The Nature of Responsibility
There are many examples of people rightly taking responsibility in the Bible—and many examples of people trying to avoid it. The latter was a major component of the Fall. Adam and Eve both tried to avoid their responsibility by blaming others, but God still held them—and Satan—accountable for their own sins. A great example of the former is David, who he became a leader by taking on the responsibility for the entire nation by volunteering to fight Goliath (1 Samuel 17). More importantly, while he sinned in some egregious ways, he was quick to repent when confronted.
And David said to God, “Was it not I who gave command to number the people? It is I who have sinned and done great evil. But these sheep, what have they done? Please let your hand, O LORD my God, be against me and against my father’s house. But do not let the plague be on your people.”
-1 Chronicles 21:17, ESV
In October 2008, two senior leaders were fired for something that happened on the other side of the world. Defense Secretary Robert Gates fired both the Secretary and Chief of Staff of the Air Force when it was discovered that four nuclear missile fuses had been mistakenly shipped to Taiwan from Hill AFB, Utah in 2006. To make matters worse, the Air Force was still reeling from a 2007 incident in which six nuclear warheads were mistakenly loaded onto a B-52 bomber and flown from Minot AFB, North Dakota to Barksdale AFB, Louisiana. Even though the official report from that incident placed the blame on base-level leadership and below, the two incidents taken together proved that the issues were much more systemic. This highlights important truths about the nature of responsibility, which is a crucial but often overlooked component of leadership.
Leadership Require Responsibility
Responsibility is integral to leadership first because it is integral to any job. To have any duty is to have responsibility, which means that in formal leadership, to assume a position of leadership is to take on the responsibility of performing all of the required duties of leadership. In an informal sense, leadership can be defined as taking responsibility for those around you. Therefore, as Simon Sinek pointed out, leadership in a very real sense is responsibility. In my leadership paper I showed that good leaders care for those they lead in addition to coordinating their efforts for the good of the organization, so a leader is responsible for the people and for the job. In other words, leadership is taking responsibility, so without taking responsibility for others you cannot be a leader. Authority therefore exists to enabling leaders to fulfill their responsibilities to their people and the organization, so legitimate authority cannot exist without responsibility.
Since responsibility can be described as duty, everyone at every level has some measure of responsibility. And just like in leadership, every duty requires a certain amount of authority. This means that to delegate a task is to delegate both the responsibility for the task and the authority required to complete the task. To give people responsibility without authority is a recipe for failure and discouragement. Unless people the authority required to do the job, can we really claim they have the responsibility to do the job? The responsibility rests with the one who has the authority, so a leader who fails to delegate authority is responsible for the team’s failures. It is therefore unjust for leaders to hold subordinates responsible for tasks they did not have the authority to properly complete. But by the same logic authority is inherent with delegated responsibility, so as a former boss of mine once said, “always assume the authority to do your job”.
Individual and Shared Responsibility
This brings up an interesting question about responsibility: when you delegate it do you relinquish it? To answer this, we must look at the concept of shared responsibility. In our individualistic culture, it is easy to focus on individual responsibility. In this view, an individual who gives responsibility does not retain it. But responsibility is not a zero-sum game, so when it is given it is still retained. The subordinate has responsibility to do the job, but the leader still has the responsibility to ensure the job gets done. Furthermore, the leader is responsible for the subordinate. Therefore, they both share responsibility. So when things go wrong it is proper to hold both individuals and leaders accountable for the particular ways in which they all failed to fulfill their responsibilities. We are all responsible for our individual actions, words, responses, and negligence. We are all responsible for the decisions we make and must therefore own the consequences of those decisions. In essence, we are responsible for ourselves as well as anything and anyone we have authority over. Both W. Edwards Deming and Joseph Juran famously place responsibility of “the system”—and therefore the vast majority of issues—on leaders. This means that while all workers are responsible for the work they do, the leaders are responsible for the tools, training, processes, policies, facilities, environment, organizational culture, and everything else they need to do the job. When something goes wrong it is often appropriate to point to both workers and leaders, sometimes appropriate to point only to leaders, and almost never appropriate to point only to workers.
