As B.B. Warfield put it, Reformed theology is “Christianity come into its own”, and the EPC should happily and clearly communicate that along confessional lines. There are important things that distinguish the EPC from the PCA, but our doctrine is not one. If we are going to contrast ourselves with other Christians, we should do so by emphasizing our confessional system over and against broad evangelicalism. The EPC is no minimalistic collection of congregations, but possess a rich doctrinal treasury that will pay off in post-Christian America. This change in language and emphasis from the stage will help shift our culture, and signal what our denominational expectations and values are, particularly for Ruling Elders who drive pastoral search committees.

There is much my own Evangelical Presbyterian Church (EPC) can learn from the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA). Although the EPC and PCA hold to the same doctrinal standards, the EPC is shrinking while the PCA is growing. The EPC can learn a lot from our larger partner about how to remain faithfully confessional and missionally relevant in post-Christian America.
Broadly speaking, the PCA is the only non-Pentecostal denomination still growing in the United States. That should cause every leader in the EPC to pay attention: the only non-Pentecostal denomination still growing in America is a confessionally Reformed, doctrinally rigorous church, and it’s not us.
So, here are the usually caveats at the outset. First, while the EPC should desire for its congregations to grow and to become a bigger denomination, our first goal should be to see Christ’s kingdom grow. Second, numerous individual EPC congregations are growing and healthy and some PCA congregations are shrinking and unhealthy. But on the whole, the EPC is shrinking while the PCA is growing, and I am focused on the general contours of both churches. Third, applying principles of denominational growth to individual congregations is immensely difficult. That requires a culture shift and buy-in. Fourth, most of what makes the PCA successful required steps it took 30-40 years ago. The EPC could try and replicate the PCA’s current practices, but without a similar foundation those practices will flounder. At the same time, the EPC cannot simply duplicate what the PCA was doing from 1984-1994 in 2024; the world is different, and so the application of this foundation will by necessity look different. Long-term vision and patience are required.
Grasping the Situation
Here is the membership trends of the major (100,000+ member) Presbyterian and Reformed denominations in the United States since 2000. There are weaknesses in this table: each denomination reports membership differently (I tried to include only active, communicant membership); these numbers tend to be generated by congregational self-reporting, which can be specious; and membership does not directly correlate with worship attendance. I selected the specific years to show the collapse of the PCUSA and transfer of congregations into the EPC and ECO, as well as to highlight the pre and post-COVID states. And yes, the RCA’s numbers are accurate; in fact, their 2023 numbers are in and it’s gotten even worse.

