Just want to say thanks again for taking my call today and for the things and articles you shared. It was helpful and encouraging. Thanks also for the reminder from our last phone conversation about David Talcott. I will reach out to him this week and see if I can glean any good curriculum ideas from him.
Keep the discussions going. They are worth it even when exhausting.
We’re in the middle of a simmering potential crisis at our church that ultimately stems from a “church officers have no authority to rebuke” assumption. And your work has been a great help.
I am not shocked to find this article as I was searching for information about my seminary as I am struggling in the counseling program with all of the liberal theology and ideology. I am not a part of the presbyterian denomination but a woman God has called to the study of counseling. I have been in classes with Prof. Barrs, Mark Ryan, David Chapman, Jay Sklar, Mike Williams and so on. I have received emails for events that hosted Jen Hatmaker ‘your enneagram coach.’ I am in a class promoting leftist ideology about intersectionality and CRT. I have read the school magazine promoting BLM. I have been utterly shocked and dismayed at the ‘Christian’ school I am attending. I can see the bad fruit. I have heard the conversations amongst students who buy into all of this ‘social justice’ ideology. I am very concerned for the leaders this seminary is producing, for the counselors who do not have discernment to see the false teaching in the counseling department. Please, if you have any power to change the course of events within this school, please take action.
Welcome, @Lyndz. While a majority of the members of this forum are Presbyterians (by name or by polity), there are some of us (I’m Anglican, others are various configuratoins of reformed Baptist), who find kindred spirits here. At any rate, within this forum’s archives you will find many posts and interactions to posts on the problems you report. Sadly, you will also find additional reports about PCA denominational leadership and leadership at Covenant which explain why changing things is going to be very difficult.
After I became a serious Christian back in 1970, I watched two very different Protestant denominations recover from creeping theological liberalism - first the Lutherans (LCMS) and then the Southern Baptists.
I might have missed the Lutherans, except that one of their stellar sons, a much loved professor of history, was on the faculty of the university where I was an undergraduate. When the orthodox Lutherans finally succeeded in grabbing the reins of the denomination, they moved quickly to fire the liberal administration and faculty members of the seminary which had been cranking out Lutheran liberals for several years. Dr. Roberts was summoned by his reforming church to serve in a reconstituted seminary. This dismayed many of the evangelical Christians on my campus who had studied church history and taken courses on the Reformation that Dr. Roberts was able to offer on a secular, state-run campus in those days.
The Lutherans and the Southern Baptists experienced these crises pretty much as all Protestant denominations in America have experienced them - via theological liberalism becoming established first in the church’s seminary or seminaries, which then produce in a decade or two a strata of pastoral leadership which infects the pulpits and ministries of the church’s congregations.You are seeing is this process at work at Covenant.
Can this be changed? Stopped? Reversed? The experience of the LCMS Lutherans and Southern Baptists illustrate two things:
Change, if it happens at all, must come from a change in the denomination’s leadership. Seminaries do NOT self-reform. They are reformed by outside pressures.
Change in a denomination’s leadership is a lengthy, arduous, messy process. It’s actally a battle royal. And if you look over the various Protestant denominations in America since the late 19th Century, you’ll see that the battle is almost always won by the liberals.
The LCMS Lutherans and Southern Baptists were exceptions.
Can the PCA be an exception? Others in the forum will have better-informed opinions on that question than I do, and I await their answer. If the answer turns out to be “no,” then again history shows us how things proceed - the orthodox depart (or are ejected) in order to form new denominations that reject the liberalizing agenda of the established denomination. That process is also beginning with PCA congregations, though it is a small process at present.
