Reasons for PCA Presbyteries to Vote Against Amending BCO 15 Regarding Commissions
In summary, these changes would make the PCA a less “grassroots Presbyterian” denomination. They would have the effect of making Presbyteries weaker—weaker in comparison to the General Assembly and weaker in relation to their own judicial commissions. They would concentrate power at “the top” of our denomination, and place important powers of presbytery into the hands of “the few.” Presbyteries would be wise to reject these changes to our BCO.
Against Item 3
Among the items the 49th Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) General Assembly sent down to Presbyteries for approval is Item 3 (Overture 25 from the Houston Metro Presbytery). This overture would amend chapter 15 of the Book of Church Order (BCO), changing the way that Presbytery judicial commissions handle cases.
Under the current system, Presbyteries may commit a judicial case to a commission, but the commission cannot conclude the case it is given. Rather, after trying the case, the commission must submit a full statement of the case and the judgment it rendered to Presbytery. Then, without debate, Presbytery either approves or disapproves the judgment.[1] To put it simply, the commission does all the work of the trial, but the Presbytery approves the final decision.
The proposed amendment would change two things. First, it would make the judgment of judicial commissions final: Presbytery would not have to approve anything. Second, it would require that complaints related to the case be heard by the commission that tried the case, not the Presbytery as a whole.[2]
These changes are not flashy or outwardly exciting. They intend to simplify our BCO, making all Presbytery commissions function similarly, and removing an extra step from our already complex judicial process. However, these changes would prove inadvertently detrimental to our church and her government.
In summary, these changes would make the PCA a less “grassroots Presbyterian” denomination. They would have the effect of making Presbyteries weaker—weaker in comparison to the General Assembly and weaker in relation to their own judicial commissions. They would concentrate power at “the top” of our denomination, and place important powers of presbytery into the hands of “the few.” Presbyteries would be wise to reject these changes to our BCO.
Grassroots Presbyterianism
The PCA is often described as a grassroots Presbyterian denomination. One of the easiest ways to understand what grassroots Presbyterianism means is to look at what our Book of Church Order says about two things: power and parity.
Power
Our BCO specifies that the power to make judgments affecting the life of the church belongs to the elders of the church acting jointly in a church court.[3] The Lord Jesus has committed this power exclusively to the courts of the church, and so in the PCA it belongs exclusively to Sessions, Presbyteries, and the General Assembly.[4]
Because Christ gave this power specifically to the courts of the church, courts can never delegate this power to some other body. Just as an elder cannot delegate his preaching responsibility to a non-elder, a church court cannot delegate their responsibility to make binding judgments of doctrine and discipline to some other body of Christians.[5]
Parity
The PCA BCO also specifies that there is parity across the various courts of the church. One often hears about one kind of parity in the PCA—the parity between ruling elder (RE) and teaching elder (TE). Though TEs have been given the special responsibility of Word and Sacrament ministry, they and REs are the same thing at the end of the day: elders.
The same can be said about church courts. Sessions, Presbyteries, and the General Assembly differ in certain respects, but at the end of the day they are all “Presbyteries” in that each is composed of presbyters.[6] This means that Sessions, Presbyteries, and the General Assembly all possess the same inherent powers (BCO 11-3, 4). A Session has just as much right to resolve a question of doctrine, or judge a discipline case, as the GA, and the decision of each is equally binding.[7]
Protecting the PCA
These features of grassroots Presbyterianism aren’t just interesting “distinctives” of the PCA. They have the very practical effect of guarding the church against hierarchical Presbyterianism and oligarchical Presbyterianism.[8] These two deformities of biblical polity aren’t just imagined boogeymen. They are legitimate dangers to the life of the church, and were instrumental to the decline of both the Northern and Southern Presbyterian churches in the 20th century.
In a hierarchical polity, a higher court has more power than a lower court, and ends up dominating it. There is no longer parity between the courts. In such a situation, the General Assembly would wield inordinate power over Presbyteries and Sessions, giving it great power to steer the entire denomination. Even the barest majority of the Assembly would be able to direct the church on any ecclesial matter.
