Editor’s Note: A shortened version of this article appears in the September 3, 2007, print version of The Presbyterian Outlook.
Items in The Presbyterian Outlook over the past several months continue to suggest the need for a review of where we appear to be heading after the events of 2006 and some thoughts that might help to determine whether the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is headed in the right direction. The latest item was Leslie Scanlon’s report on the activities of the Form of Government (FOG) Task Force in the June 25/July 2 issue. Two other items were in the May 14 issue. The first (p.13) was a plaintive cry by Ross B. Jackson to encourage everyday Presbyterians to make what he called some “root” changes (Making Disciples – What Presbyterians NEED to Read.) The second (p.32) was a letter from Dawson Watkins suggesting that positions taken by Louisville be better supported with facts. These gentlemen are obviously as concerned as I am about the dearth of biblical evidence offered for positions taken by both officials and laymen and women of the PC(USA).
Even a cursory reading of The Outlook and Presbyterians Today reveals the lack of biblical references that support positions or opinions. But I am persuaded that neither the reading of good books nor more factual support for positions will produce the results we need. Left to themselves, Christians will not take the time, or make the effort to educate themselves in the disciplines needed today. It is the job of the church to make disciples. That it is not doing this job at all well is revealed by the recent publication by The Barna Group of its Annual Tracking Study (available at [email protected] ), which shows that “commitment to orthodox biblical perspectives is slipping in a number of areas.” The areas that are most pertinent to this discussion are:
- The number of Americans who “believe that God is the all-powerful, all-knowing creator of the universe who rules the world today” has dropped from 71% to 66% during the past year and is “the lowest percentage in more than twenty years of similar surveys.”
- Within 10 areas of religious engagement, eight were statistically no different from a year ago. The two that did change were that Americans were less likely to volunteer at church and, the one that concerns us here, were less likely to read the Bible. David Kinnaman, who directed the study, noted in his Perspectives on the Research, ‘most Americans do not have strong and clear beliefs, largely because they do not possess a coherent biblical worldview. That is, they lack a consistent and holistic understanding of their faith. Millions of Americans say they are personally committed to Jesus Christ, but they believe he sinned while on earth. Many believers claim to trust what the Bible teaches, but they reject the notion of a real spiritual adversary or they feel that faith-sharing activities are optional. Millions feel personally committed to God, but they are renegotiating the definition of that deity.
‘In fact, one reason why beliefs fluctuate is that most Americans’ hold few convictions about their faith. For instance, even among those who disagree with orthodox views, many do so while hedging their bets. Most Americans have one foot in the biblical camp, and one foot outside it. They say they are committed, but to what? They are spiritually active, but to what end? The spiritual profile of American Christianity is not unlike a lukewarm church that the Bible warns about.’ Kinnaman, the president of the research firm, suggested that the shift away from biblical perspectives is like moving the foundation of a building. ‘We are likely to see more significant alterations to the spiritual landscape, since what a person believes dictates a great deal about their behavior and allegiance. To give purpose to the spiritual lifestyle of Americans, there are few tasks more important than helping Americans develop a biblical view of life. Otherwise, millions of people, including many within the youngest generations, will conclude the Christian faith does not represent deep, consistent truths about the spiritual and natural world.’
Why not? Many of the insights drawn from the findings of Barna Group studies and others, reveal some interesting answers, including the relative indifference of most churched Christians to unchurched people; the overt emphasis upon a personal rather than communal faith journey; the tendency of congregations to perform rituals and exercise talents rather than invite and experience the presence of God; the absence of a compelling call to action to those who attend; and the failure to listen to dissident voices and spiritual guidance to dig deeper in one’s faith. These factors give us some insight into the “why not.”
But in reading Leslie Scanlon’s article on FOG in the June 25/July 2 issue of the Outlook I concluded that much of the church nowadays is attempting to find answers to questions answered centuries ago but which answers no longer seem adequate in a world of political correctness and seemingly endless accommodation to the currently popular vogue. But they are adequate; always have been. The pearl has been found; the field has been bought and the treasure uncovered. I believe that there are three foundations which, if preached and taught in our churches, if supported by our denominational leaders, will produce the “fire in the belly” we so badly need today. They are the Word, the Mission, and the War.
First some assumptions, what we used to call presuppositions. The most basic of all is that a Christian worldview is the best one and is the one that brought the west to its zenith, Closely allied with that: the source of the knowledge needed to create such a worldview is the Bible. The two thoughts expressed by Jackson and Watkins, that Christians need to study more and that they need to bring more facts to bear on their thoughts and ideas coalesce with Barna’s findings and point to some new directions and some old practices. These are wrapped up in the three foundations headlined above They must be the platform from which we preach and teach.
