Written by K. Scott Oliphint |
Thursday, March 9, 2023
As Christian apologetics seeks for connections between Christianity and those who would oppose it, so also can persuasion engage in confrontation between opposing views. The two topics, then, far from being mutually exclusive, sharpen each other as iron sharpens iron. As a matter of fact, as we will see, these two topics substantially and significantly overlap, or at least they should.

Almost immediately after my conversion to Christ, I was eager to tell people what had happened to me so they might have the same experience. I became a volunteer leader in an evangelistic ministry, and it was not long before I had the opportunity to communicate to others the joy and reality of my own conversion. I wanted both to commend and defend the Christian faith. One occasion from those early days sticks out in my memory—a conversation with a man who had become a good friend.
I remember my almost desperate desire that this man be converted. I wanted to tell him all I had learned and to defend its truth if needed. I sat down with him one day and began to explain the gospel to him. I talked about God as our Creator. I explained how sin had entered our world through Adam. I gave him examples of sin’s effects in almost every aspect of the world today.
Then I recounted to him the story of Christmas and told him the good news of the cross of Christ, his resurrection, and ascension. I then told him that, like the Philippian jailer, all that was required on our part was to believe in Christ and we would be saved. I flooded him with as much information as I could muster.
As a young and inexperienced Christian, I was greatly encouraged that throughout the discussion, he was nodding in agreement with everything I said. I was ready to defend it all, but he had no real objections. It all seemed to be so seamless and easy. I don’t recall that he had even a single question for me.
When I had said everything I knew to say, I asked him if he was ready to make a commitment and to believe in Christ. He answered with a single word: “No.”
I was stunned. I asked him, given what I had said, why he wasn’t ready to make a commitment. His response still rings in my ears: “Nothing you have said indicates that I need this. I can’t see the need for a commitment.” His response devastated me, though I tried not to show it.
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It is clear that the evening worship service is not widely known in the PCA. Introducing regular evening services will take patience and encouragement to teach members about the blessing of worshiping together morning and evening. Through our surveys of church websites, we were encouraged to see many churches offer a regular meeting on Sunday evenings if not a full service, including hymn sings, prayer meetings, or catechism classes.

Perhaps one of the greatest blessings of the Christian faith is the blessing of the Lord’s Day, setting aside one day in seven to gather with God’s people for His worship. The conviction that the Lord’s Day ought to be set aside for worship is why at one time it was the near-universal practice of Reformed churches to gather for both morning and evening worship on Sundays.Regrettably, the practice is no longer common in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA). According to a recent project led by Justin Andrusk to collect comprehensive data on the prevalence of morning and evening worship in the PCA, only 238 of 1930 churches (12.3%) listed in the PCA directory report having both morning and evening worship services regularly.
The Case for Morning and Evening Worship
The Bible makes a strong case for gathering twice on the Lord’s Day. The Bible is bookended with the rhythms of morning-and-evening (Gen. 1; Ex. 20:11; Rev. 4:8, 7:15). Throughout the Old Testament, it was the practice of the Israelites to worship God morning and evening, as evidenced by morning and evening sacrifices (e.g., Ex. 29:39) and psalms for morning and evening worship (Pss. 92, 134). After the Resurrection, Christ appeared to His disciples on the first day of the week in the morning and in the evening (John 20). In connection with the Resurrection, the early church began to meet on the first day (Acts 20:7; 1 Cor. 16:2; Rev. 1:10; cf. Westminster Shorter Catechism 59).The historic practice of gathering for morning and evening worship continued with the Protestant Reformation. According to the Westminster Standards, the whole day is to be spent “in the public and private exercises of God’s worship” (WSC 60; Westminster Larger Catechism 117; Westminster Confession of Faith XXI.8). The Directory for the Public Worship of God of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church states that it is “highly advisable that a congregation assemble for public worship at the beginning and the ending of the Lord’s Day” (I.A.4.b). Similarly, the Directory of Public Worship of the Reformed Presbyterian Church North America records that “the session should carefully consider whether a second meeting should be held” (2.F-9).
Morning and Evening Worship in the PCA
While anecdotally, the view is held that morning and evening worship is not as common in the PCA as it is in other Reformed and Presbyterian denominations (such as the OPC or the RPCNA), data on the prevalence of morning and evening worship in the PCA has never before been recorded. To collect this data, we visited every church website in the church directory and counted by presbytery the number of websites mentioning both a morning and evening worship service.
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Written by T.M. Suffield |
Tuesday, March 28, 2023
When we use inhuman words to describe ourselves, we slowly imagine ourselves less human. In time we become less human because our metaphors matter. In the church, the great Spirit-filled vehicle of becoming more human as we become more like Jesus, more like the world that sin made us forget, we should be especially careful to use metaphors which advance our shared humanity.

The words that we use create the categories that we think in. Language is upstream of thought.
Which sounds like a completely crazed thing to say, I imagine, though I’ve touched on the concept before when explaining why we can’t be ‘fixed’ and why ‘family’ is not a helpful term to use for the church, unless you actually are one.
The metaphors that we use are often inspired by the world around us, but they come with an implicit set of assumptions that then create categories for us. Almost as though our metaphors are ploughs that run furrows down the fields of our minds. To think across the furrows is difficult work and can sound bizarre to those who thoughts flow neatly and clearly along them.
This is the principle at play in Orwell’s famous novel 1984. Language is tightly controlled, with the dictionary being reprinted regularly, because the words we do and don’t use surround the edges of our thinking like fences that keep the sheep from straying. It’s a rare sheep who decides to play on the other side of the fence anyway—these madmen are sometimes those who revolutionise the way we approach our lives and thoughts, and sometimes they are just madmen.
Language makes an incredible tool of control, and often unwittingly we let forces we are unaware of control us through its use.
You can see this at play in most of our lives. To take a church example, imagine a church is Complementarian by conviction—which means that they understand the Bible’s witness to be that elders or pastors are, by definition, men—like mine is. Then imagine that they are concerned that their application of true Biblical principles can unjustly prevent women from serving in ways that God would call them to: I think this is common, though plenty of Complementarians would disagree with me.
That church then calls women into a variety of ‘leadership’ positions that are not eldership, depending on their convictions as to where they draw those lines. If they start to use the same terminology to speak of all of these various people, office-bearers or not, perhaps calling them all ‘leaders’ generically, then to begin with their Complementarian convictions will be fine.
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