In an oligarchical polity, power resides not in courts, but in committees.[9] The courts lose their exclusive right to exercise their God-given powers, having delegated them to smaller groups of men. These groups of men functionally replace the courts of the church. Even though power formally resides in the court, the court is held captive to the committees which practically exercise all the power.
All one needs to do to see the danger of these two polity dynamics is imagine that your “side” is in the minority at the General Assembly, or the minority of the various committees of the courts. Regardless of what “side” one is on, we all should want to preserve the grassroots nature of the PCA.
Protecting Grassroots Presbyterianism
The proposed amendment to BCO 15 would have two effects that damage grassroots Presbyterianism in the PCA. First, it would weaken Presbyteries in comparison to the General Assembly. Presbyteries would lose power that the Assembly would maintain—the power to correct any perceived error in the action of a judicial commission—making the Assembly a more powerful court. Presbyteries would then have to rely on the Assembly for something they formerly were able to handle themselves. Second, it would weaken Presbyteries in comparison to their judicial commissions. Presbyteries would have no natural mechanism to overrule a judicial commission, making commissions unduly powerful and functionally independent of the Presbytery itself. These effects would make the PCA both more hierarchical and more oligarchical—the Assembly would have more power than Presbyteries, and Presbytery judicial commissions would be functionally unaccountable to Presbyteries.
A Practical Example
These problems with Item 3 might seem theoretical at first glance, and perhaps minor in nature, but they would become very real when a messy discipline case comes before Presbytery. Imagine that a discipline case arises in your Presbytery and that Presbytery refers it to a judicial commission. Under the amended version of BCO 15, the commission conducts a trial, renders a judgment, and ends the matter. But what happens if it becomes apparent to the great majority of Presbytery that the commission erred in its judgment? These members can raise a complaint, but the same judicial commission would now hear and adjudicate the complaint. If they dismiss the complaint, then there is nothing else the members can do at the level of Presbytery. The commission’s judgments on the case and the complaint reign supreme. In a real way, the commission has replaced Presbytery in the exercise of judicial power. The commission has the power here, not Presbytery. The only recourse Presbytery has now is to raise the complaint to the General Assembly. Rather than having the natural power to overrule their commission, they must rely on what amounts to a more powerful court to rectify the matter.
Now consider the above scenario under the current version of BCO 15. The commission has erred. A great majority of Presbytery believes them to have erred. To correct the error, these Presbyters need not complain to the commission and then raise the complaint to the General Assembly if that proves unsuccessful. All they need to do is not approve the recommended verdict of the commission. They then can either assign the case to a new commission, or try the case as a whole. Presbytery reigns supreme over its commission, and it does not need the General Assembly’s help or permission to do so.
The amendment to BCO 15 would lead to powerful judicial commissions and weak presbyteries, both of which would damage the PCA’s grassroots Presbyterianism.
An Amendment Without Good Reason
Item 3 originated as Overture 25 from Houston Metro Presbytery. In the overture, two main reasons are given for amending BCO chapter 15. First, it is said that requiring Presbytery to ratify the decision of a judicial commission is “a source of confusion and misapplication by Presbyteries.”[10] While I can readily sympathize with BCO-induced confusion, I have a hard time doing so with the matter of Presbytery judicial commissions. The very first sentence of chapter 15, which has the title “Ecclesiastical Commissions,” explicitly states that Presbytery judicial commissions operate differently than all other commissions, and references the paragraph within the chapter that sets forth the rules governing them.[11] Surely at least one member of Presbytery would think to read chapter 15 when Presbytery seeks to establish a judicial commission!
Of greater interest is the second reason given in the overture. It is said that requiring Presbytery to ratify the decision of a judicial commission runs counter to the purpose of commissions in general. Commissions are supposed to “deliberate upon and conclude the business referred to it,” but Presbytery judicial commissions are not fully allowed to do so.[12] This reason is a far stronger one, as it suggests that BCO 15 arbitrarily distinguishes between types of commissions, and therefore it arbitrarily restricts the power of Presbytery to address its own business.
