Presby-What? – Presbyterian History

Hey, everybody.
Welcome to the Pastor Talk podcast.
Glad that you’re here with us today as we begin a new series that we are calling Presby
What?
A look at what it means to call ourselves Presbyterian,
where that word comes from,
the history, the heritage,
the theology behind this word that we use fairly regularly in
this church, but many are confused by,
and as we go through some of our story as Presbyterian
people, we hope that there’s some things in it that will be interesting to you,
that will be helpful to you,
whether or not you call yourself Presbyterian,
we hope it’ll give
you a better sense of what we mean when we use the term,
and today we start by kind of
looking back a very,
very broad overview of the history of how we got to where we are now.
Yeah, Clayton, I think when lots of people think about different churches,
they probably most naturally think about the differences of worship,
which is a thing that makes sense.
If you go to one church and they have a praise band and everybody stands for a long time
versus you come to a church where there’s stand-up, sit-down,
more liturgical kinds of setting, some churches take communion every Sunday,
some churches take it occasionally,
some churches almost never take it,
and I think that it’s tempting to think that the
All of these differences are simply surface differences.
But the truth is each of these church families have long arcs and differing spots within
the journey of the Christian family writ large.
Since Jesus rose again,
the church has gone through many different seasons.
And I think one of the maybe helpful ways to sort of start teasing out the conversation
of what makes Presbyterians distinctive is to look at the setting in which Presbyterianism
began to make sense.
And I think you have to have some context there that it was happening in a very tumultuous
moment in the life of the Christian church.
You had Martin Luther,
who was already testing the grounds of the Roman Catholic church.
We sometimes think of the Reformation.
We give that a capital R Reformation.
We like to think of that as being the time when the church was reformed.
I don’t think that’s entirely accurate,
Clayton. You can look back through history and see other reformations with a small R,
moments where you have like the Benedictine order or you have these desert mother, father,
the father and mothers of the desert,
sort of differing purification moments within the
Roman Catholic church.
But this moment came when Luther takes a stand and theologically,
you suddenly have this
person, John Calvin, who fits within this larger Reformation idea but has his own unique
voice in the midst of it all.
Yeah.
So I think one thing as we start that may be helpful is that while we could never talk
about one church as a single root,
there did develop for the most part the Catholic church
that from say the third century on is kind of,
it’s going to be what most people understand
when they use the word church.
It’s really, it’s not the only thing out there,
but in large measure,
it’s going to dominate
people’s experience.
And there were questions, there was unhappiness,
there were disagreements along the way.
But really that remains true for many centuries.
In the eighth century,
the Holy Roman Emperor is claimed and at that point,
Rome and the church are just about indistinguishable from one another.
And in large measure,
that continues for several hundred years until we move into kind of the
middle of the second millennium and as we hit the 14, 15 hundreds,
we get some increasing
voices about unhappiness and dissatisfaction.
And those really come together in a man named Martin Luther.
In 1517, he expresses his unhappiness with the church,
though he does so from inside the church.
He is a Catholic, a monk,
he’s in the brotherhood.
And he begins to question many of the things and this kind of throws a match on gasoline
that has been out there.
And really this reformation,
this period of change that we call reformation,
takes off literally like wildfire and it brings into the conversation several regional places and
the reformation begins to have a kind of geographical feel.
At times, it’s a little hard to distinguish the political movement from the religious
movement.
They get very tied together.
But our start as a Presbyterian,
our heritage, if we’re going to go back and look for where
we began, it has to be there in the midst of that reformation and what Luther began,
though we branch off fairly quickly,
but that’s where we get our beginning.
Right.
And you’re going to have to reckon with,
if you’re looking for that Genesis point, you’re
who was very much,
he was conversant with Luther,
he wrote Luther, he was in the midst
of that conversation, but disagree with Luther in some significant areas.
And I think you’ve mentioned,
but to tease out a little bit more,
when we think of reformation,
we often think of the theological differences.
