Tag: NAPARC

Does Aaron Renn Really Think Elites Will Save Us?

Published on by D. G. Hart2 Comments

Trying to situate Aaron Renn on the landscape of twenty-first century American Protestantism is a tall order. The Indiana native, who consults on urban planning and opines about churches, describes himself as a writer who covers “the human, cultural, and institutional foundations of American flourishing during an era of transition.” (Full disclosure: as someone who considers himself an urbanist, I regularly read and benefit from Renn’s social media links and commentary on urban planning, politics, and economies.)

Renn came to the attention of many with his First Things article (Feb. 2022) on the three worlds of evangelicalism, a scheme that identified 2014 as the beginning of an era when being Christian in America was no longer an asset but a defect. This was around the same time that he helped to found “American Reformer” as an outlet for aggressively Protestant reflection about politics and society. Over time, “American Reformer” became a platform for pronouncements on Christian nationalism, though Renn never seemed to embrace the label. His outlook about the importance of Christians establishing culture-shaping institutions is clearly compatible with Christian nationalism but Renn himself has not waded into those turbulent and sometimes dirty waters.

One other part of Renn’s body of work so far to attract attention is his lament about the absence of evangelical elites. Again at First Things (where the editor, Rusty Reno, features an odd selection of Protestant writers), Renn wrote the provocative article, “The Problem with the Evangelical Elite” (December 2025). The problem comes at readers fast and hard in Renn’s opening paragraph:

The problem with the evangelical elite is that there isn’t one. All too few evangelical Christians hold senior positions in the ―culture-shap―ing domains of American ―society. Evangelicals don’t run movie studios or serve as editors in chief of major newspapers or as presidents of elite universities. There are no evangelicals on the Supreme Court. There are hardly any leading evangelical academics or artists. There are few evangelicals at commanding heights of finance. The prominent evangelicals in Silicon Valley can be counted on one hand. There are not even many evangelicals leading influential conservative think tanks and publications, despite the fact that evangelicals are one of the largest and most critical voting blocs in the Republican coalition.

Renn goes on to offer an explanation for the problem. Evangelicals stress soul-winning over vocation and lack institutions that incubate leaders in business, law, technology, and higher education. But his analysis comes with a reason to be concerned about the lack of evangelical elites. Renn views the United States as a society coded Protestant. Consequently, for the country to go forward in a healthy way, it needs people who come from America’s historic religious heritage. “America needs Protestants to take on the leadership burdens of society,” he writes, “and in view of the dramatic decline of mainline Protestantism, they must come from evangelical ranks.”

Renn does concede the presence of evangelicals in certain elite positions but deems this inadequate for providing real leadership. The one place where evangelicals produce “elites” is in Christian ministry. Renn writes, “evangelicals overwhelmingly fund and support people who focus on Christian ministry” and create “pathways to sponsorship for missionaries, church planters, and campus ministers.” They do not do the same for “people engaged in secular domains and activities.” Renn used Grok to supply the receipts. When asked about the top evangelical leaders, AI supplied the names of “fifteen evangelical elites” that was “100 percent pastors and other professional Christians.” A similar query for Roman Catholics produced a list where only 20 percent were clergy.

Renn’s nonchalance about evangelical pastors and theologians may explain why he pays so little attention to the communions that belong to NAPARC. He does not say this explicitly, but it comes through in the people he does interview on his podcast. He has hosted leaders of the Reconquista in mainline Protestantism, both Jake Dell (another contributor to First Things), a Congregationalist in Woodbury, Connecticut, and Richard Ackerman of Redeemed Zoomer fame, as an apologist for the PCUSA. In fact, when Rusty Reno interviewed Renn as a follow up to his article on evangelical elites for the First Things podcast, the Hoosier consultant praised the Social Gospel, political Progressives, and the mainline churches that spread those movements a century ago. This is not meant to score points by brushing Renn with the guilt of Progressivism and the Social Gospel. It is, though, an observation that suggests Renn has a soft spot for Protestants whose theology and practice did not measure up even as they transformed (for a time) American society.

