Synod property police will force padlocking of congregations
The Layman 218th General Assembly Preview (2008) Volume 41, Number 3, Peace River Presbytery filed an overture to the General Assembly, repeating Kirkpatrick’s unsubstantiated allegations and calling on the World Alliance of Reformed Churches to investigate the EPC.
And who presides as president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches? Clifton Kirkpatrick!
So the circle is complete. Kirkpatrick alleges an impropriety and voices a prediction (more a plea than prognostication). Peace River dutifully picks up the cudgel, repeats Kirkpatrick’s unsubstantiated charges, and does the deed. Ergo, Kirkpatrick, the accuser becomes Kirkpatrick, the judge.
That’s the pattern that is emerging in the Bayou State. In lockstep with counsel put forth by Kirkpatrick’s lawyers (the Louisville Papers) and consonant with Kirkpatrick’s published “musings,” the Synod of the Sun now wades into Louisiana swampland as its self appointed property police. The Sun’s purpose is to “help” presbytery officials padlock congregations that are considering a move to higher ground.
It won’t work. Coercion – historically the last gasp of failing regimes – never does. It only steels the conviction of those whom it oppresses. One has only to look at Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, a ruthless tyrant whom Kirkpatrick and his colleagues helped enthrone, who maims those who oppose him in a desperate effort to stave off an inevitable defeat.
Kirkpatrick, who has earned the dubious honor of overseeing the most precipitous decline this denomination has ever known, is about to add another failure to his tally. Cajoled by his counsel, synod apparatchiks will run roughshod over presbytery prerogatives. They will bludgeon congregations whose only sin is that they love Jesus and wish to worship him unencumbered by denominational syncretism.
Martyrs will be made, and Presbyterians in the pews will be driven further from overlords who cling to an ersatz authority.
This is the stuff of a dying denomination, bringing to mind a Middle Ages moment, when a moribund Roman Catholic bureaucracy believed it could silence Luther, Calvin, Knox and others with book burnings, inquisitions and princely proclamations. It didn’t work then, and it won’t work now.
So, to evangelical Brave Hearts in South Louisiana Presbytery: beware of those who have commissioned themselves to help you, lest instead they help themselves to you and the things that you have dedicated to the glory of God.
The Layman