I think certainly pastors err that way towards what’s the theological difference between
Calvin and Luther and the Lord’s Supper,
which was a big dividing point for lots of different reasons.
What we might miss is they had different orientations to the political powers of the day.
You had our Catholic kings and queens who were quick to start oppressing these people
who were going forward with the Reformation.
And so you had differing responses to it.
Luther, for a long time,
sort of tried to hold on to this idea that he could remain
within the church until that no longer was tenable.
And he very much had this sort of theology in which the state was an unfortunate reality
that had to sort of be maintained.
And these political alliances were distasteful,
but they had to exist for the sake of the world.
Calvin was a little bit interesting.
He was more committed to the politics of the day.
The Reformed theology goes back to a person who was committed to trying to be embedded
in public life and try to lead in city ways,
that faith and the way that we govern can
be connected in some really intrinsic ways.
And he was distinctive in his own sort of leanings in that way.
Yeah, and I think one of the major differences,
if we talk about the two as characters,
Luther
tended to get on the wrong side of the divide.
And so he was under political pressure as well as religious pressure because where he
served in Germany was largely Catholic in the monarchy.
And so Luther tended to run headlong into government pushback as well as religious pushback.
Calvin largely over in Switzerland is specifically in Geneva through some trial and error and
there were some back and forth.
But in the end,
largely had the support of the government and the local officials as well.
And so they had a very different experience though they participate in the same ongoing conversation.
Though Calvin, as you mentioned, Michael,
Calvin does take it in his own unique way.
Calvin is trained as a lawyer,
Luther’s a monk.
Calvin is a very careful,
very logistical thinker,
a brilliant man,
great with languages,
a scholar,
tremendous memory,
a prolific writer.
Also, maybe less so than Luther, but argumentative, combative.
Luther,
by the end of his career,
by the end of his life,
was at odds with lots of people.
Calvin maybe navigated that to some extent better than Luther did.
You could argue either way.
But Calvin was not opposed to calling out those he perceived as his enemies and in times,
maybe with less colorful language than Luther tended to,
but equally as forcefully.
We might miss in a moment,
Rochelle and I used to joke when we lived in Tulsa,
Oklahoma, that you couldn’t drive a block without hitting another church.
And the reality is we live in a country that has so many different Christian families
represented.
I just think we struggle to understand how universal the Roman Catholic Church was in its day.
The idea that these reformers would even have a voice at all was astonishing.
And some of that is owed to the printing press in our own worship.
If you’re going to make a connection to today,
when Presbyterians wear robes,
it’s a harkening back to John Calvin himself,
who was an academic, a professor,
a teacher.
And the idea was that the pastor is one who is enabling the laity to be Christian in their
own time and place.
And that idea, which we might take for granted,
was revolutionary in its moment.
You have to remember that for a thousand years plus,
the Catholic Church conceived of some of its
fundamental education happened through stained glass windows because people were illiterate.
They couldn’t read.
The Bible was maybe the only Bible in the community was the one that was in the sanctuary.
And it didn’t make sense for anyone else to have it because no one else could have made sense of it.
And yet here in the Protestant Reformation,
you have Calvin, the teacher, other reformers seeking to
teach using the printing press,
new technology to get the Bible and theology into the hands of
Christians throughout the entire congregation.
This is a sea change in how the church has governed,
how the church has conceived of the purpose of the
laity, the people who come to worship every Sunday.
And it’s a significant sort of opening in which Calvin,
Luther and others live.
And it’s it’s both it’s a struggle because as you start looking ahead in history,
it both sets up the
cycle where the church starts to divide and split and divide and split into perpetuity beyond that.
Yeah, I think if you were going to look for fundamental distinctions between the Catholic Church of
their day and the reformers,
one of the ones I think that is most helpful is this idea that authority lay
not in the structure or in the people in the structure,
for instance, in the Catholic Church.
Authority is not the declaration of the pope about the Bible.