Nevertheless, and contrary to Overture 25, there is good reason to distinguish between judicial and non-judicial commissions of Presbytery. The key difference between these two types of commissions is how they relate to the judgments that Presbytery makes. Consider a common commission of Presbytery: an ordination commission. It deliberates upon a number of matters relevant to the business of ordination (day, time, giving a charge, etc.) before concluding the business (actually ordaining a person). However, the commission does not judge that the man is ordainable. That judgment has already been determined by the Presbytery as a whole. The commission simply carries out the will of Presbytery.
The above example helps us to see why it is proper to distinguish between judicial and non-judicial commissions of Presbytery. In the case of the ordination commission, the Presbytery has already made a judgment on the matter at hand (ordination) and the commission enacts this judgment. In the case of a judicial commission, the Presbytery has not made a judgment on the matter at hand (the guilt or innocence of the accused). Indeed, it is part of the very nature of a judicial commission that Presbytery cannot have made any judgment at all—that is what a trial is for. Because there is no judgment, the commission has no right to enact any judgment. The judgment of the commission only becomes final when the Presbytery makes it their own.
Conclusion
The PCA is not perfect, and neither is our polity. But the glorious thing about our polity is that it can be more and more conformed to the command of Scripture. The Lord Jesus Christ is King and Head of the Church, and He has appointed a government for it. It is our duty to conform our polity to the appointment of our King. While he reigns supreme over the Church as an exalted King, he administers his government through lowly elders. In his perfect wisdom, He has given the responsibility of judgment to elders acting together in courts, not acting individually. We cannot improve on this, and our polity should reflect these principles as clearly as possible.
Rather than clarifying these principles in our polity, Item 3 obscures them. Therefore, it should be defeated.
Stephen O’Neill is a Minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and is Assistant Pastor of Hope PCA in Lawrenceville, NJ.
[1] Though the presbytery cannot debate the verdict of the commission, there is nothing in the BCO that would prevent questions being asked of the commission from the floor of Presbytery.
[2] Complaints are addressed in chapter 43 of the BCO. Notable for the purpose of this article is BCO 43-2, the first sentence of which reads: “A complaint shall first be made to the court whose act or decision is alleged to be in error.” With the current language, Presbytery, not the commission of Presbytery, receives and addresses complaints.
[3] BCO 3-2 distinguishes between the “several” powers and the “joint” powers. The “several” powers are those that can be exercised by an officer individually (i.e., “severed” from the court). Preaching is an example of a several power. The “joint” powers are always exercised in church courts in the form of judgments rendered by the courts.
[4] The classic example of this in Scripture is the Jerusalem council in Acts 15. There, after careful deliberation, “the apostles and the elders” render judgment on doctrinal matters that become binding on the churches.
[5] This point was stressed by James Henley Thornwell when the 1847 Old School General Assembly considered a report on the topic of ecclesiastical commissions. Thornwell agreed that ecclesiastical commissions could exercise any power the court possessed, but not as a delegated power. Commissions exercise the powers of the court as the court itself. The commission, in a sense, is the court. An unappreciated consequence of this is that all members of church courts are, de jure, members of commissions of the court. See James Henley Thornwell, “The General Assembly,” Southern Presbyterian Review 1, vol. 2 (September 1847): 83-85. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/590be125ff7c502a07752a5b/t/5fceb7dbb4902412734c1a64/1607383005407/Thornwell%2C+James+Henley%2C+The+General+Assembly.pdf
[6] BCO 10-1 states: The Church is governed by various courts, in regular gradation, which are all, nevertheless, Presbyteries, as being composed exclusively of presbyters.
[7] This is why higher courts are instructed to grant great deference to lower courts (BCO 39-3), and why higher courts only take up the business of lower courts under specific circumstances. Either a lower court asks the higher court to take up a matter, or some allegation of error is made against the lower court and filed in due order.
