Tim Keller's essay on why he loved the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) has become something of a canonical text for denominational leaders and pastors. In it, Keller defines the three dominant blocs of the communion as doctrinalists, transformationalists, and pietists.
Doctrinalists are the party most concerned with the theological purity of the church. Transformationalists tend to be more outward focused and concerned with the renewal of culture. Pietists remind us of the core teachings of Christian faith and the basic daily practices of the Christian life.
Doctrinalists at their best are intellectually serious, deep in history, devoted to the teachings handed down by our fathers and mothers, and keen to see them passed on to the next generation. They help remind us all of the centrality of theology, study, and the preached Word in the life of the church.
The transformationalists at their best are missionally engaged, astute observers of culture, strategic in their forms of engagement and able to create mass change in unique ways. Their ambition, concern with the universality of Christian discipleship, and desire to see whole societies and cultures and institutions transformed by the Gospel call all of us to deeper fidelity to Christ and a faith that is not only personally engaging, but also publicly significant.
The pietists remind us of the basics. They call us to ordinary love of God and love of neighbor. They play the Puddleglum-like role of reminding us that if we have mastered core reformational doctrines or launched multiple thriving outreach ministries but lack love, then it is all for nothing. Their sincerity, warmth, and focus is a gift to us all.
This, of course, is a large part of Tim's argument: All three of these streams are good and necessary in Christian movements, all three are natural children of the Reformed theological tradition, and so the best thing a Reformed denomination can do is figure out how to get all three to play nicely together instead of picking one or maybe two sides to run with and leaving the others out. And in all of that I think Keller was obviously correct. But also for his proposal to work, members of each bloc need to be closer to the healthier expression of that group. And lately in our communion it has felt rather more like we are regularly seeing each at our worst.
So what does each stream look like when it isn't healthy?
Because of their primary concerns, the doctrinalists tend always to operate with one eye on the past—which isn't at all bad in itself. But this tendency to almost reverence past leaders and movements can cause them to adopt a fatalist sensibility about denominational decline. They seem to end up thinking that denominations are always and inevitably getting worse because they are always and inevitably drifting progressive. This leads them to react with great hostility to ideas of how to improve or renew denominations due to an instinctive hostility to any change that can in any way be coded as "progressive" in nature, even if the changes aren't actually progressive.
At its worst, this leads the doctrinalists to schism after schism as each new denomination fails, in their view, to successfully pass on the faith and, therefore, must be abandoned. One small group that broke off from the PCA several years ago has already had its own schism since leaving the PCA. In terms of their daily life in the church, they tend to construct ideas of what is "essential" to believe and their ideas of this are almost always narrower than the PCA's actual confessional standards and denominational rules. Prone to fear and suspicion, they can strain at gnats in the ministries of their brothers and create atmospheres in which it is impossible for presbyteries to accomplish anything through relationship; everything becomes captive to procedures and processes.
I am aware of one case, for example, in which a pastor who was attempting to remove a minister from his pulpit over theological disputes casually mentioned to the presbytery that he had spent more than 60 hours reviewing the other minister's sermons for signs of heretical teaching. How a minister serving as the lone pastor of a small church can make the time for such things is still a mystery to me many years later. Moreover, when you inform everyone in your presbytery that you are willing to dedicate 60 hours of time to listening to a brother's sermons in hopes of getting him removed from ministry... well, it tells everyone else in the room that you'd theoretically be willing to do the same to them. There are few things more destructive of trust within a presbytery than behavior of that sort.
Meanwhile, when the transformationalists are at their worst they will burn churches on altars to their own failed aspirations. When their ambitions, nearly always too large for one person's ministry, are thwarted or disappointed by the realities of church life, they can give into their own sort of rage. But it is not usually expressed through plain aggression, as with the doctrinalists. Rather it is conveyed through a plaintive passive aggressive posture that begs listeners to view them as victims of forces outside their control. (These "forces" are almost always the doctrinalists, who will somehow end up being slandered as racists or fascists at some point in the conversation.) When that fails, they pivot to a similarly entitled sense of disappointment and resentment toward the people who, in their eyes, failed them. (These people are usually just "people who went to my church that I did not like.")