The reformers instead believe that the authority was found in the scripture itself,
rightly read and rightly understood.
And so rather than this tradition that had come to rely on, quote unquote, experts,
the reformers moved that idea toward the belief that people should have a Bible.
They should read it.
They should they could access in it directly a word of God for their life and for their faith.
And of course, that meant by extension teaching people to read.
It meant providing Bibles,
translating Bibles instead of Latin and Greek.
They were now able to try and move them toward languages for the people.
And this was this doesn’t sound controversial.
But in its day,
this was a major point of conflict with the established church who believed that the
ability to interpret lay in the authority of the structure.
And so one of those fundamental divisions leads not just to a difference in theology,
but a very different measure of practice where people were encouraged to have a Bible.
You know,
in the Catholic Church of Luther’s day,
the average layperson would not have had a Bible.
By the end of Luther’s lifetime,
those who followed the Reformation teachers would have almost all had a
Bible.
And so these are just some of the side effects that happen in that move toward being,
quote unquote, people who interacted deeply with scripture.
And I think we continue to see that influence in our tradition.
If we look back,
whether we’ve done it right or wrong,
we’ve always believed that the answers to our issues
and questions were first and foremost scriptural.
The second thing I think that Calvin particularly does is we move maybe outside of Luther and we hone
ourselves more on John Calvin and John Knox,
who follows him, is that Luther, as I mentioned, was trained in a lawyer and had a deep belief in order,
in the right way to do things,
in a systematic approach to
just about everything, including church, morality,
life, discipleship, education.
And we don’t have to look very far in the Presbyterian Church to see vestiges of these ideas of orderly,
of
segmented, of systematic.
We do that really well.
At times we’ve overdone that.
But I think, Michael, a lot of that could be attributed to the way in which Calvin did his work and the way in
which he initially at least arranged his authority within the church.
Yeah, and maybe for those of you joining the conversation,
it would be helpful to hear that in the church that would
have been before the Reformation,
the authority to make decisions and the expectation for leadership all
rested upon the structure of the church,
the hierarchy of the church.
Very much the bishop was the one who led that they were the one who was responsible.
And Calvin brings this sense of systematic order for the purpose of keeping the people,
the general priesthood of all
believers, all of the church is given responsibility.
When when John Calvin reads scripture,
he doesn’t see a hierarchy of one Christian sort of being higher up the ladder.
He sees everybody being on the same playing field.
And the problem there is that you can’t have a thousand people doing a thousand different things.
There needs to be a way that the church can be knit together as a body that works in unison as opposed to some sort of
chaotic mess.
And so his sensitivity towards exacting systematic structure gets worked out both in his theology.
If you read his theology,
it is highly ordered.
It’s A plus B equals C kind of stuff.
But that also works out as he starts to frame the best way to order these things.
And I think it’s interesting not only to see what happens as he writes it.
You can just look at some of the volumes of Calvin’s work.
He wrote a ton,
an amazing amount for his time.
And so that just huge amount of work,
along with some of the other reformers that were contemporaries of him,
becomes a huge resource as the
Reformed tradition goes on into the second generation.
And we begin to see some of that theology being taken up and maybe not reinterpreted,
but certainly honed and clarified.
Yeah,
Calvin creates what he calls the Institutes of the Faith,
still the seminal beginning work of Reformed theology.
He writes a commentary on every book of the Bible except Revelation.
He writes sermons, very long sermons that he publishes weekly,
often two, three, four a week.
And my favorite thing about reading Calvin is when he says,
I must briefly mention this point and five pages later you’re wrapping it up.
He was a very prolific writer.
His teachings and his ideas end up in the hand of a man named John Knox, who’s in Scotland.
And though there’s not real discernible difference between them theologically,
Knox is really the catalyst of what we call Presbyterianism from there on in that he works with the structures.
The idea of how we govern ourselves,
the idea of commissioned rulers,
the idea of elections,
the idea of serving terms.
Lots of this takes place under Knox’s leadership in Scotland.