[8] The PCA’s first three stated clerks, Morton Smith, Paul Gilchrist, and Roy Taylor, have all written about the grassroots nature of the PCA’s polity in opposition to hierarchy and oligarchy. Dr. Smith’s “How is the Gold Become Din,” and Dr. Taylor’s “Non-Hierarchical Presbyterianism” can be found on pcahistory.org. Dr. Gilchrist’s “Distinctives of Presbyterian Church Government” can be obtained from the PCA historical center, though it is not on the website.
[9] I use committee in a non-technical sense here, referring to any subset of a body that has been given some task, role, or power by the larger body. True committees, commissions, boards, and agencies all fall under this broader use of “committee.”
[10] Overture 25 can be found in the 49th General Assembly Commissioner Handbook, 97.
[11] The sentence reads: “A commission differs from an ordinary committee in that while a committee is appointed to examine, consider and report, a commission is authorized to deliberate upon and conclude the business referred to it, except in the case of judicial commissions of a Presbytery appointed under BCO 15-3.”
[12] Commissioner Handbook, 97. The overture references the previously cited sentence, but excludes the special provision for Presbytery judicial commissions.
-
A Biologist Explains Why Sex Is Binary
When biologists claim that sex is binary, we mean something straightforward: There are only two sexes. This is true throughout the plant and animal kingdoms. An organism’s sex is defined by the type of gamete (sperm or ova) it has the function of producing. Males have the function of producing sperm, or small gametes; females, ova, or large ones. Because there is no third gamete type, there are only two sexes. Sex is binary.
The transgender movement has left many intelligent Americans confused about sex. Asked to define the word “woman” during her Supreme Court confirmation hearings last year, Ketanji Brown Jackson demurred, saying “I’m not a biologist.” I am a biologist, and I’m here to help.
Are sex categories in humans empirically real, immutable and binary, or are they mere “social constructs”? The question has public-policy implications related to sex-based legal protections and medicine, including whether males should be allowed in female sports, prisons and other spaces that have historically been segregated by sex for reasons of fairness and safety.
Chase Strangio of the American Civil Liberties Union frequently claims that the binary concept of sex is a recent invention “exclusively for the purposes of excluding trans people from legal protections.” Scottish politician Maggie Chapman asserted in December that her rejection of the “binary and immutable” nature of sex was her motivation for pursuing “comprehensive gender recognition for nonbinary people in Scotland.” (“Nonbinary” people are those who “identify” as neither male nor female.)
When biologists claim that sex is binary, we mean something straightforward: There are only two sexes. This is true throughout the plant and animal kingdoms. An organism’s sex is defined by the type of gamete (sperm or ova) it has the function of producing. Males have the function of producing sperm, or small gametes; females, ova, or large ones. Because there is no third gamete type, there are only two sexes. Sex is binary.
Intersex people, whose genitalia appear ambiguous or mixed, don’t undermine the sex binary. Many gender ideologues, however, falsely claim the existence of intersex conditions renders the categories “male” and “female” arbitrary and meaningless. In “Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex” (1998), the historian of science Alice Dreger writes: “Hermaphroditism causes a great deal of confusion, more than one might at first appreciate, because—as we will see again and again—the discovery of a ‘hermaphroditic’ body raises doubts not just about the particular body in question, but about all bodies. The questioned body forces us to ask what exactly it is—if anything—that makes the rest of us unquestionable.”
Read More
Related Posts: -
How to Encourage Your Elders
Written by Geoffrey R. Kirkland |
Saturday, April 30, 2022
Never let prayer be underestimated. A simple text or note of encouragement saying that you are praying for your elders will add fuel to the fire of their love for and diligence in interceding for the flock. Every faithful shepherd prays for the flock of God. But in knowing that you are praying for him will enrich his prayer time, fill him with awe in God and humble his soul before the God of grace. Let him know what you’re praying for. Pray for his preparation to teach the Word. Pray for his wife and children. Pray for his home life. Pray for his humility and love for Christ to increase. Pray for God to bring opportunities to speak of Christ with the lost.I serve alongside some great men. God has graciously put me in a church body with godly people who love Christ and a solid leadership team firmly committed to His Word.