NAPARC does register occasionally on Renn’s radar. At “American Reformer,” Renn wrote positively about two PCA pastors who have articulated a “positive vision for America.” One is C. R. Wiley’s First Presbyterian Church of Battle Ground, Washington. Renn observes that this church is “creating well-paying jobs and paying taxes, turning vacant downtown buildings into a farmers’ market and bakery, and building an architecturally significant new church that provides needed community and conference-center space.” More than a church, First Presbyterian is also building community.

The other NAPARC exception is the exceptional Tim Keller. Renn argues that Keller’s book Every Good Endeavor explains the doctrine of vocation in a way that “comprehends the exercise of power—that validates and valorizes people who reform public policy, invent new technologies, become presidents of elite universities, acquire major media properties or foundations, organize research teams, or serve as Supreme Court justices.”

Renn also credits Keller’s last white paper, “The Decline and Renewal of the American Church,” with calling for the “creation of a think tank, the endowment of chairs at top universities, the creation of grants for young Christian scholars, and the establishment of a Christian equivalent to the Federalist Society.” This is the sort of infrastructure necessary to cultivate evangelical elites. In his “American Reformer” article, Renn added “people today could learn from figures like Keller, who built an influential institution grounded in an expansive vision of the future.” The New York City PCA pastor was doing what Protestant leaders “have done throughout our national history,” namely, created “the institutions and norms that are absent today.”

What is especially odd about Renn’s reflections on Protestant churches and American society is that the institution-building conservative Protestants performed after liberalism and the Social Gospel captured the mainline denominations – creating seminaries, denominations, colleges, magazines, publishing companies – don’t register on Renn’s elite Protestant meter. Of course, they should not because these conservative Protestant institutions are not producing the leaders of Silicon Valley or qualifying for nominations to the U.S. Supreme Court. But for a man who pays attention to institutions, it is surprising that Renn pays so little to the institutions that comprise NAPARC — the very institutions that shaped Renn’s beloved Keller. Instead, he himself starts new institutions like “American Reformer.”

The other odd part of Renn’s institutional analysis is a failure to see where churches becoming leaders in the community leads. This is a lesson that ChristNats should also consider. The mainline churches a century ago abandoned the teaching of orthodox pastors and theologians who were not obvious leaders in their communities but leaders in the church, charged with trying to remain true to the teachings of Scripture and the practices of their communions. What led to the failure of Protestantism in the United States at elite levels was the loss of Protestant faith at elite levels. Mainline Protestants remained moral and culturally Protestant (especially in opposition to Roman Catholicism and in support of American exceptionalism). But in the words of H. L. Mencken, they tried “to get rid of all the logical difficulties of religion” and were left with “ a row of hollow platitudes, as empty as of psychological force. . . as so many nursery rhymes.”

Aaron Renn is a smart fellow and well worth reading about urban planning, economic development, rents, architecture, traffic rotaries, and mass transit, but he has apparently yet to consider the paradox that haunts Christianity. Christ taught in Matthew 16:25: “For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” That verse need not relegate Christians to a perpetual underclass of underachievers. But Christ’s words suggest a paradoxical relationship between Christian devotion and cultural success that moved John Newton to write in his famous hymn, “Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken”:

Fading is the worldling’s pleasures,
all his boasted pomp and show;
solid joys and lasting treasures
none but Zion’s children know.

Every honest student of church history has seen near term success turn into fool’s gold of apostasy. Surely, Renn could offer a few warnings about the dangers of elite Christianity.

How Orthodox Presbyterians became PCA

Published on by D. G. Hart11 Comments

Another way to supplement Chris Gordon’s post about the demise of confessionalism in the CRC and lessons for the PCA is to consider what happened to the OPC after the failure of union between the CRC and the OPC.

