How Confessing Churches help change a denomination
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, April 3, 2002
The denomination was in a steep decline, having lost nearly a third of its members. Many of its leaders were advocating policies that conflicted with its constitution and Biblical heritage.
Homosexual activists lobbied for ordination, and some denominational leaders granted them their demands. Many of the ministers were conducting services of marriage for same-gender couples. One such service was a mass event intended to dramatize the cause through a photo-op for the secular media.
A strain of universalist theology began to penetrate the denomination. No longer was there a shared confession that Jesus Christ alone was Savior and Lord for the world. Personal experience – not Scripture – became a dominant authority for making decisions.
Sophia worship and re-imagining God became the rage among many in the denomination, who no longer believed Christ’s atoning work on the cross was necessary for salvation.
But a new grassroots movement among evangelicals began to help usher in change.
Consider what happened at the most recent national meeting of the denomination. The delegates, by voting margins of 65 percent and better:
- Defeated attempts to impose non-Trinitarian language on the liturgy.
- Affirmed Jesus as exclusive Lord and Savior of the world, against efforts to legitimize the doctrine of universal salvation as if it were a standard teaching.
- Resisted persistent challenges to grant legitimacy to homosexual behavior. They retained language declaring that “homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching.” And they defined “practices incompatible with Christian teaching” as chargeable offenses.
- Defeated proposals to require the hiring of active homosexuals in church positions and attempts to require church-sponsored Scout troops to accept homosexually active leaders.
Since that national meeting in 2000, disciplinary action has been taken against ministers and church leaders who defied the church’s standards. Some have been defrocked.
Fact or fantasy?
It’s fact – for the United Methodist Church, the second-largest Protestant body in the United States. Methodism has had a dramatic faith-lift, and much of that can be attributed to the Confessing Movement within the United Methodist Church.
UMCCCMCCM %Congregations35,6091,367 3.84%Members8,333,770630,429 7.56% PCUSACCMCCM %Congregations11,1781,244 11.13%Members2,560,000418,00016.33%While the Methodist Confessing Movement might not be a blueprint for what could happen because of the growing Confessing Church Movement within the Presbyterian Church (USA), it does suggest that evangelicals in a mainline denomination can make a major impact.
In some ways, the Presbyterian Confessing Churches may be even better positioned to initiate change.
The Methodist movement began in 1995. Today, it represents 3.84 percent of the denomination’s 35,609 U.S. congregations and 7.56 percent of its 8.3 million members.
In only a year, the Presbyterian Confessing Church Movement has grown to 11.1 percent of the denomination’s 11,178 congregations and 16.33 percent of its 2.56 million members. The percentage of Presbyterians in both categories is more than twice as high as the Methodist movement.
The Confessing Church Movement within the Presbyterian Church (USA) became a part of an evangelical surge that gained momentum after commissioners to the 213th General Assembly in Louisville last year:
- Elected a moderator – Jack B. Rogers – who not only endorsed ordaining practicing homosexuals, but also advocated marriage for homosexual couples.
- Approved an overture asking presbyteries to repeal the denomination’s historic prohibition against ordaining self-affirming, practicing homosexuals and to nullify the denomination’s Biblical and confessional declarations that same-gender sex is sinful.
- Approved a theological statement that called Jesus “unique” but fell short of affirming that Christ alone is Lord and Savior for all the world. The statement had a loophole large enough to allow universalism as an acceptable doctrine of Christianity.
While the 213th General Assembly was in session, the Confessing Church Movement included 420 congregations. Rogers bitterly denounced the movement; it has tripled since then.
There have been other signs of surging evangelicalism in the PCUSA since the General Assembly:
- Long-time renewal organizations in the PCUSA endorsed the Confessing Church Movement and stood in solidarity to restore constitutional integrity in the denomination.
- In conjunction with the Confessing Church Movement, evangelical commitment to the movement’s three tenets – Jesus alone as Lord and Savior, Scripture as the infallible rule of faith and life and God’s unchanging standards of holiness – has spawned volumes of sermons, commentaries and other exchanges in publications and on Web sites.
- In October 2001, more than 1,200 evangelicals – a record – attended the annual “Gathering” sponsored by the Presbyterian Coalition, where a “Vision Statement” calling for massive changes in the PCUSA was enthusiastically endorsed.
- At year end, Christianity Today listed the Confessing Church Movement as one of the major religion stories during 2001.
- In February, nearly 1,000 Presbyterians attended the volunteer-organized National Celebration of Confessing Churches. More than half of the celebrants were lay people.
- In a national referendum, the denomination’s presbyteries resoundingly defeated Amendment 01-A, the 2001 General Assembly’s proposal to delete the “fidelity/chastity” clause from the constitution.
- More than 14 complaints have been filed in church courts against individuals and governing bodies that had announced that they are openly defying the constitution.
- Linked by networks that are an outgrowth of the Confessing Church Movement, evangelical pastors and lay people are becoming involved in regional caucuses to pray for renewal of the church and map strategies to attain it.
- Several of the denomination’s leading evangelical theologians have stepped to the fore to affirm the Confessing Church tenets.
So, can evangelicals in the Presbyterian Church expect legislative renewal comparable to what has happened in the United Methodist Church?
The first test of that possibility will be at the 214th General Assembly when it meets in June in Columbus, Ohio.
There, commissioners will work their way through an abundance of overtures and commissioners’ resolutions – ranging from a call for a moratorium on enforcing the constitution to allowing dissenting congregations to leave the denomination with their property.
How those matters are decided depends on who has the votes, and that depends on whom presbyteries elected to serve as commissioners to the 214th General Assembly. Evangelicals won with 73.2 percent of the presbytery votes on Amendment 01-A, but that doesn’t mean they also elected 73.2 percent of the commissioners or anywhere near that percentage.