In his “Why we are stronger together” workshop at the Presbyterian Church (USA)’s Big Tent 2015, Philip W. Butin, presented his 10 Biblical, theological and practical reasons to “Make every effort to maintain the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace (Eph. 4:3)”
During his presentation Butin, who co-pastors First United Presbyterian Church in Fayetteville, Ark. with his wife, told those attending the workshop that he was currently serving on a presbytery discernment team, and that the church his team was working with was really trying to discern God’s will, and they were listening to the presbytery. At this time, he said, the church had not made any moves toward leaving.
Butin said there were “a few churches thinking about if they should be in” in the PCUSA due to certain changes that had been made in the denomination. This has been happening since the 1960s, he added, over various issues.
Asking, “What are some important reasons for Presbyterians to stay together?” Butin’s list of ten included three Biblical reasons, four theological reasons and three practical reasons.
Biblical Reason #1: “The church is the body of Christ.”
Reading various verses from the fourth chapter of Ephesians, Butin said “obviously the author wants to emphasize unity.”
This is where unity “requires difference,” Butin stated. “If the Father, Son and Holy Spirit were all the same in the Trinity, there would not be a Trinity. If all are the same in the church, there would not be a body of Christ. … God’s strategy is ‘if you want to be one, you have to be different.’”
He read verse 7 “But each of us was given grace according to the measure of Christ’s gift.” That is pretty much overflowing, Butin said. “The point is that not everyone has the same grace, but each of us has different ways of reflecting God’s grace depending on the gifts given.”
Biblical Reason #2: “Jesus prayed that His followers would be one.”
In John 17:21-23, Jesus prayed that his followers would “be one,” said Butin. “Our unity is an important part of our witness.”
Biblical Reason #3: “Love is the most important mark of the church.”
“Look through the New Testament,” Butin said. “Love is the most important mark of the church – not being right … not everyone being on the same page.”
Reading John 13:34-35, what he called the Love Commandment, Butin said that “thinking about leaving a community because you are upset needs to be questioned if we love because He first loved us.”
He also read from John 15:12-17, saying that “if there is love in the church it is a true church. If there is not love in a church, it is not a true church.”
Theological Reason #4: “We confess one holy, catholic and apostolic church.”
That confession, he said, comes from the Nicene Creed. Butin showed a list of the “Marks of the church” from the PCUSA’s Book of Order (F-1.0302). They include:
- Unity
- Holiness
- Catholicity
- Apostolicity
“For Presbyterians, each of these four marks are God’s gifts to the church in Jesus Christ,” he said. “We believe we are called to actively seek unity, holiness catholicity and apostolicity in order to fulfill Gods intention for the church.”
He mentioned the tension between unity, which is defined as staying together, and holiness which is defined as being set apart.
He encouraged those in the workshop that if they knew anyone or of any church that was leaving the PCUSA – “or if you are on a presbytery committee dealing with a church leaving” – ask these questions:
- How has God called us to be one?
- How has God called us to be holy?
- How has God called us to be catholic?
- How has God called us to be apostolic?
Theological Reason #5: “The church is our mother”
“Can you think of some ways the church is like our mother?”
The answers Butin heard from those in the workshop included: nurturing, discipline, keeping us in line and teacher.
He then quoted John Calvin:
But as it is now our purpose to discourse of the visible Church, let us learn, from her single title of Mother, how useful, nay, how necessary the knowledge of her is, since there is no other means of entering into life unless she conceive us in the womb and give us birth, unless she nourish us at her breasts, and, in short, keep us under her charge and government, until, divested of mortal flesh, we become like the angels, (Matt. 22: 30.) For our weakness does not permit us to leave the school until we have spent our whole lives as scholars. Moreover, beyond the pale of the Church no forgiveness of sins, no salvation, can be hoped for, as Isaiah and Joel testify, (Isa. 37: 32; Joel 2: 32.) (1559 Institutes IV.1.4)
“Calvin didn’t make this up,” said Butin. “It goes back to Cyprian, who said that you can’t have God as a Father if the church is not your mother.”
“If your mother is aging … maybe even loses her memory and forgets who she is. I think you know where I am going with this,” he said. He then alleged that this is what some people who are leaving the denomination are saying about the PCUSA. So what do you do, he asked? “If your mother is aging do you leave her for another mother?”
Theological Reason #6 “The PCUSA still reflects the marks of the true church”
For reason #6, Butin read from the PCUSA’s Book of Order:
In addition to the universal ‘marks’ of the church from the Nicene Creed, Protestants acknowledge ‘notes’ of the visible church that help us to recognize the presence of Christ in the true church.
These are still reflected in the PCUSA, he said. “It is not confessional or Reformed to leave a church.”