With this in mind, let’s look again at our nuclear incidents. In the Taiwan incident, various workers were responsible for mistakes in identifying, pulling, and shipping the fuses, so they were justly held accountable for their negligence. At the same time, the incident was in large part caused by various factors that were outside of the control of those workers and therefore the responsibility of leaders at various levels, so they were also justly held accountable. Similarly, the Minot incident involved many personnel failing to properly prepare, load, and inspect the warheads, leading to rightly-deserved adverse actions. But the organizational culture that allowed this perfect storm to happen was the responsibility of leaders at various levels who were also rightly held accountable. Both incidents together pointed to enterprise-wide issues, which were the responsibility of the Secretary and Chief of Staff, meaning that they were rightly held accountable as well. To borrow the analogy we discussed here, there were bad apples (individuals), bad barrels (units), and a bad barrel maker (the Air Force as a whole). Properly solving the problem therefore required people at all levels to be held accountable for what they were responsible for.
Properly solving the problem also required an immense amount of pain and effort for everyone in those units and across the Air Force for years. Many people who were completely uninvolved suffered the consequences of these incidents and therefore bore responsibility as well. This may seem unfair to our individualistic culture, but this is the reality of shared responsibility.
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Ministry Moves Reported in 2023
When viewed in historical perspective (going back to 2013), it remains the case that more than any other denomination, the EPC is the destination of choice for PCA ministers transferring out of the PCA (71 in the years 2012-2022). The same move is much less common for entire congregations, despite certain high-profile examples, going back to the 1990s.
The Stated Clerk of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) reports annually on statistical changes that take place each year, including ministerial and congregational departures from the denomination.
Over the past two years, I have published posts (here, here, and here) which have brought together data to ‘track the stats’ regarding losses from the denomination. My question has been – and continues to be – What can this data tell us about the preferred destination(s) of the ministers and congregations that leave the PCA for other ecclesiastical settings?
The various lists of congregations added, transferred, or dissolved in 2022 are found on pages 239-240 of the Commissioner Handbook to the 50th General Assembly. Similar lists of ministers added to the PCA, dismissed to other denominations, deceased, or otherwise removed from office in 2022 are found on pages 240-246. Once the Minutes of the 50th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America are finalized and published, this post will be updated to direct readers to the appropriate page numbers in the Minutes.
After comparing the statistical reports on pages 239-246 with other information I could find online, here are my summary findings for the changes in the roster of PCA congregations and ministers in 2022:
Congregations Organized in 2022: 24Gross Total of Congregations Added in 2022: 27
Congregations Dissolved in 2022: 8Congregations Dismissed to Other Denominations in 2022: 6 (1 ACNA; 1 BPC; 1 CMA; 1 CREC; 2 Independency)Gross Total of Congregations Lost in 2022: 14Read More
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The Courage To Be Presbyterian
Written by Jon D. Payne |
Monday, June 20, 2022
The temptation for the church to broker God’s truth for the sake of ecclesiastical unity and cultural acceptance is a perennial one. The evangelical world has already made that deal. It’s disgraceful. But we must not! My fellow elders in the Presbyterian Church in America, we must firmly resist the temptation to negotiate biblical fidelity and confessional integrity. The erosion of orthodoxy often begins with the pursuit of counterfeit unity.[6] True unity, however, is always founded upon the unadulterated truth of Scripture.The book of Hebrews is full of strong exhortations and sobering warnings for the Church throughout the ages.[1] It was originally written to encourage first-century Jewish Christians not to abandon gospel orthodoxy. It was a call to resist the seductive enticements of religious and cultural syncretism. This urgent message to persevere in the truth — no matter what — is a profoundly relevant one for our current cultural moment. It is a remarkably fitting word for the Presbyterian Church in America, as we gather together in Birmingham for the 49th General Assembly.
