What Do We Say To Our Congregations on Sunday?”: Responding to the G.A.’s Action on Ordination

Written by Michael R. Walker

Saturday, 24 June 2006 00:00

Many of us are asking this question today, as we prepare to meet with our congregations after our General Assembly’s decision to shift our ordination policies. Immediately after the Assembly, I asked another pastor friend of mine what he would say to his congregation on Sunday. Below is his response, and beneath his response I give some practical points as well:

“In some sense that’s a peculiar question, because I’m an evangelical. What I will do Sunday is what I do every Sunday: preach the Gospel. The Gospel’s central themes are well known, its details being spelled out in Holy Scripture, the text from which we read and preach week after week. It’s about a creation gone awry, a God whose capacity to love and forgive exceeds our capacity to sin and rebel, and a hope for a glorious future where there is no more crying and no more dying – all revealed to us in the work and person of Jesus Christ. In one sense, yesterday’s events have very little impact on what I’ll preach on Sunday. Misguided decisions of ecclesial assemblies don’t do anything to diminish or obscure God’s victory over sin, death and the devil.

But from another perspective, in all honesty, I suppose recent events will have something to do with how I approach things on Sunday. It’s not as if the Gospel has undergone any fundamental change. Jesus doesn’t change. We know this because of the constancy of God’s Word and the presence of God’s Spirit. But the context into which we speak these great truths has changed and is always changing. So what’s the word for this time and place?

The church is sinful but God is faithful. In the midst of corruption, deception, and confusion in the Church, which at times like this seems as Babylonian as the world, the Gospel lifts high the cross. The cross judges all human sin and subterfuge, whether in the Church or in the world. It is God’s word to our confused and broken church. But it is not the last word. There is another word, equally abiding but much more hopeful. There is the word of the resurrection. Many of us are as confused, afraid and despairing as that original band of disciples first faced with the loss of the Master. The risen Christ speaks the same word to us as to them. He shares his peace and bids us not to fear. He is with us now and to the end of the age.

We live in a world of sound bites and reductionisms. If we conform to its norms we will offer our churches a truncated Gospel that will elicit cynical despair or naïve optimism. The Gospel of Jesus Christ offers another way. It gives us and those we’re called to lead a true picture of the harsh and stark realities of our sin, exponentially more severe when we coalesce in community. But the Gospel doesn’t end there. The proclamation of the cross is meaningless without the hope of the resurrection. In the words of the Task Force: “It’s a package deal.” And this is the package evangelicals will preach on Sunday. The package that comes to us in the incarnation of the one who is both fully God and fully human, also a package deal. We evangelicals must neglect neither side of the package. We do our church a disservice if we proclaim to the church the stark reality of our sin without the boundless hope of the resurrection. Likewise, we offer nothing the world doesn’t offer if we preach the power of positive thinking, ignoring the profound brokenness, sin and corruption that was manifested in the Assembly’s recent actions.

In an age where the church is filled with negative naysayers and manipulative spin-doctors, evangelicals must preach the Gospel of the whole package. This holistic Gospel is made clear on every page of Holy Scripture. What will we say to our congregations on Sunday? That will be dictated by the passages of Scripture we are led to and the context into which we speak it. Wherever these realities lead us, the center is still the same: Jesus Christ, fully God, fully human, the One whose life, death and resurrection gives us a completely accurate picture of ourselves and our church. God has given us the gift of the Gospel, and with it gives us himself in and as Christ and through the Spirit. In doing so God offers us real, true and deep healing and opens up the possibility for the transformation of our church, our world, and first and foremost ourselves.

What will we say to our congregations on Sunday? The details will differ from place to place but the center must remain the same: not a center devised by calculating political strategists or polity experts but the center who reconciles all things to himself…Jesus Christ. His is the glory, the honor, the power, now and forever. Nothing that happened this week changes that. Thanks be to God.”

