Two Challenges Ahead for the PCA (Presbyterianism, Pt. 10)

How to maintain the best of Presbyterianism’s standard of thoughtful, learned preaching and teaching while reaching an increasingly diverse culture is one great challenge facing our church today.

Editor's Note: This article is the last of ten in a series adapted from talks given to Faith Presbyterian Church in Tacoma, a congregation of our denomination (PCA) and presbytery (Pacific Northwest Presbytery). We have retained specific references to that congregation to keep intact the flow of thought. 

We have completed this brief overview of Presbyterianism, including not only the government or polity of our congregation, but also our church’s historical tradition, a tradition that bestows upon us, no doubt more than any of us knows, a distinctive character to our church among the churches of Christendom. When Mark Twain (so it is said) described someone as being “as confident as a Presbyterian with four aces,” he was trading on a particular reputation Presbyterians had in his day. Whether we have quite the same reputation today, there can be no doubt that our church is, in many ways, a product of its past, and Presbyterianism is a large part of that past. H. Richard Niebuhr, in a 1929 book entitled The Social Sources of Denominationalism, argued that denominations were less the product of religious and theological differences between Christians than of socio-economic factors. He pointed out that specific denominations tended to be drawn from one or another social stratum. Niebuhr’s thesis has been subjected to severe criticism by subsequent scholarship, and it is now known that early Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians, for example, contained in their membership a wider variety of social and economic strata than Niebuhr thought. However, there can be no doubt that denominations (and Presbyterian denominations are among them) do tend to attract certain kinds of people in greater numbers. This presents a particular challenge to Presbyterians in the increasingly multi-ethnic United States of America.

Individual pastors and congregations increasingly find inspiration in ministries, churches, and programs in other denominations than in their own or in no denomination at all.

For example, Presbyterianism’s historic insistence on a highly educated ministry (still today, both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree are generally required to enter the PCA ministry) has meant that it has few African-American and Hispanic churches. It has also meant that Presbyterian churches tend to be middle- and upper–middle class churches. College graduates make up a higher percentage of their membership than is the case in other denominations. To ask, for example, a young twenty-something Hispanic husband and father who has aspirations to the Christian ministry, and perhaps is already pastoring a congregation, to embark on formal education that may well take him ten to fifteen years to complete while supporting his family, is in almost every case impracticable. Our own Presbytery is facing this issue presently with regard to Chris Granberry’s wonderfully effective ministry among the Yakama people in White Swan, WA. Mr. Granberry does not have the education ordinarily required to enter the Presbyterian Church in America’s ministry. The question can be put with brutal candor: shall we maintain Presbyterianism’s historic insistence on highly educated pastors and, therefore, for all practical purposes, accept that Christians among the Yakama will be Baptists or Methodists or Bible-church folk, or shall we relax those standards in order to provide a Presbyterian church for them? It is all very well to pray for and hope for a steady stream of evangelical and Reformed young men of African-American or Hispanic descent, or of men committed to working among Native-American populations, with diplomas in hand, eager to enter the Presbyterian ministry; but that stream, at present, is a trickle, and shows little sign of becoming a flood. How to maintain the best of Presbyterianism’s standard of thoughtful, learned preaching and teaching while reaching an increasingly diverse culture is one great challenge facing our church today. 

Another challenge is the weakening of the denomination itself. It is not that denominations are disappearing per se, but their influence is decidedly on the wane, a fact that has often been observed and commented upon by sociologists of religion. When I was a boy and young man growing up in a conservative Presbyterian denomination, one could attend one of our churches in Delaware, Ohio, Missouri, or California and immediately feel at home. The worship was familiar, so too were the hymns, and the preaching sounded much the same. The denomination communicated to its churches a particular ethos. Nowadays, and not only in our Presbyterian Church in America, that is no longer the case. One can attend ten different PCA congregations and think oneself in ten different denominations! We have churches that seem virtually unchanged from what they would have been in the 1950s. We have churches that sing hymns, kneel for prayer, and observe the Lord’s Supper every Sunday, such as our own. We have churches that use very elaborate liturgies, much more like Episcopalian than historic Presbyterian worship. We have seeker-friendly churches that sing choruses and include a drama sketch in their Sunday services. We have ministers who wear robes, collars, suits, or sport coats, and ministers who wear shorts, Hawaiian shirts, and sandals. The denomination still exists for certain purposes and functions in certain ways, but those ways are further and further removed from the life of its particular congregations. The denomination has little to say about how its churches worship and work and seems content with its diminished role. At the most recent PCA General Assembly, in large part due to the protection it affords the larger church from lawsuits originating in local congregations, the Stated Clerk reminded the commissioners never to speak as if the denomination had any control over its member congregations! I suspect there were very few of the more than thousand ministers and elders who heard this who realized what a radical and revolutionary redefinition of Presbyterianism it represented! We are used to and comfortable with local congregations going their own way. 

However, will a denomination be able to maintain a meaningful existence over time in such circumstances? That is the challenge posed by our modern situation. Will denominations, including Presbyterian ones, become increasingly merely administrative organs for the collection and distribution of money and for the organization of collective ministries, and become less and less the church herself in its larger form? And will congregations increasingly chart their own course with little regard for a collective mind or will? That is clearly what seems to be happening in American evangelical church life nowadays. Individual mega-churches that produce church music, provide pastoral seminars, and create ministry programs are increasingly more influential than entire denominations. Individual pastors and congregations increasingly find inspiration in ministries, churches, and programs in other denominations than in their own or in no denomination at all. Some sociologists of religion have styled the new American mega-church as “the new denomination.”

I do not know where all of this will lead. The church has always been shaped by cultural factors, and that is what is happening today. An ascendant individualism in American culture has weakened the collective structures of the church in predictable ways. So has John Locke’s definition of governments as voluntary associations. Whether a more robust Biblical mind will assert itself at some point waits to be seen. There is precious little the individual congregation can do when the denomination itself is conspiring in its own demise! But, many worse things have faced the church in her past, and these sorts of problems are doubtfully the “gates of hell” that our Savior was referring to when he spoke of building and preserving his church. What is more, it is certainly possible that the withering of denominations will prepare the way for a new and glorious period of Christian unity! Let us pray to that end. We go on as Presbyterians, but, much more, as the followers of the Lord, seeking in all things to be faithful to his Word, striving to understand it aright, and then to obey it as loyal sons and daughters of Christ’s church, our mother.