When a Christian supports the church, it includes participating in its ministry with time, talents, and skills. A tithe, or even a tithe plus, placed in the plate, bag, or box does not exhaust the meaning of “support.” As the Apostle Paul has said, the church is a body with each member fulfilling a necessary part of its life. So, when one professes faith in Christ or is received by transfer from another church and vows are administered, it is important to realize that supporting the church means being a disciple not only with dollars and cents, but also with time and talents. Vow four is a call to be involved in the work of the church because not only money, but also many hands, make light work of a congregation’s ministry.

The Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) requires those professing faith in Christ to affirm five vows indicative of their covenant with God and his Church (Book of Church Order 57:5). The vows acknowledge an individual’s sinfulness and need for God’s mercy, trust in the Son of God as savior from sin, purpose to live submitted to the Holy Spirit in obedience, concern to support the work of the church, and willingness to submit to the government of the Church. It may be thought that these vows date from the earliest days of Presbyterianism, but this is not the case. The article that follows provides a history of the development and use of vows in the branch of American Presbyterianism from which the PCA was established and it considers the context and influences creating an environment conducive to their adoption and use.
As Presbyterians increased in number in America and congregations were organized it became necessary to establish in 1706 the first presbytery which was named “The Presbytery.” The Presbytery provided a hub of connection for the many scattered churches so presbyters could deliberate common issues and provide collective leadership for their congregations. Continued growth and additional presbyteries led to formation in 1717 of “The Synod.” Twelve years later, The Synod subscribed to the Westminster Confession of Faith and its associated catechisms, however Westminster’s Directory for the Public Worship of God was not subscribed to, but it was instead recommended for use; it was “unanimously” judged “to be agreeable in substance to the Word of God” and “to all their members, to be by them observed as near as circumstances will allow, and Christian prudence direct” (Klett, 195). Westminster’s Directory did not include vows of membership.
Fast forwarding six decades, American Presbyterians experienced sufficient growth to convene in 1789 the First General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (PCUSA). That same year the first edition of the Constitution of the Presbyterian Church was published containing the Westminster Confession and catechisms, Form of the Government and Discipline, Forms of Process, and Directory for the Worship of God. The Directory published by the PCUSA is different from the directory composed by the Westminster Assembly, but the influence of Westminster can be seen in the organization, topics, and some portions of the text. The PCUSA Directory is more concise than Westminster’s, it includes paragraph enumeration, and it added a chapter on the singing of Psalms along with other changes. The following is the entire text of the 1789 chapter titled, “Of the Admission of Persons to Sealing-Ordinances,” which for twenty-first century readers means admission into communicant or church membership.
Sect. I. CHILDREN, born within the pale of the visible Church, and dedicated to God in baptism, are under the inspection and government of the Church; and are to be taught to read, and repeat the Catechism, the Apostles Creed, and the Lord’s prayer. They are to be taught to pray, to abhor sin, to fear God, and to obey the Lord Jesus Christ. And, when they come to years of discretion, if they be free from scandal, appear sober and steady, and to have sufficient knowledge to discern the Lord’s body, they ought to be informed, it is their duty, and their privilege, to come to the Lord’s Supper.
Sect. II. The years of discretion, in young Christians, cannot be precisely fixed. This must be left to the prudence of the Eldership. The officers of the church are the Judges of the qualifications of those to be admitted to sealing ordinances; and of the time when it is proper to admit young Christians to them.
Sect. III. Those, who are to be admitted to sealing ordinances, shall be examined, as to their knowledge and piety.
Sect. IV. When unbaptized persons apply for admission into the church, they shall, in ordinary cases, after giving satisfaction with respect to their knowledge and piety, make a public profession of their faith, in the presence of the congregation; and thereupon be baptized.
There is a distinction between admitting covenant children into communicant membership and admitting “unbaptized persons.” Presbyterians emphasized the responsibility of children to come to terms with their covenant baptism and grow in knowledge of the Lord sufficiently, as Section I expressed it quoting Scripture, “to discern the Lord’s body” (1 Cor. 11:29). The terminology used is that of the covenant child’s duty and responsibility to partake of the Lord’s body and blood in faith. That is to say, is the baptized child going to continue in the covenant, or is he or she going to become a covenant breaker. The “Eldership” determined the admissibility of the baptized to the Lord’s Supper, apparently without them coming before the congregation, but the unbaptized were to make their profession of faith before the congregation and then be baptized. No vows for becoming a communicant member of the church are included in the Directory for Worship in 1789.
Nearly fifty years later, 1837, there was a major division of Presbyterians resulting in two Presbyterian Churches that were known popularly as the Old and New Schools. The Old School-New School division is important for the founding of the PCA because at the time of the division, the Presbyterians in the South were predominately Old School. An edition of the Constitution of the Presbyterian Church published just before the division, 1834, provided instruction concerning church membership but like the 1789 edition, it did not have membership vows.
In 1861, there was another division of Presbyterians as a result of the Civil War. The Old School churches in the Union through the Gardiner Spring Resolutions required allegiance of the PCUSA churches to the Union and their continued work to preserve the Union. This, the churches in the Confederacy could not do, so the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America (PCCSA) was formed. About half-way through the war, the PCCSA united with the southern New School Presbyterians to become one general assembly. Shortly thereafter a committee was appointed to revise the Old School Directory for Worship. The war ended in 1865 with the committee having not reported regarding the progress of their work. The PCCSA changed its name to the Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS). Attempts to revise the Directory continued sporadically until 1879 when a new committee was appointed for the work. Despite good intentions, it took fourteen years to complete and adopt the finished Directory. The next year, 1894, the first edition of the Directory with membership vows was published, but it included only four of the five vows that would come to be used by the PCA.
The vow missing is the one regarding support of the church’s ministry and work, which reads, “Do you promise to support the Church in its worship and work to the best of your ability?” It was added to the PCUS Directory during an extensive revision of the Book of Church Order that was published in the edition of 1929, however, it was not added as the last vow but rather the fourth resulting in the relocation of the previous fourth to the fifth position. After thirty-five years, since the 1894 edition, the PCUS found it necessary to include a vow regarding church members supporting the ministry of the church, which raises the question, what prompted the revision?
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Two plenary keynotes at the CFH (one from Kristin Du Mez and the other from Jemar Tisby) encouraged Christian historians to embrace activism on behalf of justice, but I suspect that competing evangelical interpretations of what constitutes justice will lead some Christian academics to embrace some causes that are directly opposed to those that other Christian academics embrace.  This is not the first time, of course, that American Protestantism – or American Protestant higher education – has experienced a fissure on an issue of theology, social justice, or politics.  

