We need to do better by the Reformed faith. We should not shun words like beautiful, nuance, winsome, and missional, but find ways to use them and use them properly: to extol the virtues of the Westminster Standards as a philosophy of ministry and summary of the Scripture’s teaching.

Language shapes the way people think and heavily influences the judgments people make. George Orwell illustrates this well in 1984. We see this in secular culture; simply by adding the modifier affirming to a product, policy, or institution, it is easier to brand opponents of the policy, product, or institution as some sort of -phobic.
Who could possibly be opposed to something that is affirming and who could survive being labeled some sort of -phobic? Language manipulates the way people perceive issues and even whole groups.
Even in the Church labels influence the way people in the Church relate to one another and how we see ourselves relative to others in the communion. Of course our primary identity flows out of Christ as saints, beloved, and children. Nonetheless in a communion as large as the PCA it is helpful to recognize where one stands along the spectrum.
In 2015, TE Bryan Chapell wrote describing his impression of three main groups in the PCA: “traditionalists, progressives, and neutrals.” Nobody seemed to like Chapell’s designations, and the volume of blogs on all sides objecting to the way Chapell described the different groupings suggests he was probably near the target(s).
While I am not a fan of being labeled a traditionalist, the three words Chapell used to describe the three groups were respectful and accurate enough for people to grasp what he was talking about in 2015 without a whole lot of nuance or elaboration. There are simply differences of ministry perspective, philosophy and priorities across the PCA, and people generally fall into one of about three broad categories. Chapell’s three words effectively distinguished the three groups.
Shaping the Message
Not all labels are as neutral as the ones in TE Chapell’s 2015 article. If an elder is described as winsome, missional, outward facing, and/or gospel centered where would we assume he falls in the Chapell Taxonomy above? If a congregation tends to focus or speak much on “beauty” and “authenticity,” where would you tend to assume it falls on the Chapell Taxonomy?
Recently a church website posted selections of references given for pastoral candidate TE James Kessler, including one from now Stated Clerk Chapell.
Stated Clerk Chapell asserted,
James [Kessler] is courageous and gospel centered. He is very insightful of people. James has multiple gifts so he has an extraordinary ministry. He is a true gem. James has been a leader in the denomination, especially of those pastors who are ‘gospel centered.’
Are there PCA pastors who are not “gospel centered,” is there a portion of the PCA which is not “gospel centered?” What would the taxonomic label for this group be? “Law Centered?” We can only speculate, and that is not the purpose of this article.
My purpose is, however, to highlight how men on the more confessional or “traditionalist” end of the PCA spectrum have done a poor job using language to communicate the beauty, loveliness, and grandeur of simple, ordinary, plain, vanilla, Old School, Reformed, Westminster, Confessional, Ordinary Means of Grace Presbyterianism.
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Written by Amy K. Hall |
Friday, March 1, 2024
As with the exodus, the cross is proof that God is real and powerful. He moved history in exactly the way he promised (see Isaiah 53). He raised Jesus from the dead! More than that, if he was willing to give his own Son for our good, we can trust that he is for us. He loves us. The objective evidence of his love is right there on the cross, and we can argue for the cross with objective evidence.

In a society that’s hostile towards Christian morality, how should we go about teaching our children God’s commands so that they’ll desire to follow him rather than the culture surrounding and pressuring them?
Not a God of Blind Faith
The first thing to remember is this: Our God is not a God of blind faith. As our Creator, he knows we are beings who need reasons for what we do, beings who are rational and who love, beings who are motivated by a desire to seek our good and the good of our loved ones. Of course, our sin distorts these qualities, even at the best of times, and we can be deceived about what actually is good for us (see Eve). But at root, our rationality and our desire to pursue what’s good for us are both good aspects of our humanity that God repeatedly appealed to when revealing his commands to his people.
We see a clear example of this approach in Deuteronomy 6:20–25, where God instructs the Israelites as to what they should emphasize when teaching their children his commands:
When your son asks you in time to come, saying, “What do the testimonies and the statutes and the judgments mean which the Lord our God commanded you?” then you shall say to your son, “We were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt, and the Lord brought us from Egypt with a mighty hand. Moreover, the Lord showed great and distressing signs and wonders before our eyes against Egypt, Pharaoh and all his household; He brought us out from there in order to bring us in, to give us the land which He had sworn to our fathers. So the Lord commanded us to observe all these statutes, to fear the Lord our God for our good always and for our survival, as it is today. It will be righteousness for us if we are careful to observe all this commandment before the Lord our God, just as He commanded us.”
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Saturday, August 20, 2022
There is no pressure in Christianity to be happy. There is instead an invitation to feel. To truly enter into the reality of the things that life throws at you, good and bad. To discover the emotions of God, what he loves and what he hates. We are invited to live life to the full. And that may look more like your life than you realised as you read through tear-stained eyes. Or it may not, and you may have to truly enter the joy and the sorrow of the situations that you find yourself in. Jesus did, and he invites us to follow him, with a cross on our shoulder.

Jesus came to give us life, and life to the full. Life that is abundant, excessive in quantity. We know the words of John chapter 10 well enough, but I think it’s difficult for us to picture what that means.
I hear the phrase “life to the full,” and I inevitably picture someone into extreme sports—perhaps a surfer—who is living their life to the full by chasing the thrill of adrenaline coursing through their body.
Or, if we look at the culture of our churches rather than the things we say, we might wonder if ‘life to the full’ had more to do with being Middle-Classed and living a nice well-adjusted life where our psychological drama is kept to a minimum and we earn a good salary and live in a nice-looking house with our 2.4 children. You might scoff at the characterisation, but when 70% of the British church is degree educated, something is off, even if this is unlikely to be the cause.
Life to the full cannot mean living like a beach bum. It cannot mean living like an upwardly mobile knowledge-worker in the suburbs. It cannot mean being employed by a church. And, it must be possible for people in all three of those situations.
Why can’t it? It must include Jesus’ own life. If his life cannot be described as ‘to the full’ or ‘abundant’ then we are defining our terms wrongly. When Jesus said ‘life to the full’ he must, as Alain Emerson points out in his beautiful memoir Luminous Dark, surely have meant a life like his own.
At this point I suspect you’re still with me. Most of us know this implicitly, even when our cultures speak differently. We imagine instead that life to the full is a life replete with joy, with friendship with God, and with demonstrations of God’s power dogging our footsteps.
A fully charismatic ‘naturally supernatural’ lifestyle, that sounds more like it! That lines up with Jesus’ own ministry and sounds like ‘life in abundance’ as well. That’ll be it, right?
A life like his own. Marked by suffering as well as joy. We should imagine that our abundant life will be as marked by struggles, disappointment and pain as his was.
What is life in its fullness?
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