Written by Aaron M. Renn |
Friday, August 12, 2022
Churches in cities are exposed to cultural change early. For this reason, they often pioneer ways of responding to these changes. Even if urban churches fail to reach the culture (or capitulate in inappropriate ways) they can show the broader church what not to do. It may be easy to cast stones at urban church leaders from the comfort of a red-state suburb or small town. But it would be wiser to pay attention to the pressures they’re operating under, because those same forces will soon be everywhere.

Cities are important for the church’s mission because, increasingly, that’s where the people are. Until very recently, humanity lived almost exclusively in villages or rural environments. As recently as 1910, only 10 percent of the world’s population lived in cities. Today it’s over 50 percent urban, and that number may rise to 75 percent by midcentury. Paul Romer describes this radical change as human beings going from living in packs like wolves to living more like ants or termites.
The shift is primarily happening in the developing world. Africa is now urbanizing faster than any other continent. According to the UN, half of global population growth by 2050, about 1.2 billion people, will be in Africa. By 2050, 21 percent of the world’s population will live in African cities. China and India have also been urbanizing. Over 1 billion people around the world now live in urban slums, more than the combined population of the United States and Europe. As missiologist Ray Bakke said, “It’s no longer a grass thatch roof from a jungle. [Cities are] the new mission field of the future on all six continents.” 
The Great Commission pushes us to reach every people group and location on the planet, but the sheer weight of demographics argues for a more urban mission field today. For every 100 million new urban residents, we need to launch 10,000 new urban churches just to hit a ratio of one church for every 10,000 people. This means we’ll need to start tens of thousands of new urban churches in the coming decades.
But What About America?
Urbanization looks different when we’re studying the United States. If you follow the Census Bureau’s classification, our country has long been filled with city dwellers—reaching 50 percent urban in 1920 and sitting at around 80 percent urban today. But the “80 percent urban” figure is misleading as the bureau says that any place with 2,500 or more residents is urban. Someone living in John Mellencamp’s “small town” home of Seymour, Indiana, is now technically a city dweller.
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When a woman’s case is twice as likely to be blocked on procedural grounds, it is difficult indeed to perceive “that our system is just.” Based on the data alone, it looks quite unjust. And the men who made that statement were aware that “perception [of justice in the PCA system] is essential to the moral and spiritual force we trust our discipline will have for the good of the church.” Can there be any “moral and spiritual force” for disciplinary processes that appear unjust?