And it’s there that they begin to use this term Presbyterian,
which is from presbyteras,
the Greek word that means elder,
ruled by elders.
That’s what our label means.
We are a church ruled by those within the church who are elevated to leadership.
And so John Knox is where we probably look to find our name and the heritage of our names tradition.
And Presbyterianism then, for at least its early life,
existed in thought other places.
But as Presbyterian,
it is mostly located in Scotland.
It stays there,
begins to move slowly.
But that’s really where it cuts its teeth.
And for a significant period of time,
that is,
I would say generally,
Michael, the hangout of people who would have known themselves as Presbyterian.
Yeah.
Presbyterian congregations will have a bagpiper on Reformation Sunday or something harkening back to that heritage.
But it is very much that structure that gives leadership and authority to the elders within the congregation that really changes the way that the church can think of itself.
And it’s significant because in a former in another structure,
and this is happening in other Protestant settings as well,
even Lutheranism, you have much more responsibility within the church’s life given to these bishops.
People hire up this this chain in Presbyterianism.
When you elevate the ability for people on the local level to lead,
you raise the expectation for their knowledge of their Bible and their theological competence.
And you create this system that can grow like wildfire.
If people get engaged and if people are driven forward,
they can take leadership in ways that other church families wouldn’t celebrate.
And so it becomes this slow building engine that ultimately,
as we start thinking towards what it looks like,
how it gets to Northwest Iowa,
it starts to go out into the frontiers.
And it grows as a group of Christians.
Yeah, not only do Presbyterians not have a single individual vested with power,
we vote on nearly everything no matter how long it takes.
And that has a significant bearing for two reasons as we try to begin focusing on our experience as Presbyterian in what we could call America.
So Presbyterians make their way to America.
They do that fairly early.
They have significant success along the eastern coast.
And if you go to the eastern coast,
you’ll find many historic, beautiful Presbyterian churches.
We did well there.
We struggled, though, as expansion began to happen and as people moved west.
And this happened historically very quickly.
Once the frontier was open,
lots of people were on their way west,
either to California or to the middle part of the country.
And Presbyterians struggled to keep up with that because, as we’ve mentioned,
we have a heritage of putting a significant emphasis on education.
And the Presbyterians were unwilling to shorten the process it took to educate pastors.
And while other traditions said,
OK, we’ll do the short course and they can learn what they need or we’ll set up a place out there and they can kind of do community learning.
Presbyterians, being a little more state in our approach, said,
no,
we’re going to train them.
That takes three to five years.
That’s what it’s always taken.
That’s what we’re going to do.
And so we struggled to move people out in the western direction of the United States as quickly as we should.
That led ends up leading to one of the first splits in American Presbyterianism with a group that believed they needed to get out there quicker.
They thought the evangelism was more important than the education.
What we would talk about as the historic root of the Presbyterian Church in the United States disagreed and said,
no, education is more important than than that.
And so Presbyterians are a little slow to the party,
though they they get there.
They get.
But they in many instances,
they get there and they find someone else has been their first.
And the further you move west,
the less uncommon it would be to go check the dates of churches and find that Presbyterians were on the later end of the window in those eighteen hundreds.
Yeah.
And to put that maybe in perspective,
a contrast of Presbyterianism might be Methodism.
And you have this idea of the frontier rider,
the pastor who gets on the horse and gets sent out.
There was just less rigid structures.
There were, if you’re going to be cynical,
less hoops to jump through in the process of preparing for ministry.
People could be equipped.
They could be sent out.
The idea is that we can train them while they’re out there.
And so their way of governing and training allow the kind of quick expansion that that you don’t see.
On the other hand,
we shouldn’t pass out to the West too quickly without recognizing the influence that’s happening out east in the United States.
Not only are these churches being planted along the eastern coast of the United States,
they’re frequented by many of the significant leaders of the early colonies.
You have a number of even Presbyterian governance ideas.
