There is much that the PCA can learn from J. Gresham Machen. But the two lessons surveyed above—to prioritize the gospel of Christ for its own sake and to express clearly one’s confessional convictions on pressing matters within the church and the world—rise to the top. Machen believed the first of these tasks was (and is) vital to the existence of the church and the second was (and is) critical to the church’s long-term health. And he did so with firm resolve to submit his every engagement in the church and in the world to the law of love.

This year is the centennial anniversary of the release of J. Gresham Machen’s classic work, Christianity and Liberalism, a most opportune time for all in Reformed denominations, not just Machen’s own Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC), to reflect on the still relevant insights Dr. Machen has left us. My own denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. So PCA folks are providentially poised not only to give special praise to God for his grace to our expression of Christ’s kingdom, but also to assess how we can grow as a church that is “faithful to the Scriptures, true to the Reformed faith, and obedient to the great commission.”[1] With Machen’s famous book in hand, then, let us dare to ask: What can Machen teach the PCA that is useful in current days?
Asking this question requires that we first dig down to the varying roots of the OPC and the PCA. At the first General Assembly of the OPC in 1936, Machen described the thirty-four ministers and some five-thousand brave souls who had joined him as “members, at last, of a true Presbyterian Church.”[2] By claiming to represent a “true” Presbyterian church, Machen implicitly declared the northern Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A, infected as it then was with the rife spirit of modernism and liberal Protestantism, to be a false church. Over a decade earlier in Christianity and Liberalism, Machen had already been urging liberal ministers of the mainline denomination to withdraw from it in the interests of honesty, going so far as to suggest that the Unitarian Church is “just the kind of church that the liberal preacher desires—namely, a church without an authoritative Bible, without doctrinal requirements, and without a creed.”[3]
By contrast, the southern Presbyterian conservatives who founded the PCA nearly four decades after the birth of the OPC styled their new denomination a “continuing Presbyterian church loyal to Scripture and to the Reformed faith.”[4] That is, while the founders of the PCA observed that the southern Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS) was traveling a liberal course that made division inevitable, many of them envisioned the PCA to be “distinctly mainline in orientation.”[5] Like Machen and the OPC, they wanted the PCA to preserve confessional Presbyterianism in America, but to do so in a way that could also achieve “the larger goal of evangelizing and renewing American culture.”[6] Notably, the PCA has not always trumpeted this dimension of its origin story, and there have always been those within its ranks who have resisted the mainline desire for cultural influence in favor of a more thoroughly Reformed identity.[7] This fact helps to explain the tension and, at times, the struggle, over the PCA’s identity and direction over the half-century since its founding.[8]
The PCA’s ambivalent relationship with the broader culture also gives glimpse into the first lesson the PCA can learn from Machen: to be on guard, as a church, against using the Christian faith to achieve allegedly higher this-worldly goals. To be clear, this caution does not oppose Christian influence for cultural betterment per se. When Christ characterized his followers as “the salt of the earth” and “the light of the world,” he was hardly calling them to a separatistic or quasi-monastic lifestyle.[9] What Machen warned against was regarding the Christian gospel more as a means for worldly influence than a message directing sinners towards the realm of heaven through faith in Christ. The danger, Machen believed, lay in the fact that the former orientation inevitably replaces the glory of God in Christ with the rehabilitation of this “present evil age” (Gal. 1:4) as the chief end of man. As Machen puts it in Christianity and Liberalism,
[I]f one thing is plain it is that Christianity refuses to be regarded as a mere means to a higher end. Our Lord made that perfectly clear when He said, ‘If any man come to me, and hate not his father and mother . . . he cannot be my disciple’ (Lk. xiv. 26). Whatever else those stupendous words may mean, they certainly mean that the relationship to Christ takes precedence of all other relationships, even the holiest of relationships like those that exist between husband and wife and parent and child. Those other relationships exist for the sake of Christianity and not Christianity for the sake of them. Christianity will indeed accomplish many useful things in this world, but if it is accepted in order to accomplish those useful things it is not Christianity . . . Christianity will produce a healthy community; but if it is accepted in order to produce a healthy community, it is not Christianity.[10]
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Notes
[1] “Presbyterian Church in America,” accessed February 2, 2023.
[2] J. Gresham Machen, “A True Presbyterian Church at Last,” Presbyterian Guardian (June 22, 1936): 110; emphasis added.
[3] J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, new ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009), 139–40.
[4] G. Aiken Taylor, “For a Continuing Church,” Presbyterian Journal (November 3, 1971): 7; emphasis added.
[5] Sean Michael Lucas, For a Continuing Church: The Roots of the Presbyterian Church in America (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 2015), 3.
[6] Lucas, For a Continuing Church, 3.
[7] E.g., in his sermon at the first General Assembly of the PCA, Jack Williamson declared, “We have committed ourselves to the rebirth and continuation of a Presbyterian Church loyal to Scripture, the Reformed faith, and committed to the spiritual mission of the Church as Christ commanded in the Great Commission.” W. Jack Williamson, “To the Glory of God,” Presbyterian Journal (December 26, 1973), 11. It is odd that Lucas cites this sermon as evidence that those who formed the PCA were “profoundly interested in preserving American civilization through their efforts” (Lucas, For a Continuing Church, 2, cf. 313–14), since nowhere does Williamson call for this goal. Williamson did describe the visible church as “an institution in society,” but only to note that, like other institutions, the church possessed certain “distinguishing characteristics” or “marks,” namely, “the pure preaching of the Gospel; the Scriptural administration of the sacraments; and the exercise of discipline.” Williamson, “To the Glory of God,” 19.
[8] This struggle was recently evident in the contested decision of the 49th PCA General Assembly to withdraw from the National Association of Evangelicals. See Emily McFarlan Miller, “Presbyterian Church in America votes to leave National Association of Evangelicals,” Religion News Service, accessed February 4, 2023.
[9] See Craig Blomberg, Matthew,The New American Commentary 22 (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 1992), 102.
[10] Machen, Christianity and Liberalism, 127–28.
This article was published in the Spring 2023 issue of the Reformed Forum Magazine. Subscribe now for free. If you provide a U.S. mailing address, we’ll mail complimentary copies of future issues to your door. You’ll also receive a link to download a PDF version of our current issue.
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Jesus came into this world to rescue us from sin and death, including the sins that fuel rage-driven ministry. He is our hope and our strength. No darkness will overcome Him or prevail against His church.