The merger that the OPC and CRC contemplated between 1956 and 1972 never took place but at roughly the same time that those negotiations died, the PCA was born and for the next twenty years became the chief player in ecclesiastical mergers-and-acquisitions. First the PCA acquired in 1982 the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod (an earlier merger of revival-friendly Covenanters and dissident – read agreeable – Bible Presbyterians of the McIntire variety) and then the PCA almost in 1986 absorbed the OPC (a majority of Orthodox Presbyterians voted in favor but not by the two-thirds majority required for sending the plan to presbyteries for ratification). In the aftermath of that failed plan for Joining & Receiving, congregations in the OPC and PCA had the liberty to re-align if they chose. This was opening for a number of New Life churches (among them the Glenside congregation where Tim Keller learned the ways of New Life Presbyterianism) to join the PCA during the late 1980s.

Again, a piece of OPC history (self-promotion alert) that fills out Gordon’s observations:

In 1988 the effects of the OPC’s change of direction were still visible but not altogether clear. Again the church experienced a growth numerically, rising to 19,422 members but it also lost two more congregations to the PCA, one (New Life) in Philadelphia and one in Southern California. Only in 1989 did the OPC’s statistician start to notice these numerical changes as part of a “step backward.” That year was the peak of membership and congregational loss. The church’s total membership decreased by 3.5 percent to 18,689. [ed. no snickering] Meanwhile, five congregations transferred to the PCA, among them New Life in Escondido, California. This was the same year that the Assembly’s decisions about Bethel church took their toll. A majority of the Wheaton congregation (162 out of 301) left the OPC to form an independent congregation, which eventually affiliated with the Evangelical Presbyterian Church. In 1990 the “step backward” statistically lengthened. The OPC lost another 546 members and three congregations; among them New Life, Glenside, joined the PCA. Only by 1991 did the hemorrhaging stop and membership begin to rise again. In 1992 the OPC added 525 members and total membership increased to 18,767.

The movement of OPC congregations into the PCA was the occasion for a exchange between John M. Frame and Richard B. Gaffin, Jr. in New Horizons on realignment at the same time that statistics were revealing the consequences of congregational transfers. It was a telling exchange because it revealed an important aspect of Orthodox Presbyterianism that after the semi-centennial was beginning to reassert itself within the life of the communion and causing sufficient discomfort for others to look for another denominational home. That characteristic of Orthodox Presbyterianism was the Reformed doctrine of the church in which membership in particular communion was not a supplement to Christian identity but its embodiment. As Gaffin explained in this exchange, the OPC was not merely a denomination; “it is a church, a church that exists by divine warrant.” As such, he added, “Biblical presbyterianism has no place for loyalties torn between the denomination and the local congregation, or for greater loyalty to either one.” In contrast, Frame, who was then an associate pastor of the New Life congregation in Escondido that had realigned with the PCA, explained that the reason for transferring was to partner more effectively with other church planting efforts in southern California. Denominational affiliations for him were at best accidental, at worst sinful. Either way, he hoped that denominational “barriers” would become less important and that Orthodox Presbyterians would understand that transferring to the PCA was not a sign of disloyalty or contempt. The move was simply practical.

Clearly, Frame did not see the switch to the PCA as the serious risk that Gaffin said it was. Gaffin believed such transfers were dangerous because they nurtured a mind set that increased divisions in the church, not along lines of biblical witness, but according to personal preferences or styles of ministry. As such, Gaffin was expressing a doctrine of the church that had deep roots in American Presbyterianism reaching back to Old School Presbyterianism and even to the Old Side Presbyterians of the colonial era. Frame, in contrast, was more typical of a view of the church characteristic of New School and New Side Presbyterians, where the formal work of ministry was supplemental to the religious endeavors of all believers. In other words, whether Frame or Gaffin acknowledged the history of American Presbyterianism in their reflections, they spoke volumes about Orthodox Presbyterianism and how it emerged and developed in relation to its Presbyterian past. Among the many convictions for which the OPC had stood historically, the doctrine of the church as part of biblical teaching and necessary for faithful witness was one of the hallmarks of Orthodox Presbyterianism. During the 1970s and 1980s that ecclesial conviction had begun to wane if only because it was not producing the size and influence that some Orthodox Presbyterians desired. But as the OPC began to take stock of its past, it also recovered one of its most noticeable features. Furthermore, just as that commitment to biblical Presbyterianism had been a source of frustration to Bible Presbyterians in the 1930s, neo-evangelicals in the 1940s, and more generally to Orthodox Presbyterians like Edwin H. Rian who had hoped the OPC would turn out to be a conservative version of culturally established and respectable Presbyterianism, so in the late 1980s as the OPC recovered its doctrine of the church some felt compelled to look for better, friendlier, or less restrictive expressions of American Presbyterianism than the OPC. (Between the Times, 316-18)