And we’re going to talk a little bit about how we’re governed and why that matters in another conversation.
But there’s some ideas of the election of people to leadership from within,
of distributions of power that originated within some of this Presbyterian understanding of what it means to be church.
That some of these public civic leaders overheard that they found helpful in some of those early conversations about our own governance.
So once we get to that conversation in another conversation,
you may be surprised to find out how closely mirrored our national government government government structure and our church structures actually are.
Yeah, for better or worse,
American political ideas in some fashion,
we’re tied to Presbyterian and we share many of the same strengths and weaknesses because we govern ourselves in similar ways.
So then the second thing we I think we see,
though, in that westward expansion is another trait of Presbyterians that has largely been true.
You know,
when you begin your life as a church by splitting from another church,
you are less likely,
I think, to come up with the idea that you alone have it figured out.
And one of the one of the longstanding strengths,
I think, of Presbyterianism is that we have generally avoided the temptation to believe that we’re the only way to be Christian.
We have, therefore,
also generally been willing to partner with people who were Christian in slightly different ways or in other ways,
had different opinions, at least, about some things.
And in our area here in northwest Iowa,
here in the Midwest,
you see the results of some of that partnership in the small towns that you might go through.
The town I grew up in had a Presbyterian church.
The next very small town over had a Methodist church.
Presbyterians and Methodists had a kind of working agreement as the Presbyterians worked their way west.
If there was a Methodist church already in town,
rather than duplicating the efforts,
they would move on to a community that didn’t already have a church.
And Methodists honored the same agreement.
And Lutherans were part of that to some extent.
But it’s not uncommon in the part of the country we live to go in and find in small towns, at least,
a Methodist church or a Presbyterian church.
But if the town is not big enough for both,
you generally won’t find both.
And we were able,
even in the midst of that,
to cooperate with other churches.
And I think that’s a distinctive at our best.
We have done that well.
Yeah, we’ve not only partnered,
but we’ve sought in many different points in our history as a as a family of faith to try to have a contemporary voice in the issues of the day.
And along with Presbyterians,
commitment to education is a longstanding commitment to what the gospel means in culture and in our shared life together.
So for all of these different seasons,
Presbyterians, many of them with prominent voices,
are trying to add their voice in different points in history,
whether that’s the Civil War.
There was significant disagreement about what place Presbyterians should have in the conversation of race and governance that went on towards the early nineteen hundreds when you had conversations about alcohol and those women voting.
All of those issues,
Presbyterians were involved.
So there’s a long arc of Presbyterians seeking to try to find ways to to name the gospel’s relation to our lives lived.
That being said,
that was also a source of much of our difference in opinion and conversation and even some denominational splits over the years.
But what’s remarkable about our history,
Clint, is sometimes we talk internally about being a place with a big tent.
And it is astonishing how wide Presbyterians have generally been able to keep the theological tent for those who are welcome in the fellowship.
It’s not always been you have to you have to check all of these particular boxes or you’re not in that that’s been pretty generous as a Christian family.
Yeah, we’ve had some ups and downs.
There are multiple Presbyterian denominations.
But if we look at what we would consider the main trunk of Presbyterians,
we did an interesting thing in the period right before the Civil War.
Many churches split in the north and south.
They followed the movements of the nation and there were northern churches and southern churches.
It happens to the Methodists.
It happens to the Presbyterians.
And shortly before then,
the Presbyterians had also had a disagreement that has mostly theological roots.
And so you have what they called new school and old school Presbyterians and you have those in the north and the south.
So for a for a short period of time,
there are four versions of the main branch of Presbyterian isms new and old,
both in the north and south.
Interestingly enough, when they get back together,
they put the old new behind them,
but they stick with the north south.
So until 1983,
and that’s why this is significant until 1983,
there is a northern Presbyterian church and a southern Presbyterian church.
And in 1983,
those two churches reunite.
And what makes that significant is that this and virtually every other Presbyterian church in the country is the product of that reunion when the northern and southern church comes back together.
