The authors of Overture 15, Westminster Presbytery, argue that ministers of the gospel are to be above reproach in their Christian character and self-conception and that a man would disqualify himself from ordained office in the PCA if he identified himself in terms associated with the LGBTQ+ movement or has a Gay self-conception.

I have been asked to write on why the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) presbyteries should formally vote to include the new paragraph, Overture 15 in the Book of Church Order 7-4:
Men who describe themselves as homosexual, even those who describe themselves as homosexual and claim to practice celibacy by refraining from homosexual conduct, are disqualified from holding office in the Presbyterian Church in America.
With my wife Rebecca, we were one of the first three missionary families sent out by the first General Assembly (GA) of the PCA in Birmingham, AL, in 1973. Thus, I was greatly moved by the GA speech of Palmer Robertson, a fellow missionary professor and a long-term friend, of around my age, who has been noting the growing and unique emphasis on homosexuality that he has seen in so many cultural expressions like television and public life. Like him, my conviction is that the issue will become the cause of serious Christian persecution. Clearly, we have to get this right—for ourselves and for the next Christian generation we are raising.
I will argue that presbyteries must vote in Overture 15 for two reasons: 1. For the integrity and purity of the ordained ministry; 2. for the clarity of the Gospel message we bring to the world and especially to the youth in our churches.

For the integrity and purity of the ordained ministry

We charge new candidates for ministry to “adorn the profession of the Gospel in your life, and to set a worthy example before the church” (BCO 24-5-4).
One cannot help but compare this to the words of TE Greg Johnson: 
…you wanna know about my sexual brokenness? I am happy to talk to you about what I talked about in the pulpit two weeks ago, and that I think is relevant to this conversation. I am a pornography addict. I have had a pornography addiction for 15 years. that pull is still as strong as it was. I’ve mortified this for 15 years and it still, you know, I see a computer terminal unmonitored and immediately my mind thinks, I want to look at porn. Fifteen years of strangling this thing, and it doesn’t die, it doesn’t go away…  
I know that if I look at one image, I’m going to look at a thousand. I know I’m not going to come up for air for hours.
The authors of Overture 15, Westminster Presbytery, argue that ministers of the gospel are to be above reproach in their Christian character and self-conception and that a man would disqualify himself from ordained office in the PCA if he identified himself in terms associated with the LGBTQ+ movement or has a Gay self-conception. Johnson’s “gay self-conception” is indicated by the small but significant detail that the spine of his book, Still Time To Care features the gay rainbow.
Some admire Johnson’s honesty and oppose Overture 15 because it is unfair that homosexuals alone be targeted since there are many other sinful conditions that need to be addressed that tempt ordained ministers. This year I was asked to evaluate a Ph.D. thesis by Jeffery Adams Moore whose very well argued and exegetically supported thesis is that there are three sins that Scripture specifically highlights as the most significant: the three are: “abortion, [and] assisted suicide [forms of murder]…and homosexuality.[1]  These sins “oppose the one-man, one-woman multiplication of humanity for earthly rule under the triune God’s heavenly rule. Such sins are inversions of the created order and resist the spreading of God’s image for his glory.”[2] Though a Baptist, soon-to-be Dr. Moore identifies among others John Calvin, Francis Turretin, Charles Hodge, Herman Bavinck, and Louis Berkhof as theologians adopting this conclusion. The gravity of this sin must also be understood in terms of its role in our present godless culture.

For the clarity of the Gospel message that we bring to the world and especially to the youth in our churches.