In other words, the consequences of Reformed ecumenism from the 1970s and 1980s were having consequences for all of the players — the CRC, OPC, and PCA. Where Presbyterians went, their forms of association, and their understand of the church were factors in the witness they embraced.

How the OPC Avoided becoming the CRC

Published on by D. G. Hart3 Comments

Chris Gordon’s piece on how the CRC lost its Reformed bearings has wisdom not only for noticing similarities between the CRC and New Calvinists but also contains a warning about developments in the PCA:

NAPARC churches should not forget their older brother, the CRC. Unless these concerns are taken seriously, I foresee the PCA and other Reformed denominations following this trajectory heading for fights, splits, and empty pews. They will be on a fast track to becoming just another mainline liberal denomination scratching its head at General Assembly meetings as they desperately try to find answers. I pray that my dear brothers and sisters in NAPARC will hear this humble plea from a brother in Christ who learned how true it is that those who forget their (church) history, are most certainly doomed to repeat it.

One difference between the CRC and PCA is the former’s ethnic outsider self-identity compared to the latter’s effort to become the Presbyterian insider. In other words, the CRC wanted to leave the ghetto and enter the mainstream; one way to do that was to embrace some forms of evangelicalism. For a time the CRC even considered merging with the OPC (as explained in Between the Times — self-promotion alert!):

Decreasing familiarity with the OPC was one of the factors to which Henry Zwaanstra pointed in this study of the CRC’s ecumenical relations. In fact, his narrative highlights developments in 1967 as decisive for sinking the project. The previous year, according to Zwaanstra, the OPC’s committee was requesting “their general assembly to declare that the joint committee should work toward the definite goal of organic union.” But the following year, the OPC’s Assembly “retired its representatives from the joint committee and appointed new members.” The reason for the new appointments, according to Zwaanstra, was “mandate to investigate trends toward Liberalism in the CRC.” . . .

Indeed, the overwhelming factor that prompted the OPC to worry about liberal theological trends in the CRC was a re-ignition of anti-liberal polemics during the mid-1960s over the PCUSA’s adoption of The Confession of 1967. During the 1960s leadership within the OPC spent considerable time disputing the mainline Presbyterian Church’s revision of its confessional standards and faulting the denomination for embracing a Barthian doctrine of the Word of God. This view, exhibited in the Confession of 1967, distinguished in effect between the sort of encounter with divine revelation that came through Scripture rather than regarding Scripture itself, its words, paragraphs, and books, as the Word of God. One Orthodox Presbyterian who was particularly vocal in defending the Reformed doctrine of Scripture and in criticizing was E. J. Young, newly appointed to the OPC’s committee to confer with the CRC. The Old Testament professor was by no means insensitive to the assistance the CRC had given to the OPC since Young had served with the likes of Van Til, Stonehouse, and Kuiper, and as a renowned scholar had trafficked in Christian Reformed circles at conferences and lectures. And yet, Young was adamant in his diagnosis of Barthian developments in the PCUSA and was likely sensitive to similar trends in the CRC even if evident in much less noticeable ways.