And finally, after a hundred and twenty to twenty five years,
undoes what happened in the Civil War split and reunites in what we now call the Presbyterian church in the United States of America, the PC USA,
which is the name of the denomination we belong to and is the
largest of the variety of ways to be Presbyterian.
And though each would trace their way to the domain branch,
I think you could I think you could make a pretty strong case and keep in mind I’m biased because I’m in this version.
But I think you could make a pretty strong case that that is the historic route and the main movement.
And so we find ourselves actually surprisingly in a version of Presbyterianism that is 40 years old in our lifetime that happened in my lifetime.
I was a teenager.
I don’t think I understood the importance of it.
I remember my pastor mentioning it,
but it didn’t really mean anything.
But the whole lot of people in this church,
Michael, lived through that and are part of the efforts to say we should try to get that tent back together.
We should try to live together despite some differences and different ways of doing things and we should move our way back toward unity.
And the Presbyterian church,
like all churches, we’ve messed that up many,
many times, but it’s an admirable goal.
Yeah, and one that you could really trace the themes and threads from multiple different directions.
I mean,
there’s been entire books written about a particular aspect of the church and their theological uniqueness.
I think it’s worth saying,
though, if you’re looking at this from a broad perspective,
that Presbyterians have always sought to try to find ways to to both live in good order, to live thoughtfully.
There’s always been an emphasis on continuing to this day on the education of pastors,
the equipping of the leaders of local congregations.
All of this remains true in our seeking to be faithful.
I think you can also,
though, point to this desire to try to find ways to reconnect with the larger church that that existed in the unification of a divided church.
But it has also concurrently been running,
even those the north and south churches were trying independently to have ecumenical conversations with the Lutherans and the Methodists and with even the Roman Catholics about how can we have mutual broad understandings about what it means to be the church,
the whole church, the group of people who are trying to follow Jesus in the largest sense.
And we call that the universal church.
And so I think there’s this sense in which maybe those two are almost in opposition.
There’s certainly intention,
this desire to be thoughtful,
the desire to have conviction,
which Presbyterians have always had,
but also the desire to be generous, open, gracious,
humble enough to recognize there’s other people who are living in differing traditions.
And I do think that that makes a mark on our family of faith,
both the larger family,
but also our local one.
Yeah. And and as we as we think about our local church,
maybe it’s helpful.
We hope some of that history is helpful.
We hope it’s coherent.
But to think for a moment of a snapshot of where we are in this last generation of Presbyterianism,
what does it mean to be Presbyterian?
Who are we as a denomination?
And, you know, a snapshot of our church is,
I think, interesting and maybe also telling of where some of our strengths and weaknesses have been.
In the 1940s and 50s,
Presbyterians do very well.
It is not uncommon for significant,
quote unquote, people in communities to be Presbyterian,
including at the national level,
presidents,
congressmen,
senators. Presbyterianism was thought of as respectable and Presbyterians with their in with their emphasis on education and influence in society attracted many people with those ideals.
So it’s not uncommon that Presbyterians are well educated,
that they’re people of means,
that they’re people who have some idea of impacting.
Society around them.
And we really carry those themes forward into what we would call our modern era.
Now, the downside of that has been Presbyterians have not historically done real well with multiculturalism.
We’ve always been interested in reaching into the lives of other races and ethnic people.
But we’ve not attracted them very well.
We’ve not welcomed them particularly well.
In the current evolution of our Presbyterian church nationally,
we are something like 98% Caucasian and 2% other.
The number may have bumped a little bit.
I’ll be generous and say 5%,
though I think that’s overstated.
We just have not gotten significant traction with diversity.
We talk about it a lot.
It’s important to us.
But when it comes to living it out in the formation of and the incorporation of other ethnic groups into our churches,
it’s not a place we’ve had a lot of success.
We’ve also probably, if the truth be told,
retained some of Calvin’s formality.
We’ve tended to be very, very structured.
