Wynn Alan Bruce, climate martyr and climate saint, killed himself in a climate memento mori. We can pass him off as a clearly disturbed man and pray that his soul has found eternal rest, but what to say about the fact that a movement exists that valorizes him? In the long term, like the Shakers before them, climate activists will write themselves out of the future both with purposeful childlessness and by refusing to engage in life on normal terms. 

On April 22—Earth Day—the climate activist Wynn Alan Bruce, of Boulder, Colorado, set himself on fire outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington D.C. The day after his death, the climate scientist Kritee Kanko tweeted, “This guy was my friend…This act is not suicide. This is a deeply fearless act of compassion to bring attention to climate crisis. We are piecing together info but he had been planning it for at least one year. #wynnbruce I am so moved.”
Kanko’s sanguine, even proud, reaction to a friend’s self-immolation is an example of what has become increasingly obvious to anyone who has kept up with today’s professional tree huggers: climate activism is now a death cult.
I have family members who work in the field of environmental protection, so I grew up around plastic reduction measures and solar panel installations and manuals about composting and recycling bins. I’ve worked on environmental projects my whole life, and I believe that we have a moral responsibility as the stewards of creation to protect it, especially when we see, for instance, how microplastics are causing infertility or how soil degradation is costing farmers money while lowering our food quality. But the “climate justice” movement, far from fighting to protect us, aims to destroy not only our quality of life today, but the existence of the human race in the future.
Consider the following headlines: “Climate change is making people think twice about having children,” from CNBC, “Your Diet Is Cooking the Planet,” from the Atlantic, “Social Distancing? You Might Be Fighting Climate Change, Too,” from the New York Times, and “Climate change anxiety is real. Here’s how you can manage those feelings,” from NPR. When the mainstream media marches in lockstep on this question, it is clear that there is a concerted push to make you feel bad for being a person. After all, we emit carbon with every exhalation.
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It should be clear that oaths and vows play an important role in societies of all kind (and in society in-general). They build trust. They teach people to tell the truth and to fulfill promises. Yet what we have today is the breakdown of such trust. And this is tied with the weakening of oaths. Brothers and sisters, God is the foundation for oath-keeping. Those who do not fear God (or believe in Him) will not take their oaths seriously, for they do not believe God will judge them for such violations. Yet God has promised to punish all who break their oaths. We need to restore the importance of oaths and vows if we are going to have a healthy society of any kind. And this must start in the church of Christ.

Every communing member in the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) takes membership vows. While officers (elders and deacons) take vows to uphold the Westminster Standards and Book of Church Order, church members take vows acknowledging their sin (vow 1), affirming their trust in Christ’s salvation (vow 2) and promising to live as Christians, support the church, and submit to its government (vow 3–5).
Although the church member is not required to affirm the entire Westminster Confession and Catechisms, his vows are no less serious than those of the minister. In fact, the very reason vows are required is because church membership is a serious thing. In taking membership vows, a person makes “declarations and promises” by which he or she “enter[s] into a solemn covenant with God and His Church” (BCO 57-5). The member takes such vows before the elders, and usually also before the entire congregation. But they are also vows before God Himself, as God is witness to such promises.
PCA Membership Vows
The PCA’s five membership vows are as follows:

Do you acknowledge yourselves to be sinners in the sight of God, justly deserving His displeasure, and without hope save in His sovereign mercy?
Do you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ as the Son of God, and Savior of sinners, and do you receive and rest upon Him alone for salvation as He is offered in the Gospel?
Do you now resolve and promise, in humble reliance upon the grace of the Holy Spirit, that you will endeavor to live as becomes the followers of Christ?
Do you promise to support the Church in its worship and work to the best of your ability?
Do you submit yourselves to the government and discipline of the Church, and promise to study its purity and peace? (BCO 57-5)

