Hard lessons of PCUSA

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The PCUSA is the topic of today's NoCo.

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What's on the desk today? I almost said what's on tap, but that might not.
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You might not like that. The PC, not politically correct, but PC USA denomination.
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You might say to yourself, are all Presbyterians the same? Yes, they're all like Karl Truman.
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By the way, I emailed Karl and said, get back on the show. And he did not take that command. He took it as a,
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I don't know, what do they call those requests in the Greek language? Not evocative. I know that, I know better than that.
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It was subjunctive. Not subjective, subjunctive.
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May, I think that's it. I don't know, I could be wrong. PC USA 2012, how we got here.
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Now it is dated, but it is excellent. You've got a wide variety of Presbyterian churches.
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Some liberal, some conservative, like other denominations, i .e. Baptists. And I'm kind of a middler in a sense, because some things we do along the
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Presbyterian line, some things along the Baptistic lines. And so I'm stuck in the middle.
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What's that old song? Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right. Here I am, stuck in the middle with you.
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I know, I know, I'm older, that's all right. And they've got the OPCs on the conservative side.
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You have some PCA churches in that denomination that are more conservative.
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I think that whole thing's gonna blow up or split apart. You've got different philosophies there.
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Maybe I could define them as the Ligon Duncan style versus the Tim Keller style.
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And then you've got PC, oh, you probably got EPC someplace in there, Evangelical Presbyterian Church.
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Did I say EPC? EP, EPA. You've got a whole variety of things.
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And you've got the PCUSA. And most likely you're going to get liberal teaching there.
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What's happening is there are some people who are more conservative in the PCUSA. I don't think they'd really be conservative, conservative, but compared to the rest of the, in my opinion, loonies in the
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PCUSA, there are some conservative ones in there. And a particular man wrote the PCUSA 2012, how we got here.
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Carmen Fowler LaBerge is the president and executive editor of The Layman.
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And you can just type this in, PCUSA 2012, how we got here. Here's in quotation marks.
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By Carmen Fowler LaBerge. I don't know, male, female, doesn't matter.
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The very back, it says the Presbyterian Lay Committee, The Layman, PLC Publications, The Layman Online.
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Layman .org. Something sounds very loud. Think it must be the heater, who knows?
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And I'd like to talk about this PCUSA 2012 article, how we got here, because it is fascinating to watch one compromise leads to, how it leads to the next one.
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As you know, the show is called No Compromise Radio, always biblical, always provocative, always in that order. And really the point is
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Jesus doesn't compromise. And therefore I don't want to compromise either, even though I know I do. Someone whacked me on the
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YouTube site about, well, any discernment ministry called
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No Compromise Radio has to be whacked out. Now, I don't think they've ever listened to the show and I don't think they ever will, but I think they're one of those big donors
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I will be meeting in California. I don't care if you're a big donor or not.
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I just, if you have a piece of coffee in your hand, you're my friend. Why can't we just all get along? What happens with a denomination?
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What happens with a church? What happens with a person when you start cutting corners, when you contour the rough edges of your doctrine off?
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Well, you don't have to go very far here in New England in the 1700s, 1750s through 80s, and you watch churches that were
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Calvinistic. People didn't like some of those doctrines about hell and predestination and or reprobation.
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And let's make things nicer, kindler, not kindler, kinder, gentler. That's the kindler is gentle and kind put together.
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And before you know it, you have Unitarian. You have Universalism.
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Oh, it started off maybe not quite that big a jump, but eventually it gets there. There are some
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Presbyterians in this Presbyterian PCUSA denomination that they don't like where the thing's gone because it has tanked.
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And it would document back in the old days, the Presbyterians, and remember, this is the group, if memory serves me, that Machen bolted from long, long time ago.
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In 1910, the General Assembly of the PCUSA, I think they were called
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Presbyterian Church USA back in those days. Maybe that was before they're split. They had five essential and necessary doctrines that all the ministers had to believe.
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They were known as the five points. See, you thought only the five points of Calvinism were the five points or the five souls of the
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Reformation. Well, the General Assembly of the PCUSA, they have five points. Inerrancy, virgin birth, substitutionary atonement, bodily resurrection, authenticity of, as we would say around here, miracles.
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Miracles. And that is a basic, that's basic fundamentalism is basically what it is.
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Things can go on as time moves. 1924 version,
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Auburn affirmation, same denomination. Everything here is the same denomination. Presbyterians must safeguard liberty of thought and teaching of its ministers.
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So you don't want to bind the scriptures, bind the minds of the ministers with scripture.
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Safeguard liberty of thought. I never think that's what I need. Whenever I train men for gospel ministry, I never say, oh, that's what they need, liberty of thought.
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Sorry, son, you're an errand boy, and you put your head down and you pass the baton to the next guy, don't drop it.
