First came “good faith” subscription, then an proposal for women deaconesses, followed by the Strategic Plan. Now comes the National Partnership. It was a semi-private group of PCA pastors whose aim was to help the PCA out of the predicament that Tim Keller once celebrated — its diversity, that is, the inability of officers and members to agree on basic matters such as what constitutes Reformed Protestantism and a Reformed church. The Partners were a covert enterprise until their “confidential” letter went public at the Aquila Report. The Partners aims are three:
1. Greater participation in the Polity of the PCA through church courts. We keep our members informed on presbytery work (including key votes) across the denomination and provide resources for those presbyters seeking advice.
2. Greater dedication to the work of the Assembly through preparation, committee participation and floor debate. We seek to staff committees for healthy and effective denominational business.
3. Greater love for the Brethren through resourcing and communication. We share ideas and uphold our good faith subscription to the standards, preferring charitable and respectful dialogue over the action of courts in settling theological differences.
These aims will help in “preserving and advancing our beloved Church as the gospel-centered, pastoral, missional and reformed denomination our forefathers envisioned,” and “serve our denomination by active engagement in the church courts the Lord has entrusted to us.”
One question that arises from these aims is why the PCA’s current Presbyterian polity and standards for ordination and membership are incapable of serving these ends. Perhaps the problem is that the denomination is divided over whether or not to follow its standards of polity, theology, and worship. That might explain the language of love and dedication. You go subjective when the objective isn’t working.
Andy Webb interprets that Partnership as another effort to thwart the voices and efforts of conservatives in the PCA:
Despite the manifest failure of conservatives to move the PCA in a conservative direction in matters of critical importance like creation, the National Partnership represents the second major group formed by PCA liberals and moderates to attempt to overcome our supposed influence. If your objective is to force conservatives out of the PCA, you will probably succeed. Many of us are already teetering on the brink of leaving, and making it clear that we will never be allowed to influence the PCA to cause it to remain on what we believe to be a Biblical and confessional path or hold positions in the denominational leadership would probably be all that it takes to force us out.
I don’t presume to advise the PCA on its problems opportunities even if it was the first Reformed communion to have (all about) me as a member. But I can draw on experience in the OPC and make a couple of suggestions.
First, Webb talks about the gatherings of conservatives in the PCA in ways that resemble the after-hours activities of OPC commissioners to General Assembly:
When conservatives do meet, it is usually a casual smoker at an event convened for other purposes, such as the General Assembly, the GPTS Spring Conference or Twin Lakes. There is no docket, no moderator, no secret handshake and little or no consensus. Usually we sit around, catch up with old friends, discuss theology and politics, and engage in the conservative’s favorite past-time: complaining about the direction in which things are going both in the culture and the denomination. Occasionally solutions to perceived problems are offered, but there is hardly ever agreement on them and nothing is implemented.
In other words, conservatives in the OPC don’t have to have special gatherings because they are already meeting to do the work of the church. No one really knows if conservatives dominate the OPC because the denomination’s ministry is generally confessional and those who belong to it sense intuitively and explicitly the boundaries of participation. Envelope pushers know when they have left the fold and do so.
Second, the OPC pitches in for all its ministries. To be sure, not every congregation contributes to the funds of World Wide Outreach which pays funds the work of foreign missions, home missions, and Christian education. Some congregations can barely afford a pastor. But the OPC has a strong sense of the collective ministry of the church such that denominational efforts are the business of the entire church. In contrast, the PCA, as Paul Settle’s 25th anniversary history shows, has operated much more along congregational as opposed to presbyterian models. Missionaries have to raise their own funding; agencies have to do the same whether through sales of materials or direct contributions from wealthy individual donors. The PCA is presbyterian formally, but does not function that way.
The lesson may be that the PCA needs to go from being the Southern Baptist Convention to a truly Reformed church where ministers (even celebrated ones), congregations, presbyteries, and agencies all recognize that they are already partners in a common enterprise regulated by Presbyterian polity, Calvinist theology, and Reformed worship.
Old Life 