PCA Sturm und Drang on the horizon?

In the spring of the year, the time when presbyters go out to battle...

by Brad Isbell

The season is upon us. Presbyteries meet with an eye toward nominations, conflagrations, overtures, do-overtures, and assemblies general. Elders take stock and make reservations. Denominational issues become more real than they seemed in the bleak midwinter.

The annual-assembling Presbyterian Church in America, turning 50 and preparing to celebrate (or conflagrate?) in Memphis this June, is big, broad, and still orthodox in an evangelical sort of way. If this born-in-Birmingham denomination were a house, a cable TV remodeling show host might say she has good bones and a serviceable foundation. She grew like Topsy for a while, and some of the additions and improvements turned out a little weird—the proportions and paint scheme are messy. But messy is good, right? Still, some wonder if everything was really done to code, if some of the previous subcontractors weren’t a little shady.

Well, in the name of unity and progress, presbyters are often exhorted to empathy and imagination…maybe we should coin a new term: empathigination. Empathy is good. Putting oneself in the trendy, white-soled brown leather casual shoes of another can be helpful. For the last couple of decades, it seems empathigination in the PCA is primarily enjoined upon the cons (the conservatives and confessionalists).

In the interest of empathizing with the cons (for those who find this difficult), I offer as a service these words from a small-church pastor who ministers in the Southeast:

“I think I understand the frustration {two very online pastors} and most progressives feel. They are in a church world they don’t really want to be in. They believe many things the PCA believes, but they want to have practices that are simply not part of the ecclesiastical world they belong to. They stay constantly frustrated with their denomination because it is fundamentally something they aren’t. They want revivals, normative principle of worship, and the ability to innovate as they think appropriate. They want presbytery to be a network, more than a presbytery. They want the GA to be more national conference, less church court. Now, they have had successes, made changes, and have gotten a lot of what they want. But in the end, there are too many people committed to the denomination being what it is…this holds them back. And they do not want to be held back at all. They want full freedom and are resentful of any who don’t want the same, or who try and stop them from doing what they want.”

You may think the pastor’s words are unreasonable or that they rest on misunderstanding of the PCA’s polity and history, but concerns about polity, offices, order, latitude, confessional subscription, worship, and mission are real to many elders and sessions. And they really must be addressed if the PCA is to hang together rather than just hang around for a few more years. No one wants a book to be written titled How is the Golden Anniversary Become Dim.