Resist the Via Media
Intense cultural pressure and religious persecution made life difficult for Jewish believers in the first century. Being a Christian was never easy. Sometimes the biggest threats to the peace, purity, and unity of the church came from parties within the church. The same challenges were true for the great cloud of witnesses who preceded them— those resolute believers “of whom the world was not worthy.”[2]
Faithfulness to Christ was an arduous and costly road for the Hebrew Christians. Consequently, the temptation to compromise and negotiate the truth was ever before them. The satanic invitation to accommodate doctrinal error, syncretize truth with falsehood, and even apostatize, could at times be palpable. Christian profession meant persecution on some level.[3] There was a very real possibility of social, economic, and physical hardship for those who devoted themselves to Jesus Christ and His objective truth.
There was also a temptation for these early Christians to grow discouraged with the conflict and division within the Church. For the sake of peace and unity, some attempted to forge a theological via media, seeking to amalgamate old covenant shadows with new covenant realities.[4] The move to foster a middle-way with those who taught doctrinal error, however, would only eclipse the glory of the heavenly High Priesthood of Christ, subvert the true gospel, and sabotage the Church’s mission. Therefore, God’s people were admonished in the book of Hebrews not to explore third-way options for the sake of religious respectability, cultural approval, or peace in the church. Rather, they were exhorted to persevere in God’s way, to “hold fast the confession of [their] hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful.”[5]
The temptation for the church to broker God’s truth for the sake of ecclesiastical unity and cultural acceptance is a perennial one. The evangelical world has already made that deal. It’s disgraceful. But we must not! My fellow elders in the Presbyterian Church in America, we must firmly resist the temptation to negotiate biblical fidelity and confessional integrity. The erosion of orthodoxy often begins with the pursuit of counterfeit unity.[6] True unity, however, is always founded upon the unadulterated truth of Scripture.
Lift Your Drooping Hands | Hebrews 12:12-17
In God’s providence, my devotions have recently been in the book of Hebrews. It’s a theological treasure, rich with gospel truth — a ravishing portrait of the preeminence of Christ and His all-sufficient mediatorial work. The church would do well to become more familiar with it. After reading Hebrews 12:12-17, and the corresponding commentary in John Owen’s works, it strongly occurred to me that the passage is an especially relevant word for our current moment in the PCA.
Therefore lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint but rather be healed. Strive for peace with everyone, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord. See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God; that no “root of bitterness” springs up and causes trouble, and by it many become defiled; that no one is sexually immoral or unholy like Esau, who sold his birthright for a single meal. For you know that afterward, when he desired to inherit the blessing, he was rejected, for he found no chance to repent, though he sought it with tears. ~ Heb. 12:12-17
The author or preacher of Hebrews is fully aware of the church’s problems. He understands that there are deadly diseases plaguing the body of Christ. Rather than ignore or dismiss the spiritual contagions, however, he confronts them head-on. He doesn’t want them to take root and spread. He is a faithful pastor. He loves the church. John Owen writes:
It is the duty of all faithful ministers of the gospel to consider diligently what failures and temptations their flocks are liable or exposed unto, so as to apply suitable means for their perseveration.[7]
In this section of Hebrews, the church is being exhorted and admonished through powerful metaphors; that is, metaphors related to his athletic metaphor at the outset of the chapter.
Therefore … let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us (12:1)
The preacher compares the Christian life to a race, and his athletics metaphor resumes in verses 12-14 when he exhorts God’s people to “lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint but rather healed.” In other words, he is urging the church to be roused from its spiritual lameness, due to doctrinal compromise, and to return to the straight paths of Christian truth and practice. He urges them to “be healed” before they are “put out of joint”, and it’s too late to recover.
