Classical Presbyterian

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I will briefly share my initial reflections on the meaning of what happened at GA and my estimation of what it might mean for us. These reflections are my opinion alone. Please keep this in mind as you read this. I welcome your additional thoughts and reflections as you respond to what I write.

1. This GA simply reinforced what we already know: We will not be able to "win" the denomination in our lifetime. If we want to see the PC(USA) restored as a Reformed church that stands for Biblical truth in a fallen world, we had better start thinking of olive orchards: You plant olive trees so that your grandchildren may one day eat the fruit. This will go from really bad to far worse at the national level.

The focus of our effort had better be on local growing of evangelical churches and grooming officers for the long haul as a dwindling minority, as exiles and aliens. If we stay within the PC(USA), we must realize that we will not live to see Jerusalem restored to us. As exiles in Babylon, our captivity will be many generations. We cannot win, but we can witness. We can sing the songs of Zion by the waters of Babylon.

2. The whole concept of "renewal" must die immediately. This will not happen in our lifetimes, as I stated above. We will be in perpetual dismay if we choose to cling to the dead (and faulty) image of winning votes to restore the denomination. Don't fool yourselves! Teaching a Biblical faith to fallen people who still seek the name "Christian" is FAR MORE difficult than sharing Christ with unbelievers who never claimed the name. It's going to be harder for us to even survive, much less "win" anything in the national assemblies.

As evidence of this, I submit that we shall never see another committed evangelical elected Moderator in our lifetime. They are done with us. Oh, they may well choose compromised turncoats or fakers, but we will never be given the national stage to share our views. We're out, emergent is in.

3. The institution will put increasing pressure on us to conform and submit. As Esther and Mordechai found out, the Hamans of the world will not long tolerate our existence in their planned, gated communities of the future. We had better be planning now for underground organizations, acts of defiance and civil defense of our presbyteries and churches. They will come for us.

4. Those of us who cannot make the turn to being exilic witnesses must leave and we need to help them get out. That's right: we need to help the weak and oppressed churches who cannot bear the task (and who are not called to it) achieve their freedom. Like a Dunkirk-type of operation, we need to guard the shores while as many possible board the ships departing to safer shores. And we need to be gearing up for this action NOW.

5. My final point: The only reason to stay in the PC(USA) at this point is to witness if you are called to remain. And that's a godly ministry! If some of us are called to remain behind as the faithful remnant while many of our brothers and sisters seek other countries in which to dwell, we should not think that we (or they) are in any way being unfaithful. It's about discernment. Are YOU called to stay and witness? Are YOU called to evangelize and support your hurting (or lost) colleagues in the fallen structure? Or are you called to assist the refugees building in the EPC? No one can answer this but you.

However, I would advise that as we each make this decision, we should take the Biblical advice about seeking God's will: Find godly counsel, read and consult the Word, pray unceasingly and with confidence, cultivate fruit of the Spirit and don't rush the process. God will tell us where we need to be.

So, that's what I have. I see that we either choose to be the faithful remnant in our captivity or we choose to seek another denomination in which to minister. No GA can change this fundamental choice for us. May God lead us to a proper understanding of His will for each of us, our presbytery and our church.

While I struggle to respond to all that has come to pass following the 219th General Assembly of the PC(USA), I feel it's time to post some preliminary thoughts about the overall scope of what was done. I can sum it all up in a word: captive. This was a captive assembly

1. The assembly was captive to the culture. Here is what I mean: count how many proposals considered were in response to the society in which we live. That's pretty much all of them. Jesus presented us with a vision of the church that would overtake the very gates of Hell, a church that was always on the attack. This assembly told us of a church that can only adapt to the world, respond to the calls of culture and weakly adopt the mores of North American postmodernism.

2. The assembly was captive to a particular agenda. This seems obvious. Much of what comes out of our national offices and committees seems to have the sole purpose of reshaping the church into an entity that is "adapted and always adapting according to the wishes of the elite." Whether it is the wide ranging powers of newly formed commissions or the amendments that would overturn our present constitution or even the strong arming of the Board of Pensions into sin-endorsing profligate expenditures, the GA has proven that we don't even know what the Reformed faith is any more.

3. The assembly was captive to a false understanding of our polity. From our beginnings, our faith was founded on confessional soundness and congregational strength. Upper governing bodies were for the purpose of serving the congregations. Now, we exist to serve the elite. Presbyterianism gives way to hierarchy and top-down models of change. I'm afraid that coercion will be the result.

4. The assembly was captive to confessional anarchy. We pass measures that contradict our very confessions on which we are built. We fund that which our confessions call sin. We endorse measures that lead little children into sin. We obfuscate the foundations of our faith to take the wide and easy path to our destruction. And we cease to be a confessional body in any meaningful sense.

5. The assembly was captive to a theory that has yet to be tested. You might as well have called this assembly the Phyllis Tickle Assembly. She is the new prophetess of the movement to change our church into something foreign to anything our ancestors would even recognize as a church based on the Bible. She is the celebrity of all who seek to turn the PC(USA) into something foreign to the church of our apostolic heritage.

Do you want evidence? Just read what is coming out to the denomination from this assembly. Or, if your'e short on time, go and read about the opening worship and you pretty much have the whole case right there.

I did not recognize anything remotely Reformed in this GA. Winning one more round of votes will mean nothing about this larger issue. Short of a God-designed revolution of repentance and submission to the Word under the Lordship of Christ there is nothing more we Reformed can do for the institution itself.

We are strangers in a strange land, exiles in our own country.

And don't read my reflections here as a slam against any individuals at the assembly or against the commissioners. I don't intend them to be that. There were many wonderful, gifted and passionate people there. Many leaders in the denomination have my utmost respect as individuals and I don't want these words to seem like an insult. This situation is larger than one person and we are all caught up in it.