We’ve tended to be pretty formal.
And while that’s not a bad thing,
we have struggled, I think, at times to move out of that in an era where many of the churches around us and many of the people going to churches
found stayed and formal a little less attractive.
There was a time in which that was a compliment to a church.
Those days are probably over.
I don’t think anybody would use the words formal and stuffy as what they’re looking for in a congregation.
And Presbyterians have, I think,
to be honest, I think we’d have to say we’ve struggled to make that transition as well.
Yeah.
And Presbyterians have in many ways shared the fate of some of our mainline cousins,
the Methodists, the Lutherans,
the Episcopal’s.
We came to this point in the 60s of membership continued to grow.
Sanctuaries were built.
Presbyterianism very much spread around the country,
even in places where it wasn’t readily established.
There were church plants all the time.
In fact, pastors were hired for the sole job of doing church planting.
Presbyterianism,
meanwhile,
as it grew in social influence and financial capability,
became a major force for good in the world through missions that spanned the entire world.
Just an amazing amount of cooperation and work put forward.
And then this slow transformation began to happen where churches began to lose and not gain members.
And it wasn’t like a tsunami that hit the beach and everything was destroyed.
It was far more of a trickle,
just even in some ways a little bit unknown on the scene.
There was a little bit of this narrative that, you know,
kids leave home, they go to college and they come back to church,
but fewer and fewer came back to church.
And suddenly we begin to now see,
as we look back 20,
30, 40 years in the future,
looking back on that time,
we see that since that time,
our church has been consistently losing membership.
And the American church,
we’ve actually begun to see a significant increase in church closures,
not just people leaving,
but congregations no longer being able to be financially and congregationally vibrant.
So we’ve now begun to see both the strengths that we relied upon in a moment of great success in some ways become a little bit of a problem as we continue to seek to try to give voice to some contemporary issues.
We often sometimes are tempted to fixate on the things happening in popular culture and fail to recognize the significance of some of this congregational decline.
And Presbyterians writ large are trying to figure out what it looks like to be intergenerational, growing,
faithful congregations in the midst of a season where many congregations have been able,
unable to do that successfully.
Yeah, and there are lots of threads in that tapestry and lots of scholars trying to understand all of what happens in the decades from about 19,
late 50s,
early 60s until where we are now.
Lots of things in society change and lots of things change for churches,
but it has not been by most standards that you could think of a quote unquote successful time for Presbyterians.
We have struggled in those moments to keep up with those shifts.
And one of the struggles we seem to have Presbyterians are not as an organization,
both systematically in terms of our structures and philosophically in terms of our ideas,
we are not particularly nimble.
We tend to trust our history and we tend to push forward with the patterns that we’ve established because in their day they were given a great amount of thought and we were deeply educated on them as we trained.
And so Presbyterians have in large measure looked to the past and tried to maintain what the way we’ve done things,
even when it was less apparent or even apparent that those things were not working and that that has been,
I think one of our primary struggles.
Now it has, we’ll unpack some of the directions of it.
It has some theological implications,
it has some mission implications,
certainly has some financial implications,
but I think by and large we joined what is called the mainline church,
the established church of American history,
Methodist Lutherans, even Catholics to some extent,
though they have a different pattern.
And we stayed on the train,
not only when the train’s wheels started to squeak,
but maybe even when the tracks got loose and parts started falling.
We have tried to sail our ship far into the future when it seemed clear that it perhaps wasn’t as seaworthy as it used to be.
Yeah, I think another way of saying that is we have been firmly committed to our forms of worship while worship has been in many ways experimented with in ways unthinkable in previous generations.
And we do have some historical connections there,
we passed by it,
Presbyterians have,
and certainly the reformed tradition and theologians had significant voices in the great awakenings of America’s past,
so Presbyterians haven’t been all stodgy and no fun.
