Breaking down Moderator Donahoe's appointments to the Revoice study committee

Ken Lamb (@Krlamb1) has pretty well nailed the alternatives: “… standing up and opposing this direction at every opportunity or also be willing to be berated for leaving.”

The Really Big Problem is the first of these alternatives: to stand up and oppose a heterodox/heretical trend before it becomes pernicious. I do not know of any pastor-training program that gives serious attention to how this can be done. Most think that a review of the relevant verses in Matthew 18 is all you need.

With most right things to do, we sinners - and especially we sinners who are pastors - fall off the horse to one side or the other. Most fall by ignoring the need for correction. And, so, the error spreads and intensifies. All along, of course, the reasons not to address the problem become stronger as well! And all those reasons boil down to this: “What turmoil discipline will cause! We don’t want that, now do we?”

On the other hand, there are Christian communities which come down fast and hard on the slightest departure from whatever standards are in force. The micro-management, while technically and legally licit drives far more sheep out of the fold than it preserves from error. It ends up mostly preserving not the truth but the personal opinions of one or two elders.

It looks like a pastoral Scylla and Charybdis which no shepherd can safely navigate. And, truly most do not navigate it safely. The vast majority end up succumbing to Scylla - the six-headed rock monster who foments error, rather than the whirlpool Charybdis who simply sucks the life out of any ship of Christians who pass by too closely.

Can the PCA recover at this point? God knows, while we do not know for sure. History shows us that recovery at this point would require what amounts to a denomination-wide insurrection against the institutional muckety-mucks who (as the composition of the study committee shows) are in firm control of the denominational machinery.

Such insurrections have succeeded! The orthodox Missouri-synod Lutherans did this back in the mid-1970s. It took the PCA equivalent of two GAs to oust the governing board and president of the LCMS seminary which was teaching error to the next generation of Lutheran pastors.

The Southern Baptists succeeded as well, under the insurrectionist leadership of Paige Patterson and Texas Judge Paul Pressler, though it took longer. In the SBC, one needs about a decade or more of successive conservative convention presidents to effect reform, because the administration of the denomination is spread through a matrix of boards, commissions, and agencies. Any convention president can reappoint only a few boards (or portions thereof).

I don’t know enough about the PCA, how it “works,” and so forth, to recommend a course of action. The history of God and His people in the OT gives two ideas which PCA denizens can use to illumine their own situation:

  1. Leadership for Reformation comes from the institutional bottom of the barrel. This is the constant lesson from Scripture. Look at the Judges. Look at King David - so utterly irrelevant to his entire family that his own father gives him nary a thought. St. Paul - with his erudition and Jewish pedigree (cf. Philippians 3:4-6) - is not an exception, for to the Jews he is a traitor, and to the Christians he is a murderous persecutor.

  2. If the rot is deep enough, reformation is not possible. Retreat and reorganization is the only option, because the time has come when the inmates now rule the asylum.

Is the PCA at this point? That’s a call for orthodox insurrectionists inside the PCA. If retreat is the only option, there are destinations already available.

My prediction at this point is this: the next turning point is going to be when the study committee puts forth its majority report, and (possibly) a minority report, and then what the GA does with this. If the majority report is adopted, if (as Greg Johnson is convinced will happen) the “gay identity” finds a permanent seat at PCA tables, then the time has likely come to retreat.

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