Some in the church were like distance runners who had wandered off course. They were lost, slumped over with spiritual exhaustion, hands hanging down, and knees devoid of strength. They were unsteady, accommodating error for the sake of unity and peace. Owen explains that by the preacher’s words
“that which is lame,” the apostle peculiarly intends those that would retain the [Jewish] ceremonies and worship together with the doctrine of the gospel. For hereby they were made weak and infirm in their profession, as being defective in light, resolution, and steadiness; as also, seemed to halt between two opinions, as the Israelites of old between Jehovah and Baal. This was that which was lame at that time among these Hebrews. And it may, by analogy, be extended unto all those who are under the power of such vicious habits, inclinations, or neglects, as weaken and hinder men in their spiritual progress.[8]
Dear fellow PCA elders, shouldn’t we be compelled to ask— In what ways might we, as a denomination, be “made weak and infirm in [our] profession, as being defective in light, resolution, and steadiness?” I would argue that the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) accommodation of certain aspects of the current moral revolution has made us “weak and infirm” and is close to putting us “out of joint.” The accommodation of particular facets of the cultural revolution is the biggest threat to the spiritual health and future viability of our denomination.[9]
The moral revolution has overwhelmed western civilization, and is especially manifested in the LGBTQ+ and critical social justice movements.[10] Intersectionality is the new reigning religion in the West, and her prophets, priests, and rulers are seated on the highest thrones of earthly power. The evidence of the moral revolution is ubiquitous. Sadly, this insidious revolution has found a foothold in a growing number of our churches, presbyteries, agencies, and ministries through side B gay Christianity/Revoice, and critical social justice (It gives me absolutely no pleasure to express it. I wish it wasn’t true). What is, perhaps, even more concerning than the ministers who positively and publicly affirm aspects of these false ideologies, are those who quietly acquiesce to them, reluctantly accepting error without protest. This quiet acquiescence is a spiritual cancer to ministers, and to denominations. Owen is right: “A hesitation or doubtfulness in or about important doctrines of truth, will make men lame, weak, and infirm in their profession.”[11] Therefore, there must be no hesitation as it concerns the sufficiency of the gospel, and the divinely appointed means of grace, for the discipleship and mission of the church. We don’t need side B or CRT. In fact, no one needs it. We have the gospel— the power of God unto salvation for all who believe (Rom. 1:16; I Cor. 1:18)!
Read More[1] The author refers to his epistle as “a word of exhortation” in Hebrews 13:22.
[2] See Hebrews 11:1 – 12:2.
[3] “Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.” II Timothy 3:12
[4] See Hebrews 8:1-6; 10:1-39
[5] Hebrews 10:23; c.f. 3:6; 4:14; 6:18.
[6] Counterfeit unity is a pseudo unity created by mixing truth with error for the sake of peace. Ironically, it’s a “unity” that eventually leads to deeper and more permanent division.
[7] John Owen, Commentary on Hebrews, Works, vol. xxiii (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1991; first published 1684) p. 277.
[8] Ibid., 283.
[9] This is true for all denominations.
[10] Two recommended primers on these issues are Carl Trueman’s Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution (Crossway, 2022), and Thaddeus Williams’ Confronting Injustice without Compromising Truth: 12 Questions Christians Should Ask About Social Justice (Zondervan Academic, 2020).
[11] Ibid., 283.
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A Case for Ruling Elder Prayer in Worship
There are some conservative Presbyterian churches that currently practice – with pleasing edification – ruling elder-led corporate prayer. In one such church, a ruling elder writes: “Prayer with and for the congregation is foundational for ministry, and corporate prayer led by the Ruling Elders who have come from among the congregation can help teach the people how to pray themselves in a biblical, mature, and thoughtful way.” Another ruling elder adds: “Since the congregation is shepherded by a team of elders, RE-led corporate prayer allows the congregation [to] hear the heart of each shepherd and thereby fosters trust in the team as a whole.”
Two years ago, while working in another state, I worshiped in a local PCA church. While the sermon was weak as dishwater, I walked out of that sanctuary thankful to God that I had heard a biblical, earnest, compassionate, well-delivered congregational prayer. That was the best part of the service. The prayer was delivered by a ruling elder.
Perhaps that’s a shocker to some. If so, why?
