It is with a mixture of sorrow and hope that we, the elders of Memorial Presbyterian Church, after fifteen months spent fasting, praying, waiting, consulting and listening, now write to call a meeting of the congregation for 5:30–6:30 p.m. Friday, November 18, 2022, in the Auditorium for the purpose of deciding on matters pertaining to denominational alignment. We are recommending the congregation vote to withdraw from the Presbyterian Church in America in accordance with Book of Church Order 25-11

October 18, 2022
Dear church family,
Memorial exists to bring the Welcome of Jesus through his Gospel as found in his Word to St. Louis. We have seen how he provides for us. We have experienced his Spirit’s work among us. We have had our hearts captivated by the gospel. We have had the privilege of being coworkers in what Jesus is doing on the earth. For the past 40 years, we have done so as a member church of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA).
Since our first letter on July 13 and last letter on September 8, troubling new circumstances have arisen that move us to believe it is time for us to take the next step toward denominational realignment.
It is with a mixture of sorrow and hope that we, the elders of Memorial Presbyterian Church, after fifteen months spent fasting, praying, waiting, consulting and listening, now write to call a meeting of the congregation for 5:30–6:30 p.m. Friday, November 18, 2022, in the Auditorium for the purpose of deciding on matters pertaining to denominational alignment. We are recommending the congregation vote to withdraw from the Presbyterian Church in America in accordance with Book of Church Order 25-11, which states:
Particular churches need remain in association with any court of this body only so long as they themselves so desire. The relationship is voluntary, based upon mutual love and confidence, and is in no sense to be maintained by the exercise of any force or coercion whatsoever. A particular church may withdraw from any court of this body at any time for reasons which seem to it sufficient, provided, however, the congregation is given at least thirty-days’ notice of any meeting where the congregation is to vote on a proposed withdrawal from the Presbyterian Church in America.
Memorial exists to bring the Welcome of Jesus to sinners like ourselves, helping them embrace that Welcome, live out that Welcome and unleash that Welcome in the power of the Holy Spirit. Continued attacks from within our denomination have and continue to hinder and distract from that mission. We need a team that is for us.
This is a historic moment. As historic as our vote in 1980 to leave what was then our denomination. We believe this step is necessary to protect Memorial’s ministries and ministers from distraction and abuse. More details about our recommended path forward will be forthcoming in the coming weeks.
In our last letter, we explained that there were some questions about which we still needed further information. Two questions related to our reception into another denomination. We are still working on those questions and hope to have full answers for you soon.
Two other questions were related to timing and unity. We heard the congregation asking:

If Greg is tried (or re-tried) by the PCA sooner rather than later, will that hold up the church’s denominational realignment until after the trial and ruling has come—a judicial process that can take months or years?

We have now learned that, yes, once a court of the church (whether local Missouri Presbytery, denominational supreme court or General Assembly) takes a case, thereby entering into judicial process, the pastor involved must see the case through unless another denomination receives him into it. Other denominations can be hesitant to receive a pastor under such circumstances, and would likely require a supermajority vote to receive him. This could hold us all up.
Greg was exonerated by our denominational supreme court a year ago. But his critics have been busy retargeting him and—just this month—now targeting other Memorial pastors.
Our denominational supreme court already has requests from several regional presbyteries to try (or re-try) Greg in an attempt to reverse last year’s ruling. They could vote to accept this case as early as this weekend or as late as February. If they refuse to take the case, a minority report is likely, setting Greg up for a possible trial on the floor of General Assembly next June in Memphis.
Additionally, our local Missouri Presbytery has received a number of new requests for investigations even since our last letter to you. One misrepresents Greg’s views and involves accusations that his 2021 book doesn’t properly reflect the nuance of the Westminster Larger Catechism.
And yet another most recent one requests that pastors Sam Dolby and Keith Robinson also be investigated—alongside Greg—concerning their Christian character due to their support for our Chapel ministry to artists.
Other possible cases against our pastors are also developing. The flow of these baseless judicial attacks is unlikely to slow down. We are being deliberately targeted. To protect our pastors—and to keep our presbytery from having to do multiple formal investigations of baseless accusations—we therefore think it wise to take this next step in realignment sooner rather than later.

We also heard you asking, whatever we decide—and it will be the congregation that decides, not the Session—we are your servants—how can we do it together as a family, with love even when perspectives differ?