A cursory reading of the Bible reminds us that God really, really doesn’t take kindly to those who stir up division and dissension among His people. He wants His people to be united in love and truth.
This isn’t a new idea, and it shouldn’t be shocking. It isn’t the sort of insight that comes from years of faithful study, or a careful exploration of the languages, the context of the text, or anything like that. It’s an observation that literally anyone who is functionally literate is capable of making.
And yet, it’s one that we keep failing to really be mindful of, isn’t it?
Two Kinds of Divisive People
There are two sorts of divisive people, of course. There are the contentious and overt false teachers, the people that Paul warned about in so many places, like:

This is who we typically think of when we think about division. But they’re certainly not the only kind we’re cautioned against. The second is actually much more damaging. We are warned against:

Those among us who stir up foolish controversies (Titus 3:9 )
People who incite unrest and factionalism (2 Tim. 2:23 ; 16:17 )
Fools who sow discord and say they were only joking ( 26:19 )

The difficulty with this group is that, in many cases, they’re not teaching overtly false doctrine. In fact, many paint themselves as Defenders of the Truth; the last bulwark, the Spurgeons and Luthers of our day, here for a time such as this to hold back the encroaching darkness of theological liberalism.
And yet, perhaps ironically, their approach to defending the truth too often results in a different sort of falsehood—error based in both doctrine and practice. They bite and devour one another (Gal. 5:15 ), turning on an ever-decreasing set of allies until, eventually, none can meet their standard of orthodoxy.
The Fuel of Rage Driven-Ministry
No doubt, a list of names comes to mind as you read that sentence. No doubt some of them would cross over with the list I have in mind. I don’t feel the need to address those people specifically by name in this article, because naming names isn’t the point here. But those names you can think of should serve as a warning against what might be called a rage-driven approach to ministry, one that has embraced the way to get attention on the social Internet:
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So what can we conclude about the infamous dropout numbers? The rates of dropout and return are far less bleak and more complex than we’ve been led to believe. The claim that 90 percent of kids drop out after high school clearly needs to be left behind.

