Connectionalism and Confessional Exceptions
Can EPC Presbyteries exercise authority over a local church’s election, ordination, and installation of officers? On the one hand, local congregations have the irrevocable right, in perpetuity (BoG 6-2, 25-2B), to elect their own officers. On the other, there are numerous restrictions and mandated procedures for how that election process should be done (e.g. BoG 10-10 on nominating procedures, 11-3 on preparation, and 12-6 on examinations). Each court of the church is required to annually submit its minutes to the court above it. So Sessions need to submit their minutes to their Presbytery, and the Presbytery must review those minutes to ensure the local church is in conformity with the EPC’s constitution. If the local church is not, the Presbytery is allowed to require a revision to the church’s practice to meet the EPC’s constitutional standards. This process is called “Review and Control” (BoG 2-4)…
EPC Ruling Elders and Confessional Exceptions
All ordained officers in the EPC are required to vow that they “sincerely receive and adopt the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Catechisms of [the EPC] as containing the system of doctrine taught in the Holy Scriptures”. Like many other Presbyterian denominations, the EPC has long debated how to handle its officers disagreeing with parts of the Westminster Standards. For Teaching Elders (pastors), the EPC has determined they may declare disagreements (exceptions) and the Presbytery may allow those exceptions (see BoG 12-4). The exceptions have to be stated and the Presbytery has to vote to allow or disallow them…
Confessional Subscription in the CRC
So it begins: “Historically there have been very few requests for an exception about a specific teaching. But following Synod 2022’s decisions regarding human sexuality, particularly in affirming the confessional status of the church’s traditional understanding of marriage, some Council members have been seeking a process to file an exception, indicating their difficulty with that decision.”
The CRC’s approach to scruples and exceptions, “gravamen”, has differed from the confessional subscription debates in Presbyterianism. No more. Now, at least for the Council of Delegates (denominational executive committee), “When a delegate requests an exception, the Council’s executive committee will make a decision on whether or not to grant it, based on the centrality of the belief for which the exception is sought and the member’s agreement not to publicly contradict, teach, or act against the synodical position.”
The resistance to this recommendation hits all the familiar beats…
Liberty In Non-Essentials: Sin in the EPC
What is sin? Sin is many things, but at its core sin is lack of conformity to and violation of God’s law (cf. WSC 14, WLC 24). Doing what God forbids is sinful and not obeying what God commands is sinful. Christians often disagree about what God has required in his word, which is why confessions of faith are valuable. A confession of faith is a statement of belief about what God’s word teaches. For the EPC, we believe that the Westminster Confession of Faith with the Larger and Shorter catechisms contain the system of doctrine found in the scriptures. We confess that these documents faithfully represent the truth of God’s word. Other churches may disagree with us, and some in the EPC may disagree with parts of these documents (more on that in a minute), but this is the chief role of a confessional system: affirming what the church believes God has revealed to us about himself and our duties towards him.
The EPC’s motto includes “In Non-Essentials: Liberty”. The idea in the motto, and very much the reality in the EPC’s culture, is that we foster liberty towards one another in areas of non-essential doctrines. People have the freedom to not only disagree with each other on these non-essentials, but are also able to have different non-essential practices. The most notable example of this is the ordination of women…
PCA Big Tents and Strict Subscription
PCA Pastor David Cassidy has written on the problem of presbyteries granting exceptions but forbidding them to be taught (something I’ve written about a lot, most recently here). Cassidy says that the PCA is great because it is a “good faith subscriptionist” denomination, not a strict subscriptionist church, and this change in policy makes the PCA de facto strict subscriptionist. He, correctly, notes that presbyteries cannot bind the conscience of ministers in this way, and so the recent move by the PCA is incorrect. But something he fails to consider in his piece is that the alternative to grant-and-forbid is outright denial: if an exception cannot be granted while simultaneously banning its teaching, the presbytery has the right to deny granting that exception. That doesn’t change in any scenario, and I know plenty of presbyteries where exceptions are only granted because they believe they can forbid its teaching. If this option goes away, fewer exceptions will be granted, and the PCA will become far closer to a strict subscriptionist church than it is under the current arrangement. In fact, the PCA will grow more divided culturally as each presbytery varies in what exceptions it allows (goodbye recreation on the Sabbath!), a problem that doesn’t exist in stricter denominations.
Being a big tent denomination means allowing strict subscriptionists to not only belong to the church, but to practice their convictions of strict subscriptionism and being ok with that.