This question was on my mind in the days leading up to the 2022 Conference on Faith and History that met at Baylor University last week, and now that I have returned from the conference, the question continues to concern me.  Two plenary keynotes at the CFH (one from Kristin Du Mez and the other from Jemar Tisby) encouraged Christian historians to embrace activism on behalf of justice, but I suspect that competing evangelical interpretations of what constitutes justice will lead some Christian academics to embrace some causes that are directly opposed to those that other Christian academics embrace.  This is not the first time, of course, that American Protestantism – or American Protestant higher education – has experienced a fissure on an issue of theology, social justice, or politics.  But this time, when evangelical higher education fragments over issues of social justice, I expect that there will not be merely two separate factions, as there were in the modernist-fundamentalist debates of the 1920s.  Instead, there will be at least five.

Faction 1: Conservative Culture Warriors
The most politically conservative evangelical faction to emerge from this split will be the culture warriors.  Staunchly opposed to critical race theory, feminism, and so-called “socialism,” culture warrior colleges and universities (and faculty that identify with this view) see their Christian mission primarily in terms of training a new generation of Christians to resist cultural liberalism through a Christian faith that is inextricably connected with conservative political principles.  Some of these institutions, such as Liberty University and Patrick Henry College, have developed close relationships with the Republican Party or conservative elected officials in recent years.  Others, such as New Saint Andrews College in Moscow, Idaho, may not be election campaign stops for conservative Republican presidential contenders but are just as politically conservative and are closely connected with a Christian homeschooling movement that attempts to reject cultural liberalism in all its forms.

Culture warrior institutions are a leading segment of Christian higher education today.  Liberty University enrolled 15,000 residential students and 80,000 online students in 2020.  (By comparison, Wheaton College enrolls slightly less than 3,000 students; Calvin University has about 3,300 students; Azusa Pacific enrolls just over 10,000; and Baylor has an enrollment of slightly more than 20,000.  Messiah University, the academic home of the current CFH president, has 2,338 students).  Liberty University’s history department has two chairs – one for its residential program and the other for its online classes – and it offers a Ph.D. program.  But at the CFH, the nation’s leading culture warrior institutions are barely represented at all.  This year’s conference did not include any papers from faculty or students at Bob Jones University, Regent University (the university in Virginia Beach that Pat Robertson founded – and that hosted the 2016 CFH), or Patrick Henry College.  There were two panelists from Liberty University, but neither one was a member of that university’s history faculty.  So, if one looks only at the CFH, one might not know that culture warrior institutions are attracting tens of thousands of new evangelical undergraduate students every year.