The Word
My grandson TJ, then about age six and already a man of few words, was dashing through the house one day on his way to the car where his mother was waiting. As he went through the room where I was sitting, I asked, “Are you ready to go, TJ?” “Yes I am PawPaw,” he replied. He continued through the house and his grandmother, not hearing my question, asked him, “Are you ready to go, TJ?” “I already said that!” he said with some irritation. God, too, must get awfully tired of hearing the same questions over and over again, the answers to which He has already provided in His Book.
I am increasingly concerned with the many shades of gray often incorporated into positions recommended by PC(USA) working groups when more straightforward biblical positions are available. In most cases we just need to ask, “Hath God said?” Yes, God hath said, and it is time we quit listening to other voices. He has spoken with an intensity and clarity that makes a shambles of our politically correct world. And just as often, we try to “improve’ upon the hard sayings by taming them into vapid and non-threatening instructions the world finds acceptable. And about that time our strong and fearless Lord is reduced to “gentle Jesus,” who loves everybody and challenges nobody! But that’s a false portrait. Jesus is neither a wimp nor a shaman eager to fix all of our problems.
It’s been a very long time since there have been so many opinions for solving our problems with so little scriptural documentation for those opinions as there have been in recent years! We seem to be ready to listen to every other voice, every other opinion, but those of our God! In the small 1961 edition of The Confession of Faith, which is in my library, there is an amazing and enlightening discussion of how the Westminster Confession was written. The British Parliament, which had called the Westminster Assembly into being, established a set of regulations that “indicated serious business for the Assembly” and provided, among other things, “that every member, at his first entrance into the Assembly, shall make serious and solemn protestation not to maintain anything but what he believes to be the truth in sincerity when discovered unto him;” and “… that what any man undertakes to prove as necessary, he shall make good out of the Scriptures.” Each member subscribed to the following vow read at the beginning of each week or month the Assembly was in session: “I do seriously promise and vow in the presence of Almighty God, that in this Assembly, whereof I am a member, I will maintain nothing in the point of discipline, but what I believe to be most agreeable to the Word of God, nor in point of discipline, but what may make most for God’s glory and the peace and good will of His church.” The Westminster Confession of Faith has stood for more than 360 years. Every part is supported by Scripture, not by man’s opinion. It was prepared by men who believed in the inspiration and infallibility of Scripture and that when God’s word says, All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness,” we are obliged to go there to find answers to our problems.
When did we stop doing that? If every member of every committee had to subscribe to the same regulations and vows, I believe our churches and church organizations would be well on the way to recovery. With modern computer search engines, we could have the answer to nearly every supposed problem in less time than it takes a committee to finish its coffee time. Our problem is that we are often trying to find a way around what Scripture clearly says so that we will appear “relevant” and “politically correct.” If we cannot bring ourselves to trust and act upon the answers we find in Scripture, then perhaps we should just fold up our tents and silently steal away! He will not give His glory to another. He will not bless man’s opinion when it differs from His own. Our fate will be continued decline to eventual insignificance unless we repent of trying to please man instead of God and plant ourselves firmly on His word. The will of the Lord is found in only one place: the Bible. The Bible is truly the “breathed out” word of the living God and it is infallible. There is no other such source. We need to quit playing games and get on with what we are really supposed to be about, which is the second foundation:
The Mission
In our search to articulate who God calls the PC(USA) to be, and what God calls the PC(USA) to do, the first thing we need to remember is that we are not the ones who determine what our mission is! That mission will not be determined by polling. Our Lord has already made the determination and our role is one of obedience. We are concerned over what to do with the money entrusted to us, with who may be ordained, with our relationship with the “civil magistrate,” as Calvin calls it. All these concerns and many more may be important, but they are not our mission and our expenditure of so much time and energy on them only detracts from our mission and reveals how much we have moved from our base.
