The pastors of two large and prominent Presbyterian (PCUSA) churches are reacting negatively to the decision of the recent General Assembly to attempt a change in the denomination's constitution that would remove the clause requiring sexual faithfulness within marriage as the only biblical sexual expression. Story in the Layman Online.

Pastor Vic Pentz, of the Peachtree Presbyterian church in Atlanta, the denomination's largest congregation with 8700 members stated that the PCUSA is

a slow motion train wreck for the past thirty years. . . . the smoke seems at last to have cleared, and the steaming debris of the PCUSA has settled into place. It's not a pretty sight. One thing (is) for sure: this Humpty won't be getting back together again for a long time, if ever.
. . .
The battle is lost for evangelical renewal groups within the system. The old 'stay-fight-and win' strategy is history."


Pastor Ron Scates of the Highland Park Presbyterian Church in Dallas said

The PCUSA is clearly on a path of self-destruction in cutting herself off from the larger, global church, . . . [the denomination is taking a] different path than the path God has revealed to the Church in His Word.

Highland Park Presbyterian will be considering withholding funds from the denomination.

If these two major and influential churches leave the PCUSA, expect an exodus. On the plus side, with these two responses, the proposed changes to the Constitution may be dead in the water with the presbyteries, where similar proposals have been rejected twice in the last ten years.

Previous post on the General Assembly actions this summer.

Hard to believe that the major source of theology for the fundamentalist movement in America came from the nineteenth-century faculty of the Princeton Theological Seminary, the flagship Presbyterian seminary. After chapel on weekday mornings I drank coffee with friends under the portrait of B. B. Warfield.