Not every faculty member at these institutions fully embraces the Christian nationalist ideology of their school, but those who do necessarily become activists – but activists for a cause that is diametrically opposed to the social justice mission that Kristin Du Mez and Jemar Tisby encouraged historians to embrace.  The chair of Liberty University’s residential history program teaches a graduate course, for instance, on “American Christian Heritage.”  He is a member of the university’s Center for Apologetics and Cultural Engagement at Liberty University.  Other members of the department teach courses such as the upper-level undergraduate course “Reagan’s America.”  In addition to classes such as “Reagan’s America” and “American Christian Heritage,” Liberty University’s online catalog offers classes on Jacksonian America, “The World of Jonathan Edwards,” “History of American Entrepreneurship,” and the Korean and Vietnam Wars, but not a single class on the civil rights movement, African American history, the history of American women, or any aspect of gender studies.  Instead of activism on behalf of minority groups, this Christian nationalist version of Christian higher education features an activism for a particular brand of conservatism – the conservatism that holds the American military and free enterprise in high regard and that celebrates the only two American presidents whose names headline a Liberty University history course: Andrew Jackson and Ronald Reagan.

Few other scholars, even at the most conservative Christian institutions, take this sort of Trumpist conservative partisanship seriously – which is why institutions in this category that once had some sort of connection to the CFH and the rest of the Christian scholarly world have become increasingly alienated in a faction of their own.  They might have a substantial part of the evangelical market share, but they’re no longer in conversation with the rest of Christian academia, which increasingly views them as engaged in a wholly different enterprise from their own educational mission.
Faction 2: Color-Blind (but anti-nationalist) Conservatives
The second most-conservative faction to emerge from the split will be color-blind conservatives who eschew Christian nationalism.  Like the culture warriors, institutions and individual academics who fall into this category are deeply concerned about the perceived moral decline of the United States, and they are also generally politically conservative and committed to free-market principles, but they don’t want to make their institutions adjuncts of the Republican Party.  Evangelical institutions that fall into this category are strongly committed to biblical inerrancy and gender complementarianism, and they are critical of critical race theory.  Among conservative intellectuals in the never-Trump crowd, faction 2 is attractive; it allows one to remain committed to all of the traditional principles of political conservatism while remaining critical of the Trump phenomenon, which has hardly any support among humanities faculty in colleges and universities, whether Christian or not.  But as conservative as faction 2 evangelicals might seem to outsiders, they sometimes face a difficult time navigating the politics of their highly conservative denominations and evangelical culture in general because of their unwillingness to support Donald Trump.

Despite issuing an official statement opposing CRT, Grove City College became the subject of a months-long uproar after the college allowed Jemar Tisby and Bryan Stevenson (founder of the Equal Justice Initiative) to speak on campus but then found itself caught in a bind between the criticism from parents who worried that the college was embracing CRT and faculty and students who identified as conservative but didn’t want the college to compromise academic freedom.  This week’s college conference on “The Limits of Government,” sponsored by the Institute for Faith and Freedom, presumably represents the type of activism that is more in line with Grove City College’s core constituency.  Instead of Jemar Tisby, the conference will feature Lenny McAllister, an African American Republican who is described on the conference announcement as a “civil rights advocate” who is promoting “equality” through “free market solutions” and “adherence to the spirit of the U.S. Constitution.”

Evangelicals who fall into faction 2 profess a genuine concern for racial justice, but they define it in individualistic terms and often deny the existence of structural racism – especially when it challenges the principles of the free market, which they believe offers the greatest hope for long-term poverty relief.  In doing this, they genuinely believe that they are upholding important principles of fairness; critical race theory, they think, is racist and therefore antithetical to Christian values.  While often criticizing Donald Trump and the evangelicals who support him, they are usually unwilling to vote for pro-choice Democrats, because they view the sexual revolution and abortion as the most urgent moral problems of our time.  So, for them, activism is much more likely to mean participating in a march against abortion or speaking out in defense of religious freedom when they feel that it is threatened by legislative initiatives such as the Equality Act than advocating for racial justice.

