Those were among the messages that people heard at the first day, Monday, of the Confessing Churches Celebration in Atlanta — the first national gathering of a grassroots group whose organizers say they want it to remain just that, loosely connected, but who also are planning to raise money and set up communication and theological networks and plan to hold a “Confessing the Faith” conference next October l with evangelicals from the United Methodist church and other mainline denominations.
“It is time for Presbyterians to be known as a people who love Jesus,” Paul Roberts, pastor of Summit church, Butler, Pa. — the first Presbyterian congregation to issue a confessional statement last year — told a crowd that organizers estimated at about 850.
Retired seminary professor Ulrich Mauser decried “the Babylonian captivity of our denomination” and asked whether evangelicals are being driven “into a safe harbor where you celebrate your own conviction for yourselves and by yourselves . . . We must reach the stage where we can say we are the true reformed church and those who deny the claim separate themselves from the body of believers,” Mauser said.
“A marvelous thing has been happening among us during these past 10 months amidst the bones of a dying ecclesiastical structure and an organization whose policies and programs have driven away 1.7 million Presbyterians,” Parker Williamson, executive editor of the The Presbyterian Layman, said Monday night.
“Jesus Christ is rebuilding his church. The sessions of 1,220 congregations representing more than 413,000 Presbyterians testified to this fact tonight. The word of the Lord is moving through this bone yard and the church of Jesus Christ is coming alive before our very eyes.”
And Williamson, as did other speakers, drew distinctions between the PC(USA) denomination — to which he made it clear that no financial or other loyalty is required — and truth-seeking confessing churches.
What’s said about the national church is meaningless to him, Roberts said — it’s the grassroots and the local churches he cares about. Roberts encouraged those at the conference not to be shy about saying what they believe — telling them to “look up, pray up, stand up, speak up,” a phrase that was repeated by others, becoming one of the celebration refrains.
“You are the church,” Williamson told a crowd that gave him a standing ovation. “And you are the church not by fiat from some General Assembly who does not know who Jesus is. You are the church not by declaration and imprimatur of officials who say they don’t know the meaning of chastity or repentance. You are the church for one and only one reason: you are confessing the church’s faith.”
The sessions of most Confessing Churches have issued statements listing their belief in salvation through Jesus alone, in the authority of Scripture and in the need for holy living, reserving sexual relations for marriage — beliefs that many evangelicals contend no Presbyterian should be reluctant to sign on to.
In the PC(USA), “the words conscience and experience sound constantly in our ears,” and some see conscience as the sole source of revelation from God and the arbiter of right and wrong, Mauser said. But our views must be set aside when they conflict with God’s word, with Scripture, he said — adding that “we reject the false doctrine,” words from the Barmen Declaration that later were flashed onto a big screen and which conference participants recited in unison.
Mauser said in a workshop: “We don’t speak a common language anymore in the Presbyterian church. We may use the same words, but we mean different things . . . It goes very deep. It means holy words like the name ‘Christ,’ ” or sin or redemption.
Throughout the day, speakers held nothing back in their criticism of the PC(USA) and even of evangelicals.
“Beware of a General Assembly task force designed to tell you that inclusiveness is good and that the tent is big enough for both Baal and Yahweh,” Williamson said. “That’s not theology. That’s politics. Beware of politicians who would woo you into something they call the third way. For each of us here has heard the Lord Jesus say I am the way. Know that there is no other way.”
Presbyterians should give money joyfully to ministries that uphold the beliefs of the Confessing Church Movement, Williamson said. “But we will not give one shekel of the Lord’s money to those who believe He is merely one of many in a cafeteria line of saviors.”
Jim Logan, pastor of Bread of Life Christian Ministry, a Presbyterian congregation in Charlotte, said the PC(USA) was “once on fire for the Lord,” but “now the church is neither hot nor cold but lukewarm, and in dire danger of being rejected by the Lord.”
Preaching from the third chapter of Revelation — “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me” — Logan called on Presbyterians to open the door up again to Jesus.
They can open the door, he said, in part through making a commitment to live in holiness and to obeying the Bible. “We have to be people of the book, not just those parts that please us” — the parts Logan called the “bless me” texts. “We have wanted to void and negate the word of God. But God’s word is already settled in the heavens,” he said.
And “it’s a travesty,” he said, when there’s no difference in the lives of those who say they’re born again and those who do not.
The Confessing Church Movement has cracked the door open a little — “you stuck your foot out there and your neck followed,” Logan said. But it’s not enough, he said, and “Jesus is still standing outside the door saying `Let me come in.’ “
Opening the door through repentance, prayer, obedience and acknowledging Jesus as Lord also means giving up pride, Logan said. Presbyterians have “looked down our noses at everyone else,” he said — but opening the door means “you might have to put up with new stuff,” with crying babies and people who come with guitars and drums and their own kind of music.
“Swing that door wide open and let Him come in,” Logan said, “with all that that implies.”
