Saturday, June 28, 2008

PC(USA) in the Ditch

From Presyterians for Renewal:

The actions of the 218th General Assembly have made it clear that the PC(USA)’s compromise of the Gospel of Jesus Christ has reached an unprecedented level. It is clear that the PC(USA)’s confession of the Lordship of Jesus Christ and commitment to our Reformed confessions has (sic) weakened to the point that we can no longer assume a common framework of conversation. The pain of this realization has been used by God to clarify our next steps.

Read all of PFR's "Reshaping the PC(USA)" report on the current GA and what, finally, PFR proposes to do.

This action by a very faithful group of Christians in our denomination has really been long in coming.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

So, basically, the GA has decided that the reason that our denomination is shrinking is that we have paid too much attention to Scripture, so we need to get away from that annoying book. Isn't that the gist of this? The society and the culture declares that sexual sin is no longer sin, and so we tow the culture line and agree.

I am seriously considering jumping ship. However, the problem is that the Presbyterians who actual consider the Word of God to be just that have been jumping ship, and look where it's getting us.

I figure that if this continues, then my kids will only know the Presbyterian Church (USA) by stories I tell them. And I'm not even sure that I will tell them stories about it except as cautionary tales.

Am I a right-winged nutcase for wanting to see my church adhering to Scripture as much as possible, and being salt and light to the world rather than letting the world continue to influence us?

Paul Stokes said...

I talked to one younger person about this. His view seemed to be that what GA does doesn't much matter; that it is more about who controls the property that keeps pushing this thing and that's not so important; and that there are plenty of faithful churches around to which one can go if your church goes down.

We have attended our church for 35 years. Many times it would have been so much easier to have left, rather than put up with various forms of local, presbytery, and denominational nonsense. We've had to explain ourselves to orthodox Christians from more "faithful" churches. Yet God has blessed us greatly through our church and even the higher structures. "Faithful" is not a word that is confined to the idea of having right theology, although it includes it.