Evangel Presbytery will meet on Thursday, February 20th, 2020 from 10am-5pm at Trinity Reformed Church in Bloomington, Indiana. We’d be delighted for you to join us!
If you think you will come, it would be a big help to us if you would please RSVP right here.
See you soon!
Guest post by Andrew Dionne, senior pastor at Trinity Presbyterian Church in Spartanburg, South Carolina. (Facebook, Twitter)
Trinity Presbyterian Church initially met on the north side of Spartanburg, SC in the early 1970s. In August 1972, Walnut Grove Presbyterian Church merged with Trinity Presbyterian Church. Her denominational home became the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod (RPCES). On the first Sunday of September 1978, Trinity dedicated its present building on the west side of Spartanburg County. In August of 1982, Trinity was received into the Presbyterian Church in American (PCA) when the PCA officially “joined and received” the RPCES.
On May 5, 2019, after several trying years in Calvary Presbytery of the PCA, Trinity voted to leave the denomination and affiliate with Evangel Presbytery. In congregational meetings leading up to our departure from the PCA, the case for leaving the denomination was outlined, argued, and ultimately affirmed by the congregation. The PCA, it was argued, was significantly and irreparably compromised both in doctrine and practice.
Concerning the doctrinal degeneration of the PCA, there was widespread affirmation of the social gospel and a sophisticated embracing of the “celibate gay Christian” movement. Concerning the practical drift of the PCA, the polity of the PCA became more and more hierarchical, going against the basic principles of Presbyterianism. Over the course of her history, the PCA had increasingly resisted the practice of church discipline. That rejection of one of the three marks of the church was evident in every level of the courts of the church (sessions, presbyteries, and general assembly). Lest you think we are lobbing stones without having had any skin in the game, the details of our battle within the PCA against liberalism is documented on Warhorn Media’s website.
Perhaps the most discouraging element of our final days in the PCA was the unwillingness of the conservatives in the denomination to fight those pastors and elders who were promoting the sin of effeminacy. When the conservatives waved the white flag and determined that the differences they had with men who rejected Scripture were merely “differing perspectives” of “teammates and friends,” the end of our affiliation with the PCA became a positive necessity.
It is with joy that Trinity Presbyterian Church has affiliated with Evangel Presbytery. Our hope and prayer is that Evangel Presbytery will serve as a simple source of accountability and encouragement. We have no desire to see Evangel become a national denomination with influence. We’ve already seen how that desire corrupts men and institutions. May God bless our efforts.
That’s a common question we get from those looking on from the outside and wanting to know more about Evangel, and it’s not a bad question. After all, over two-thirds of the adults in the United States identify as Christians, and slightly less than half identify as Protestant. That many Protestants – roughly 150 million – must represent a huge number of churches. Surely our churches can find a denomination or association worth affiliating with, right?
Well, it’s complicated. If you’re reading these words, you probably recognize that the United States has been turning away from its Protestant roots for many generations now. Of those 150 million who identify as Christian, many millions deny basic Christian truths like, “Jesus is God” or “the Bible is the Word of God.”
Narrowing things down a bit further, roughly a quarter of the United States adult population are Evangelical Protestants. And then, when you narrow it down to Evangelical Protestant churches that are either reformed or presbyterian, that percentage shrinks to around 1% of the adult population, or roughly three million people.1
Three million people is still a lot of people, and, sadly, they do represent a large number of different denominations and associations that have a long history of division. And so the question remains: why another denomination?
If you take the time to read our commitments page (and I hope you do), you’ll see that we are Westminsterian in our theology – which is to say, reformed and evangelical – and presbyterian in polity. This is pretty standard stuff in our theological neck of the woods, and if we had left it at that, our churches may very well have been able to join another denomination. That leads us to what sets us apart…
Normally, particular churches and denominations with our same theological commitments declare themselves to hold to either the credo-baptist or the paedo-baptist position on baptism. That is to say, some of them think it’s good and proper to baptize the infants of Christian parents (such as the Presbyterian Church in America or the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church), while others believe that a person should be baptized when he can make a personal and credible profession of faith (such as the Southern Baptist Convention). In either kind of church, leniency on this point is sometimes permitted for church membership but never, or very rarely, for church officers. But as we specify in our BCO, churches who join Evangel Presbytery may declare in their bylaws that their officers “must be exclusively credo-baptist, exclusively paedobaptist, or may be comprised of both.”
So while there have been separate credo-baptist and paedo-baptist churches for centuries, there are few examples in church history of churches who accept both positions simultaneously, and very few denominations today who do so. Our congregations have many friends on both sides of the debate, but there simply weren’t very many willing to officially associate with us given our long-standing commitment to freedom on the time and mode of baptism. We did carefully consider the few that exist, but decided that our differences in other areas – whether cultural or theological – were too significant to set aside. And so here we are.
In a word, no.
Evangel Presbytery grew organically out of the brotherhood of like-minded churches. We share theological commitments and cultural commitments, and we love one another. We’re committed to the three marks of the church: pure preaching of the Word, the proper administration of the sacraments, and the conscientious exercise of church discipline. What’s schismatic about that?
On top of that, we feel that our open-handed position on baptism is good for our churches and a challenge to long-standing factions in the reformed church which grieve the Lord. That’s the very opposite of being schismatic!
In future posts, we hope to write more about how each of our churches were drawn to form a new presbytery. Even as we build, we are delighted to see God bless other Reformed and Evangelical denominations. The fields are white for the harvest.