This whiney public posture alienates many, rendering them untrustworthy and ineffective within denominational politics, even when the things they are calling for are often good or, at the very least, not particularly objectionable.
Finally, the pietists at their worst become clueless and apathetic. They struggle to connect the dots between procedural matters like presbytery meetings or overtures to the general assembly and the ordinary work of pastoral care. So they tend to roll their eyes at the fights between the first two groups. They can be dismissive toward their brothers who do care about such things and highly disengaged from the life of their home denomination.
All of this is some necessary background before I can make a few brief observations about the much discussed seminar that was (and then wasn't).
First, due to the weaknesses described above in the doctrinalist bloc, it is not surprising that a rotting doctrinalism looks very like an angry, aggressive Twitter swarm. Effective denominational leadership will require ignoring such swarms. But it will also require not doing the sort of things that embolden the swarms and legitimize their concerns in the eyes of others in the church.
Second, the whiney response of many leaders more friendly to French has rather vindicated many of the concerns raised by those opposed to the seminar.
Third, regardless of what one thinks of French's work, denominational leaders owe him an apology for what has happened over the past several weeks. Given how polarizing French himself has become, he struck me as a strange choice for the panel. But the way denominational leadership effectively threw him under the bus and then handled the decision to cancel the event was simply unprofessional.
Fourth, there is a further leadership failure here as well: This was an 8am seminar slot that no one ever goes to because it is at 8am. It is amongst the least important things that goes on at General Assembly. So denominational leaders managed to take something as trivial as a barely attended 8am seminar and turn it into a significant scissor within the church one month before we convene for our national gathering.
Fifth, as far as I can tell, basically all the plausible healthy futures for the PCA involve two key things: a) teaching and ruling elders spending far less time on Twitter and Facebook Groups, b) denominational leaders and prominent figures ending their alarming habit of vindicating online swarms through bad judgment.
Now, strange as it may seem given how negative all of the above was, I want to try and pivot these observations toward something more constructive because I think there are actually plenty of reasons to be hopeful about the PCA's future, provided we can stop sabotaging ourselves with unnecessary errors and own goals.
All things considered, the PCA actually has an enormous amount to be grateful for. Many things are going quite well, though they're seldom talked about with anything like the frequency and attentiveness we give to our problems. We are still growing, which is virtually unheard of amongst literally any other traditionally white Protestant denomination in American Christianity. In the 18 years I have been part of the PCA we have added 51,446 members and 282 churches. We also have a successful campus ministry that has likely saved us from the demographic collapse facing most other denominations in America. There are many healthy presbyteries, literally hundreds of healthy, thriving churches, and much else to be grateful for besides. For example, I got to spend a few days last August at RTS-Orlando for an event there and found the entire stay immensely encouraging. (While not officially part of the PCA, RTS-Orlando has extensive ties to the PCA, such that a healthy, thriving RTS-Orlando is extremely good news for the PCA as a whole.)
Additionally, I actually think the problems afflicting the PCA right now are almost all less intense forms of the exact same problems affecting everyone in American evangelicalism at the moment. So if you're going to leave the PCA, you either need to go non-denominational (which has its own problems with accountability, structure, and influence, of course) or you're going to end up joining another denomination with problems that will look very, very familiar once you've settled down in your new home.
Let's begin with a quick recap of the six-way fracturing schema that Michael Graham and Skyler Flowers created to describe the fragmenting of American evangelicalism.
The four relevant groups for church life are as follows. I'm also including a publisher with each one to serve as a kind of institutional example of each:
What follows will have a bit of jargon to it, but if you simply keep those four categories in mind, it should still make sense.
Most denominations in America have a range that covers three of those four categories. If you're the Southern Baptist Convention or Anglican Church in North America, the range runs from mid 1 to mid or high 3. If you're the Christian Reformed Church the range runs from low 2 to mid 4. When you have a range so broad, it makes denominational action very difficult. The gap in shared concerns, experience, media consumed, etc. between a mid range 1 and a mid range 3 is nearly impossible to overcome.
