In Luke 13, Jesus responds to two recent tragedies with a sobering and eternal warning that we all need to heed carefully lest we stumble upon the Rock of offense (1 Pet 2:8). In the first instance, Pilate, no friend of the Jews, mingled the blood of some Galileans with their sacrifices (v. 1). Even though Luke does not explicitly identify who these Galileans were, based on Pilate’s disdain for Judaism and the involvement of “sacrifices,” it is reasonable to think that they were Jews worshipping at the temple. Moreover, it is likely that it happened around Passover since that was the only festival when the laity could slaughter their own animals. To the disappointment of the crowd, likely composed of Jews, Jesus’ reaction to the tragic event is unsympathetic at best and at worst callous. Surprisingly, He does not applaud them as martyrs or unsuspecting heroes. Furthermore, Jesus does not address the political, social, or national issue, but turns the sensation of the event to a call for repentance. To Jesus, what is supremely significant about this sudden loss of lives, regardless of the cause, is that it serves as a wakeup call to the living of the coming judgment and eternal death to all unrepentant sinners.
Then in v. 4, Jesus recounts another recent event where 18 were suddenly killed in an accident. Based on the Jewish historian Josephus (Jewish War 5.145), the 18 victims were likely Jews in Jerusalem. In like manner, Jesus expresses little compassion about this tragedy but reiterates the warning pronounced earlier, “repent or perish!” His response (v. 5) is identical to the first except the word “likewise” (Greek hōsautōs rather than homoios) which is slightly stronger in force and suggests by the repetition a more emphatic call to respond (BAGD 899). Jesus deliberately uses the passions that surround these tragic deaths to warn them about the need for repentance. In so doing, Jesus highlights how tragedy exposes the fragility and unpredictability of life and thus the eternal significance of being right with God. Therefore, no matter how protected or sheltered one’s life may appear to be (clearly not as much as we assumed before COVID-19), death shows no favoritism. Whether we are prepared for it or not, there is an appointed time for everyone to die and face judgment (Heb 9:27).
In both of these instances, what Jesus focuses on is not the occasion, circumstances, or timing of a person’s death, but the inevitability of eternal death for all those who do not repent. In other words, there is a far greater calamity that awaits those who do not repent and trust in Christ than any untimely, sudden death that one could suffer in this life. The Greek word for “perish” (vv. 3 and 5), apollymai, generally means to destroy, to ruin, to die, but here Jesus uses it with the force of eternal destruction (as in the case of Matt 10:28, “And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear Him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” Compare also 1 Cor 1:18, “For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” “Perishing” is antithetically parallel to “being saved” which clearly has an eternal significance.). The death that Jesus warns about is the wages of sin which the soul must pay for eternity. Jesus believes that repentance is so essential in this life that He accentuates these two tragic events to warn His hearers about it. For those who did not have an eternal perspective on life, Jesus’ word would have appeared cold and uncaring.
An important note to make at this point is that repentance is not merely a one-time act that happens at conversion but a way of life. Even though believers are justified by faith in Christ, they continually war against indwelling sin in this life (Rom 7:13-25). Therefore, as disciples of Christ, the call for persistent repentance is a must (Luke 9:23). In writing to a group of churches, John declares in 1 Jn 1:8, “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.” Moreover in Rev 2:1-7, Jesus confronts the church in Ephesus for abandoning their “first love”—their fundamental love for Christ and for one another. Consequently, Jesus declares to them, “Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first. If not, I will come to you and remove your lampstand from its place, unless you repent.” In the same way, we must continue to repent of our sins lest our hearts become dull and hardened (Mt 13:15) and fall short of finishing the race (2 Tim 4:7-8).
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Overtures 20, 21, 25, and 26 all call for changes to disciplinary procedures. Tennessee Valley also sent Overture 26, which proposes an amendment to BCO 32-19. Currently, when a person is charged with an offense and tried by his session or, in the case of a minister, by his presbytery, he may be represented before the court by anyone who is a member of the church or (in the case of a minister) another member of his presbytery. This overture proposes that the person charged would be allowed representation by any member in good standing in a PCA church. Tennessee Valley argues that small congregations or presbyteries may not include members who are well versed in PCA disciplinary procedures and so under the current provision might be underrepresented in a trial. The proposal does not alter the prohibition against employment of professional counsel. 

In the PCA, an overture is ordinarily a proposal from a lower church body to a higher body requesting the higher body to take some particular action. We’ve reviewed the first 19 overtures sent to the 51st General Assembly here and here. Since that time, 16 additional overtures have been sent to the GA.