A second major issue regarding homosexuality, sometimes called “sexual androgyny” [the mixing of male and female] since it includes transgenderism, transvestitism, bi-sexuality, agenderism, drag, and cross-dressing, is not only whether it is, as such an immoral way of behaving but in what way does it deeply and fully express the worldview of paganism and thus has an important ideological status. In other words, without practicing androgynous sexuality, can one affirm it as valid, and thus be just as pagan as the small percentage of actual practitioners.
The paganization of Western culture began with the invasion of Eastern spirituality in the Sixties when people discovered personal, New Age “spirituality.” But for progressives that individual experience had to become a Western worldview, and some of the leaders knew what to do. The Jungian/Gnostic, June Singer, in 1977 made a programmatic statement that others are now putting into practice. Have you ever wondered why recently the LGBTQ agenda is now everywhere, being promoted as the great issue of contemporary social and moral rights, as professor Palmer Robertson pointed out at the GA? Why must children be taught to think this way in schools? Why is Disney committed to promoting it, at the expense of losing many parental customers? Why Drag Queens must be reading in happy hour to children in public libraries? Why has transexual Adm Rachel Levine, an overweight middle-age man and father of a number of children, appointed the 17th Assistant Secretary for Health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and Sam Brinton, appointed as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Spent Fuel and Waste Disposition in the Office of Nuclear Energy for the Department of Energy, shows up to work in the White House and in Paris in heels and a short dress and make-up and stiletto heels, and who boasts about his involvement in “puppy play,” that is, grown men putting on dog masks and behaving like submitted animals for sexual stimulus—why have these two been sent to represent the US government at the celebration  Bastille Day at the French Ambassador’s residence?
Sam Brinton wrote a scathing rebuke of federal law enforcement agencies for raiding Rentboy.com, a now-defunct website that reportedly ran an illegal prostitution ring that often sold the sexual services of young boys to much older clients.[3] He stated: “The raid on its headquarters has thrown many gay, bisexual, and transgender young adults into turmoil as their main source of income has been ripped, away due to irresponsible and archaic views of sex work.”[4]
The short-term answer to these questions is the Biden administration’s radical commitment to LGBTQ ideology. The long-term answer goes back to 1977 when June Singer asked: “Can the human psyche realize its own creative potential through building its own cosmology and supplying it with its own gods?”[5] The new cosmology would include, as Singer said, “the longed-for conjunction of the opposites,” and “a new androgynous sexuality.”[6]The spirituality of the Sixties, she declared programmatically:
…[since] we have at hand…all the ingredients we will need to perform our own new alchemical opus…[the great work, a term from satanist traditions]… [we will] fuse the opposites within us: “the archetype of androgyny appears in us as an innate sense of…and witness to…the primordial cosmic unity—functioning to erase distinction…this was nearly totally expunged from the Judeo-Christian tradition…and a patriarchal god-image.[7]
“Primordial cosmic unity” eliminates the very notion of a distinct divine creator, thus eradicates the biblical revelation of God. Singer understood that the spiritual Age of Aquarius had to become the Age of Androgyny, that the “new humanism” predicted by Carl Jung required the full acceptance of “androgynous sexuality.
This term, androgyny, is employed in a significant way by the great expert in the history of religions, the Romanian, Mircea Eliade who argues that androgyny is a religious universal or archetype of pagan priests or shamans that appears virtually everywhere and at all times in the world’s religions. Mircea Eliade explains the spiritual meaning of androgyny as “a symbolic restoration of chaos, of the undifferentiated unity that preceded the Creation.” The androgynous being thus sums up the very goal of the mystical, monistic quest, whether ancient or modern:
…androgyny in many traditional religions functions as “an archaic and universal formula for the expression of wholeness, the co-existence of the contraries, or coincidentia oppositorum . . . symboliz[ing] . . . perfection . . . [and] ultimate being. . . .[8]
Modern witches call for “a nonbinary look at Source itself,… finding our power as we reweave ourselves back into the reflection of god-herself, as the divine-androgen. [9] The androgyne is thus the physical symbol of the pagan spiritual goal, which is the merging of two seemingly distinct entities, the self and god, and a mystical return to the state of godhead prior to creation, which is the essence of idolatry.
This is the very same logic that Paul employs in Romans 1:18-27. The homosexual act exchanges the worship of God for the worship of creation. In creation, homosexuality is an inversion of God’s design for one-man, one-woman “fitted” sexual intimacy with openness to procreation. In redemption, same-sex sexuality fails to herald and signify the sacrificial redemptive relationship between Christ, the Bridegroom, and his bride, the church, as two distinct bodies united by grace.
That the pagan priesthood would be so identified, across space and time, with the blurring of sexual identity via homosexual androgyny indicates, beyond a doubt, the enormous priority paganism has given, and continues to give, to the undermining of God-ordained monogamous heterosexuality, and the divine image, and the enthusiastic promotion of androgyny in its varied forms.
Chapter 7 of the PCA Book of Church Order affirms that “teaching elders [must be] specially gifted, called and trained by God to preach…” If ever was needed this kind of worldview preaching and teaching it is surely now.
Are pastors who accept Side B thinking about homosexuality able to help students navigate through the worldview of androgynous sexuality as a fundamental opposition to biblical orthodoxy. Taking Greg Johnson as an example, he boasts, as a gay, celibate man, that not experiencing marriage in this life, is a foretaste of heaven. He sees celibacy as an “intrusion ethic,” an in-breaking of the ethics of the coming age into our present era, since in heaven “none of us will be married.”[10] This is not strictly speaking true. Though he holds up his life of celibacy as a sign of selfless Christian sacrifice, one may wonder if, in as subtle way, he uses celibacy not, as it should be, as a unique divine mission but, as, in a certain way, of maintaining his single homosexual lifestyle.[11] Perhaps a better way would be for Rev. Johnson to marry a godly Christian woman to better understand the importance of biblical heterosexual marriage. For Johnson, the mystery that moves him is that Jesus took him on “as his little brother,”[12] not his bride. For Paul, the profound mystery that God’s establishment of marriage in Genesis 2:22-25 expresses, is Christ, the bridegroom’s love for church. (Eph 5:31-2). In this sense, marriage will go on forever.
I end with a citation of my final paragraph of my review article of Greg Johnson’s book, Still Time to Care. “The call for cultural apologetics is not an appeal to pastors to preach politics! It is a matter of understanding the implications of our theology so we all can understand and live out those implications through the power of the Word and the Holy Spirit. A solid understanding of worldview is an increasingly great need in our nation’s churches and pulpits, which are abandoning orthodoxy in favor of cultural myths. They are turning away from God the Creator and Redeemer to celebrate depraved forms of pagan living. May we all speak clearly and boldly to Christians and non-Christians alike, with grace, humility, clarity, and power—following the example of the Apostle Paul.”[13] 
Dr. Peter Jones is scholar in residence at Westminster Seminary California and associate pastor at New Life Presbyterian Church in Escondido, Calif. He is director of truthXchange, a communications center aimed at equipping the Christian community to recognize and effectively respond to the rise of paganism. This article is used with permission.