PCUSA
PCA
CRC
EPC
ECO
RCA

2000
2,525,330
306,156
276,376
64,939

211,554

2005
2,316,662
331,126
273,220
73,019

197,351

2014
1,667,767
358,516
245,217
148,795
60,000
147,191

2019
1,302,043
383,721
222,156
134,040
129,765
124,853

2022
1,140,665
390,319
204,664
125,870
127,000
61,160

Change, 2019-2022
-12.4%
+1.7%
-7.9%
-6.1%
-2.2%
-52.7%

The PCA is the only Reformed church that has grown since 2000 without relying on transfers from the PCUSA. The PCA even had a number of disaffected groups leave it over the past few years and yet is still growing, including through COVID. The situation is actually worse for the EPC; we peaked at 150,042 members in 2016, and have declined by ~16.2% since then, while the PCA grew by 4.3% over that same period. It continues to worsen when attendance, not membership, is taken into account. The EPC’s average Sunday attendance across the denomination in 2014 was 118,947. It was down to 82,673 in 2022, a drop of a whopping 31.5%. Now, average denominational attendance is harder to measure and report accurately compared to membership, and the post-COVID practice of online “attendance” (which the EPC is trying to measure, but not well) has complicated matters. Yet the reality is clear: the EPC’s worship attendance is declining even faster than its membership. On the other hand, the PCA does not track Sunday worship attendance, but the consensus seems to be that their in-person worship attendance on Sundays is actually higher than their official membership (the OPC is on a similar path of growth and attendance as the PCA, but its total membership of 36,255 is significantly smaller).
This is not how the EPC talks about itself. We tend to talk about how much we’re growing and how the PCA is fracturing. How can the reality be so different? Regarding the PCA, the EPC has confused highly visible debates and a few departures with things going systemically wrong. Reflecting upon ourselves, the number of EPC congregations went from 182 in 2005 to 627 in 2022, but the number of congregations and pastors in the EPC has not yet declined. So the sense of growth we had from transfers in 2005-2014 has continued, even as we’ve shrunk by 25,000 members.
And long-term the situation is equally grim. Ryan Burge is a specialist in religious statistics, and he found that the overwhelming majority of American Protestant denominations have adult populations that are themselves majority over the age of 55 (the percentage of U.S. adults that are 55+ is about 35%), meaning that most Protestant groups are facing a demographic cliff. Pentecostals and congregationalist groups are the only churches with a majority of their adults ages of 18-54. However, the PCA just barely missed that cut, with 49% of its adult membership under the age of 55. The PCA’s 18-35 population is why: This group represents 29.4% of the U.S. adult population and 25% of the PCA’s adult membership, which are roughly comparable. The PCA is the only non-congregationalist denomination in the United States not staring at demographic extinction, and it looks to keep growing in the future.

The EPC is not big enough to make Burge’s data, but we fall into the “Other Presbyterian” category (with the CRC, ECO, and the RCA) where 62% of adult membership is over 55. This is actually worse than the PCUSA (60% of their adult membership is over 55), whose demographic demise is typically treated by the EPC as all but assured. One of the big takeaways just from looking at this data is that the massive influx of PCUSA congregations into the EPC in 2005-2014 masked that the underlying culture and demographics for many of those churches were not primed for long-term health. The EPC is essentially still the church it was in 2005: approximately 75,000 members then and 82,000 worshipers now. And it’s not like the PCA is growing by births alone; it’s averaged 5,000 adult professions of faith and 2,500 adult baptisms a year for the past 5 years. Their church planting and foreign mission ministries are also far more developed than the EPC’s.
To their credit, many of the EPC’s leaders have been trying to take steps to address this (e.g. the Revelation 7:9 initiative, the recent push for every-member evangelism, and the foregrounding of church revitalization and “next generation” ministry training). The PCA is far from perfect and is itself facing a number of challenges (e.g. engaging the working class, catching up to American racial demographic changes), though any issue they have, the EPC has worse. So, in light of the EPC’s real situation of decline and the PCA’s of growth, we should consider what we can imitate for long-term success.
Rigor and Doctrine
Both the EPC and PCA are Reformed and Presbyterian churches that affirm the Westminster Confession and Catechisms as containing the system of doctrine found in the scriptures. One thing that sets our denominations apart is that the PCA is robust about this affirmation while the EPC is minimalistic. We have the “Essentials of Our Faith”, after all. But the PCA’s confessional robustness is the primary factor in their growth. Cultivating a similar confessional rigor while maintaining our cultural ethos should be the first thing the EPC attempts in imitating the PCA.
Yes, doctrinal and confessional minimalism is a possible avenue for church growth. The Pentecostal, congregational, and non-denominational movements are all demographically viable, with non-denominational Christianity now the largest faction of American Protestantism. These groups tend to be doctrinally minimalistic. The problem is that doctrinal minimalism leads to doctrinal and cultural non-distinction: if your church tries to minimize distinctive doctrines and practices it inevitably becomes indistinguishable from broad, non-denominational evangelicalism. But as Reformed Presbyterians, we confess distinctive things. When Reformed churches downplay their Reformed distinctives, their witness, ministry, members, and children all cease being Reformed. Why attend the local EPC congregation that tries to be minimally Reformed when the local non-denominational church is exactly the same without the Presbyterian baggage? Why attend the local EPC congregation that tries to focus only on the evangelical essentials when the PCA church down the road is excited about their Reformed nature instead of minimizing it? The most famous example of this phenomenon is when the Christian Reformed Church burned their wooden shoes in the 1980s. In an attempt to go beyond their traditional, ethnic parochialism and join broader American evangelicalism, the CRC distanced themselves from their historic distinctives, and partially jettisoned their (Dutch) Reformed faith and practice along with their Dutch culture. It led to a massive numerical collapse, and the ongoing conflict in the CRC is about how to either reclaim or reframe the role of historic Reformed doctrines and practices. Reformed confessionalism and Reformed minimalism cannot coexist.
The PCA has taken the opposite tact: they have embraced and led with their Reformed values. No one is surprised about a PCA church not only affirming, but regularly teaching on predestination, unconditional election, limited and penal substitutionary atonement, monergestic salvation, the 10 commandments as God’s moral law, the regulative principle of worship, the spiritual efficacy of the sacraments, covenant theology, repentance unto life, etc. Ministry and discipleship are consciously informed by Reformed doctrinal principles, and the PCA and its congregations enthusiastically proclaim them as scripture’s testimony. And the PCA approaches this through the lens of Westminsterian confessionalism, not a reduced set of fundamental tenets. The PCA is known for its Reformed and Presbyterian distinctives. The EPC is known for letting pastors and churches disregard those distinctives.
The PCA’s ordination standards are very high. Pastoral preparation is theologically and doctrinally rigorous; in the face of growing secularization and post-Christian pressure on the church, the PCA has decided that the only way the church will remain a faithful witness is if these standards are maintained. The PCA’s expectation is that pastors are to possess biblical and theological expertise and that they are trained accordingly. Pastors are to be biblical specialists who can speak scripture to an alienated culture, and this specialization operates from a clearly Reformed and confessional vantage point. It is through this pastoral approach that the PCA’s theological culture and health is maintained.
There are many ways to assess congregational health, but the PCA first evaluates church health on confessional terms. Is the biblical gospel being preached, the sacraments being properly administered, worship being performed purely, discipline being enacted? These questions are frontloaded and never taken for granted. Other questions about evangelism, being a sticky church, mercy ministries, skill of musicians, neighborhood demographics, budgets, valorizing the past, etc., are secondary. Those are important topics, but don’t supersede (by either commission or omission) the bigger doctrinal categories; the same cannot be said for the EPC at this moment.
The missional fruit for the PCA is clear: by being center-bounded on a robust confessional system for their pastors and churches, the PCA has successfully adapted to our culture and built healthy congregations without losing their Reformed distinctives. It may seem odd from an EPC perspective, but the PCA’s stricter approach to Reformed theology has granted them greater flexibility; having a broader foundation and knowing their center clarifies their missional parameters.
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Ignoring Israeli women and the deplorable sexual violence they are experiencing simply because they happen to be Jewish really beggars belief and tells us all we need to know about so much of modern feminism and the MeToo movement.