Two of these new overtures address the subject of previously submitted overtures. Overtures 23 and 24 would amend BCO 13-6, 21-4, and 24-1 to require background checks as part of examinations for ordination to office and transfer of ministers into a presbytery, an issue already addressed in Overtures 6, 16, and 17. 
The proposed changes in Overture 24, from South Texas Presbytery, are identical to those proposed in Overtures 16 and 17, outlined in the previous update. This proposal calls for each presbytery to order and review background checks for minsters seeking transfer from other presbyteries and denominations, and for candidates for ordination under “specific rules and policies” for such background checks. Each session would be required to do the same for candidates for ruling elder and deacon. While the proposal does not specify details of the “specific rules and policies,” the overture does include suggested policies that presbyteries or sessions could adopt. The background checks would serve as part of the candidate’s/transferring minister’s examination in Christian experience (in the case of a candidate transferring from one presbytery to another or of a candidate for ruling elder or deacon) or acquaintance of experiential religion (in the case of a candidate for ordination as a teaching elder or a man transferring from another denomination). 
Overture 23 from Missouri Presbytery differs in that it includes items covered in the suggested policy of Overture 24 (who received the background check and who pays for it) in the proposed BCO amendment itself, as well as specifying that the background check be state and federal and fingerprint based.
Overtures 20, 21, 25, and 26 all call for changes to disciplinary procedures. 
Overture 20 proposes the most extensive changes, virtually reframing BCO 31, 32, and 35. The details of the proposed changes are too extensive to report in detail here, but the rationale for the overture summarizes them as retaining most of the current text with some additions throughout, relocating various items, and adding several new paragraphs concerning matters such as impartiality, reporting allegations, reporting the results of investigations, imposing non-censure suspension, and adopting closed session. 
Overture 20 was proposed by the session of Fountain Square Presbyterian Church in Indianapolis to Central Indiana Presbytery which rejected it. The Fountain Square Session then forwarded it to the GA under the provisions of the Rules of Assembly Operation (RAO) 11-10 which allows a session or individual to send an overture rejected by their presbytery to the GA provided it is accompanied by an extract from the minutes of the presbytery showing its rejection. 
Central Indiana Presbytery did approve and send Overture 21 to the GA, which would amend BCO 43-1 to extend the prohibition against complaints filed during a judicial case. The current BCO provision prohibits a complaint in a judicial case in which an appeal is pending. Overture 21 proposes this be extended to any point after the case has commenced (i.e., after the court has found a strong presumption of guilt), arguing that under the current provision complaints could delay a trial for a significant period of time. 
Overture 25 from Tennessee Valley Presbytery would amend BCO 31-2 which concerns the investigation of reports concerning a member’s character. This proposal would allow presbyteries and sessions to utilize “experienced or specially qualified outside parties or consultants” in such investigations as the circumstances warrant. Tennessee Valley argues this would clarify the paragraph, as some have argued that it restricts involvement in investigations to the presbytery or session conducting it. 
Tennessee Valley also sent Overture 26, which proposes an amendment to BCO 32-19. Currently, when a person is charged with an offense and tried by his session or, in the case of a minister, by his presbytery, he may be represented before the court by anyone who is a member of the church or (in the case of a minister) another member of his presbytery. This overture proposes that the person charged would be allowed representation by any member in good standing in a PCA church. Tennessee Valley argues that small congregations or presbyteries may not include members who are well versed in PCA disciplinary procedures and so under the current provision might be underrepresented in a trial. The proposal does not alter the prohibition against employment of professional counsel. 
Overture 22 from South Florida Presbytery seeks to remedy a potential inconsistency between BCO 8-7 and 13-2. BCO 8-7 locates a minister’s membership in the presbytery where he labors; BCO 13-2 says he is a member of the presbytery in which he resides.
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If this were an isolated occurrence it would be one thing; regrettably, this does not seem to be the case. If one were to summarize the crisis of evangelicalism in America today, he could probably do so best by saying that its internal struggles arise because its institutions do not represent the vast majority of its people, and that their actions do not put into practice the beliefs or preferred actions of those people.

In a previous article I responded to a claim published at byFaith, the official magazine of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), which stated that “gun violence” is “the leading cause of death among children in this nation.” I referenced CDC cause of death data by age which showed this is false, and in a subsequent article requested that readers contact byFaith and urge them to retract. An unclear but apparently significant number of people did so, for which I am grateful.