We are therefore scheduling two additional fireside chats, which also will involve intercessory prayer for our protection and unity as a congregation.
This will not be an easy decision for some of us. Greg has shared how deeply sorrowful this decision is for him. Greg is not alone in these feelings. This will not be a time to celebrate.
While Memorial will continue to send students to Covenant College and continue to support our MTW missionaries and especially our RUF minister at Wash U, many of us and many of our Memorial siblings are already grieving a loss. Please be in prayer for them. Speak kindly to them. Reach out to listen and to love. And respect your sibling’s perspective, especially if it differs from your own.
Also, realize that it is common to experience feelings of anxiety during periods of uncertainty or transition. We encourage you to channel any anxiety into prayer for the church.
We will have a Fireside Chat and Prayer Gathering Monday, October 24 at 7:00 p.m.
We will have another Wednesday, November 9 at 7:30 p.m.
Our intention has been to bathe this process with prayer and with love. We believe this decision to be the most loving option for Memorial, for same-sex oriented believers, for our pastors and, yes, for the PCA itself.
We hope that Memorial’s withdrawal from the PCA will strengthen the hands of our friends within the denomination. As their opponents have capitalized on the “wedge issue” they found in knowing the PCA had a celibate same-sex oriented pastor, we can now remove Memorial from that equation. Critics will have to find some other cause with which to rally their troops. Lord willing, that will help our friends in the denomination as they work hard to once again take leadership to ground the denomination in a humble, winsome and missiological grace.
We believe Jesus is walking with us through this process, as is our current presbytery. The gospel is at work among us. The Lord’s Spirit is within us. We are not afraid.
In this letter, we have described what we believe we must move away from to protect our mission. In a fourth letter, we hope soon to offer a clearer picture of what we hope to move toward. We are still discerning that matter, and we are excited by the possibilities. Jesus loves Memorial, and we are confident that he will preserve us in our mission as he pours his love and Spirit out upon us—and through us to others.
We love you and thank God for you.
Your servants in Jesus,
The Session of Memorial Presbyterian Church
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In Confessions, he tells a better and more rational story about reason, interweaving how our thinking depends on trust, how our deepest desires move us along through life, and how disordered loves misalign our intellectual quests for the truth. And he does this all while layering his account with the Scriptures; most notably the Psalms, Luke’s story of the prodigal, and the opening chapters of Genesis. Confessions is thus suggestive for how we might integrate various disciplines—exegesis, theology, counseling, and preaching—together to witness in a secular age in which “coming of age” is highly prized.