The Australian Sky News host Sharri Markson has done a terrific job reporting from Israel this past week. Of course this was mainly done as an acknowledgment and a reminder of the horrific atrocities that happened on October 7, 2023 by Hamas, and are still happening by the terror organisation. We must never forget.
In her programs from Israel she had a number of moving interviews with victims of all this, including those who survived the day and were able to speak about it, and some who were finally released as hostages. We heard such tragic and shocking stories, especially as to what the women had to endure at the hands of their Islamist captors.
Sharri and others asked some obvious questions that still deserve answers: Where are all the Western feminists when you need them? Why have hardly any of them been speaking out for the Israeli—and other—females being treated so diabolically by Hamas? Why the silence? Why the selective outrage?
Yes, some voices over the past twelve months have been heard on this, but far too few. For example, late last year Candice Holdsworth asked, “Why can’t “intersectional feminists” condemn Hamas’s misogyny?” She said in part:
It is surely possible to express opposition to Israel’s military action in Gaza without whitewashing Hamas’s crimes. But in recent weeks it has been disturbing to learn just how many people are willing to deny Hamas’s atrocities, or to view its sadistic violence as a legitimate form of “resistance.”
When self-declared feminists join in with this apologism, they make clear that they do not see all women as worthy of the same moral consideration. The woke belief in an “intersectional” hierarchy of oppression, which paints Palestinians as eternal victims and Jews as oppressors, seems to have blinded them to the brutal violence that so many Israeli women were subjected to six weeks ago. Their rigid ideology will not let them see Hamas’s mass rape of women for the atrocity that it is.
Condemning Hamas’s violence against women really shouldn’t be difficult. It is a very peculiar kind of feminism that insists otherwise.
And a half year ago Nils A. Haug wrote about this as well:
The reality is that for all advocates for women’s welfare, especially in the area of sexual violence, the crucial concern at this time should be the terror perpetrated on defenceless females of all ages through acts of sexual depravity, torture, and death by Hamas in Israel on October 7.
The moral obligation of lovers of peace, and those who hold to the sanctity of human life, is to speak out against injustice. This is particularly so in crimes of violence against the defenceless. It is therefore fitting to expect women’s rights groups to speak out on behalf of traumatized females of all ethnic and religious categories.
This approach was ratified in by Nobel Peace Prize winner Eli Wiesel in his 1986 acceptance speech: “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” Archbishop Charles Chaput remarked that “tolerating grave evil within a society is itself a form of serious evil.”
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I’m glad a Dutchman broke my brain that day. He took me into a windowed room I’d never entered. And now the rest of the world is bathed in biblical light as I strive to stay low, worship well, and love deeply.