As of this writing byFaith has not retracted the original claim, however. Their reason? Per the response to my complaint from some of their leadership, they maintain the original claim’s accuracy. They appeal to a study by the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) that discusses how “firearm-related deaths” are the leading cause of death “among children and adolescents,” a group it defines as “persons 1 to 19 years of age.” That is an insufficient defense.
Problem one is that infants under the age of one are children, and that 18 and 19 year old adults are not. To give an idea of how much this statistical sleight of hand skews the results, consider that infants under one accounted for about 56% of child deaths in 2020, while 18 and 19 year olds had more firearm homicide deaths between them than the entire 0-17 age group (1,435 v. 1,376), and nearly as many suicides (~79% as many). One can only claim that firearms-related deaths were the leading cause of death among children and adolescents in 2020 by denying the majority of child deaths, in other words, and by also including many adults of an age particularly prone to criminal violence and self-harm.
Problem two is that “firearms-related deaths” and “gun violence” are not synonymous, as the former appears to include accidental deaths, whereas the CDC distinguishes between unintentional and violence-related injuries when it categorizes causes of death.
Problem three is that there is an implicit denial of the personhood of infants in any study that talks about children’s deaths that intentionally omits them from its findings. If one truly cares about children’s wellbeing and wishes to empirically study causes of its destruction, one must include all children. As the NEJM study did not do that, we can only include that they either do not regard such infants as truly being children, or else that they are more interested in pursuing a political agenda than in handling the data in a dispassionate manner. Neither of those commends the study in question as reliable, and yet byFaith has hedged its defense upon it.
Now let us trace the sequence of events up to this point. First, byFaith published an inaccurate claim. Second, it was publicly contradicted and was publicly and privately requested to retract the claim. Third, it refused to retract and attempted to defend its original statement by appealing to a source that speaks of a different category of deaths among a different group of people, and which seems to espouse sentiments – i.e., that infants under one do not count as children – that could be used to justify infanticide.
There is no gentle way of putting this, but suffice it to say that such actions do not constitute good journalism. It is one thing to make a mistaken claim of fact, though editors ought to verify the accuracy of articles before publishing them. It is another thing, and worse still, to try to justify one’s mistake by appealing to sources that do not, by their own description, purport to discuss the same thing or the same group of people as one’s own claims. Again, “children” are a different group than “children and adolescents,” and the proper definition of the former is people in the 0-17 age range, not the 1-19 age range that the NEJM uses (inaccurately) for the latter group. (Actually in common parlance children means either pre-pubescent people, but I am using it in its widest sense to refer to what the law typically calls minors.)[1]
It is worse still to justify all of this on the ground that the original article was an impassioned pro-life plea, as byFaith’s response to my private complaint attempted to do. Defending life by appealing to a source that has published pro-infanticide material in the past (compare this and this), and that appears to maintain infanticide-compatible notions about the personhood of infants in the particular study to which one appeals is a strange method, surely. And it is all the worse in that it distracts from what is an indisputably worse cause of death among children, abortion. In 2020 the top 20 leading causes of death for children counted by the CDC totaled 27,054 deaths; abortion accounted for 620,327, or nearly 23 times as many as all those others combined.
Two things before I proceed. One, miscarriage appears to be the largest killer of children, though unlike abortion it is not clear that it is directly preventable in many cases. (If anyone with a medical background believes that I am mistaken here, please drop me a line of correction.) Two, my own writings up to this point had the same effect as byFaith’s, in that they ignored prenatal deaths, which are vastly more common than deaths among children after they are born. Insofar as I believe that byFaith erred by distorting the nature of the matters in view, it is a thing of which I also am guilty. Mark that well, reader: Tom Hervey was wrong too, in that he lost sight of the larger picture.
There is a bit of a difference, however, in that I did not attempt to cast my position as being part of a larger, thoroughly pro-life plea as byFaith has done: my concern was with the inaccuracy of the original claim, and of how publishing it risked bringing our denomination into disrepute and played (if unwittingly) into the hands of political agitators who wish to heckle people into doing their bidding by the use of the same original claim about children and gun violence (often verbatim). Now to summarize, the PCA’s denominational magazine has been engaged in poor journalism, and has willfully persisted in that poor journalism in a way that unhelpfully distorts the nature of our thinking about pro-life matters.