But what we must do is face the hard reality and face it head on. Our denomination is captive to a foreign power. We hold too little to Christ and too much to the ways of a dying world.

May the Lord Jesus set the captives free.

Everywhere around me the multicolored stoles are being worn by commissioners, observers and attendees of the General Assembly. They are hand woven and they display the rainbow colors that have been chosen by the homosexual community to symbolize their agenda. I would estimate that one in six people wear them. Passed out free of charge at the More Light booth and That All May Freely Serve, they are also especially popular with the Youth Advisory Delegates. Almost half of the youth are wearing them. But here is what is even more surprising: In committee, the commissioners are also wearing them! As the committees deliberate, pray, debate, discuss and amend the overtures and items of action proposed for the GA, a substantial portion of the commissioners have already publicly declared by their stoles how they will vote and where they stand on the major issues that confront the GA.In short, the wearers of these stoles are making a public declaration that they are immobile to the Holy Spirit on the issue of sexual ethics in the PCUSA. They are fully persuaded and completely decided on the issues that relate to sexuality in our denomination. Here is where this situation strikes at the very heart of this General Assembly: The people who wear the stoles are making a mockery of everything that this national gathering of the denomination’s governing body is supposed to stand for. Do you think this sounds harsh? Then consider: This assembly was told from the very beginning, in literature, music and spoken presentation, that we were here to "sense the Spirit" and to "follow the Spirit's lead." We were told that we would be led by the Spirit to make decisions that might just surprise us. We were informed that Spirit-led decisions were often sudden and unexpected. This is what "spiritual discernment" in the assembly was presented to be. So, these commissioners who choose to wear the stole of homosexual acceptance are nullifying everything that was said about the work of the Holy Spirit in this assembly. I hesitate to call it hypocritical, but it is hard to see how you can avoid the charge. As this GA is led by many “progressives” who favor such postmodern ideas about being led by the Holy Spirit and the stoles are passed out to those who are also in agreement on this issue, then showing a sign of absolute pre-judgment displays a startling level of disdain for a sincere commitment to be led by the Spirit.I shudder to think what would be said if evangelicals would have chosen an outward sign that showed that we also refused to abide by what we said we held most dear. We would never hear the end of it.I guess I should have known that this would happen. Clearly all of the elaborate phraseology about allowing the Spirit to take us "wherever the Spirit wanted to go" was really just a code phrase. Clearly, spiritual discernment at this GA only applies to those who hold to such outdated and outmoded ideas as Biblical truthfulness, confessional integrity and historic orthodoxy. My mistake. I thought it applied to us all.Cross posted at The Layman Online, GA Blog.

This pretty much sums it up:

That's right! The New Form of Government that is being pushed--er, I mean "presented" to us is about as exciting of a product as New Coke was back in 1985. Like with the New Coke disaster, not only will the original formula (i.e. Book of Order) die, if passed the new coke of NFOG will introduce a wholly new concept into our denomination's governance: Total power over congregations by presbyteries.

Like the lame-o New Coke scheme, the NFOG seeks to restore the sagging fortunes of a very old brand by giving us the flavor of the competition. Here is the reasoning--People don't like the old, classic Book of Order? Well, then give them something new. But instead, the committee took a very old idea, it seems. They took the idea that higher 'councils' of the church should have the ability to do whatever they want to the lower ones. Basically, that model is what the Catholic's have--at top down power structure that knows all, sees all and can do all, without ratification from local congregations. Coke tried to become Pepsi and now the PC(USA) wants to become Rome lite.

The NFOG committee might as well come out and thank us in the demeanor that they are proposing we adopt: "We'd like to thank all the 'little people' that made this new polity possible. But now we're done with you."

I'll take a Presbyterian classic, thank you. If I wanted domination in the guise of unity, I'd swim the Tiber.

I'm going to post later tonight, but I thought I'd post a pic of the N-FOG discussion from earlier this morning. And yes, some people DO wear tennis shoes to these meetings.

Well, the packing proceeds apace and I'm in the final preparation for the flight to Minneapolis tomorrow to attend the 219th General Assembly of the PC(USA). Beaver-Butler Presbytery is generously paying my way so that I can be overture advocate for our "Flexible Presbyteries" overture. I will be working hard to get people informed about why this overture can help make our denomination more suited for ministry in the 21st century North American context. There are many other worthy overtures as well and our evangelical allies will be working with every ounce of our strength to put faithful choices before the body for deliberation and decision.

I'd also like to announce that The Layman Online will be using my posts as a part of their GA Blog project! So, during GA, you can come here to the blog to read my thoughts as the process unfolds or you can go over to the Layman Online site to read there. (I advise you to look both places, personally.) Carmen Fowler has written some profound and moving commentary already, so I commend TLO to you for your GA news.

For each morning of the assembly I will be leading devotionals for a group of committed men and women who are working as hard as we can to advocate for biblically faithful actions at the assembly. We've been meeting online and in conference calls for prayer and planning for several months now. If you're going to be at the GA, look up Robert Austell, Bob Davis, Carmen Fowler or go to any of the PC(USA) evangelical booths to ask for our meeting details. We'd love to have you!

If you can't be there, we need your prayers! Pray that the Spirit will guard and guide the commissioners to strengthen our denomination through bold acts of obedience to Jesus and His commandments.

Okay, I've got to get back to packing now. These bags don't fill themselves. If I run out of pipe tobacco or forget my matches or the needed cables, books or other essentials, it's going to be a grim GA for this classical Presbyterian.

May the Lord preserve His church!