The War (Some of Us) Never Fought
Non-confidential thoughts on Andy Webb's call to join the ARP
By Brad Isbell (Chortles Weakly), PCA ruling elder
Many Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) elders are not happy with their former fellow presbyter pastor Andy Webb, whose video extolling the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church (ARP) and encouraging PCA churches to affiliate with the ARP (as his church recently has) was shown and commented upon on a recent Presbycast.
What I said mildly on the show (because Andy is a friend and we aren’t harsh with our guests, friends or not) let me say more strongly here: I do not endorse or suggest that PCA churches should join new denominations or form a new denomination at this time...or maybe ever.
The PCA may need to eventually split, with a large group of likeminded churches moving—or staying—together, but it should not splinter, with faithful churches chipping off to various denominations in disorderly fashion. If unfaithful churches leave (as some have) that's not splintering, that's going out from us because they were not properly of us. Of course, the worst move would be to congregational independency, which would prove that a church was not even truly presbyterian. Independency is ecclesial narcissism, the furthest thing from presbyterianism.
I do not mean that Andy was unfaithful in leaving the PCA for the ARP—I'm thinking of churches like City Church of San Francisco, a Texas church that went to the just-right-of-the-mainline Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians (ECO), and the several New York City-area PCA churches which have left over the last decade. Those churches needed to leave, because their positions suggested a different view of scripture and polity than that held by the PCA. Andy's church did not.
There are reasons for PCA churches not joining the ARP, among them the loss of local fellowship/proximity to churches of the same denomination (in most parts of the country), since the ARP is much smaller (one tenth the size of the PCA) and has limited geographic distribution. The (optional) female deacon issue is another reason. A friend told me today that no one should get their hopes up about the ARP sunsetting or removing their provision for female deacons— for relational reasons he doesn't think it will happen, though the ARP is studying the issue. The ARP is often likened to a big, mostly-happy family. Homey as the denomination is, the ARP has a slightly more hierarchical government structure (compared to the grassroots PCA) which is a bug or a feature, depending on your perspective.
I’m glad that Andy is happy, but his experience should not necessarily guide faithful PCAers. And as he noted, the ARP is not perfect, nor is any other church. It may have less strife because of a certain amount of homogeneity and the fact that it is concentrated in the Southeast. The peace and continuity of the ARP is certainly to be commended. Like most presbyterian churches, it was formed in part because of disagreement and division, but for the ARP that was about 200 years ago, not in living memory as is the case with the PCA. That could explain the difference in “spirit.”
Hasty decisions to depart are dangerous. Andy started talking about leaving as early as 2014, so his church’s decision was anything but hasty. I worry more about those who have only been thinking about it for a couple of years...or a couple of months. As I said on the show, one man’s conscience might well require him to remain while the conscience of another might compel him to go. Remember J. Gresham Machen, the founder of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church who fought longer and bore more than most of us can imagine, and who was run out of a church with actual theological liberals who were, as he said, proponents of an altogether different religion from biblical Christianity. He wrote this in a private letter in 1929, seven years before leaving a corrupt church:
"I hate this whole ecclesiastical business, for my part, with all my soul. If I consulted my own desires, I should keep out of it. I should write conservative books and enjoy the plaudits, perhaps, of liberals and conservatives both. But in my inmost soul I should know that I had been unfaithful to Christ. I do not think that we can avoid contending for His cause just because there are dangers to our souls in that contention."
Finally, the battle in the PCA may be, to invoke a Peter Hitchens book title, “The War We Never Fought.” Some feel that the confessionalist* (or conservative, if you will) segment of the PCA has hardly put up a good fight, conceding much ground in the last 25 years to those with a different understanding of the nature and mission of the church as well as a different regard for her confessional standards. And I might agree with that assessment.
*Many are offended by the confessionalist/progressive distinction, but if there is one thing we learned from the release of the National Partnership email cache it was that the National Partnership also sees a distinction which might offend: healthy/unhealthy or narrow vs. missional.
Our church left the RCA for the PCA several years ago, and two very practical reasons that we gave, back then, were:
1. If good, faithful reformed people move to town and are looking for a new church, they are likely to recognize a PCA church as another group of good, faithful reformed people, but might well not recognize an RCA church as such.
2. For men in our own congregation who felt called to ministry, we felt we couldn't really recommend RCA seminaries to them and would be wary about recommending RCA ordination... which is a very uncomfortable position for an RCA church to be in.
We didn't leave lightly, and our senior pastor at the time (Kevin DeYoung) had long been a member of a RCA reform movement (somewhat like the PCA's Gospel Reformation Network, I believe). But in the end we did (and oh my, the RCA pastors they sent to us for a congregational meeting to attempt to persuade us not to leave... they did not help their case, shall we say).