Sadly, it is all too common for church members to break these vows. The last two vows are particularly difficult – we might even say, “counter-cultural” – in our day and age, as they require respecting and honoring church leadership. Members vow to “support” the church and “submit” to its “government and discipline.” This means members promise to live godly lives in accordance with the Bible and Westminster Standards (“discipline”), as well as yield to the Session when it makes a decision that the member disagrees with (“support the Church” and “study its purity and peace”). Submission requires humility, but that is what God requires of us. Consider the following clear precepts from Scripture:
Likewise, you who are younger, be subject to the elders. Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another, for “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.” (1 Peter 5:5, ESV)
Obey your leaders and submit to them, for they are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account. (Hebrew 13:17)
Breaking Membership Vows
There are many ways to break these membership vows, including promoting false teaching or factions in the church. Transferring membership to another church for insufficient reasons is also a violation of these vows. However, it is too frequently the case that members of PCA churches break their vows by leaving the church and not transferring to another church. When a member stops attending church for a long period of time or requests to be “removed from the rolls” – and does not transfer to another gospel-preaching church – then he has broken his membership vows.
In this case, he has not endeavored to live as a follower of Christ (vow 3), since a Christian attends corporate worship (Heb. 10:25). He has not supported the church in its worship and work (vow 4). He has not submitted himself to the government and discipline of the church or studied its purity and peace (vow 5). Because he “has made it known that he has no intention of fulfilling the church vows,” the Session is to “erase” his name from the membership rolls as a form of “pastoral discipline without process” (BCO 38-4). Yet the Session has a duty to remind the member of the “declarations and promises by which he entered into a solemn covenant with God and His Church… and warn him that, if he persists, his name shall be erased from the roll.”
Such violation of vows and erasure from membership rolls is not to be taken lightly. It is “discipline without process,” meaning there is no formal discipline process of excommunication. Yet the person erased from membership is no longer a member of Christ’s visible church, and thus he is no longer welcome to partake of the Lord’s Supper in a PCA church (until there is reconciliation and restoration to church membership).
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As Christians, we will, inevitably in this age, find ourselves in a flawed church. But where God has planted a faithful church within our community, we can thank God for His gracious provision, both for our nurture in Christ and for a witness to Christ in our world. And we can allow the disappointments and difficulties we experience to drive us, in faith and hope, to the means that He has appointed for our church’s transformation: prayer and the Word.

Many years ago, a move for a new job meant that my young family needed to find a church in our new community. This provided an opportunity to train my children for the day that they would need to choose a church with their own families. We reviewed Acts 2:42–47, and after each visit to a congregation my boys provided their assessment of how, so far as one visit could show, the congregation evidenced the marks of church health found in the passage. How was the Word preached? Was a commitment to fellowship and prayer apparent? How were the sacraments observed? Did there appear to be a desire to add to the church through evangelism? The intent was to equip our family to choose a healthy church, using biblical categories. These are questions that should be asked again as we consider planting churches in a culture deeply shaped by consumerism and discontent.

These marks of church health form a pattern that is stitched through the narrative in Acts describing how Jesus built His church through His Apostles (e.g., 4:32–33; 6:4, 7; 12:5; 13:3; 19:10, 20). When the Apostle Paul sent Timothy to lead the church in Ephesus back to health, he focused his efforts on the means of prayer (1 Tim. 2:1, 8) and the Word (2 Tim. 3:16–4:4) while he also sought to restore discipline according to biblical orthodoxy and order (1 Tim. 1:3; 3:1–15; 5:19–20; 2 Tim. 1:13–14; 2:14). The Reformers recovered this scriptural pattern and summarized it as the means that God has ordained to administer His grace and therefore the marks of a true church. In other words, when we ask what Scripture tells us about how to identify a true church (its marks) and the methods that God uses (means) to work in and through it, the answer is found in the faithful administration of God’s Word, prayer, the sacraments, and discipline. These are the instruments through which God, by His Spirit, powerfully does more than we could ask or imagine in the lives of church members (Eph. 3:20–21). Where these marks and means are present and faithfully administered, there a true church is, and Christians should feel not only free to join with it but immeasurably graced to be included.

In this age, however, no true church will be a perfect church.

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