TULSA — They’ve come from all over the country, fired up, Presbyterians wanting answers for a church many of them think has jumped off the cliff.
“Why are we here?” asked New Wineskins co-moderator Dean Weaver July 19 during the opening session of the Wineskins’ second national convocation.
They are here, he replied, because “everything has changed” in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). “We are here because everything has changed, but God has not.”
And the church, he said, “is not a denomination.”
Around the globe, Christianity is exploding in faithfulness, fervor, and numbers, Weaver said — and Presbyterians want to be part of that. But the PC(USA)’s General Assembly did things in June that have caused the Presbyterian Lay Committee’s board of directors to say the assembly has “broken covenant and invited schism” and taken a “plunge into apostasy” — things the Lay Committee contends cannot be fixed from within.
Weaver said one online blogger announced recently: “Enough is enough, and we are going to take action.”
He also said many Presbyterians have approached the New Wineskins leadership, asking, “Is this just going to be another one of those meetings where we get together and talk about talking?”
Weaver said he desperately hopes the answer will be “no” — that here in Oklahoma, New Wineskins supporters will move way beyond just words.
So the New Wineskins leaders are proposing specific, concrete action to be taken before this meeting ends July 22, Weaver said. Among those proposals — which only delegates from congregations that have formally signed on with the New Wineskins can vote on later in the meeting — is one saying that the New Wineskins “connections” would be “formalized as the New Wineskins Association of Churches,” signaling potentially the start of a new denomination.
That association also would call for a “congress of renewal leaders” later this year. “The purpose of the congress will be to pursue common ground towards a preferred future,” according to a proposed action plan handed out at the start of the Tulsa meeting.
The New Wineskins Association would form a nine-person strategy team, which would develop a “transition plan” that “will include but not be limited to dismissal of congregations from their presbyteries.”
And the New Wineskins Association would meet in the winter of 2007 to consider and act on the recommendations of the strategy team.
During the next six months, the New Wineskins leadership is suggesting, congregations can “confess Biblical truth” and “work together to discern the future of our relationship with the institutional Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)”
They can target financial giving — using their dollars to support work they see as solid.
They can “take steps to see that the property of the congregation is protected for proper use in serving Jesus Christ and the Great Commission” — although it does not specify what those steps would be.
They can make it clear they will not ordain sexually-active gays and lesbians. One of the hottest issues in the denomination now is a recommendation from the Theological Task Force on the Peace, Unity, and Purity of the PC(USA) — a recommendation the General Assembly approved in June — that would allow a candidate for ordination or installation to declare a “scruple” if they could not in conscience comply with a part of the denomination’s ordination standards. The presbytery or session would then have to decide whether that scruple involved an “essential” of Reformed faith and practice.
Some see that controversial Recommendation 5 as providing a balance between individual conscience and national standards — while keeping intact the PC(USA)’s ordination standards that require chastity if someone is single or fidelity if they are married.
But many conservatives in the church disagree — saying the PC(USA) has stepped away from what the Bible teaches in a way that cannot be tolerated.
So now there is increased talk of working with what New Wineskins calls “common cause” partners — and the recognition that, as preacher James H. Logan put it, “when we get to heaven, there’s not going to be a Presbyterian section.”
FOLLOWING BIBLICAL TRUTH
Logan — co-founder of Jim Logan Evangelistic Ministry (www.jlem.org) and the kickoff preacher in the opening worship — told the Presbyterians that “we are gathered out of a sense of crisis,” and said that’s not a comfortable place to be, “particularly for those of us who pride ourselves on being good Presbyterians.”
But Christians are called to biblical truth, Logan said, and “the Word of God is sometimes like a two-by-four that hits me right between the eyes. … No matter how uncomfortable it makes you feel, God’s Word is true.”
He urged them to show the kind of faith that Christians in Africa have shown — people who kneel down in the dirt to pray, those “saints of God” who pray with pure intensity as though they’re about to fight, their hands balled into fists, their eyes closed tight in concentration.
Logan said one African friend made this comparison between the faith of Christians in his part of the world and those in the United States. “When you need something, you go down to Wal-Mart and pick it up,” the friend said. “Here, we have to pray it down.”
So Logan urged Presbyterians to live in faith, not in fear. Some want to wait until they can see the future, saying, “Now wait, God. I’ve got a mortgage, two car payments, two kids in college, two dogs … I can’t just pick up and go.”
But Abraham went when God told him to, Logan said. Real unity, he said, comes not from a denominational label, but from following Jesus Christ and the Word of God — from believing in “one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all who is over all and through all and in all.”
Sometimes, following biblical truth means standing alone, Logan said.
“There are some people I can’t hang with, because we don’t have the same spirit,” he said. And later: “When you’ve got the Holy Ghost living in you, it will develop in you intolerances.”
So Logan challenged the crowd in Oklahoma, asking them: “Will you walk in faith, or will you walk in fear?”
Sometimes God will call people to break the law, regardless of the consequences, and “that is a lonely place, he said. When you walk obediently, “you may lose some people . . . But for every one you lose, God will send four in their place.”
Logan said he’s drawn his own line in the sand.
“I’m going to confess biblical truth. If you want to know where Logan stands, look for me at the B-I-B-L-E, standing on the Word of God.”