Theological Reason #7: “We are always to be motivated by faith, hope and love”
Butin mentioned several Scripture texts when discussing reason #7.
What, he asked “are our motivations?”
He also asked “In your experience what are some of the feelings, reactions or attitudes that have motivated people to want to leave the PCUSA?”
The answers included frustration, discouragement and betrayal.
“If a congregation or individual were to seek to leave the PCUDSA, do you believe this could be a faithful response to God’s calling in scripture?,” Butin asked, and then indicated that he does not see it as faithful.
Practical Reason #8: “General assembly votes cannot reflect the whole church or the whole truth”
Butin said that the PCUSA’s General Assembly is “just 500-600 people delegated to pray and to vote. We are committed as Presbyterians to respect those decisions.”
He did admit that councils have erred at times but then affirmed that’s not evident in the current decisions. The recent General Assembly decisions related to homosexuality are carefully worded, said Butin. Those who don’t agree with the decisions are protected. “No one has to do anything,” he continued. “The traditional positions need to be respected.”
Seemingly contradicting himself, he added that, “Jesus didn’t say that the PCUSA is the way, the truth and the life. He said I am the way the truth and the life.”
Practical Reason #9: “Leaving is not likely to help Presbyterians as a whole to impact our culture more profoundly for Christ and his kingdom”
Butin declared that the PCUSA was “between a rock and a hard place. Either we expand our boundaries as a Presbyterian church, so we continue to include people as the world changes, or we continue to split off and be bound by certain issues.”
“We have made lots of changes making a bigger tent instead of a smaller tent,” he said. “Let’s have a bigger tent and let’s all celebrate baptism, the Lord’s Supper and Biblical teaching, but have a broader sense of the breadth of who is welcome in our community. … Let’s invite people in and have less rigid boundaries.”
Practical Reason #10: “We need one another: conservative, liberal, and everything in between”
“You can take my body and split it in half,” Butin said. The right side and the left side. But what happens to the body? It’s dead.
“We need each other because we are the body of Christ,” he said.
“If we can believe in something like the Apostle’s Creed … if we have the same basic core beliefs … Let’s stay together. Let’s minister together,” he said.
14 Comments. Leave new
As someone who who is still in the pcusa, but is in favor of churches leaving with their property at no charge, I would’ve had to have access to an open bar to listen to this dribble.
The discernment process is nothing more now than the presbyteries discerning how much money they can get from parting congregations.
If staying meant that we could all agree and disagree and just keep it at that, then there would be plenty of reasons to stay in unity. However, PCUSA controls where all the money goes and what they want to support and where they choose to divest from – and that’s more than just discussion. If they didn’t wield power in funding, then everything above would be valid. Unfortunately, with PCUSA using the money as they see fit, then all ten points above are just nice ideas. There can be no unity where one side uses money that the other side has no say in. People need to face the fact that right now as things stand, there is no reasoning with the hardliners in PCUSA. We either accept their new ideas or get out, follow the new order or get out.
As usual, the denomination loyalist proclaims that the PC(USA) is the ‘Church’, as if it were the only ‘true’ church.
All the PC(USA) is, is a vine on the vast tree that is the Church, albeit a sick and withering vine, slowing detaching from the doctrine as has been known for 2,000 years.
“The PCUSA still reflects the marks of the true church.”
I cannot disagree more. Essential doctrines central to the Gospel of Jesus Christ, such as the Penal Substitutionary Atonement and Salvation by Grace Alone through Faith Alone in Christ Alone are regarded as mere “theories” and disbelieved by a great many pastors and teachers in the PC(USA), and the recent redefinition of marriage greatly perverts and distorts the marriage of Christ and His Church in the marriage of one man and one woman. I am sure that there are many PC(USA) pastors and teachers that still faithfully proclaim the Gospel, but there are many, many more who do not.
“Leaving is not likely to help Presbyterians as a whole to impact our culture more profoundly for Christ and his kingdom.”
PC(USA) Presbyterians have not profoundly impacted the culture for Christ for at least the last half century. Sadly, the unbelieving culture has profoundly impacted the Presbyterian Church (USA), as evidenced by the latter’s vapid insistence that the Church must conform itself to the culture in order to retain its young people.
“We need one another: conservative, liberal, and everything in between.”
