We are not promised praise.
We are not promised tolerance, or understanding.
We are promised, division, persecution: the division of families, the use of courts as a means of oppression, and that we will never be welcome in Israel.
Being innocent will not be an excuse: instead it will be a confirmator sign that badthink needs cleansing.
“Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. Beware of men, for they will deliver you over to courts and flog you in their synagogues, and you will be dragged before governors and kings for my sake, to bear witness before them and the Gentiles. When they deliver you over, do not be anxious how you are to speak or what you are to say, for what you are to say will be given to you in that hour. For it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you. Brother will deliver brother over to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death, and you will be hated by all for my name’s sake. But the one who endures to the end will be saved. When they persecute you in one town, flee to the next, for truly, I say to you, you will not have gone through all the towns of Israel before the Son of Man comes.
Our societies have rejected the gospel: this is a time of winnowing. Compromise will not work: it removes our discernment so we are not crafty but foolish at the same time as we lose our innocence.
It seems that while the PC(USA) is the legal successor to prior Presbyterian denominations, dating to the founding of the United States, it is not heir to the same theological vision or has squandered what inheritance it did receive leading to a significantly diminished witness at home and abroad.
At home, the denomination itself reports that fifty American congregations have departed since the redefinition of marriage in June 2014, and 209 congregations total in 2013-2014 alone. The last time the denomination had a net-increase in membership—one unrelated to a denominational merger—was 1965.
Once again explanations vary as to the reason. Parsons claims that approximately one-third of the recent decline can be attributed to congregations departing to more conservative or evangelical denominations like the Evangelical Presbyterian Church of the Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians (ECO).
The remaining two-thirds are due to “…aging, the lower birthrate, people moving to where churches aren’t.” There is no doubt that both of these causes—theological conflict and demographic shifts—have precipitated the numerical decline of the PC(USA). These same trends threaten the denomination’s very existence.
Theologically, the PC(USA) made the calamitous choice of choosing to abandon consistent doctrinal standards—of even the most elemental type—in favor of an ad hoc, case-by-case approach, in which no belief is out-of-bounds as long as you can get a majority to vote for it. In a denomination that has come to value niceness as the zenith of the Christian virtues, simply appealing to one’s private, subjective interpretations or experience is generally sufficient to pass muster.
The PC(USA) is a denomination full of well-educated people, but at times it evinces a peculiarly petulant stupidity. Take, for example, a recent conversation in which it was claimed that should Presbyterian pastors be required to believe and follow our confession’s he would immediately be fired since he does not observe the Lord’s Day in the fashion envisioned by the Westminster Confession of Faith.
His assumption is, of course, that he shouldn’t be deposed from ministry because of this. This is based on the presupposition, almost universally shared today, that whatever I/we/culture do is right simply because I/we/culture do it.
It is time to cling to the gospel and accept persecution. The alternative is not mere extinction, it is irrelevance.
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