In 2021, one of the PCA’s highly regarded pastors wrote that ruling elders “by gifts and calling are not theologically, biblically, or rhetorically equipped for the task” of public prayer. It wasn’t clear to me if he intended to argue that no ruling elders should pray in public, but the door was opened for such an interpretation.
I respectfully disagree.
The reason this piece is bylined by a nom de guerre is not to avoid disagreeing with a leading pastor in my denomination – whom I respect, of whose ministry I think highly – but to protect the identity of those churches and individuals referenced here.
I’m not saying all or even most ruling elders ought to be delivering prayers in corporate worship. But some REs are capable of public prayer, either through gifting, studied practice over years of service – or both. Probably others are doing their best to improve their skills in this area. They ought to be encouraged.
Here are four points to consider regarding the public prayers of those whom a Presbyterian pastor, James E. Blythe (1765-1842), considered to be “the sheet-anchor of the church’s safety” – the eldership:Most important, if a ruling elder is “not theologically” equipped to pray publicly (as the article asserted), how then is he theologically equipped to teach God’s Word, as I Timothy 3 requires of an elder? Perhaps part of the apparent disparity between the teaching and the praying of REs has more to do with one’s specific preparation than overall theological equipping. If a ruling elder approaches his scheduled opportunity to lead in corporate prayer with the same attitude he most likely adopts toward teaching a Sunday School class – in other words, this is something that deserves my serious preparation, rather than doing it off-the-cuff – his prayer should be more focused, scriptural, earnest, and edifying. For most elders, this probably includes the use of some form of notes to aid in the moment of delivery.
Having ruling elders prepared to pray publicly is of service to the church should a pastor suddenly become unavailable. Not long ago, the elders of a church I know were faced with an urgent text message (during Sunday School) from the expected visiting pastor who reported he was stuck in traffic. (Thankfully, he made it with a few minutes to spare.) Perhaps just as likely in this era, however, what will a church do if its pastor is arrested for his faithful preaching – such as from Romans 1 or I Corinthians 6? The ruling elders should be prepared to step up, to lead and pray. Such a scenario was unthinkable in America a decade ago – but no longer. Think about it. Should churches be forced into homes or underground at some point, REs will have to share the burden of leadership, to include leading in prayer.
Related to this, could it be any clearer to informed Christians in the pew that the America in which anyone older than 40-ish grew up, is gone? Some have observed the country is experiencing the worst leadership in its history in multiple arenas – politics, education, academia, business, and all too often the church. Almost the only place where legitimate, honorable, godly, and – increasingly – courageous leadership may be found is within those true churches that hold faithfully to the Scriptures and inculcate in her members the fear of the LORD, not of men. Encouraging the lay leaders – ruling elders in the case of Presbyterian churches – to prepare themselves to participate in public prayer is one important way in which leadership is promoted within the flock of God, with potential spillover influence beyond. It ain’t happening elsewhere, so it must happen in the church.
Finally, there are some conservative Presbyterian churches that currently practice – with pleasing edification – ruling elder-led corporate prayer. In one such church, a ruling elder writes: “Prayer with and for the congregation is foundational for ministry, and corporate prayer led by the Ruling Elders who have come from among the congregation can help teach the people how to pray themselves in a biblical, mature, and thoughtful way.” Another ruling elder adds: “Since the congregation is shepherded by a team of elders, RE-led corporate prayer allows the congregation [to] hear the heart of each shepherd and thereby fosters trust in the team as a whole.” Churches hearing their own shepherds pray, doesn’t that seem valuable? If some churches are doing this well, why not others?So, while disagreeing with the 2021 article in one respect, I wholeheartedly agree on the need for “thematic order,” employing “scriptural language,” and, “urgency and earnestness” in public prayer. Let our churches – led by pastors who model such prayers – encourage their elders to equip themselves for this shared ministry task, thereby to bless Christ’s flock and honor the One who alone draws near to “all who call upon Him in truth” (Psalm 145:18).
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