“Conservative” v. “liberal” is NOT the issue! The issue is believer v. unbeliever
“Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers. For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness? What accord has Christ with Belial? Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever? What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God; as God said, ‘I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Therefore go out from their midst, and be separate from them, says the Lord, and touch no unclean thing; then I will welcome you, and I will be a father to you, and you shall be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty.’” (II Cor. 6.14-18)
Evangelicals have long remained in the Presbyterian Church (USA) in order to be salt and light, to be a prophetic witness for Jesus Christ in the context of a spiritually desolate denomination that has turned its back on God as He is revealed in the totality of the Scriptures, in order to call said denomination to repentance. But theirs has been the errand of Isaiah, to whom the Lord said, “Go and say to this people: Listen intently, but don’t understand; look carefully, but don’t comprehend. Make the minds of this people dull. Make their ears deaf and their eyes blind, so they can’t see with their eyes or hear with their ears, or understand with their minds, and turn, and be healed.” (Is. 6.9-10)
Now, many Evangelical Presbyterian individuals and congregations are discerning the Lord’s call to separate from the moribund PC(USA) and to join themselves instead to congregations and denominations that, like David, are “after (His) heart, who will do all (His) will.” (Acts 13.22)
I recall a simular power point by a denominational functionary at a Presbytery meeting a few years ago, same empty platitudes. I challenged her post meeting with a simple question. Say you can have one of two conditions, you cannot have both at the same time, one needs to choose. 1. you can have functional or administrative unity in the denomination, for whatever that may be worth. or, 2. you can have a process to extract or get money out of said institution, at the expense of unity? You must choose, what would the choice be? Her silence said all that needed to be said.
All it would take to establish trust in the institution across all sections and isles of the church would be to repeal the property in trust clause, could be done as easily as an AI at the next GA? Your sisters and soul mates in the UCC and UU operate under the similar understandings. Where is the hate and discontent in those groups? Of course that will not happen in the PCUSA because money and power are involved. As the Left is apt to say, no justice, no peace.
Many believe that we have been in the end times since 1948 when the nation of Israel was reborn.
I think the words of Jesus as quoted in Matthew 24 cover this very nicely:
“See that no one leads you astray. 5For many will come in my name, saying, ‘I am the Christ,’ and they will lead many astray.
“11And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray.”
The more they open their mouth, the more disunity there is. The more they promote” big tent” ideas as unity, the more we know it is A false message.
How can opposite views exist together, how can belief and unbelief unite us
and witness to our world? There are different visions waring against each other.
Sessions are divided, churches are divided, presbyteries are divided,
the GA was divided all because of a philosophy that every one can act according to their own conscience.
New Christians will be lost in this environment and that is why I can no longer support this denomination. If people are not grounded in Scripture they will be confused by the messages in this denominations and some will be lost.
To all: I you are still in the PCUSA, you should talk to your Session in order to have them present and promote an ammendment to the Book of Order to eliminate the trust clause.
And here’s a real scary thought: the next GA conference is coming up in 2016. Can you imagine what new ideas this next group will come up with?
Where to begin? So many errors in such a short space. I’ll start with the first and most obvious: PC(USA) is not the Body of Christ.
The fact is that even if individual churches are unable to leave PC(USA) at this point, Christians will. There are a lot of Bible-believing churches that are growing in most communities just as mainline denominations such as PC(USA) are dying because of their apostasy. Scripture is clear that you have to come out of a church controlled by false teachings, teachers and pastors, because that church is not part of the Body of Christ. The infection is now everywhere in the mainline and you must not be part of it. Coming home from our church last Sunday, we drove past our local Episcopal Church which sat there empty with its doors locked, just as it has been for a couple of years. The school there has been closed for more than 10 years now because all the families had left. My wife said how sad it was to see a dead church, especially on the Lord’s Day. But apparently the endowment is enough to keep the grass cut and the landscaping done, so it just sits there. That is the fate to which PC(USA) is now also consigned.
Amen! Absolutely true!
Pathetic! The True Church is not an institution. PCUSA is no longer part of the Church of Christ.
Unity and diversity in 1 Corinthians 12 is all about different Spiritual Gifts
and how God arranges us in the whole church to bring about God’s will
in our world. Here is a verse in the middle of that chapter that helps us
evaluate where God wants us to be serving.
” But God has set the members, each one of them in the body just as He pleased.”
For me, this gives me permission to prayerfully before God in discernment
consider where God wants me to be placed. It is not about a mandate
to stay in the PCUSA (or leave) but rather a matter of obeying where
God calls me.
Each of us is in that decision making process. God is moving people around and we need to stop being complacent or make a denomination an idol. Ten reasons to stay together is secondary to God’s call. I respect the call God has for where you are placed…..in or out of the PCUSA and hope
there can be respect for those who choose to leave. It is God’s work not our work.
The place the Holy Spirit is putting you for the sake of God’s will is the reason and motivation for which you make your decision. It is a higher calling, above anger or frustration, to obey God and powerful in results
and in realizing the unity of purpose to obey God for saving people in this generation.
I associate a “Big Tent” with a circus; sadly that’s what the PCUSA seems to have become.