The historical scholarship of academics who endorse the beliefs of faction 2 is likely to be shaped by a conservative interpretation of American history that sees the decline of sexual morality or traditional religious practice (rather than debates over equality) as the most important trendline of the last few decades.  Carl Trueman’s (Westminster Theological Seminary) The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to the Sexual Revolution, is a wonderful example of the type of scholarship that one can find from historians in this camp.  It’s certainly activist in the sense that it is attempting to diagnose and correct the perceived problems of the sexual revolution rather than present a dispassionate narrative in the mode of Leopold von Ranke.  And it’s unapologetically Christian and deeply theological.  But it’s not the sort of activism that Jemar Tisby highlighted.
So, evangelical academics who fall into faction 2 are caught in a bind.  They’re often critical of Christian nationalism in general (and may even view it as dangerously heretical idolatry), which separates them from evangelicals in faction 1.  Indeed, some evangelical historians teaching at faction 2 institutions have written thoughtful critiques of Christian nationalism, as CFHer John Wilsey (Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) did in two separate books on civil religion and the idea of a Christian America.  But at the same time, their strong opposition to the sexual revolution and their general belief in limited government and the free market makes them wary of joining evangelicals to their left who believe that Christian politics should center on opposition to structural racism and gender inequities.  In the view of many members of their own highly conservative denominations who voted for Trump, these faction 2 academics may already be too progressive, but from the standpoint of most other Christian academics, their refusal to embrace anti-racist activism that is defined structurally rather than individually makes them far too conservative.  Outside of a small group of faction 1 and faction 2 institutions, the assumptions about race among faction 2 academics are diametrically opposed to the prevailing assumptions of the profession and of secular academia in general.  This will probably mean that faction 2 evangelical scholars will be increasingly intellectually marginalized in nearly all parts of academia, with the single exception of a small conservative academic subculture that only a few other historians are willing to engage with.

In the view of most of academia, faction 2 academics are on the wrong side of morality and history.  Despite their attempts to separate themselves from the pro-Trump evangelicals, they’re going to have a hard time convincing other academics in the age of DEI that their views are not politically dangerous and immoral.  I wish that were not the case, because I respect many scholars in faction 2 even if I don’t fully agree with them on every issue, but I think that my expectations that this faction will become increasingly marginalized and beleaguered are probably realistic.

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When we take risks, particularly ones that advance the kingdom in some way, God is glorified; but we also experience joy. Have you ever done something you knew you were made for? Maybe it was having children or starting a business. Perhaps it was pursuing a creative outlet or serving overseas as a missionary. When we engage in activities that advance the kingdom of God, we will experience joy while glorifying our Creator. Things won’t always be easy, but they will always be purposeful. We will not waste our lives.

By and large, we live in a world that discourages risk-taking. Many of us, knowingly or unknowingly, have been conditioned to take the safe route through life’s twists and turns. I sometimes wonder how many people have been dissuaded from doing risky, world-changing things simply because it wasn’t “realistic” or in line with “the way the world works.”
Not only have we been conditioned to avoid risk, many of us have bought into a narrative that promotes a one size fits all mentality to success. For instance, we’re told if we want to have a successful career, we must train at the best universities. We’re told if we want to live with financial security, we must invest while we’re young and maximize our earning potential during our working years. We are sold youth at every turn through advertising and social media and then spend tons of money on anti-aging products to appear younger than we actually are.
Am I the only one, or does something about the success narrative seem off? Does anybody else feel like they’re being lied to?
Maybe I’m being overly critical of the world’s approach to life and success. After all, I believe education is a gift. My education is serving me well. I also think maximizing one’s earning potential can allow for greater generosity, which is something Christians should take seriously. Furthermore, when people care for their bodies, whether through exercise or anti-aging products, couldn’t the case be made they are simply stewarding what God has placed in their care?
I’m not necessarily opposed to the success narrative. Some of it can be redemptive. My real concern lies with fixating on the status-quo because it can be destructive to a person’s God-given, God-glorifying mission in life.
It’s not wise to avoid taking risks, especially kingdom risks, simply to maintain the success narrative. God has placed us on earth for a reason. We live where we live and during the time we live because God has stuff for us to do. Right now. In 2021.
It would be a regrettable thing to miss out on God’s plan for our lives because we were more concerned about our own plan or the opinions of others.
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