A well-grounded Christian hope perseveres through all the confusion going on in our culture. Live each day to the glory of God by displaying this hope to those around you. Love God, enjoy him each day, care for your family, care for your neighbor, and rest in Christ. It’s possible to be so caught up in changing the world that you don’t even influence those in your circle. Serve faithfully where God has you and never lose hope. 

It was the strangest of times, it was the most frustrating of times. How else could one revise Dickens’ famous opening line to describe our current cultural era?
Foundational ideas and understandings are changing at lightening pace. The majority opinion from twenty years ago regarding marriage is now viewed as oppressive and unwelcome in public discourse. Definitions established for much of human history that differentiates a man and a woman are now viewed as abhorrent. Basic biology and common sense are thrown out the window to create a new normal. Like a square cat or smelling seven, much of the language of today is illogical and unscientific, yet the culture demands full acceptance without discussion or debate.
Watching the culture go down such a dark path brings about a great deal of discouragement for believers. Some Christians have given over to despair, while others have embraced a blind optimism that doesn’t take seriously what’s at stake with the current issues.
Christian Hope
In his book Strange New World, Carl Trueman warns believers against both despair and blind optimism: “To fall into the former would be to fail to take seriously the promise that the church will win in the end because the gates of hell shall not prevail against her. To engage in the latter is simply to prepare the stage for deeper despair later. And both will feed inaction, one out of a sense of impotence, the other out of naïveté.”
Instead, as believers traverse these dark roads, we do so with hope. Not a false hope that pretends problems don’t exist, but a hope that sees the issues and yet perseveres; a hope rooted in the ultimate reality of who God is, the good news of the death and resurrection of Christ, and the imminent return of Christ. As Trueman explains, “Christian Hope is realistic. It understands that this world is a vale of tears, that things here are not as they should be, and that…all life death does end. This world is not the Christian’s home, and so we should not expect it to provide us with home comforts.”
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Written by Frank J. Smith |
Saturday, October 21, 2023
In June of this year, the PCA General Assembly celebrated its jubilee.  Locally, the half-century milestone was marked by a service conducted on October 13th by Westminster Presbytery, the regional body of ministers and churches. Covering southwestern Virginia and northeastern Tennessee, Westminster Presbytery has long had a reputation for its staunch adherence to the standard Presbyterian doctrinal standards–the Westminster Confession of Faith, Westminster Larger Catechism, and Westminster Shorter Catechism.

A special event was held recently in the Tri-Cities, commemorating the establishment of a group of Presbyterian churches.
Fifty years ago, a new denomination was born, as numerous churches and ministers separated from the Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS).  Known informally as the Southern Presbyterian Church, the PCUS, by 1973, had become liberal in its theology.  Concern over that liberalism prompted about five percent of the mainline denomination to withdraw and to form a new branch of the church, the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA).
The PCA began with 260 congregations and 41,000 members, virtually all of them in the South.  Today, it has more than 1900 organized churches and missions and close to 400,000 members, spread throughout the United States and Canada.  It is the largest conservative, Bible-believing Presbyterian denomination in the country.
Significantly, the denomination has continued to profess belief in the inerrancy, infallibility, and inspiration of the Bible; the virgin birth, sinless life,  substitutionary atonement, and bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ; salvation by faith alone and grace alone; and justification based upon the imputation of Christ’s righteousness alone.  The PCA also maintains standard Biblical ethics, as witnessed by its commitment to traditional marriage and to preserving the life of unborn babies.
In June of this year, the PCA General Assembly celebrated its jubilee.  Locally, the half-century milestone was marked by a service conducted on October 13th by Westminster Presbytery, the regional body of ministers and churches.
Covering southwestern Virginia and northeastern Tennessee, Westminster Presbytery has long had a reputation for its staunch adherence to the standard Presbyterian doctrinal standards–the Westminster Confession of Faith, Westminster Larger Catechism, and Westminster Shorter Catechism.
The October 13th event was held at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Kingsport, Tenn.  Several of the founding fathers of the Presbytery spoke.  A common theme was the crisis of conscience that each one faced, and the opposition and challenges that resulted from their resolve to separate.
Delivering the keynote address was Rev. Larry Ball, a retired minister who had served for a number of years as the Stated Clerk and who enjoyed a long ministry in Kingsport.  Mr. Ball recounted the history of the Presbytery, and also stressed the need to remember God’s acts lest future generations forget.
The other speakers were Rev. Pete Hurst, who in 1974 became the first pastor of the host congregation in Kingsport and also served in Alabama and Virginia; Rev. Sidney Anderson, who became a missionary in Nigeria and the Czech Republic; and Dr. Frank J. Smith, who was a ministerial candidate in 1973 (the first one in the PCA) and whose father was the first Stated Clerk of the Presbytery.
The evening was characterized by joy, reflection, poignancy, and anticipation of what the next fifty years might hold.
The service is available on Westminster Kingsport, the host congregation’s YouTube channel.
Frank J. Smith is Pastor of the Atlanta Reformed Presbyterian Church (RPCNA), Atlanta, Georgia.
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This report contains real stories of real women who were abused or assaulted. It’s tragic. It’s painful to read. However, the real answer is found in the pages of Scripture and does not require the implementation of new methods, programs, or policies. Women and girls within local churches need to know that men, pastors, and the church as a whole is committed to obeying the Scriptures which address matters of abuse, sin, assaults, and sexual misconduct.