Learning new things is like opening doors to windowed rooms. We can enter another space we haven’t seen before, but that other space also lets light into the hallway of the present. All we had thought and experienced before is hit with new color. In some cases, that color change is so drastic that we question whether we really saw things before as we should have. Everything ripens for the thrill of reinterpretation. As we learn, we not only go to new places; we revisit all the old ones and see them as we never had.
Something like this happened to me some years ago when I was listening to an old lecture from the Dutch theologian Cornelius Van Til. The audio quality was poor (circa 1970s), and I struggled to make out all the words. I had no idea what sort of door was about to open. And then the handle turned.
We certainly cannot penetrate intellectually the mystery of the Trinity, but neither can we penetrate anything else intellectually because all other things depend on the mystery of the Trinity, and therefore all other things have exactly as much mystery in them as does the Trinity.[1]
Hmm, Amen…Wait—what? We can’t penetrate the mystery of the Trinity—sure, I’ve got that. Who would dare to disagree? But everything has as much mystery in it as the Trinity does? Who would dare to agree?
Is a yellow tulip as puzzling as the divine persons? Is grass as incomprehensible as the Godhead? Does a dog’s bone have divine depth? Van Til’s words drove me deeper into thought. I had always learned to link the doctrine of God to the doctrine of creation (the famous Creator-creature distinction). But now I had to think about how the nature of God has an effect on the nature of the world all around me.
Here’s what I believe Van Til meant, and how it’s revolutionized my approach to…well, everything.
Differentiation and Divine Threads
The Trinity is the source of all things. That much seems simple enough. But then Van Til goes deeper. In his Introduction to Systematic Theology, he wrote these cryptic words: “for a consistent Christian theology the principle of individuation lies within the Godhead.”[2] I’ll assume that sentence produces the same response in many readers that it did in me: huh? Individuation is the ability to identify and distinguish individual things amidst the panoply of creation. It’s how we can identify the significance of one yellow tulip picked from our front yard, which has many other things on it (including some forgotten kids’ toys). This is related to Van Til’s discussions about “the one and the many,” or universals and particulars, which is a whole other rabbit hole to fall into.
If this all sounds horribly abstract, just hold on; I promise there’s a point. If we want to actually identify and differentiate between the things around us—to see their significance amidst the multitude of created things—we have to go all the way back to the Trinity. In Van Til’s words, “There is a deep and rich differentiation in the personal relationship between the three persons of the Trinity.”[3] Put differently, in the Trinity, there is differentiation among the divine persons in the one essence of God. We can distinguish between the Father, Son, and Spirit without losing the unity and deep relationship in the Godhead. And so, because creation is an expression and revelation of this God, all of the myriad things in our universe are significant and meaningful because of who God is: three perfectly differentiated persons (Father, Son, and Spirit) in one perfect essence, a God who works many things at many moments all according to one plan.
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