This week my denomination, the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, held its 46th stated General Assembly in Denver, Colorado. This is the annual meeting and council (synod) of my church, and every pastor has a right to attend and every congregation may send elder representatives. Due to the subject of same-sex attraction and ordination, this was the most intense and contentious assembly in recent EPC history, if not its most divided assembly ever. More on that towards the bottom. But there was quite a lot of other things going on at the assembly, and below is a summary of the official actions taken.
To amend the EPC’s constitution requires a majority vote of one assembly, a majority vote of three-fourths of the presbyteries over the next year, and then a majority vote of the subsequent assembly. The GA completed that amendment process in four areas that essentially cleaned up and standardized language related to the ordination process.
The EPC’s formal ecumenical relationships are called “fraternal partnerships” and are aimed at increasing cooperation on mission, church planting, theology, and education. The EPC entered into a fraternal partnership with the The Evangelical Church of Egypt (Synod of the Nile), which is a wonderful development….
I have a review of Myles Werntz’s Contesting the Body of Christ: Ecclesiology’s Revolutionary Century up at Mere Orthodoxy.
“I believe in the church.”
This article of the Christian faith seems unusual compared to others in the church’s creeds. Our faith, like everything else about us, is fallible and marked by sin. Still, this is a confession of God’s divine action and preservation of Christ’s body. There is a church, and it is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. But what does this pronouncement look like in practice? The early twentieth century’s ecumenical movement had promising energy, but it has largely faded. Now, after a century marked by fragmentation, schism, and deepening denominational stratification, discussions of the church and its oneness seem exhausting and exhausted…
The church is one because it is the body of Christ animated by His Spirit. Its unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity are not external additions; they arise from its very life. To be the church is to be these marks. With this overall thesis in mind, Werntz traces the ways different twentieth-century Christian traditions “contested” or worked out what the church’s essence meant for their lives and practices…
I’m back at reformation21 with an article on what constitutes church health when things are declining. Here’s an excerpt:
“Who can change the sinner’s heart?”
Imagine if Jesus told the parable of the sower as if he were a church health guru:
The seed is the word of God. Those ones that fell along the path, snatched up by the birds? They heard the word, but your preaching wasn’t enthralling enough, and so the devil got ‘em. And the ones on the rocky soil? Well, what did you expect? If you call people to repentance, to be completely reconstructed by God’s grace on his terms, they’ll walk away. Duh. And then of course the ones that fell among the thorns couldn’t find the perfect programming tailored for their niche demographic at your church, and so they didn’t mature.
This is preposterous! This absurdity is not how Jesus talks.
And yet something very much like this logic has quietly settled into parts of the modern, evangelical (and dare I say it?), Reformed church. When the gospel does not appear to “work,” we assume the problem must lie in the delivery system—insufficiently compelling preaching, inadequate programming, or a failure to craft the right strategy. The implication is subtle but powerful: if we would only improve the machinery of ministry, the harvest would follow.
But that is not how Jesus tells the story…
I had a great time participating in Mere Orthodoxy’s first ever author forum to discuss my book Keeping Kids Christian. We ran out of time to cover all the questions, so I wrote up a series of short answers that Mere Orthodoxy published, along with a link to a recording of the forum.
This Tuesday, March 31st, I have the privilege of participating in Mere Orthodoxy’s forum series, “Conversations for Humans”. It’s hosted online and open to the public; you can register for the event here. I’ll be talking about my book Keeping Kids Christian and what the church can do to promote faith transmission to the next generation.