There are, of course, denominations and networks that have a narrower range of viewpoints. But the range runs from, say, low 3 to high 4 (mainline denominations like the Episcopal Church or the Presbyterian Church (USA)) or low 1 to mid 2 (the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, or CREC). In those denominations, it is very hard to resist a creeping extremism because neo-evangelicals are generally not good at resisting progressive evangelicals, and mainstream evangelicals are generally bad at resisting neo-fundamentalists. So these denominations will naturally trend in ever more extremist directions as time passes, especially as their moderates burn out and leave in search of calmer ecclesial contexts.
What makes the PCA unique is that we have a narrower range of viewpoints and a healthier range. The PCA has been more of a low 2 to mid 3 denomination for most of its recent history, which makes our conflicts a bit simpler than what you might find in the SBC or ACNA. Sadly, this is beginning to change as the low 2s sometimes become frustrated and move lower on the scale and the mid 3s do the same, but moving higher on the scale. The danger we face now is that we would expand our range of viewpoints in the communion via negative polarization and soon find ourselves with our own version of the problems affecting the SBC, ACNA, and CRC at present. We should work to prevent that change from happening, however. Low 2s and mid 3s can still usually find some common concerns, experiences, and so on which help to anchor their trust and shared life in an institution.
To take one example, I remember talking with Tim Keller about his role on the denomination's sexuality report. He and Kevin DeYoung were the two biggest "names" on the committee and would naturally end up playing a significant role in shaping the document. So when they had a long layover in the same airport, they took the time to walk around the airport for several hours discussing the report. At the end of it, Tim told me, they were both fairly surprised to realize that they had very few real disagreements. That unanimity that existed between a low 2 figure like DeYoung and a low 3 like Keller showed up in the report, which I still think is one of the best documents of its kind that any church has produced in recent memory.
As long as we can maintain that primary range of low 2 to mid 3, it will limit the scale of the fights that happen. To see what I mean, consider that the SBC is currently dealing with an attempted takeover from a well-moneyed group of neo-fundamentalists (some of whom aren't even part of the SBC) while the Christian Reformed Church currently has a considerable number of 4s teaching at one of their denominational colleges and brazenly defying the church's stated affirmation of the orthodox teachings on sexuality. If you're in the PCA now, I suspect you would rather deal with the fights we have than find yourself fighting fundamentalists with close ties to Nazi pornographers or fighting progressive evangelicals who are openly defying church teaching with no apparent consequence.
I say this not to minimize the issues we are facing in the PCA or to minimize the real things that need to be repented of. Rather, my goal here is to try and give PCA elders, who spend much of their time attending to church matters (and rightly so), some broader context for the evangelical world so that they can see that the fights we're having in the PCA aren't unique to us and actually the versions of them happening outside the PCA are often quite a bit worse.
Moreover, not only are things often more complicated outside the PCA, I also think there is hope for things to get better in the PCA. It doesn't have to be this way. Doctrinalists can choose to calm down, ask questions of their brothers rather than accuse them, and generally adopt a more measured presence in the church. Indeed, some are already doing this—DeYoung comes to mind. The transformationalists can choose to be less hostile to the doctrinalists, to sacrifice some of their own ambition for the good of the church, and to generally eschew whining and victimization as public advocacy strategies. The pietists, meanwhile, must recognize the real ways in which engagement in the procedural life of the church is an occasion to love neighbor because it is an occasion to see to the organizational life of our communion and to insure that our house is in order. It has been said that budgets are moral documents because the day to day choices we make about how to use our money is itself indicative of the state of our heart. In a similar way, procedures, committees, and meetings can be an occasion for love of neighbor because the work that is done through these systems can help the entire church be healthier and more faithful.
General Assembly could be an occasion for joy, for brothers to dwell together in unity, which Scripture tells us is good, and to reflect on the many ways God has been faithful to us. Often that actually is what goes on at GA, even if you might not know it from the squabbling that can happen there as well and that always attracts more attention.
Even so, my call here is not for the PCA to become something different, do something wildly new, or to attempt some project of internal revolution to purge some undesirable group from the church. My call, rather, is for us to be what we have always been when we are at our best.