Since we are not the ones who determine our mission, we must turn to the One who does, and has. In response to Peter’s declaration, You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.“ Jesus says, Blessed are you Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by My Father in Heaven … and on this rock I will build my church” Matthew 16:16-18. Then, just before He returns to the Father, He gives the church its mission: All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you … Matthew 28:18, 19, 20a. Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation. Mark 16:15. Also …and that repentance for forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in His name to all the nations, beginning at Jerusalem“ Luke 24;47; Feed My sheep John 21:17. That is the over-arching mission of the church, of all churches; everything else is built upon that. Anything and everything we do, or want to do, must contribute to the building of the church as set forth by our Lord. To quote one of the great ones, Donald Grey Barnhouse: “The true Church is left here, not to perfume the dung heap of a fallen humanity, but to save as many individuals out of the wreck as is possible before the final destructive crash comes.” (From Barnhouse’s “The Invisible War,” p. 245. This book is also one of the best discussions of the kind of war the church is engaged in.) Please note that the mission given to us by our Lord has two parts. We are to go into all the world, to all the nations, and preach the gospel. Then, after baptizing those the Lord causes to respond to the gospel, we are to “make disciples,” to teach them “to observe all that I commanded you!” And we are to do this “beginning in Jerusalem!” And that means we are to do this beginning in the local church!
When our shortage of funds causes us to cut our missionary teams instead of things that are by definition secondary to preaching the gospel, we are on thin ice. When it comes to making disciples, to teaching all that the Lord has commanded us, we rate as abject failures. Our puny efforts at “Christian education” at the local church would be laughable if they did not reveal an abysmal disregard of what our Lord told us to do. If you think I am exaggerating, please visit George Barna’s Web site and spend some time reviewing his studies of what churchgoers know about their religion! Those studies reveal that most people who have been going to church and Sunday School all their lives are ignorant of the most basic facts of Christianity. When our young people leave home and their home church, they, for the most part, leave their religion as well. We must do a better job of making disciples.
What good is it to have an educated clergy if we do not educate our church officers and our lay men and women? What good is an educated leadership if that leadership presides year after year over a membership constantly deserting and whose remaining members are becoming more and more illiterate in the content of their religion? Perhaps it would help if we learned to think in other categories, those that we will be required to employ to be successful at using our third foundation.
The War
We don’t talk much about war these days except for the one in Iraq. But there is a much more important war we have to fight, and it is no less real than the one in Iraq and others around the world, more important because of who declared it. The Lord God said to the serpent, I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring, he shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel. Enemies are, of course, at war with one another and the Old Testament is largely a story of that war. The New Testament church was inducted into the war when Jesus established the church upon Peter’s words: You are the Christ, the son of the living God, He set the terms when He said that He would build His church on that declaration and that the gates of hell would not prevail against it. However we interpret the expression “gates of hell” or Hades, the declaration could well allude to attempts by “the gates of hell” to destroy the church and that the church would be required to resist that attempt. He clearly established the battle lines when He declared, Whoever is not with me is against me. The Lord has also declared: Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, and a man’s enemies will be members of his own household. Half the world is aflame, and the other half may soon suffer the same fate. And it is aflame precisely because the separation about which our Lord speaks is taking place on a scale not often seen in world history.
That does not mean that the war was meant to be a civil war! For the past several years, we have seen the church at war with itself as it attempts in at least two denominations to define where it should stand. Believers choose up sides against other believers and the rock throwing begins and, in our case, goes on for decades. What is needed within the church is not warfare, but discipline. And discipline cannot take place until the church knows and declares what it stands for. In not taking a clear biblical stand on important issues, the church has chosen to permit the choosing up sides to continue and thus assures a continuing hostility within the church. Like those described by Amos, we will find ourselves running to and fro, seeking the word of the Lord but never finding it because the Lord has sent a famine not of bread or water, but of hearing the words of the Lord, (Amos 8:11,12).
It is fine to talk about church growth, but it is no strange thing for the church to get smaller for the right reasons. When Jesus said, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you, the church suddenly got smaller as … many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with Him. And a leaner, tougher church met the Pentecost challenge and 3,000 souls were added to its rolls. This is the war that the church has joined and we would do well to remember that the church on earth is often called “The Church Militant” and the church in heaven “The Church Triumphant.”
This war will not end, of course, until Jesus comes again. In the meantime, the church needs to reexamine its priorities and its activities in terms of warfare, and that means getting rid of the unnecessary baggage that has crippled its efforts for years.
The Right Stuff
Those are the elements we must get right. If we do not, if we fail to pattern our work on biblical principles, if we waste time on side issues that are not part of our God-ordained mission, if we fail to realize the seriousness or even the existence of the war we are in, we risk being relegated to the sidelines. It is indeed likely that the Lord has already begun to shift His blessing to other churches in other places peopled by those who, like the sons of Issachar, had understanding of the times, 1 Chr. 12:32. May we emulate those sons of Issachar and not the Pharisees and Sadducees, who the Lord said were able to discern the face of the sky but who could not discern the “signs of the times,” (Matt. 16:3.)
BILL NEWKIRK is an elder of Trinity Church in Satellite Beach, Fla.