If this were an isolated occurrence it would be one thing; regrettably, this does not seem to be the case. If one were to summarize the crisis of evangelicalism in America today, he could probably do so best by saying that its internal struggles arise because its institutions do not represent the vast majority of its people, and that their actions do not put into practice the beliefs or preferred actions of those people. We keep putting up institutions and celebrating, often more than is warranted, various individuals in our midst, and like clockwork they keep turning about and taking their cues rather from our wider society and its discourse and current events than from the people whom they are supposed to serve.
An example of that appears here as well. For some time now many evangelicals have been sorely embarrassed at the suggestion that preventing defenseless children from being murdered in utero is our foremost concern in questions of life and death. Our opponents frequently accuse of us of not caring about human life after it enters this world, and say things like ‘you talk about the sanctity of life for fetuses, but after they are born you are content to let them languish in oppressive and abusive familial and socio-economic circumstances – some love of life that is!’ And so now our prominent people have begun talking about a larger pro-life vision, and shift the focus from the first point of defending life (logically and chronologically), to talking about promoting a culture of life in general. That is not necessarily wrong as such, but it has the potential to become so by a) suggesting as true what is in many cases baseless slander by our opponents; and b) shifting the definition of what constitutes pro-life action.
It is the latter that is entailed in byFaith’s position here. Their original article regards it as imperative to “stop excusing our lack of progress in reducing mass shootings and work on creating and implementing the solutions that will foster a safer society for all,” and deems the present public safety situation for children in America as a “hellish” and “unsustainable” crisis that demands immediate action by everyone (“we must all start working for a safer society”).  In byFaith’s personal response to me one of their staff explicitly connected advocating to protect “elementary school children” (his phrase) to advocating against abortion.
There is no comparing abortion to criminal violence against children in general, or to school shootings in particular, and the attempt to do so is an exercise in moral blindness. Elective abortion is legal murder that is encouraged, protected, and subsidized by our government, and in the last 50 years has accounted for the deaths of tens of millions of children. By contrast, gun murder (and suicide) is in contravention of our laws. Legality and social celebration on the one hand and criminality and social deprecation on the other make the two things, abortion and firearm murder, vastly different in nature; and alas for us, the socially approved one is the more common by far, which is the real crisis that calls for our action.
If we limit our focus to school shootings, which were an important emphasis for byFaith (per the original article and their subsequent response), there is no comparison at all. In the entire 52 year period for which the Center for Homeland Defense and Security (CHDS) has analyzed school shooting deaths they identified 371 that involved minors (and that includes suicides, accidents, self defense, and justifiable homicides by law enforcement). In that same period probably at least 223 million people have been students;[2] and 371 out of 223,000,000 across half a century is not a crisis, but an extreme rarity (comp. footnote), even granting there is probably some undercounting for the pre-Internet era.[3]
And yet, these things notwithstanding, byFaith would have us “get on with the good work that needs to be done” viz. gun violence and children’s safety in this country, whatever that entails (and neither they nor Cassidy have said, as others have noted). I think I speak for a great many people in the PCA when I say that we expect better from our official news agency, and that it is a point of some embarrassment and frustration that it not only published inaccurate claims that are popular with political factions that are in most respects our enemies, but has persisted in mistakenly asserting their accuracy in a way which draws their journalistic competence yet further into question and which, worst of all, redefines what is entailed in the single most important moral movement with which evangelicalism is involved.
Tom Hervey is a member of Woodruff Road Presbyterian Church, Five Forks (Simpsonville), SC. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not of necessity reflect those of his church or its leadership or other members. He welcomes comments at the email address provided with his name.
[1]     Adolescents (ages 13-19) accounted for 2,543 firearm homicides and 1,239 firearm suicides during 2020, out of a total of 2,811 and 1,293, respectively, or about 90.5 and 95.8% of deaths among people in the 0-19 age group in those categories.
[2]     Figured by subtracting foreign-born residents and people over 65 and under 5 years of age from the nation’s total population as estimated by the Census Bureau, an admittedly rough estimate.
[3]     Figures for minors computed from CHDS’s raw data excel file. For comparison of firearm homicides in general among minors, per the Census Bureau persons under 18 accounted for an estimated 22.2% of the population in 2021, or approximately 73,989,838 people. The 1,376 firearm homicides in this group in 2020 (the last year available) represented the death of 1 in 53,772. Nothing which is so rare can be justly deemed an urgent crisis of the utmost importance. Abortion is vastly more common: 620,237 incidences against 3,605,201 births in 2020, per the CDC.
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