Thanks to arguments by Young and Van Til, for instance, by the second half of the 1960s the OPC’s sensitivity to defective expressions of the doctrine of Scripture was at an all time high and undoubtedly many pastors and teachers detected echoes of a Barthian view in Dutch Calvinist circles. Whether members of the CRC themselves actually resembled Barth or were simply guilty of not condemning Barth’s influence upon the GKN is a debatable point. Either way, the controverted status of Barthianism for Orthodox Presbyterians was certainly a factor in the growing distance between the OPC and the CRC. (161-62)

The OPC did not have a front-row seat to changes in the CRC, but it had more familiarity than most Presbyterian churches. In which case, reading about OPC-CRC relations between 1956 and 1970 is a supplement to Gordon’s post (read: buy the book).

Does the Tie that Binds Extend to Old Life?

Published on by D. G. Hart65 Comments

I wondered after reading this:

Jevon is a Pastoral Resident and Church Planting Intern at Independent Presbyterian Church in Memphis, Tennessee. What that means is that Jevon is a Bible-believing Christian who has devoted his life to serving Jesus Christ vocationally within the same denomination that we’re a part of. Jevon and I have a whole lot in common. Though we’ve never met personally, I can say with a great deal of confidence that our fellowship would be sweet.

But there is one observable difference: Jevon is black, and I am white. Because of the color of his skin, Jevon faces fears that I don’t face. That fact alone is profoundly disturbing to me, and it should be disturbing to all Christians. For at the foundation of Christianity is the belief that ALL men and women (no qualifications) are made in the image of God and deserve the dignity and treatment consistent with that reality.

I too like to think (all about mmmmeeeeEEEE) that I am a Bible-believing Christian who serves Christ and who has fellowship with Pastor Shurden through ecumenical ties between the OPC and PCA. And yet I wonder if the sweet, sweet fellowship that he assumes he has with Jevon Washington also includes confessional, spirituality-of-the-church Presbyterians like moi.

Or in this post-Ferguson era does Pastor Shurden feel more affinity with Michelle Higgins than with Chortles Weekly? If the basis for fellowship among Presbyterians is biblical teaching summarized in the Confession of Faith, then creed matters more than blood. After all, it takes more than being human to belong to a Presbyterian communion (though being human is pretty good).

Too Long to Tweet

Published on by D. G. Hart299 Comments

Scott Clark has also picked up the discussion about conservative Presbyterian influence. In what may amount to the comment of the day, he replied with the following:

Influence is mediated and the the media have fragmented. There was a time when one of us might have snuck into a position of influence, when the media were more centralized and controlled by a few elites (yes, I think that much of the mainstream political media is controlled by a relatively small number of elites but we’re talking religion and theology here) but those days are mostly behind us.

The SBC is something like 16 million people. The entire NAPARC world is 1/2 million at most. Even if we add the sidelines we still don’t get to a million people. Even if the real SBC constituency is only 6 million, as some say, we’re still only a tiny percentage. There are (or were when I last looked) 60 million American evangelicals, most of whom operate with Anabaptist assumptions. They don’t even know we exist and they aren’t looking for us.

I suppose that you and I assess the state of the NAPARC world rather differently. The 2K argument is really about Christ and culture and I think the C and c argument is a pressing issue facing the URCNA right now. For a variety of historical reasons some of our congregations are not outward looking, not because they are taken up with intramural theological fights, but because they make assumptions that are deeply rooted in various cultures and those assumptions are not subject to criticism. The 2K argument, which has been a sometimes ugly affair, is a symbol of a deeper problem.

You seem dismissive of the matter of intinction but I think it’s a significant issue because, like the 2K argument, it signals a more profound problem. If people can simply withdraw the cup from the laity largely on a pragmatic basis, what else can churches do? What are the limits of ecclesiastical authority? What are the limits of pragmatism? Who authorized sessions to remove the cup from the laity? Don’t those sessions realize the cost of recovering the cup for the laity in the Reformation? Do they care? Is the supper a means of grace or the way to close a sale? I worry about those sorts of things and so I’m happy to see people in the PCA pushing back against the practice of intinction.