In some recent reflections in my own mornings of Bible reading, I have tried to think of some practical ways that Christians can encourage all of their shepherd-elders. With some intentionality, creativity and proactiveness, you can bless those men that God has put over you to care for your souls. Here are just a few ideas to help get you started.
OBEY them — Perhaps the clearest and most heartfelt way you can serve your shepherds is to simply obey them. By submitting yourself willingly and cheerfully under their authority, you honor the Lord who sovereignly put them over you to have charge over you in the Lord and to give account for your soul one day in glory. Submit to them. Obey them. Honor them. Make their leadership duties a joy and not a burden.
THANK them — Another way you can practically thank each of your shepherd elders is to carefully and thoughtfully thank them. By this, I do not speak of flattery. Nor do I refer to some generic post on social media. The heart of your shepherds will overflow with joy when you thank them and explain to them how God is using them to help you learn more about God and His Word. It’s not puffing up the man. It is exalting God and giving glory to God for His mercy in using your elder, a human instrument at that, to establish and grow you in the faith.
Read More
Related Posts: -
6 Ways Christians Can Respond to Our Strange New World
Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Tuesday, July 26, 2022
It might sound trite, but a large part of the church’s witness to the world is simply being the church in worship. Paul himself comments that when an unbeliever accidentally turns up at a church service, he should be struck by the otherworldly holiness of what is going on. The most powerful witness to the gospel is the church herself, simply going about the business of worship.The world has shifted under our feet. New notions about selfhood challenge Christians’ views, and we’ve found ourselves in a hostile place where it’s dangerous to challenge the new status quo.
To object to same-sex marriage, for example, is in the moral register of the day not substantially different from being a racist. The era when Christians could disagree with the broader convictions of the secular world and yet still find themselves respected as decent members of society is coming to an end, if indeed it hasn’t ended already. The truth is that the last vestiges of a social imaginary shaped by Christianity are rapidly vanishing, and many of us are even now living as strangers in a strange new world.
The revolution in selfhood, particularly as it manifests itself in the various facets of the sexual revolution, is set to exert pressure on the lives of all of us, from kindergarten education to workplace policies on pronouns. Christians might still be able to run, so to speak, and avoid some of these things for a period of time, but they cannot hide forever. Sooner or later every single one of us is likely to be faced with a challenging situation generated by the modern notion of selfhood. And this means that for all of us the questions of how we should live and what we should do when facing pressure to conform are gaining in urgency. Here are six ways Christians should respond to this new world.Recognize Our Complicity
The first thing we need to do is understand our complicity in the expressive individualism of our day. This statement needs a little nuance, however, because expressive individualism is not all bad. We do have feelings; we do have an inner psychological space that deeply shapes who we are.
Historically, while Rousseau is developing his notion of the self as rooted in inner sentiments, Jonathan Edwards is writing The Religious Affections and exploring that inner space from an explicitly Christian perspective. Expressive individualism is correct in affirming the importance of psychology for who we are and in stressing the universal dignity of all human beings. We might also add that this accenting of the individual is consonant with the existential urgency of the New Testament in the way it stresses the importance of personal faith as a response to the gospel. Only I can believe for me. And that places the “I” in a most important place.
But there are also problems here. Think, for example, of freedom of religion. This is a social virtue. What Christian wants to live in a country where the church is persecuted and where worshiping God is considered a crime? Yet countries where there’s freedom are also typically countries where there are many churches, even religions, to which one can choose to belong.
Within 10 miles of where I’m writing this book in my study at home in Pennsylvania, there are dozens of churches—Presbyterian, Lutheran, Eastern Orthodox, Baptist, Roman Catholic. And even the terms “Presbyterian,” “Lutheran,” and “Baptist” cover a variety of different denominations. This is the result of religious freedom—a good thing—but it also has the effect of making religion a marketplace where the congregant is the customer and the church the vendor. This means the authority in religion tilts toward the congregant, the customer, in a way that panders to the felt needs of the psychological self.