Debunking the Dropout Myth

“Well,” the pastor said, “nine out of 10 kids drop out of church after they graduate. Evidently, what we’re doing isn’t working.”
“Mm-hmm,” the children’s director agreed. “We just want to do so much better than that.”
“Is your church actually losing that many?” I asked. They looked at each other before shrugging.
“I don’t really know,” the pastor replied. “We don’t see them after they graduate. Sometimes that’s because they’re involved in another church, I guess.”
The children’s director continued, “If we had programs to teach parents how to grow their kids spiritually, we could stop the loss.”
“I’ll do everything I can to help your church,” I said. “But first, let’s rethink your reasons for considering these changes because the problem you think is the problem is probably not the problem at all.”
Here’s why these two ministry leaders—and scores of others like them—need to rethink their motivations: The nine-out-of-10 dropout number isn’t true. It was never true, yet many church leaders still believe it. Take a trip with me to the origins of this statistic and why it’s long past time to lay this lie to rest.
Gut Feelings Aren’t Good Statistics
This lie didn’t start as a lie. It was a well-intended, casual survey that metamorphosed far beyond what anyone envisioned. Some years ago, a doctoral student named Brandon Shields discovered the earliest sources of the 90 percent statistic. Apparently, it began in the 1990s when Jay Strack, a popular conference speaker, invited a roomful of youth ministers to share their gut feelings about how many youth were dropping out of church after high school. When Strack summed up the responses, he came up with a 90 percent dropout rate.
Strack later reported that he never intended his statistic to be interpreted as fact. Once he repeated the information a few times, though, other leaders began to reiterate the 90 percent dropout rate as truth. It spread quicker than a stomach virus in a cabin full of middle schoolers halfway through a week of camp. There’s nothing wrong with asking a few people how they feel about an issue. But conversational “surveys” will never result in reliable statistics. In this instance, the collective estimates of a few ministers resulted in exaggerated percentages that received tremendous publicity and eventually ended up in ministry resources.
Later claims escalated the hysteria. A popular book published in 1997 claimed that only four percent of young people surveyed at that time were born-again Christians. As a result, the author claimed, “According to present trends, we are about to lose eternally the second largest generation in America’s history.” The truth is, this survey spanned only three U.S. states and included information from a mere 211 youth. (To be fair, at least the author was transparent on his methodology.) Other leaders then trumpeted the “trend” as a harbinger of impending doom.
Bad News Is Big News
It’s easy to point accusing fingers at the sources of statistics—but the problem isn’t really the numbers. These numbers arose from well-intended attempts to assess the effectiveness of church ministries. The more problematic question is, Why are we so willing to wallow in the worst possibilities, even when those possibilities aren’t well-founded?
We get excited about bad news.
Human nature relishes the discovery of a hidden crisis. Once we’ve discovered that crisis, we rarely keep the news to ourselves. We spread bad news and, with each retelling, we tend to stretch it. That’s why God warns: “Do not go about spreading slander” (Leviticus 19:16). In a Wall Street Journal article, Rodney Stark and Byron Johnson provided a clear example of this phenomenon: “The national news media yawned over the Baylor Survey’s findings that the number of American atheists has remained steady at 4 percent since 1944, and that church membership has reached an all-time high. But when a study by Barna Research claimed that young people under 30 are deserting the church in droves, it made headlines and newscasts across the nation.”
The tendency to turn bad news into big news doesn’t completely explain how rapidly these numbers spread through churches. I suggest an additional reason. Since the 1950s, a fun-and-games approach dominated many youth ministries. In the 1990s, a new generation of youth ministers emerged.
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