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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Written by Aaron M. Renn |
Friday, March 22, 2024
Review of  “How Feminism Ends”… “if this is the end of feminism, then it doesn’t quite feel fair. If women are finally “free,” then why is it still so hard to be female? And why, after all of our hard work, are the best parts of history still made by males?”

Ginerva Davis has a very interesting review of French writer Emmanuel Todd’s book The Lineages of the Feminine in the new issue of American Affairs. It’s titled, provocatively, “How Feminism Ends”
Todd is a self-described liberal, and supports the right of adults to change their gender and, to the extent it is now medically possible, their sex. But in the places where our current moment is excessive, or historically aberrant, Todd finds an unambiguous common thread: the presence of females.
Females control the universities where such sex-denying work is produced. Females are disproportionately concentrated in the academic fields—anthropology, biology, sociology—that have most radically changed their ideas on sex and gender (in contrast, history, a more male-dominated field, has stayed largely above the fray). A female sociologist wrote the book about how menopause is a social construct; a different female anthropologist wrote another study Todd cites which argues that females should, actually, have evolved to be taller and stronger than males. (Todd responds that “natural selection is there only to be lamented over.”)
Females increasingly control the levers of cultural power; if a topic feels “ideologically central,” then it is because females made it so. At the very least, they constitute the majority of reporters who cover health, social issues, and family policy. The “gender ideology” Todd abhors runs through numer­ous female-dominated professions: it is promoted by journalists, legitimized by doctors, and codified into law by a growing number of female government officials. Todd also finds that it is almost always “mothers” (i.e., female parents) who have the final say over medical treatment for their children. And so while debates about “gender-af­firming” care tend to be sex-neutral—“parents” making decisions about the bodies of their “children”—much of the contemporary “transgender movement” amounts to a trend of older females helping younger ones escape their sex.
…
The result, Todd argues, is a split consciousness on the status of “women.” Males see women everywhere: women police them in HR departments, mock them in the news, and, to add insult to injury, continue to insist that they are members of a protected class.
Females, however, are still haunted by a lack of female “greatness”—the same problem posed, seventy-five years ago, by Beauvoir. They work under male bosses. Their countries are run by mostly male leaders. Males continue to define the cutting edge in tech­nology and industry, while females play catch-up in remedial programs (“Women in tech!” “Women in business!”). And even the most liberated female must still take her pills, and count her cycle, and watch her fertility “window” while pretending that she doesn’t care. The female condition, one of constant self-monitoring and self-suppression, is now oddly similar to that of the gender-dysphoric, which is perhaps why we females are so obsessed with them (I never felt quite so understood as a female until I read the work of Andrea Long Chu, whom Todd cites as a leading chronicler of the transgender experience). It also seems designed to create a degree of self-loathing: females are constantly set up to compete at tasks at which they are slightly disadvantaged, and are promised a life which, any rational mind will quickly discover, they will never achieve. Social media aside, it is unsurprising that a growing num­ber of women now report that they hate themselves.
Todd argues that the recent wave of Western feminist agitation that we have witnessed in the past decade (#MeToo in America, #BalanceTonPorc in France) is not the result of a massive backslide in female liberation but the opposite—external barriers to female equal­ity are falling by the year. Women are waking up to their new condition and finding it a bit upsetting. And they are looking desperately for something, anything, else to blame—femicide in a foreign country, their still-male bosses, and even the word “woman” itself.
Because if this is the end of feminism, then it doesn’t quite feel fair. If women are finally “free,” then why is it still so hard to be female? And why, after all of our hard work, are the best parts of history still made by males?
In another recent article, Stella Tsantekidou writes on “the desperation of female neediness.”
Do you know what it’s like to be a woman who wants a relationship but can’t get one? It is incredibly common and yet hardly acknowledged.
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The fall of Satan and his angels is shrouded behind a veil and cloaked in mystery.1 Throughout the history of the church, Christian orthodoxy has regarded the devil and his minions as angels who were created by God but fell into sin and misery. William Gouge (1575–1653) wrote, “The devils by creation were good angels, as powerful, wise, quick, speedy, invisible, and immortal as any other angels.”2 The Puritans believed that demons shared the same nature as angels, but through rebellion against God they became subject to divine judgment. When these angels fell, Gouge said, “They lost not their natural substance, and essential properties thereof, no more than what man lost when he fell. . . . Only the quality of his nature and properties is altered from good to evil.”3 Accordingly, the Westminster Larger Catechism aptly states, “God by his providence permitted some of the angels, willfully and irrecoverably, to fall into sin and damnation, limiting and ordering that, and all their sins, to his own glory” (WLC 19).
Lucifer: The Anointed Cherub
Writing extensively on the fallen angels, Jonathan Edwards (1703–1558) believed that Lucifer—the name that many in church history have given to Satan before his fall—was created to be immensely superior to all the other angels and held a type of leadership, dominion, and strength over the other angels. Lucifer before his fall, Edwards writes, “was the chief of all the angels, of the greatest natural capacity, strength and wisdom, and highest in honor and dignity, the brightest of all those stars.”4 Edwards pointed to Isaiah 14:12:—“How you are fallen from heaven, O Day Star, son of dawn!”—as an indication that Lucifer outshined all the other angels that were created. Edwards believed the title of “the anointed cherub” (Ezek. 28:14) points to the fact that Lucifer was created as the highest of all the angels. Lucifer is also described in Ezekiel 28:14 as residing “on the holy mountain of God,” who walked “in the midst of the stones of fire.” In Ezekiel 28:16, there seems to be a reference to the “covering cherub” (KJV) who resides in the temple’s Holy of Holies and use his wings to cover the throne of God. In this context, Edwards believed this cherub to be the being who was in the closest proximity to the throne of God. Edwards noted that this was a great honor and caused him to be exalted above all other angels. Yet, Edwards quickly pointed out, as the second person of the Godhead, Christ is exalted supremely higher than Lucifer. In other words, Edwards speculated that while Lucifer was only near the throne, Christ, being supremely higher and more excellent in His being, sat down forever with God on the throne. This conclusion results in Edwards’ astonishing statement:
Lucifer, in having the excellency of all those glorious things that were about him all summed up in him, he was a type of Christ, in whom all the glory and excellency of all elect creatures is more properly summed [up] as the head and fountain of all, as the brightness of all that reflects the light of the sun is summed up in the sun.5
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