To make the point more sharply, it’s worth noting a comment once made by Philip Rieff: “Formerly, if men were miserable, they went to church, so as to find the rationale of their misery; they did not expect to be happy, this idea is Greek, not Christian or Jewish.”
Such a notion is incomprehensible today: we as Christians intuitively go to church to feel good—perhaps to meet friends or to sing uplifting songs (whether traditional or contemporary) or to have our minds stimulated by a good sermon or our ears edified by beautiful music. Prayers, personal and corporate, tend to focus on the alleviation of misery, not on being enabled to understand it. We tend to go to—to choose!—the church that fits with what makes us personally feel good. This is true whether we are, say, emotional types to whom a Pentecostal service might appeal; lovers of artistic beauty, who might be naturally drawn to high Anglicanism, Catholicism, or Orthodoxy; or (like me) a bookish type, for whom the cerebral sermons of Reformed churches are appealing.
Perhaps I’ve overstated things here. But most of us, if we’re honest with ourselves, would have to admit that our choice of church is not entirely driven by theological conviction. Personal taste plays a role, and that is shaped by the expectations of the psychologized, therapeutic society in which we live, move, and have our being.
This also connects to another way in which the church has become more akin to the world than she often realizes: the cult of personal happiness. Now, there’s nothing wrong with being happy, of course. But the nature of happiness has changed over the years to being akin to an inner sense of psychological well-being. Once we start thinking of happiness in those terms, the vision of the Christian life laid out in Paul’s letters, particularly 2 Corinthians, becomes incomprehensible. We may not all be explicitly committed to the prosperity gospel, but many of us think of divine blessing in terms of our individual happiness. That is a result of the psychological, therapeutic culture seeping into our Christianity.
There are other areas of Christian complicity as well. How many churches have taken a firm stand on no-fault divorce, a concept predicated on a view of marriage that sees it as being of no significance once the personal happiness of one or both parties is not being met? How many Christians allow their emotions to govern their ethics when a beloved relative or friend comes out as gay or transgender? We’re all complicit at some level in this strange new world.
It’s not easy to see how we can address this, but a few thoughts suggest themselves.
First, we need to examine ourselves, individually and corporately, to see in what ways we’ve compromised the gospel with the spirit of this age. Then we need to repent, call out to the Lord for grace, and seek to reform our beliefs, attitudes, intuitions, and practices accordingly. Nothing less is required for a true reformation at this point.
Second, an awareness of our complicity should cultivate a level of humility in how we engage with those with whom we disagree on these matters. There can be no place for the pharisaic prayer whereby we thank the Lord that we’re not like other men.
Third, being aware of our complicity at least allows us to engage in the future in appropriate self-criticism and self-policing. We cannot help but choose the church in which we worship. Even the cradle Catholic today chooses to continue to attend church because there are many other available options, including not attending church at all. But having chosen the church, we can discipline ourselves to be committed to that church, stick with it, and refuse to allow ourselves to move on simply because of some trivial issue or matter of personal taste. This will be far from perfect and far from easy, but I see no other option than self-awareness and self-discipline in this matter.Learn from the Ancient Church
Traditional Christians are typically those who take history seriously. We have a faith rooted in historical claims (supremely the incarnation of Jesus Christ and the events and actions of his life) and see our religious communities as standing in a line extending back through time to Pentecost and beyond. Thus, when faced with peculiar challenges, Christians often look to the past to find hope for their experience in the present. Typically, Protestants look to the Reformation and Catholics look to the High Middle Ages. If only we might be able to return to that world, we tell ourselves, all might be well.
Anyone with a realistic sense of history knows that such returns are at best virtually impossible. First, neither the Reformation nor the High Middle Ages were the golden eras that later religious nostalgia would have us believe. The societies in which the church operated in those periods are gone forever, thanks in large part to the ways technology has reshaped the world in which we now live.
