Written by Andrew T. Walker |
Friday, June 16, 2023
For practicing Christians, fidelity to God may mean recommitting ourselves to the practices that habituate us into deeper relationship. Even when we do not feel like it, we must read our Bibles and pray as a ritual reminder that the first thing about each of us is our ultimate end, not our temporal end. Contemplating God’s works in His Word is good for you. We must go to church, catechize ourselves and our families, and love each other.

One of the most important sentences in the entire Western canon comes from Augustine. It is a statement written in the indicative voice that many are doubtless familiar with, given its ubiquity. From The Confessions, Augustine states, “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in thee.” Though this sentence is an indicative statement of truth, it also assumes an imperative: we are meant to be in communion with God. For homo religiosus, knowing God is to be human at its fullest. We are to commune with God not because we seek our own supremacy, but because communing with God is what brings peaceful rectitude to the soul. Knowing God quenches our deepest desires to know the glorious and be known by the glorious.
The First Pillar
In the planning and execution for Fidelity Month, it became clear that dedication to God needed to be the first pillar of fidelity. This first pillar reminds us of an architectonic truth: whatever the goods of family, community, and nation represent, their intelligibility must be ordered and understood by what created them and, in turn, best illuminates them: God. The “ordo amoris,” or “order of loves” spoken of in the Christian tradition, insists on the inherent goods of family, community, and nation as ends to be pursued for their own sake. The love they are given, however, is proportionate to the love they are owed. But we owe God our highest affections because it is He who has made us. As we come to know God and conform ourselves to His divine plan, fullness of being comes into view. Scripture deems the knowledge of God as a resplendent good that colors every other experience of our humanity. As Psalm 36:9 states, “For with you is the fountain of life; in your light do we see light.” Communion with God is what lights our path (Psalm 119:105). If we shall not walk in darkness, we must turn ourselves to the light (Isaiah 9:2; John 8:12).
Never more than now is the time ripe to rededicate ourselves to God. It’s what our culture needs most. With religion on the decline, it should come as no surprise that mental health appears more statistically volatile than ever before. Excise or trivialize the most important foundation of a person’s existence—their relationship to God—and it is to be expected that humanity’s sense of balance and purpose would be torn asunder.
Furthermore, in an age of cascading “identities” on endless offer, knowledge of God bequeaths a right and definitive knowledge of the self. Christian theology has a rich tradition of delineating the relationship between epistemology and anthropology, insisting on their essential unity. The two subjects ask: how do we know who we are? Theologians believe that philosophy on its own cannot adequately answer this question. In John Calvin’s Institutes, his famous opening lines sought to demarcate how knowledge of God spills over into an accurate knowledge of the self. For Calvin, they are inextricably bound in a helix-like structure. As Calvin says:
Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But, while they are joined by many bonds, which one precedes and brings forth the other is not easy to discern. In the first place, no one can look upon himself without immediately turning his thoughts to the contemplation of God, in whom he “lives and moves” (Acts 17:28). For quite clearly, the mighty gifts with which we are endowed are hardly from ourselves; indeed, our very being shares in God’s own being. Then, by these benefits shed like dew from heaven upon us, we are led as by rivulets to the spring itself.
Here Calvin restates that architectonic truth: God is the font of all meaningful knowledge. Apart from him, we fumble around in the darkness. We cannot explain the obligations that beset us without God as the source of those obligations.
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As usual, the newspapers reported on the Burning Man storm as an art festival that got rained out, which shows you why no one should read them to find out what’s actually going on in the world. But that’s another story. God cannot be silenced, and His glory and love are too powerful to be mocked forever.

A few weeks ago, millions of Americans learned for the first time about a new modern religion, because of a flash flood in the desert of Western Nevada that left some 75,000 people dangerously stranded. What were 75,000 people doing in a barren desert?
Revelry in the Desert
They were at a weeklong pagan festival called Burning Man where they go live in the desert every year for a week of revelry. Elon Musk calls it Silicon Valley’s annual must-go retreat. If so, then Silicon Valley is more of a problem than you or I had imagined.
The schedule is punctuated by a host of quasi-religious rituals. The makeshift city that hosts it boasts an Orgy Dome with long lines of people waiting to enter and do exactly what its name says. (If that seems unlikely, feel free to confirm it however you like, but be aware that what you find will be disturbing. I do not care to supply a link.)
The entire complex is centered around two freshly built structures: one of them a temple, and the other some form of massive depiction of all mankind. At the end of the week, they ritually burn the temple and the “man,” which is where they get the name Burning Man.
This year they built and burned the Temple of the Heart and the 60 ft. tall Chapel of Babel, respectively. Revelers spend months preparing for it, partly because if you are not properly outfitted you could die in the waterless heat, and partly because everyone is supposed to contribute something to the affair. If that isn’t a religion, then the word religion has no meaning.
Behind the Burning Rituals
Burning rituals are fundamental to religions as different as Buddhism, Hinduism, Molech, and that of the Vikings. There is a reason: They all reject the body. The physical world on the whole is regarded with suspicion (hence the need to escape it), but specifically the human body is regarded as an enemy in which the soul is imprisoned for the time being.
Our own bodies are the great enemy of our souls, and everything fixed about them is the enemy of the spirit which longs to be free from captivity and return to somewhere or something or nothing at all. The rainbow-trans flag which adorned the wall of the Burning Man chapel serves as testament to their rejection of the sanctity of the body and of the natural order.
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Written by David W. Hall |
Thursday, July 27, 2023
There is strength in the PCA. It is not time for a funeral. Instead, it is time for a sober assessment and perhaps some correction of purpose and strategy statements. Considering these dismal performances (if that is one’s assessment), one might ask, “How has the PCA grown?” That answer could be the most positive thing to come from this study. The conclusion is that the PCA has had a strong and consistent growth, numerically and financially from the churches in the under-300 category. 