We would do well to heed this exhortation. Many at the Assembly felt like its decision on the PUP Report changes everything. And in one sense there’s some truth to this. But in light God’s enduring faithfulness and the victory promised to us in the Gospel of Jesus Christ, very little has changed at all. We are called to press on, assured of the hope of glory which no Assembly can render a non-essential.

Still, people will want some practical guidance and basic information. There are several things pastors might want to share in an adult education class or at a congregational meeting:

Our constitutional standards have not changed. They all remain in place, including G-6.0106b, which requires that candidates for ordination live in fidelity in marriage or chastity in singleness. This essential biblical teaching is one candidates for ordained office in our church must abide by, according to our Book of Order. This standard is still in place.
The way our standards are applied may have changed. Exactly how they may have changed is not clear. Every ordained officer vows to uphold the essentials of Reformed faith and polity as spelled out in our constitution. But what those essentials are may now be left up to local governing bodies (presbyteries and sessions) to determine for themselves. We may find ourselves in a situation where a Presbytery or Session ordains someone in clear violation of our biblically rooted constitutional standards, and we may not be able to do anything about it. We will live in a time where everyone will be forced to do what is right in their own eyes.
It is clear that the intention of the Task Force was to allow for those disregarding the seventh commandment to be able to be ordained and installed as church leaders. What isn’t clear is whether or not the Assembly’s action will be able to make good on the Task Force’s intentions. The constitutional experts are not in agreement. Pray that our constitutional standards will be lifted up and vindicated despite the erroneous judgment rendered by the Assembly.
The renewal groups are united. We are committed to upholding the constitution. Truth is on our side, and we are trusting that God will vindicate the truth of His Word. At the same time, we are seeking God’s will for the future and entertaining a range of faithful, biblical, evangelical responses to our current crisis. If basic biblical faithfulness has no future in the PC(USA), we will see to it that God’s people are equipped to sing a new song in a new land. As we discern the mind of Christ together, we are free to be faithful, and we must remain united as evangelical Presbyterians. I encourage you to attend the summer events, especially that of the Presbyterian Global Fellowship.
Your session and presbytery could take certain steps to help ensure that biblical and faithful standards for ordination are upheld locally. Click here for further analysis of the Assembly’s actions and for a practical suggestion.

The Notebook

Calvin quotes

Here are a few quotes from Calvin's Institutes that I selected for inclusion in a church magazine to reflect the basic posture of Calvin's piety, oriented as it is toward magnifying the glory of God and subordinating self-concern. Unfortunately these don't convey the Christological centered-ness of his piety, but they convey where Christ leads us by the Spirit:

"We are consecrated and dedicated to God in order that we may thereafter think, speak, meditate, and do, nothing except to his glory."

"We are not our own: let not our reason nor our will, therefore, sway our plans and deeds. We are not our own: let us therefore not set it as our goal to seek what is expedient for us according to the flesh. We are not our own: in so far as we can, let us therefore forget ourselves and all that is ours. Conversely, we are God's: let us therefore live for him and die for him. We are God's: let his wisdom and will therefore rule all our actions. We are God's: let all the parts of our life accordingly strive toward him as our only lawful goal."

"We ought to we seek not the things that are ours but those which are of the Lord's will and will serve to advance his glory. This is also evidence of great progress: that, almost forgetful of ourselves, surely subordinating our self-concern, we try faithfully to devote our zeal to God and his commandments. For when Scripture bids us leave off self-concern, it not only erases from our minds the yearning to possess, the desire for power, and the favor of men, but it also uproots ambition and all craving for human glory and other more secret plagues. Accordingly, the Christian must surely be so disposed and minded that he feels within himself it is with God he has to deal throughout his life. In this way, as he will refer all he has to God's decision and judgment, so will he refer his whole intention of mind scrupulously to Him. For he who has learned to look to God in all things that he must do, at the same time avoids all vain thoughts. This, then, is that denial of self which Christ enjoins with such great earnestness upon his disciples at the outset of their service."

Ecclesiology and the Cartesian Turn

Janos Pasztor offers a packed summary of some of the ecclesiological consequences of the so-called "Cartesian turn" - the rise of the anthropological starting point -- and often endpoint -- in the pursuit of knowledge that became dominant among philosophers in the 18th century and has characterize "Modern" thought):

"Theology itself was very considerably influenced by this development. It was a 180-degree turn: it began losing its theocentric character and became more and more anthropocentric. For these kinds of theologies it was not God who would come to man addressing him in his life-giving Word, but man would make attempts to approach God by means of an intellectual enterprise. A late twentieth-century representative of this trend of thought says: 'God is the object of my consciousness which I perceive in so far as I perceive something, that is I allot him a place within the framework of a sign-system, in order to be able to talk to others about this matter.' Consequently, the church is the people, who, by virtue of having accepted the common sign-system, are seeking common answers to the meaning of existence.

"These trends of thought, however respectable they might have been otherwise, have rejected most of the things the Reformers stood for. The divine Logos, the eternal Son, 'true God from true God, begotten not made, of one Being with the Father,' became the Logos of the philosophers, a principle and idea, or a set of thoughts. As Blaise Pascal put it, here one has to deal with the God of the philosophers instead of the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Jesus Christ. Instead of listening obedience to the Word of God, one meets the rule of reason in rationalism; instead of the freedom of God's liberated children, one gets the freedom of the individual thinker in liberailsm. These ideas had a devastating effect on the field of Christology. They brought about what has been termed by Hungarian theologians, a Unitarian theology in everything but name."

"...the church is nothing but one of the many human organizations dealing with issues like religion and morals."

"....For people with that kind of idea, catholicity meant 'as opposed to confessional catholicity...the universal kingdom of spirit, but something other than the Holy Spirit,' if it meant anything at all."

Janos Pasztor, "The Catholicity of Reformed Theology," Toward the Future of Reformed Theology (Eerdmans, 1999), p. 29.

Recovering the Wounded: Healing a Church in Exile

Psalm 147:2: "The Lord builds up Jerusalem; he gathers the outcasts of Israel."

Commenting on this verse, Calvin expreses confidence that God would ultimately restore the Church from the ruinous state that formed so much of Calvin's own life:

"In calling God the former and architect of the Church, his object is to make us aware that by his power it remains in a firm condition, or is restored when in ruins. Hence he infers that it is in his power and arbitrament to gather those who have been dispersed. Here the Psalmist would comfort those miserable exiles who had been scattered in various quarters, with the hope of being recovered from their dispersion, as God had not adopted them without a definite purpose into one body. As he had ordered his temple and altar to be erected at Jerusalem, and had fixed his seat there, the Psalmist would encourage the Jews who were exiles from their native country, to entertain good hope of a return, intimating that it was no less properly God’s work to raise up his Church when ruined and fallen down, than to found it at first. It was not, therefore, the Psalmist’s object directly to celebrate the free mercy of God in the first institution of the Church, but to argue from its original, that God would not suffer his Church altogether to fall, having once founded it with the design of preserving it for ever; for he forsakes not the work of his own hands.

This comfort ought to be improved by ourselves at the present period, when we see the Church on every side so miserably rent asunder, leading us to hope that all the elect who have been adjoined to Christ’s body, will be gathered unto the unity of the faith, although now scattered like members torn from one another, and that the mutilated body of the Church, which is daily distracted, will be restored to its entireness; for God will not suffer his work to fail.

In the following verse he insists upon the same truth, the figure suggesting that though the Church labor under, and be oppressed by many diseases, God will speedily and easily recover it from all its wounds. The same truth, therefore, is evidently conveyed, under a different form of expression — that the Church, though it may not always be in a flourishing condition, is ever safe and secure, and that God will miraculously heal it, as though it were a diseased body."

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