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That's gospel ministry there. Not, I'd like some liberty of thought. New thought, novel thought, that needs to be crushed.
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That's what that needs to be. You need to be tethered to the scriptures. Preach the word.
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Also, the Auburn affirmation said you needed to, as a Presbyterian, prohibit the restricting of church teaching to rigid interpretations of scripture and doctrine.
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I mean, you can just see this, not only in the PCUSA, but you can see it in the lives of other people.
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If I meet a young man, he's believed in inerrancy his whole life and grows up in the church and he's 22 years old, 25, and he starts doubting things,
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I say, and once in a while I could be wrong, of course, but in this regard, many times
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I'm exactly right. Maybe not in the specific, but I'll explain in just a minute.
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I say, what's her name? So if it's a young lady, she's questioning things. Does the
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Bible, you know, is it really inerrant, infallible, authoritative? What's his name?
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Because these kind of folks that grow up in a local church, especially, they realize what it says about fornication and other things and they've got to then deconstruct the
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Bible as not being fully God's word so they can sleep at night after they sin because conscience is a very, very sticky thing, isn't it?
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It's a prickly thing. It's a goad.
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It is a, one of those things you put underneath a saddle if you want to upset the horse.
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It's a burr. It's a, not cold burr, but the burr under the saddle.
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The Auburn Affirmation in 1924 also said that Presbyterians must, quote, "'refuse to rank ecclesiastical '."
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Elastical. It was really stretchy. It's a stretchy doctrine. Authority, ecclesiastical authority, or the authority of the
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Bible above that of the individual spirit -led conscience. Friends, the
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Bible always trumps conscience. I don't care if it's spirit -led or not because the spirit doesn't work outside and away from the word.
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The spirit works through the word, by the word, with the word. It's a problem with mysticism.
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Spirit of God working outside of the word. Can you just hear this?
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Safeguard liberty of thought. Stay away from rigid interpretations.
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You don't want to be bound, have your conscience bound to the authority of the
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Bible. Our author says, and so we arrived at a pivotal year in our history in 1969.
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Before 1969, there was a constitutional basis to call the church to reform. Until that year, we had still ordination vows that required officers to subscribe to the
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Bible catechisms, that is Westminster Confession of Faith, as containing the system of doctrine taught in scripture.
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I mean, this reminds me of Finney. You know, I'm a Presbyterian. I believe in Westminster Confession to get ordained and then does everything he can to teach the opposite.
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But in 1969, a book of confessions was adopted and a clear, that's the title of the book, book of confessions.
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And a clear shared confessional standard gave way to a catalog of confessions, including a new one, the
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Confession of 1967. They call it
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C67. I call it C3PO. C3PO departs from the confessions that preceded it and with it carries a new set of ordination vows.
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Oh, see where all this is going? Where do you think this is going? In which the person ordained acknowledges that the
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Bible may contain the word of God. By the way, anytime you hear that, No Compromise listeners, you immediately have red flags go off, red alert, sirens containing.
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No, it is the word of God. It doesn't contain the word of God. It doesn't become the word of God. It is the word of God.
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Back to this quote here, that the Bible may contain the word of God, but it is nevertheless the words of men. See, you've got to get rid of the
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Bible and its authority because they know what the Bible says about men in leadership roles and men and women who get married.
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Contra, men and men are women and women who say they're married or want to get so -called married.
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And ordained promises only to be guided by the confessions of the church. Oh, you just see the declension, not of nouns, but of doctrine and people.
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Now, if you were a PCUSA, you might not like it if the doctrine's going downhill, but what specially gets under people's skin, as it were, you lose money and people, churches.
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Interestingly, in 1967, it was also the year, the last year our denomination grew in church membership totals.
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Since then, membership has declined from 4 .5 million to less than 2 million. It's because everybody who's in any way conservative is bolting, they're taking off.
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They don't want anything to do with it. In the 70s, the, you know, this is just a rough day for me, bad.
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The proliferation of feminist and liberation theologies led the UPC, U -P -C -U -S -A, to a theological shift from evangelism centered on individual salvation to evangelism centered on corporate or communal liberation.
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That's all we need. What had been a theological term representing a redeemed relationship with God became a political term representing our freedom from oppressive external structures, e .g.
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race, gender. Isn't that an oppressive structure, gender? So one -sided, so lopsided.
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Economics, political regimes, the shift from being a sinner saved by grace alone from above, you know,
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Ephesians 2 stuff, to being an essentially good person saved by being liberated from external oppression paved the way for the denomination's foray into politics.
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But of course, and this article, what's a guy's name again?
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Maybe it's a guy, Carmen, U -P -C -U -S -A 2012, how we got here,
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Carmen Fowler LaBerge. Then what happens? Then they support
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Marxist rebels in Latin America. Then they support, guess who in Cuba, Cuba, Castro.