[1] Jeffery Adams Moore, “Greater Sins: Are Certain Violations of God’s Moral Law Weightier Than Others?” A Dissertation Submitted to The Faculty Of Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary In Candidacy For The Degree Of Doctor Of Philosophy (Kansas City, Missouri May 2022), p. 301
[2] Ibid., p. 20.
[3] https://www.theblaze.com/news/brinton-lgbtq-child-prostitution
[4] https://www.theblaze.com/news/brinton-lgbtq-child-prostitution
[5] June Singer, Androgyny: Towards a New theory of sexuality (London: Routledge and Kegan, 1977), 237. Incredible, and never dying, this book is just as relevant today as it was initially. For Singer, there is no greater deed of mankind than to accept and integrate our opposites within. To know the androgyne is to unify the self.
[6] See the title of Singer’s book, Androgyny: Towards A New Theory Of Sexuality.
[7] Singer, Androgyny, 207.
[8] Mircea Eliade, “Androgynes,” The Encyclopedia of Religion, 154.
[9] “Getting Straight with Spirit,” Tommie StarChild, (PantheaCon 2020 conference agenda, workshop description), p.34.
[10] Still Time to Care, 100, 158
[11] I am thankful to Rev. Also Leon for this insight.
[12] Op.cit., 241.
[13] Peter Jones,  Still Time to Care About the Whole Gospel – TruthXchange  (March 2, 2022).
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The best part of the book is that, like Puritan theology itself, ‘Following God Fully’ is not purely academic, but encourages reflection and action. Coming to the end of the book, I gained a refreshed wonder at the power of God’s Word to bring light and love into whole swaths of society. I am also full of thankfulness for how he fulfills his promise to supply his church with gifts to protect it and bring it to full maturity (Eph 4:11-13). I wonder how our modern churches would be more blessed if pastors, writers (including myself), and gospel workers were gripped by the centrality of Christ in the Bible.

