How To Kill A Denomination In One Easy Move
If you want to kill your denomination in one easy move that move is to neglect General Assembly. Those who helped bring in the very things that caused you to send your ruling elders to GA in the first place (Revoice/Side-B, CRT, female line- authority, etc.) are themselves going to be at General Assembly and they are waiting to reengage at the very first indication that our denomination has again attained a false sense of security.
It doesn’t take long to recognize one. First, the crackly and poor audio. Then the sonar with the 5…4…3…2…1 countdown, brass and drum military band and the staccato words of the narrator. I am, of course, talking about those old World War II military training films that were shown to thousands of enlistees as the nation was looking to pump as many men as possible and as quickly as possible into foreign theaters of war.
Some were entitled, Combat: Kill or Be Killed, or Crack the Tank. However, one particularly jarring title was, How to Get Killed in One Easy Lesson. What was the gist of this lesson? The answer, fall into false security and laziness and you will greatly increase your chances of getting killed in battle.
Mankind was made to work. We naturally enjoy work and subduing creation. What we don’t like, however, is thorns and thistles. It is our tendency to want to put programs in place and have those programs run themselves while we do other more pleasant things. Parents send their children off to school where the professionals are supposed to do the work of getting our children into a top college and a fulfilling career. Then we hire a slam-bang-up guy out of seminary to be the youth pastor and we trust that professional to do his magic of making our children into the spiritually mature and exemplary Christians that we want for them to be.
Life doesn’t work that way. People who turn their attention away from their lawn will soon have an overgrown yard, and people who turn their attention from their children will soon have children whom they don’t recognize. The fact is sin is in the world and because of this everything that is not carefully looked after will devolve into destruction.
So, how does one kill a denomination in one easy move? Same answers: false security and laziness.
Why do I write these things? Because, I am beginning to get a sense that some confessionals in the PCA are considering taking the next General Assembly off. Perhaps the successes of the past two or three General Assemblies and the exit of Memorial Presbyterian on top of the increased expenses to attend GA have caused some to believe that things can be put on autopilot again. That is exactly the mindset that got the PCA into the situation that we find ourselves now:
- Good confessional pastors wanted to focus on their ministries, not church politics.
- Ruling elders and members wanted to focus resources on ministry, not on sending the pastor to expensive annual weeklong administrative meetings.
- Ruling elders didn’t want to spend their money and vacation time having to go to those boring weeklong meetings.
If you want to kill your denomination in one easy move that move is to neglect General Assembly. Those who helped bring in the very things that caused you to send your ruling elders to GA in the first place (Revoice/Side-B, CRT, female line- authority, etc.) are themselves going to be at General Assembly and they are waiting to reengage at the very first indication that our denomination has again attained a false sense of security.[1]
Ruling elders; would you dare leave your business on auto-pilot? Members, would dare leave the church to clean itself and maintain its own property? Of course not. How much more important is Christ’s bride than these things?
Therefore, watch over her and maintain her good health. Send your pastor to do the unpleasant work of maintaining the denomination that you love. Ruling elders, take from your time and treasure to protect the denomination that you love.
Don’t regret to one day see your church lying lifeless on the field of battle, a casualty to your false security and casualness.
Jim Shaw is A Minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and is Pastor of Redeemer PCA in Brunswick, GA
[1] See Memorial Pres., St. Louis letter to congregation Oct. 18, 2022, https://theaquilareport.com/memorial-presbyterian-church-session-calls-congregation-meeting/
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Arranged in the Body with Purpose
Do not despise your gifting, but trust that God really has designed you for the good of the church, precisely as He has willed. Celebrate the variety of people God has placed within your local body and remember that He has done it all for the common good and the building up of the body. May God be honored in His church.
Jesus promised His disciples that He would build His church, “and the gates of Hell” would not prevail against it (Matt 16:18). And for the last 2,000 years, He has been faithful to do just that. He has saved men and women and brought them together for the praise of His glory and the good of the saints. And not only has He saved, but He has uniquely gifted each one, arranging His church, His body, in a very specific way. And this is the encouragement: That the church of God is arranged with purpose.
It’s one thing to understand that we are the body of Christ, and that we are each like different parts of that body. Some are like mouths and some are like ears. Some are like eyes and some are like hands. These are body parts with noticeable purpose. Still others can feel like pinky toes or the appendix. Not really sure why they’re there, but technically a part of the body. But it’s another thing to know that, not only am I a part of the body of Christ, but I am a purposeful part of the body of Christ.