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They boycott Nestle, Taco Bell, Publix. I didn't know what
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Publix was until I went to Florida. They support
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Palestinian causes and they oppose Israel. That always strikes me as odd.
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They become pro -choice, including late -term abortions. And they want a single -payer universal healthcare program.
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You gotta worship somebody. You gotta put your energies into something. And this is exactly what happens.
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It's just mirrored in so many other people, denominations and groups. And Carmen shows the shift, continues, 1981.
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The point of the show here is compromise leads to more compromise. And once you say, I will not submit,
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I will not have this man reign over me, anything goes, and we know the direction of drift.
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We know the direction of drift. And the current is fast. It only gets faster.
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It builds momentum like a snowball rolling down a hill. In 1981, our church court, the
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General Assembly, Permanent Judicial Commission, upheld the ordination of Mansfield Kaisman.
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Kaisman was asked, was Jesus God? He responded, no, God is
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God. Later he explained, saying Jesus is one with God is a better way of saying it.
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But I too am one with God. I just have one word for that.
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Forget you, it's awful. 1993, as we see the downslide continuing, once you abandon the
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Bible, it's over, friends. So stick to the Bible. Be a workman who doesn't have to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.
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You follow men like Timothy and other apostolic legates like that, pastors who study, and you study as well.
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1993, a conference entitled, and I've mentioned this conference before, not in a good way, Reimagining God was held.
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I've always said, once you have a title of Reimagining God for your conference, it's over.
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I don't think we need folks hanging on crosses and blood dripping. Remember that one by the feminist?
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It weirds stuff. They prayed to the God of Sophia. And you know, here's the interesting thing.
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I never knew before, they replaced communion at that conference with milk and honey ceremony. 2001,
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General Assembly in Louisville, Kentucky, which is right down the street from Southern Seminary. I find that fascinating.
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Spent a great deal of time considering controversial proposals regarding interfaith relations and worship.
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See how that goes? Finally, one commissioner offered a motion that the assembly declare, quote, the singular saving
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Lordship of Jesus Christ. It was defeated. It was disrespectful to other religions.
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One speaker said, religions are like a basket of fruit. Apples and oranges are different, but they are all fruit.
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Religions are different varieties of the same thing. So they're all equal. So much for Christology, soteriology.
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And now you move to universalism, syncretism, blend all the faiths together, mind meld them.
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Spock would be very happy. And we need to change some more nation vows along with our new beliefs, right?
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We have to reflect those according to the liberal down, what do they call that?
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Downgrade. PCUSA officers take one vow regarding the
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Bible. Do you accept the scriptures of the Old and New Testament to be by the Holy Spirit, the unique and authoritative witness to Jesus Christ in the church universal and God's word to you?
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Yes, to me it is. How awful. It's not
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God's word, but it is to me. How about this vow?
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Do you sincerely receive and adopt the essential tenants of the reformed faith? Yeah, but they never said what they are.
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That's reformed. 1978, the General Assembly declared that unrepentant homosexual practice does not accord with the requirements for ordination.
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1993, General Assembly said the same thing. 1996, what do you think what happened?
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Those who are called to office of the church are to lead a life in obedience to the scripture and in conformity to the historic confessional standards of the church.
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Persons refusing to repent of any self -acknowledged practice which the confessions call sin shall not be ordained and or installed as deacons, elders, or ministers of the word and sacrament.
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G6, but we can't have that. We will not have that. So in 2001, they formed something called a people that's really, in my mind, just so awful.
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Peace, Unity, and Purity Task Force. It was also known as PUP. It's true.
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You can't make it up. They said, why do we have discord in the denomination? So what did PUP want?
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PUP wanted some recommended solutions. And what PUP wants,
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PUP gets because we've got discord. You know, that little sticky wicket that the Bible divides and doctrine divides and everything.
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2008, they wanted to delete this G6. 2010, we've got the
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LGBTQ ordination prevailed and they replaced the GA G6 number to calls,
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BR 549. They replace it with new language. The fidelity chastity language was removed.
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And churches dropped to less than 100 members. Half of the churches have only 100 members.
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In the meantime, this author says, we close far more churches than we plant and we bury more than we baptize.
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Sorry for him, but good because the thing is dead. It's apostate and it is over.
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You can read more about this because it is fascinating. At layman .org,
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the PCUSA 2012, how we got here. I could say more about this and maybe
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I will, but why stay, why go? It's apostate. My name is
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Mike Abendroth, this is No Compromise Radio. We don't want to compromise. We want to follow the
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Lord and his apostolic messengers and hold fast the word of truth, right? That's what we wanna do, not to deviate.
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I don't wanna teach new things, novel things, politically correct things. I wanna take that baton that was handed to me by John MacArthur and other men and pass it along without dropping it, adding or subtracting.
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