Pastor David W. Hall has given us the first published history of the inaugural 50 years of the Presbyterian Church in America. Single copies are available for purchase from Amazon.com, and discount pricing is available on bulk orders from the author.
Below is an excerpt charting the growth achieved and challenges overcome by the PCA following the joining and receiving of the RPCES.
PCA Church Growth, 1985-1989

Excerpts from a mid-1980s PCA document reflect the guiding principles for the desired PCA growth in the 1980s. The 1984 Assembly approved these purposes for our foreign mission board, which would also become operational for much of our home missions works in the ‘80s: “To reach . . . peoples with God’s Good News through the testimony of church-planting teams . . . Success will be judged by observable church growth.” (Min14GA, 346)
That Assembly heard that the term “observable” in the above purpose statement was to be understood as “that which is describable (possibly measurable) to such an extent that progress toward the accomplishment of our purpose can be compared to previous expectations” (Ibid, 355), and that “church growth” could be understood as “the final test of our ministry. The local body must grow in an observable fashion, qualitatively and quantitatively. We must be able to establish a causal relationship between . . . personnel and church growth.” (Ibid, 356)
Amendments to the package from the floor suggested that it was clear to most of the commissioners at that Assembly that this mission agency had embraced the numerical growth school of thought prevalent at the time. That this was so overt can also be discerned by comparing the final action of that Assembly on this recommendation. Rather than approving that entire recommended package, the Assembly amended this attempt from the floor to read finally: “To reach . . . peoples with God’s Good News through the testimony of church-planting teams . . . Success in observable church growth will be an important means of evaluation” (p. 355).
The Assembly further rejected the exclusively numeric standard of evaluation in these words, which were approved as amendments from the floor: “It is therefore our responsibility both to sow broadly and to reap the whitened fields . . . there may be exceptions, but under such church growth is the normal indicator by which we . . . will evaluate our effectiveness. . .  Obedience to the Scriptures is the final test of our ministry. Such obedience will result in God’s blessing, which by the graciousness of our God may often be observed in qualitative and quantitative church growth.” (p. 125)
Thus, this mission purpose statement was diluted away from the total identification of numerical church growth as the observable manifestation of God’s blessing to the admission that such numerical church growth serving, at least as an “indicator” and the expected norm.
Below is a summary of a study to evaluate how well one of the PCA’s leading missions agency, Mission to North America (hereafter MNA), has done according to those criteria. MNA should be grateful to the commissioners who amended the original purpose statement (as should MTW), for these statistics reveal that not only would MNA have failed to reach such standards as proposed initially, but further that numerical church growth in the PCA has not even matched the diminished predictions as amended from the floor. In fact, after 1989, the PCA may be in a non-growth modality for the first time in its young life. If so, it is hoped that the appropriate agencies will hasten to make methodological adjustments to remedy some strategy problems.
Most of the non-repeatable transfer growth from other denominations (chiefly the PCUS) has vanished, and the atypical absorption of the RPCES was history, having been completed in 1982. With no imminent scenario of absorbing the OPC, for the years 1985-1989, the growth of the PCA has been measurable in terms of constants, which before 1985 were in flux. In short, the last 5-6 years had provided the PCA with a typical pattern of growth or slow growth. At the earliest opportunity, key strategists would desire to look at this honestly to make recommendations wisely for the future.
With the unmistakable warning signal of slowing growth, a trend for five years or more would not be ignored, after having proven its trend line. Planners for the future of our denomination will want to give this phenomenon (which hopefully will be reversed) attention sooner rather than later. Stewardship requires that we consider the measurable statistics in the lean years as well as in the fat years. Such “stewardship” measurability factor was given as part of the original justification for the emphasis on measurability. This recent trend line should call the strategists attention.
This study is one such attempt to ask if it is empirically justified for leadership to advocate the imitation of the largest churches within the PCA, as is normally and routinely done. We now have a long enough period to put forth some reliable statistics to compare our measurable growth. Given the available data, one might begin with the most prominent churches and ask: “Have the largest churches in the PCA grown greater than, equal to, or less than the denomination-wide average for the five years 1985-1989 and 1989?
From a comparison of the changes in large and medium-sized churches for the five years, the net number of churches in the 300-900 membership range is mainly unchanged, as is the net number of churches with over 300 members in the whole denomination. The year 1989 and the five-year period (1985-1989) saw little change in the total number of churches in this bracket which could be studied. Thus, the PCA (neither in the one-year nor the five-year slice) is notadding a gross number of churches to the pool as targeted.
Yet the most startling statistic is that the growth rate of the PCA has steadily declined from 5.4% to 5.0% to 4.0% to 2.9%, and most recently to 1.2% in 1989. When asked about the reasons, no one seems prepared to offer the two most likely explanations for such a declining growth rate.
The two most obvious reasons are that (1) one-time bonuses, such as the J&R with the RPCES in 1982 and transfer growth from the PCUS, are non-repeatable, and (2) the top quartile of the membership, contained in these largest churches has performed more poorly than the rest of the church. Without this inhibitor of growth from the top 25%, growth would have otherwise continued in the 5% region. Whatever the other possible reasons, these statistics could either be ignored to our detriment or taken seriously and used as a stimulus for policy adjustments before it is too late.
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