Over the last few years, we have witnessed a barrage of news stories emerge within the Southern Baptist Convention that point to sex scandals, misconduct, and abuse. In 2019, the Houston Chronicle report rocked the SBC world. It revealed 700 cases that spans over a 20 year period.
Although I am no longer a pastor of a church within the SBC, I speak as a pastor who spent many years in the SBC and feels the tension growing rapidly. In short, the criticism I provide in this article comes from a heart of concern.
The 2021 SBC messengers approved to allocate funds from the Cooperative Program for a large scale investigation into the allegations and claims of sex abuse cases. Guideposts was hired as an independent investigative firm, and the SBC is prepared to use up to $4 million dollars on this entire investigation. This is the largest of such investigations in the history of the SBC.
On Sunday, May 22, 2022, the report from Guideposts was published and made available to the world. Needless to say, it was a lengthy detailed bombshell report containing harmful stories of abuse victims and accusations against public figures and well known pastors within the SBC. Since the report was published, there have been many different responses. Obviously, pastors and leaders within the SBC are trying to process this news just a few weeks prior to a decisive presidential election in Anaheim, California.
At this crisis moment, the SBC can make the right choices to move in the direction of biblical sufficiency or the Convention can choose to walk down the pathway of pragmatism. That one decision could change the future of the SBC.
The SBC and Pragmatism
The SBC has a long historical commitment to pragmatism. Not only is the SBC the largest Protestant denomination in the United States with some 47,000 churches, it’s also the most pragmatic denomination. In 1954, the SBC adopted a growth campaign under the slogan ‘Million More in 54’ and the results were extremely harmful. The idea was to grow the SBC by one million members, but the tactics were program driven and pragmatic which led to false conversions. That’s why the SBC witnessed an overflow of unconverted church members rebaptized through the years following that explosive era of church growth models.
Pragmatism is the philosophy that encourages people to make decisions based on whatever will give them positive results. In other words, if it works—do it. Pragmatism originated in 1870s and continues to be a popular means of evaluation and assessment. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that – very broadly – understands knowing the world as inseparable from agency within it. This general idea has attracted a remarkably rich and at times contrary range of interpretations, including: that all philosophical concepts should be tested via scientific experimentation, that a claim is true if and only if it is useful.
Like anabolic steroids offer instant muscular growth to athletes, pragmatism offers church growth success at a much faster rate than a model that is centered upon the Bible alone. Once leaders taste this instant success, they become slaves to it. Rather than focusing on the Scriptures, they begin looking outside of Scripture to arrange their worship services in ways that will attract people to their local church—regardless of what the Bible says.
In 2010, Andy Stanley was invited to address the pastors during the annual Pastors’ Conference of the SBC. Andy Stanley told the story of Chick-fil-A, which originated south of Atlanta. As Stanley tells the story of Chick-fil-A leaders who were trying to figure out how Chick-fil-A could grow faster, he explains how company founder Truett Cathy pounded on the table and said, “I am sick and tired of listening to you talk about how we can get bigger. If we get better, our customers will demand we get bigger.” The entire session was devoted to how pastors could learn from corporate America in making their churches better which would result in the community responding to make their churches bigger.
I recall being there in that session and looking around at a room filled with SBC pastors. What those men needed at that hour was more Scripture and less talk of corporate America. Yet, at every turn the SBC continues to turn to feed pastors pragmatism while promising them good results. It’s put on display and platformed at the SBC Pastors’ Conference and modeled through SBC leadership, Convention programs, and resolutions.
In the wake of the Houston Chronicle report, Beth Moore entered the conversation with an argument that women needed more women in places of leadership so that they could find help in moments of crisis. Moore spoke in Dallas at the ERLC’s Caring Well conference:
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