentary law found in this book will, on analysis, be seen to be constructed upon a careful balance of the rights of persons or subgroups within an organization’s or an assembly’s total membership. That is, these rules are based on a regard for the rights:

of the majority,
of the minority, especially a strong minority—greater than one third,
of individual members,
of absentees, and
of all these together.

The means of protecting all of these rights in appropriate measure forms much of the substance of parliamentary law, and the need for this protection dictates the degree of development that the subject has undergone. (RONR [12th ed], “Principles Underlying Parliamentary Law,” xlix)
As we consider the rights of the various parties in church discipline proceedings, we must consider how to balance the various rights of the prosecutor, the accused, the court, and the Church as a whole.
Summary Overview for Supporting Item 6 and Opposing Item 11
In brief, my reason for supporting Item 6 is simple: in considering this balance of rights, the accused has the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty. While there may be good reasons for suspending him from the sacraments or (if an officer) from official duties, that decision should require a supermajority (i.e., a 2/3 vote).
On the other hand, Item 11 would seek to require the same supermajority 2/3 vote after someone has had his opportunity to present evidence, call witnesses, and make his case in court. Although that individual retains the right to appeal a guilty verdict or a censure (BCO 42), the balance of rights in this situation should shift to the decision of the original court. While the court may not persist with such a suspension as a censure before the appeal is heard, I believe that the court should retain the right to determine by a simple majority vote whether there are sufficient reasons to prevent the appellant from approaching the Lord’s Table and, if an officer, from exercising some or all of his official functions.
Furthermore, since the “functions” of an officer are clearly defined in the BCO as what the officer does, and not what the church does to remunerate the officer (see BCO 8-5; 34-10; 36-7), this provision could never permit a church to suspend a teaching elder without pay.
So, to require the same 2/3 vote for this decision both before and after a trial does not properly balance the competing rights of the various parties of the case. Therefore, Item 6 would improve the balance between the judicial rights of the various parties, while Item 11 would create an imbalance of those rights.
In the rest of this article, I will expand this brief summary into greater detail.
Balancing the Rights of the Parties
It is enlightening to categorize the provisions contained in the Rules of Discipline according to the various rights afforded to each of the parties of a case: the prosecutor, the accused, the court of jurisdiction, and the Church as a whole.
Let’s begin with the rights of the prosecutor. The prosecutor has the right to bring an accusation against the accused (BCO 31-3). Nevertheless, when it is an individual making out charges against another person, this person’s rights are very limited. An injured party is required to have sought the means of private reconciliation from Matthew 18 in the case of personal offenses (BCO 31-5). Furthermore, the court is to exercise great caution to consider the character of the accuser (BCO 31-8), and every voluntary prosecutor must be warned that if he should fail to show probable cause of the charges, “he may himself be censured as a slanderer of the brethren” (BCO 31-9).
The accused, on the other hand, has many more rights protected by the BCO.Read More
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