Did you know that PCA church courts are more likely to block complaints from women than those from men? I suspected that to be the case, but didn’t have the data to prove it until digging through the past 49 years of PCA judicial proceedings.[1] I was curious if there is objective support for concerns raised by others in the PCA about how the church courts are serving its members, especially the vulnerable. For example, the PCA magazine byFaith did a write up when the Ad Interim Study Committee on Domestic Abuse and Sexual Assault[2] published their report[3] earlier this year. One of the committee members interviewed for that article expressed concerns in particular about help for female church members:
“Women in the PCA must recognize there is more work to be done (a lot of educating to be done!) before they can have assurance their case will be shepherded well.”[4]
That comment raises a question: why would women want or need “assurance [that] their case will be shepherded well”? We could easily answer that question through personal testimony, but in my experience, the testimony of women carries much less weight than men. So consider with me some objective data to see if it answers why women need assurance their cases will be shepherded well.
In the last 50 years the highest court of the Presbyterian Church in America, the General Assembly and its Standing Judicial Committee (SJC), has heard 429 cases.[5] Of those 429 cases, 138 were ruled “out of order” on either administrative or judicial grounds. These out of order (OOO) rulings are based on the requirements of the PCA constitution, the Book of Church Order (BCO). The BCO provides detailed and often complex rules to which a case must conform in order to be adjudicated, including time frames for filing complaints, questions of jurisdiction and which church court is responsible, and who has the right to seek assistance from PCA courts. Once a case is ruled OOO, the church court is essentially done with the matter unless the member objects to the ruling and seek assistance from the next higher court.
So 138 out of 429 cases were determined to be OOO. That is a high percentage (32%), nearly 1/3 of all cases.[6] There has also been an increase over the last 40 years, starting in 1992, in the rate of OOO rulings. If we take the last 10 years since 2011, the average number of OOO rulings is 47.25%.[7] That’s quite a big jump from the overall rate of 32%. With that average and overall increase, one wonders if members of the PCA should expect future cases to have a 50/50 chance of being heard.
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[1] See Minutes of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America, https://pcahistory.org/pca/ga/index.html. Data from 2022 is not available yet, I plan to update and revise my findings once the 2022 GA Minutes are published.
[2] https://dasacommittee.org
[3] https://dasacommittee.org/committee-report
[4] https://byfaithonline.com/pca-abuse-study-committee-releases-its-report/
[5] Calculating total number of cases is not straightforward. For these statistics I omitted cases that were either abandoned or withdrawn. Additionally, there are often multiple “cases,” “complaints” and “appeals” each year that relate to the same substantial matter. As much as possible, I counted the number of cases in accord with how the SJC reported them, e.g., if they grouped multiple cases together and ruled them as one, it only counted for one case.
[6] This is in the ballpark of a calculation from ruling elder and SJC member Howie Donahoe in a dissenting opinion from 2018: “In the 18 years between June 1997 and June 2015, the SJC rendered out-of-order rulings in 94 cases, i.e., in 36% of the 257 cases it received” (https://pcahistory.org/pca/ga/46th_pcaga_2018.pdf, p. 579).
[7] 2019 and 2021 are anomalous, with 100% and 0% out-of-order rulings respectively. If 2022 likewise had zero cases ruled OOO there might be cause to rethink the overall trend.
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Written by Aaron M. Renn |
Tuesday, October 31, 2023
There used to be large numbers of spaces and organizations in the world that were single sex. Male only spaces have been systematically targeted for elimination by feminists and elite culture for quite some time. The years long jihad against Augusta National Golf Club by the New York Times is a great example. At the same time, there’s a vast array of women’s only institutions and programs…Unlike with women demanding to enter male spaces, men have traditionally respected a women’s only label. But this might be breaking down. There was a lot of press about how men have started attending a tech career fair that was supposed to be for women. And why wouldn’t they? There are only a few all male spaces left.

I was delighted to see that former King’s College professor Anthony Bradley agrees with my write-up on evangelical servant leadership. He wrote on X:
Aaron nailed it! I’ve been to lots of men’s conferences and read dozens of books for Christian men: masculinity’s only expression for evangelical men is domestic. Even if things outside the home are mentioned, they are footnotes. For single young men, there is no on-ramp to live out 1 John 2:14 in their churches/communities so many look for it in video games, YouTube, etc. In fact, go to any evangelical youth group and ask the teenage boys what they want to do with their lives, you’re going to get something like this: “make enough money to provide for a family.” What they want to do, however, is fight evil and do something heroic in the world. They want to be heroes. What do we give them, instead? Small groups, a 6:00 AM Wednesday morning breakfast, 5:30AM F3 groups, and an annual men’s retreat.
Then, men are shamed for not being at home every night with their families. Then, we mock them for not having friends. It’s domestication and they run from this. Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate, Hamza, Sneako, etc. offer young men something evangelicalism suppresses: how to use their power & strength outside of the four walls of their home to do something heroic that leaves their mark on the world. Again, I want to be clear here even if the cultural mandate/outside the home is taught for young men it is neither modeled nor practiced in a community of men they can join and there is no rite-of-passage into it outside-of-the-home culture shaping. They want to be brought into adversity & opposition in the fight against real evil & dominion over creation. This is *exactly* what Jesus offered his disciples. Jesus spoke directly to what young guys want. It’s instructive. I’m so glad he didn’t invite them to follow him to stay at home, attend a 6:00AM men’s breakfast or workout group, or a weekly small group. [emphasis added]
If you don’t know Bradley, his writeup on how evangelicalism is matrilineal is a must read. He also has a recent book out on college fraternities.
These are really great observations. I appreciate that he notes how men want a mission in the world, but this is what evangelical teaching denies them as men.
I believe the root cause of much of their bad teaching is in their unwillingness to advocate for substantive gender complementarity. They affirm that it exists, but never in any specifics. Thus the only thing that distinguishes men and women is how they relate to the opposite sex. The main complementarian book defines manhood and womanhood this way. As a result, masculinity (and femininity) can only be expressed in the domestic sphere.
He is also right to talk about a “community of men.” I noted that pagan masculinitist Jack Donovan was onto something when he talked about masculinity as being experience and expressed as part of a group (in his view a “gang”) of other men.
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