Augustine of Hippo (354-430) is arguably the most significant post-biblical theologian in the history of Christianity and, as one recent historian has put it, the “greatest apologist of the Latin west.” Hence it was a surprise to us years ago when doing research for our textbook on apologetics to find that Augustine was almost entirely absent from modern debates on apologetic methodology. A question arose: what would happen if we retrieved Augustine to aid the church’s apologetic witness within post-Christendom?
To answer this question, we focused on his two most enduring books. With the reception history of The City of God, which has paid so much attention to its political and theological implications, it is important to not miss that Augustine’s stated purpose is to persuade skeptics and reassure doubters. He made clear in a letter, penned after City of God’s completion, that he wanted the work distributed to those who despise Christians and to the pagan seekers. Moreover, we also found that Confessions should be read as a work of persuasion–a story-shaped prayer, leading readers through competing philosophies before holding up the cross-shaped path to the good life. Retrieving both books together can help us address the individual and societal challenges of our present age.
Who might Augustine want to speak with today?
Before getting to the specifics of how, Augustine might want to speak to the who. Many present-day pastors and theologians, though inheritors of the Augustinian tradition, have sold off their apologetic birthright, mistakenly assuming apologetics is synonymous with a flattened Enlightenment-style rationality and seeing it as irrelevant to their ministry. This is a fair criticism of some forms of apologetics, but not of apologetics per se.
Long before the Enlightenment set the terms of so many debates, Augustine set out in The City of God to “persuad[e] a person either to enter the city of God without hesitation or to remain there with perseverance.” Mindful of the pronounced changes taking place in society and the challenges Christians felt, Augustine believed it was his pastoral calling to interact with these tectonic shifts and pour himself into the task of persuading the anxious, the doubting, and the skeptical. We can only imagine Augustine instructing pastors and theologians today to do the same.
Augustine would likely also want to have a long conversation with modern-day apologists. While he would almost certainly be pleased to observe how some of his apologetic seeds have blossomed through the ages, he would probably raise some concerns. Over the past century, at least in the United States, debate about apologetics has largely consisted of back-and-forths between evidential and presuppositional apologists regarding methodology. Though both sides have much to offer, the ways these methodological debates have often been framed have left our apologetic imaginations entrenched inside certain systems; meanwhile, the cultural winds outside have been rapidly changing. As Charles Taylor has highlighted with his use of the term “social imaginaries,” our late-modern communities have been inhaling ways of thinking, believing, and living—not mostly by way of syllogisms or analytic argument, but through stories, symbols, and artifacts—which have made Christianity seem not only irrational but oppressive and dangerous. Our cultural air is far different from what it was even fifty years ago. A changing culture, however, would not surprise Augustine; he saw it in his own time. But the idea that we would be unwilling to adapt how we attempt to persuade likely would surprise him.
In his book Territories of Human Reason, Alister McGrath has aptly summarized the work of scholars who study what is considered “rational” in different contexts. Basic logic is an important aspect of rationality, which is universally accepted. However, it is what is added to the laws of logic that does the heavy lifting in perceptions of rationality. And what is added to the laws of logic includes the available evidence for a particular person or community and the prevailing social imaginary. Hence, when we neglect to train ministers, evangelists, and apologists in how to evaluate and diagnose our culture’s dominant stories, symbols, and artifacts we risk neglecting the larger assumed frameworks within which people reason.
Moreover, in both teaching and in practice, contemporary apologetics has not sufficiently recognized the importance of humans as doxological creatures. Our desires shape how we reason and what we believe. This Augustinian insight is now being affirmed from a variety of different disciplines.
These two problems—namely, a lack of training in cultural analysis and at least a functionally reductionistic anthropology—go hand in hand. When we fail to integrate sociocultural analysis into our discipleship, we are left flatfooted when we attempt to engage the doubt and unbelief as well as the hearts and minds of those in our communities and parishes.
How might Augustine help us?
In Confessions, we read of a boy raised in church by his mother, only to walk away from the faith and pursue intellectual maturity. Confessions is an account of his truly growing up, which can help us counter contemporary secular coming of age stories.
Charles Taylor describes how many today assume they have come of age by simply subtracting religion from their lives and rooting themselves in science and common-sense reasoning.
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Wednesday, February 28, 2024
As the Christian transformation of the Roman Empire was marked by the emergence of the liturgical calendar and the turning of pagan temples into churches, so we can expect the reverse to take place when a culture paganizes….Time and space are reimagined in ways that directly confront and annihilate that once deemed sacred.

The controversy surrounding the recent funeral for Cecilia Gentili at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York has been well-documented in the press. Gentili was a transgender prostitute, an atheist, and a misogynist who denied that women’s bodies were of any real relevance. The service has been decried by Catholic conservatives as blasphemous—among other things, it featured prayers for transgender rights and a eulogy that praised Gentili as “Saint Cecilia, the mother of all whores”—and celebrated by Catholic progressives. The priest in charge of the cathedral has issued an apology, claiming that when he agreed to host the service he had no idea of what was to transpire. A Mass has even been offered by way of atonement.
The incident is eloquent testimony to the nature of this moment in American, even Western, culture. That actor Billy Porter played a lead role at the funeral is unsurprising: If anyone could be said to represent the real presence of the absolute absence of intellectual or cultural substance, it is he. Only a cultural vacuum could be filled by such a caricature, and his comment on the funeral bears testimony to this: “There’s no right or wrong way to grieve. But just make sure that you do, you allow yourself to do that, so that we can get to the other side of something that feels a little bit like grace.” What exactly that means is anybody’s guess.
One obvious question is why an atheist man convinced that he is a woman and committed to a life of prostitution would wish to have a funeral in a church. One answer is that the struggle for the heart of a culture always takes place in two areas: time and space. As the Christian transformation of the Roman Empire was marked by the emergence of the liturgical calendar and the turning of pagan temples into churches, so we can expect the reverse to take place when a culture paganizes. The pagans will respond in kind. And so we have a month dedicated to Pride and church buildings used for the mockery of Christianity. Time and space are reimagined in ways that directly confront and annihilate that once deemed sacred. A funeral in a Catholic cathedral for an atheist culture warrior is a first-class way of doing this.
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