This book is for those who have only heard of the Puritans as a movement or a vague idea, and can’t name a single person from that time. William Perkins… who?
It’s for those who belong to most major Protestant denominations in Australia, as beneficiaries of the Puritans’ reforming work.
It’s for those who want refreshing, encouraging and real-life examples of how a deep knowledge of God’s Word can lead to inflamed devotions for the Lord Jesus, rather than mere games for the intelligentsia and ‘theological ping-pong’ (148).
In Following God Fully, Joel Beeke and Michael Reeves achieve an admirable feat by putting together a short, informative and edifying book that would benefit people on both ends of the Puritan knowledge spectrum.
The ‘Who’ and ‘What’ of Puritanism
The Puritans were pastors and theologians who existed roughly 150 years following the Reformation, between approximately 1550 and 1700 AD. In many ways, they were a group of fervent-hearted gospel workers raised ‘for such a time as this’ (Est 4:14); by the time of their existence, the church was largely biblically illiterate and hungry for God’s Word:
The people of Europe had been without a Bible that they could read in their native tongue for approximately a thousand years. To be able to read God’s own words, and to see in them such good news that God saves sinners… entirely by his own grace, was like glorious sunshine bursting into the dark, grey world of religious guilt and human misery. (4)
The Puritans heralded this good news and were especially well-equipped to nourish the church back to life. They were largely ‘highly learned… well-trained in linguistics, and well-educated in biblical, systematic, and historical theology’ (148).
Beyond knowledge and skills, they were also men whose hearts and consciences were on fire for God, his Word and his church. They saw Christ in every line of the Bible and sought to expound him as clearly as possible. They fed and shepherded their flocks with tenderness and care, nourishing them with—to their delight—lengthy and scripturally rich sermons.
In short, the Puritans were gifts from God to the churches in old England, producing such a ‘movement of… intense, comprehensive pursuit of holiness [that lasted] for 150 years’ (9), not replicated even until now.
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Our opportunities for growth are limited because we have grown comfortable. And in our comfort, we forget the Lord. Obviously we don’t forget him altogether, but we forget what he actually demands of us. Because, in truth, if we hadn’t, we would be doing it. After all, Jesus said, ‘if you love me, you will keep my commandments’ and that includes all those difficult and highly uncomfortable things. We need to take seriously the call of Jesus and make ourselves much more willing to become much less comfortable.

When we read passages of scripture like the parable of the sower, we see four types of people. And three of those four are not saved. One of them doesn’t accept the Word from the off. But the two others appear to believe but later fall away. One of those falls away as a result of suffering and hardship, which seems to be what we expect. The other falls away because they get taken up with the cares of the world and exactly how that works its way out is interpreted slightly differently depending on who you are listening to.
I think many of us instinctively recognise the first two of those. We know there are those who never believed and those who face hardships and fall away. So far, no surprises really. The third group is often interpreted – often thanks to the more old fashioned ‘cares of the world’ translation – as being those who are consumed with worldly troubles and anxieties that drag them away. I’m not so convinced this is necessarily intended to convey cares as anxieties and troubles necessarily, so much as the things of the world. But because of that interpretation, those who fall away are thought to be those experiencing trouble of one kind or another.
It is this, I think, that makes Deuteronomy 8 so jarring to us when we read it. Here is what vv6-18 say:
6 So keep the commands of the Lord your God by walking in his ways and fearing him. 7 For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land, a land with streams, springs, and deep water sources, flowing in both valleys and hills; 8 a land of wheat, barley, vines, figs, and pomegranates; a land of olive oil and honey; 9 a land where you will eat food without shortage, where you will lack nothing; a land whose rocks are iron and from whose hills you will mine copper. 10 When you eat and are full, you will bless the Lord your God for the good land he has given you.
11 “Be careful that you don’t forget the Lord your God by failing to keep his commands, ordinances, and statutes that I am giving you today. 12 When you eat and are full, and build beautiful houses to live in, 13 and your herds and flocks grow large, and your silver and gold multiply, and everything else you have increases, 14 be careful that your heart doesn’t become proud and you forget the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the place of slavery. 15 He led you through the great and terrible wilderness with its poisonous snakes and scorpions, a thirsty land where there was no water. He brought water out of the flint rock for you. 16 He fed you in the wilderness with manna, which your ancestors had not known, in order to humble and test you, so that in the end he might cause you to prosper. 17 You may say to yourself, ‘My power and my own ability have gained this wealth for me,’ 18 but remember that the Lord your God gives you the power to gain wealth, in order to confirm his covenant he swore to your ancestors, as it is today.
Though the Israelites were prone to grumbling when things were not going so well, the greater danger for them was when the Lord had provided all of their needs and more besides. They were far more likely to become complacent and care far less about the Lord when everything was going well. In other words, one of the greatest dangers for God’s people was their own comfort.
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