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The Bible’s Beautiful Both/And
Like the rest of Scripture, the psalms are both divinely inspired and thoroughly human. Even more wondrously, they are simultaneously God’s words to us and our words to God. Most important, these spiritual songs filled and expressed the heart of the eternal Word made flesh. They prophesied cosmic wholeness, and they fed the soul of the human who’d accomplish it.
Our era is marked by a deep hunger for wholeness, intactness, integrity. We’re all painfully aware that—globally, nationally, and personally—“things fall apart.” Christians know the Lord is the one in whom all things hold together (Col. 1:17) and that he’ll return to bring full healing to a fallen, fragmented world. But what happens in the meantime—when, under severe pressure, our most personal way of connecting to him collapses as well? If we’re not careful, efforts to bind up a brokenhearted faith can create further fractures within our souls.
In a moving personal reflection, James K. A. Smith describes himself as a philosopher who has lost faith in the religiously persuasive power of reason. Smith isn’t advocating an anti-intellectual faith; he’s calling for anti-intellectualism in connecting to Christian truth. He decries the emotional barrenness and pastoral ineptitude of the “baseline Platonic picture of the human person in which reason rules the passions and emotions.”
Smith’s confidence in philosophy (as he frames it) crumbled during a time of deep depression when reason couldn’t make sense of his condition, much less lift him from a pit of inexplicable despair. He lauds the presence of his counselor who, instead of offering abstract analysis, lovingly jumped in beside him.
Seeing his personal despair writ large in culture, Smith concludes that “we can’t think our way out of this mess.” Tired of trading in the “truths of the intellect,” he announces: “I’m throwing in my lot with the poets and painters, the novelists and songwriters.”
My purpose here is not to directly respond to Smith (others have done so). If Smith is merely rejecting rationalism and its residue in Western faith, then with him I say “good riddance.” His vision for creative art’s contributions to faith and human wholeness is beautiful. Yet there is a warning in the way that—in tune with our tribalistic times—Smith praises good things partly by punishing other good things for being different.
Fragmented Faith
Smith cites Hans Urs von Balthasar as motivation for a new modus operandi: “Love alone is credible; nothing else can be believed, and nothing else ought to be believed.” Smith reasons, “If love alone is credible, literature is truer than philosophy.” He wants to write with “allure rather than acuity,” in a way that works “from the imagination up. Philosophy is out because it “doesn’t ‘speak’ imagination,” and the logician “speaks a tongue that’s foreign to the heart.”
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Peace in the Church
Written by Mark G. Johnston |
Friday, January 13, 2023
However difficult we may find it to get along with our fellow Christians, we share the same spiritual DNA in Christ. As we are bound to Him in salvation, we are bound to each other for eternity in the communion of saints. This is the foundation for peace in the church. Just as the forensic righteousness of our justification is to be manifest in the practical righteousness of new obedience, so too the peace we have with God in justification must suffuse our relationships in His family.One of the sweetest words in the Hebrew language is shalom—“peace.” It conveys a very specific sense of peace. As a dear Jewish friend of mine loved to define it: “Nothing out of place; everything as it ought to be.” Such a state has only ever existed in the created order at its very beginning. God surveyed the finished product of His work of creation and not only pronounced it in its entirety to be “very good,” but He also consummated it with the prototypical Sabbath rest. The secret to this peace and perfection was that God was at the center of everything and was acknowledged as such by Adam and Eve.
The entrance of sin through Adam’s disobedience brought discord and disruption. Friction resulted, not just between him and his Maker but also with Eve—with whom he had so recently been joined together as “one flesh.” It led also to his being at odds with the very creation over which God had placed him as His earthly image bearer and vice-regent. From that moment on, earth became the center of the cosmic conflict that has been raging ever since.
Mercifully, God did not wait for Adam to find the antidote to his failure. He Himself provided what was needed to satisfy His own justice and spare Adam and Eve from what they deserved for their sin. He provided two sacrificial animals whose skins would provide a covering for their moral and physical nakedness before God and would do so because the deaths of the animals pointed to the unique sacrificial death by which God would one day deal finally and fully with sin.
God made it clear from the outset that His intention for the world and for the human race was shalom of the highest order—a restored relationship with Him that would be reflected in restored relationships between His redeemed people with one another. One of the most eloquent and encouraging expressions of what this means and how it becomes ours is heard in the words of the Aaronic blessing: “The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace” (Num. 6:24–26).As has often been pointed out, the key to this shalom is not merely the absence of conflict but the presence and favor of God. The theater in which God has chosen to display this blessing is His redeemed community, the church. That is, as men and women, boys and girls find pardon and peace with God through His redeeming grace, their relationships with one another are transformed by that same grace. The church, in both its old covenant and new covenant expressions, is marked by peace and reconciliation.
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