If we’re to find a precedent for our times, I believe we must go further back, to the second century and the immediately post-apostolic church. There, Christianity was a little-understood, despised, marginal sect. It was suspected of being immoral and seditious. Eating the body and blood of their god and calling each other “brother” and “sister” even when married made Christians and Christianity sound highly dubious to outsiders. And the claim that “Jesus is Lord!” was on the surface a pledge of loyalty that derogated from that owed to Caesar. That’s much like the situation of the church today.
For example, we’re considered irrational bigots for our stance on gay marriage. In the aftermath of the Trump presidency, it has become routine to hear religious conservatives in general, and evangelical Christians in particular, decried as representing a threat to civil society. Like our spiritual ancestors in the second century, we too are deemed immoral and seditious.
Of course, the analogy isn’t perfect. The church in the second century faced a pagan world that had never known Christianity. We live in a world that is de-Christianizing, often self-consciously and intentionally. That means the opposition is likely better informed and more proactive than in the ancient church. Yet a glance at the church’s strategy in the second century is still instructive.
First, it’s clear from the New Testament and from early non-canonical texts like the Didache that community was central to church life. The Acts of the Apostles presents a picture of a church where Christians cared for and served each other. The Didache sets forth a set of moral prescriptions, including a ban on abortion and infanticide, that served to distinguish the church from the surrounding world. Christian identity was clearly a very practical, down-to-earth, and day-to-day thing.
This makes perfect sense. Underlying the notion of the social imaginary is that identity is shaped by the communities to which we belong. And we all have various identities—I’m a husband, a father, a teacher, an Englishman, an immigrant, a writer, and a rugby fan, in addition to being a Christian. The strongest identities I have, forming my strongest intuitions, derive from the strongest communities to which I belong. And that means the church needs to be the strongest community to which we each belong.
Ironically, the LGBT+ community is proof of this point: the reason they’ve moved from the margins to center stage is intimately connected to the strong communities they formed while on the margins. This is why lamentation for Christianity’s cultural marginalization, while legitimate, cannot be the sole response of the church to the current social convulsions she is experiencing. Lament, for sure—we should lament that the world isn’t as it should be, as many of the psalms teach us—but also organize. Become a community. By this, the Lord says, shall all men know that you are my disciples, by the love you have for each other (John 13:35). And that means community.
This brings me to the second lesson we can learn from the early church. Community in terms of its day-to-day details might look different in a city than in a rural village, or in the United States compared to the United Kingdom. But there are certain elements the church in every place will share: worship and fellowship. Gathering together on the Lord’s Day, praying, singing God’s praise, hearing the Word read and preached, celebrating baptism and the Lord’s Supper, giving materially to the church’s work—these are things all Christians should do when gathered together.
It might sound trite, but a large part of the church’s witness to the world is simply being the church in worship. Paul himself comments that when an unbeliever accidentally turns up at a church service, he should be struck by the otherworldly holiness of what is going on. The most powerful witness to the gospel is the church herself, simply going about the business of worship.
Many Christians talk of engaging the culture. In fact, the culture is most dramatically engaged when the church presents it with another culture, another form of community, rooted in her liturgical worship practices and manifested in the loving community that exists both in and beyond the worship service. Many talk of the culture war between Christians and secularism, and certainly the Bible itself uses martial language to describe the spiritual conflict of this present age. But perhaps “cultural protest” is a way of better translating that idea into modern idiom, given the reality and history of physical warfare in our world. The church protests the wider culture by offering a true vision of what it means to be a human being made in the image of God.
This approach is certainly hinted at in second-century Christian literature. The so-called Greek Apologists, such as Justin Martyr, addressed the Roman Empire from a Christian perspective. What’s so interesting when compared to some of the ways many Christians, right and left, do so today is how respectful these ancient apologists were. They didn’t spend their time denouncing the evils of the emperor and his court. Rather, they argued positively that Christians made the best citizens, the best parents, the best servants, the best neighbors, the best employees, and that they should thus be left alone and allowed to carry on with their day-to-day lives without being harassed by the authorities. Of course, there were limits to what they could do to participate in civic life: if asked to sacrifice to the emperor as to a god, they would have to refuse. But beyond such demands, they could be good members of the Roman community.
Read More
Related Posts:
