Church Leadership

By Dr. Roy Taylor

EDITOR’S NOTE: Dr. Roy Taylor is the Stated Clerk of the PCA. He presented this material at the September 2006 Christian Education and Publications Women in the Church Conference in Atlanta. We asked him to adopt it for Equip to Disciple as part of its ongoing feature on the church.

The Kyzer family reunion was an impressive experience for me as an eight-year-old child. My mother’s side of the family, the German side, had gathered at a park in Tuscaloosa, Alabama for a picnic and reminiscences. I knew I had a lot of cousins, sixteen to be exact; but at that gathering I began to realize my family was much larger than I had previously thought, with four generations of people who looked, thought, and behaved like each other to varying degrees. Then, when there was talk of ancestors long dead, I knew I came from an even larger family with deep roots.

The Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) is the second largest Presbyterian denomination in the USA and relatively young as far as denominations go, begun in 1973. Overall, Presbyterians are a small minority of Christians in America. We need to realize, however, that we are part of something bigger than we usually think.

Our church family has deep roots, not only back to the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, but back to the early church and even into the Old Testament era as well. It is our understanding from Scripture that the church is composed of all the people whom God has chosen to call unto Himself. Our Westminster Confession of Faith puts it this way, “The catholic or universal Church, which is invisible, consists of the whole number of the elect, that have been, are, or shall be gathered into one, under Christ the Head thereof; and is the spouse, the body the fullness of Him that filleth all in all.”1 The church then is not just New Testament believers only, but all who are saved by Christ, both before and after Christ’s incarnation and redemption.2 Key biblical texts on this issue are Romans 4 and Galatians 3 where the Scriptures teach that all believers (both Old and New Testaments) are justified by faith alone in God’s Anointed Redeemer and that all who trust in Christ are spiritual descendants of Abraham. This deep-roots understanding of the church has several significant implications. It is why we prefer to speak of a “biblical church,” spanning and based upon both Old and New Testament, scriptures rather than a “New Testament church,” not beginning until the New Testament and based on New Testament scriptures only. This means that the whole Bible, not just the New Testament, is for us. Covenant Theology may simply, perhaps simplistically, be expressed by the statement, “In the Old Testament, God was faithful to his people as families, not just as individuals; in the New Testament God is still faithful to his people as families, not just as individuals.” That is why we practice covenant baptism of our children. Moreover, we see continuity between the Passover of the Old Testament and the Lord’s Supper in the New Testament. So, the rites of our family have deep roots.

We call ourselves “Presbyterians” because we have a representative and connectional form of church government in a church governed by elders (presbuteroi). Collegial leadership by a plurality of elders began in the days of Moses (Numbers 11), was enhanced in the synagogue movement beginning in the sixth century BC, continued in the New Testament (Acts 14:23) as the apostolic practice, continued until the mid-second century AD, and was restored by John Calvin and John Knox in the Reformation of the sixteenth century.3 So the system by which our family is managed has deep roots both biblically and historically.

Just as there are strong physical resemblances in extended families, there are certain beliefs held by all branches of the Christian family. These common beliefs are expressed in such ancient creeds as the Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creed. When we confess our faith in common worship by affirming these creeds in congregational unison, we are confessing the beliefs of the extended family for millennia.

All families have illustrious members and black sheep, members of whom we are rather proud and others we would prefer not to discuss. The visible church has always been a mixture of true and false professors, truth and error. Our family did not begin in the sixteenth century Reformation. Our deep-roots view of the church means that all of the history of the church is our family’s story. We may proudly claim church fathers such as Justin Martyr, Polycarp, Tertullian, Augustine of Hippo, Athanasius, and others as “our folks.” Since the church has never been pristinely pure, as evinced by the errors and divisions Paul often addressed in his epistles, our family has had some heretics and rogues in our ranks over the millennia, which we sadly acknowledge. The church has to struggle in every generation to maintain purity of doctrine and holiness of living.

Not only does our family have deep roots, our family also has several separate branches. Though for a thousand years there were smaller and more short-lived divisions in the church, there was not a formal division until the Great Schism of A.D.1054 between the eastern and western churches. The eastern churches developed into the Eastern Orthodox Churches and the western churches developed into the Roman Catholic Church. Our spiritual predecessors were part of the western branch.

As the doctrinal aberrations and moral laxity increased over the years in the Western church, the Protestant Reformation came as a “tragic necessity” in the Roman Catholic Church in the sixteenth century. Coming out of the Reformation several family clans developed, Lutherans, Reformed, Anglican,4 and Anabaptist. Our branch of the family is the Reformed branch influenced by such leaders as Ulrich Zwingli, John Calvin, John Knox, and Francis Turretin. Reformed folks affirm that God is actively sovereign, sin has adversely affected the entire human personality, the Bible is the supreme rule of what we believe and how we are to live, and God is gracious to His people as families from one generation to another, not simply to individuals. We are part of Evangelicalism (high view of Scripture, emphasis on individual conversion, evangelism, missions, etc.) that arose due to the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century and the Second Great Awakening in the nineteenth century, the conservative side of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy between World War I and World War II, and the evangelical post World War II movement.

There have been disagreements and reconciliations that have occurred within our family over the years that resulted in several denominational-level divisions and reunions. In 1741, there was a division, the Old Side/ New Side controversy over the First Great Awakening; but a reunion took place in 1758. In 1837, there was a division over doctrinal subscription, the Old School, taking the firmer position. In 1861, the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States was formed when the Old School General Assembly required allegiance to the Federal Government of the United States. In 1865, the name of the Southern Church was changed to the Presbyterian Church in the United States; and the Synods of Kentucky and Missouri joined. The Southern Church was not as quickly affected by theological decline, laxity in discipline, and a trend toward a more hierarchal type of Presbyterian polity as was the Northern Church; but eventually, such unhealthy beliefs and practices took root. After several decades of ineffective efforts to counteract those trends, the PCUS conservatives faced a crossroads in the early 1970s. Some conservatives decided to remain in the PCUS to bear witness to evangelical truth. Others concluded that time, effort, and resources could be better channeled into positive efforts by forming a new denomination. The PCA founders “in much prayer and with great sorrow and mourning . . . concluded that to practice the principle of the purity of the Church” they “reluctantly accepted the necessity of separation” and severed their ties with their Mother Church “with deepest regret and sorrow.”5 The PCA could be rightly described as “reluctant and grieving separatists.”

Our convictions to preserve the purity of the church led us to separate ourselves from what we believed to be an irreparable situation from the human perspective. On the other hand, our theological convictions of the connectional nature of the church and Christ’s desire for visible unity compel us to seek union with other churches of the same doctrinal convictions and representative form of church government. Therefore, the PCA was involved in the formation of the North American Presbyterian and Reformed Council in 1975. For a time there was an effort to effect a four-way merger of the PCA, the Christian Reformed Church, the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America, and the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod. The four-way merger did not come about, but there was a “Joining and Receiving” that took place in 1982 when the RPCES was received as a body into the PCA. The merger added churches in the Northeast, Midwest, and West to make the PCA a national denomination and added Canadian churches as well to make the PCA an international denomination. Meanwhile, with vigorous church planting efforts, the PCA continued to grow.

Just as some families have common recognizable physical characteristics and patterns of behavior, the PCA has its distinctives as well. Our brand of Presbyterianism has been called non-hierarchal Presbyterianism, democratic Presbyterianism, or grassroots Presbyterianism. Our connectionalism is spiritual. Our churches, presbyteries, and General Assembly are separate civil entities that voluntarily bind us together. We are bound together by three mutual commitments of Presbyterian connectionalism: Doctrinal Fidelity through a binding theological standard (Westminster Standards), Accountability through connectional church courts and discipline, and Cooperative Ministry (we should minister together and can accomplish more together than independently).

We seek to relate to other Presbyterian and Reformed churches, as well as to other Christians through various means. We are part of the North American Presbyterian and Reformed Council composed of Evangelical Presbyterian and Reformed denominations in North America who hold to the Westminster Standards or the Three Forms of Unity. Early on, the PCA became part of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) composed of evangelical denominations, local churches, institutions, individuals, and ministries who subscribe to the NAE Evangelical Doctrinal Statement, representing the evangelical community in the USA. Through its participation in the NAE, the PCA has contacts with other evangelical Christian denominations, organizations, individuals, and ministries; shares in the mercy ministries of the World Relief Commission; participates in world evangelization; and has a greater voice and influence in civic engagement through the NAE Office of Governmental Affairs in Washington D.C. We are part of the World Reformed Fellowship (WRF) composed of evangelical denominations, local churches, institutions, individuals, and ministries who subscribe to the WRF doctrinal standards, forming a fellowship as a resourcing community for ministry worldwide. Moreover, many PCA local churches, individual members, officers, and ministers partner with other Christians in their own communities for evangelistic and mercy ministries through word and deed.

The Lord has richly blessed the PCA in its brief history with notable growth and an influence far beyond our relatively small size in comparison to the largest Protestant denominations in North America. We now have 76 Presbyteries,

Welcome to the first issue of 2008. We believe this year will be an especially important year for Christian Education and Publications and the Presbyterian Church in America. We ended 2007 with the topic of the church. The church and the kingdom will be the main themes for 2008 because we want to reflect the mind and heart of our triune God, and both the church and the kingdom are the objects of His deepest affections and concerns.

It becomes more and more obvious that people are deficient in understanding the church and the kingdom; hence, they have not embraced nor understood them as clearly as God would have. As a result, from a human standpoint, the church is taking a licking. People, lacking a biblical view of both, are saying things that should not be said about either. There is apparent confusion about how the local church fits into the universal church and then how the universal church, including the local, relates to and is part of the kingdom.

When we must from time to time critique the church, realizing that we as professing Christians are the church, we must remember that the church is the bride of Christ. It is His body, made up of many members. I think we should be very careful of how and what we say about the church that would suggest it is non-essential, out of date, or that our relation to the church is an elective. Using the marriage analogy of the church as the Bible does, there are times when the bride may need some counseling or help in the marriage; but there is never a time when the bride is to be abandoned or put down.

As Reformed, Bible believing Christians, we have a high view of the church. It is the place where we can demonstrate our love for God and our neighbor as ourselves more clearly than with any other institution. The church plays a key role in our spiritual lives, and how the church functions will be determined by how Christians are discipled. If that process does not include a “twenty-four/seven concept” of the Christian life and “doing all to the glory of God,” then the church will not have served the kingdom in a positive manner.

CEP is committed to assisting our local churches to be equipped to serve the kingdom. Through our training and resources, we focus on the triune God and how we best serve His purpose to this generation. The PCA’s concept of being a missional church focuses on the same, but how effective we are in that mission requires seeing the church holistically and not as separate parts. The lead article by Dr. Roy Taylor, Stated Clerk of the PCA, is a summary of a seminar from our 2006 Women in the Church conference. The article underscores the significance of our understanding the connection of the local churches. Of course, there is the sense in which all churches committed to the triune God, the Scriptures as God’s authoritative Word, the saving work of Christ on the cross and His Lordship seen in the lives of His people are connected; and we must look for opportunities to express that broader connection. However, there is a unique way in which our understanding of the church links us together with those of like mind doctrinally and missionally. It is simply not true that we can do ministry better independently. We are interdependent, and we need one another.

The truth is that you cannot serve the kingdom without a deep love for and involvement in the church; because it is to the church that God has given the assignment to disciple, train, and equip people for ministry.

CEP will be sponsoring a discipleship conference November 13-15, 2008 in Atlanta – Making Visible God’s Invisible Kingdom. It will feature speakers such as Chuck Colson, Christian Smith, myself, and a host of others. The conference is designed for those who want to make visible God’s invisible kingdom. We will keep that event before you, here, on our website, and by other means of publicity.

Our commitment to the ministries mentioned in this issue is to help and encourage local churches, and thus the PCA, to demonstrate a kingdom world and life view; to provide training and resources to equip people, young and old, to know how to interact with the ideologies of the world in order to be able to give a credible reason for our hope and faith in Christ. Our challenge is for the church to regain its God assigned position of helping its people know how to think God’s thoughts after Him and apply them to daily life. We have turned so many of those things over to other institutions that the church is “hovering on the brink of irrelevance,” and its influence is being continually marginalized, neutralized, and compromised. We must make every moment count, as we serve the King.

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Our prayer is that this issue will be helpful and challenging to you, first to pray for your local church and the PCA as a whole more intentionally and then that you will determine in no area of your life will you fail to serve His purpose to this generation. Pray that our denomination will have a kingdom perspective that will make a difference.

In this issue of Equip to Disciple, the focus in this lead article is the church. To develop this theme we will refer to two main writings by two familiar names to us: one is a chapter by J.I. Packer and the other a forthcoming book by John R.W. Stott. As we expound this theme, our intent is not only to make some general observations but also some specific ones which we hope will encourage readers to take the time to read Stott’s latest book, The Living Church: Convictions of a Lifelong Pastor.

The subject of the church has been on our hearts lately for several reasons. It appears that for some, the church is not viewed as the bride of Christ and given the place it deserves within the Christian faith. The famous saying of John Calvin, “He who has God for his father, will have the church for his mother,” is not taken very seriously nor is the strategic place of the church in God’s design. This is especially true today. We are seeing and hearing more and more negatives regarding the church. Things such as the church is an institution vs. a movement, or the church rep resents a paradigm that doesn’t apply to today’s concept of Christianity, or the church lacks authenticity and integrity. George Gallup Jr. and George Barna are serious when they warn that the church may be only one generation from extinction. Of course, they are referring to the organized church as we know it.

Bruce Hindmarsh states in the opening chapter of Evangelical Ecclesiology: Reality or Illusion? (John G. Stackhouse editor), “When one thinks about the evangelicals and what they hold dear, one would be forgiven for not thinking immediately of the church. Indeed one might even suggest, given the history of schism among evangelicals, the ‘evangelical ecclesiology’ is an oxymoron.” Therefore, he suggests that maybe the church is a non-ecclesial form of religion and evangelicalism is merely a sociological movement. I have been particularly aware of evangelicalism’s attempt to be transdenominational and international- to be inclusive but at the same time not seeing the role and place of the church in that area.

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J. I. Packer in the book Ancient & Postmodern Christianity wrote a chapter entitled “A Stunted Ecclesiology.” He writes, “I am making a case for genuine churchliness of today’s evangelical church, a churchliness that is directly in line with that of the churches that separated from Rome at the time of the Reformation. It is a case, I believe, that urgently needs to be made, both because this recovered churchliness is a significant fact that is often overlooked and because much of evangelicalism is in a state of cognitive dissonance about it, affirming churchliness yet retaining an ethos and mindset that seems to observers to deny it.” After stating five reasons why evangelicals have a stunted ecclesiology, he concluded, “My hope is that in this new century the churchliness of evangelicalism will become evident. As my analysis shows, the difficulty here is more practical than theoretical. Evangelical ecclesiology is not stunted, but evangelical churchliness as a mindset and an ethos is, and without rethinking and adjustment this will continue, so that the credibility of the evangelical claim to mainstream status as church will remain suspect and perhaps be forfeited….We wait and see.”

For space reasons, I will mention three of the five reasons for his conclusion regarding the church’s stuntedness.
1. The church is too centered on salvation. While Packer states the extreme importance of fully grasping the gospel, the focus of the church has been so much directed in that area that it has led to a human centered theologizing which sets human needs center stage and makes the Trinity’s role simply one of saving individuals. He says “church life is thought out and set forth in terms of furthering people’s salvation rather than of worshiping and glorifying God.”

2. The parachurch-centeredness is virtually an evangelical trademark. While maintaining that parachurch ministries are needed for the kingdom, they tend to take away from or divert resources and people from the church to the parachurch direction. He writes, “Sadly, by the same narrowing process that was described above, these agencies of God’s kingdom draw interest, prayer, enthusiasm, and money away from the wider-ranging, slower-moving, less glamorous realities of congregational life, so that the parachurch body comes to have pride of place in supporters’ affections and in effect to be their church.”

3. The independent church syndrome. Packer says this matches the above but goes further than the parachurch centeredness. While we thank God for the churches, Packer says, “A problem lurks here. Independent congregations are such through declining connectional bonds with other congregations- such bonds, I mean, as synods, councils, superintendent ministers, bishops, and court systems provide.” (Packer is an Anglican by church affiliation).

Our experience would concur with the above characteristics listed by Packer, and we are not encouraged because such characteristics are proliferating. As we highlight some of John Stott’s thoughts and comments on the church in his latest book, we are reminded of his statements in other articles that the churches of the West are tired and in need of a rest. Of course, the implication is that the church cannot afford to be tired and in need of a rest. I believe there is a clear correlation between a low view of the church and a lack of understanding of the Kingdom of God and how the church fits into and relates to the broader kingdom, although there are so many ways we could go with this if space allowed. Much of evangelical Christianity has not appreciated nor gotten that relationship straight in the past, and much of today’s broad emerging church paradigm doesn’t have a clear biblical theological model for the church and its place within the kingdom. Hence, the church is not taken with the seriousness that I believe one should take with the bride of Christ or His body.

While I have made it a point over the years to read everything I can by Stott, this little book on the church is outstanding. Even though I could have wished for the reader’s sake that he would have dealt more with the kingdom in connection with the church, this is an excellent book. I was privileged to read the galley proofs before going to press. I could not put it down. Here is a churchman in his late 80’s, actually 86 years of age, writing about his observations and challenges regarding the church. The opening statement of the pre face regarding the Church of England equally applies to the Reformed and Presbyterian churches, especially to the Presbyterian Church in America. Quoting the Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie, Stott writes, “If the current evangelical renewal in the Church of England is to have a lasting impact, then there must be more explicit attention given to the doctrine of the church.” Stott mentions the increased number of books focusing on the theme that the church is “out of tune with contemporary culture and that unless it comes to terms with change, it faces extinction. “Of course he said the church will prevail. When the paradigm in western culture began to shift from modernism to post modernism, the shift had a definite impact on the church.

Stott is right to suggest that how the shift plays out requires much discernment, especially for those identified with the church. He wisely counsels, “It seems to me that the traditional and emerging churches need to listen to one another, with a view to learning from one another. “The traditional church is a reference to the church as we have generally known it over the years. The emerging church is a general statement referring to those who are attempting to develop new paradigms for the church following much of postmodern philosophy.

He further reminds us to remember that while culture goes through constant change, Scripture is unchangeable. Then he states that the purpose of this book “is to bring together a number of characteristics of what I will call an authentic or living church, whether it calls itself ’emerging’ or not.”