That’s not the image we’re trying to present,
but we’ve been committed to decency and good order,
that a church family should operate in a way that’s transparent,
that’s orderly, and that it’s reliable regardless of whether you’re in Spirit Lake or you’re in New York City.
And I think what you see happening in the post 60s era is you begin to see Christians in America who are doing and trying and experimenting and church planting in ways that the earliest generation of Presbyterians could not have possibly imagined,
right?
And Presbyterians largely held some of that at very far arm’s length.
And while we were having significant conversations about is it or is it not appropriate to have a praise band,
some non-denominational churches in America were 50 steps beyond that.
And that’s not necessarily good.
I think Presbyterians would question just doing things to see what would happen rightly.
But when we naturally come to the conversation of what does it look like to be a faithful congregation in this context, in this day,
we sometimes missed opportunities because of the assumptions,
commitments that we brought to those conversations.
We’ll trace some of that more in future conversations.
Yeah, this is a fairly new theory,
so bear with me.
But I think one of the things that we may see looking back is that in an era where largely older Presbyterians, not exclusively,
but to some extent older Presbyterians versed in their ways are trying not to let a lot of culture into the church.
In other words,
whether it was music or whether it was changing the dress code or whether it was redecorating the sanctuary,
whatever it might have been,
there is a group of Presbyterians who say,
“No, we don’t want the world to come in and change the way we do church,” which is not a bad thing.
It’s simply their reaction to a world that is shifting around them.
Simultaneously, you have a group,
and let’s call them younger Presbyterians,
who are very interested in the ills of culture and very much are saying,
“We need to forge these connections between church and culture.
We need to get involved in women’s issues,
gay and lesbian issues,
racial issues,
whatever “ism” it might be,
we need to get out there and build a bridge between those things in church.”
And so you have this fascinating conflict in which some of the people are trying to keep the world out,
and other people want very much the world to come in and inform what the church does.
And looking back, I have to think that we didn’t handle that particularly well.
And in fact, Michael, I think I could make a fairly decent case that we are still feeling some of the ripples of that fundamental conflict, say,
30 years later.
Right.
And this is the irony of having this conversation,
Clint,
is that we’ve just spent about 45 minutes now talking about Presbyterianism and what it has meant historically and what it has meant to be an American who’s a Presbyterian.
And the irony is that for most Christians today,
Presbyterian,
Methodist, or Lutheran is not the most important thing when choosing a church family.
There was a day when when you went to a town and there wasn’t a Presbyterian church,
you started one because that’s the only church that you would go to.
And what I’m about to say is not a critique of that.
It’s largely, I think, just an assessment of where we are today.
When people move,
they tend to maybe start with that place that they left,
but they’re not going to be theologically exclusive.
I think most people now look for where is the church that’s welcoming?
Where’s the church that has life?
Where’s the church that’s committed to mission?
Where’s the church where there’s good preaching or opportunities for my youth to be trained up in the faith?
Whatever sort of those criteria are,
Presbyterianism has really begun to fade into the background as a larger church culture.
We still have our structures.
We still have our commitments,
certainly to that social space,
certainly to the education of pastors,
certainly to the governments of local congregations.
But I think as it looks at the lives of families and Christians seeking to find a place to worship,
it’s now less about some of those things that we’ve spent this time talking about.
And now it’s more about how faithfully is Christ represented in the proclamation teaching and life of this group of people.
Yeah, and it seems to me,
Michael, that’s a pretty good stopping point, a transition point.
In the next couple of sessions,
we will talk about what Presbyterians believe historically and currently.
And it seems to me that that’s a fairly good bridge.
You know, we have,
I think in this day and age,
probably thousands and thousands of people who call themselves Presbyterian.
But outside of what they experience at their local church,
they perhaps wouldn’t know what’s at stake in that label.
The labels in churches in general have declined in importance.
I think you’d find lots of Presbyterians that if someone asked them,
what do Presbyterians believe,
they’d say,
well,
I’m not sure.
Here’s what my church does.
Here’s what the church I attend does.
And so next week,
the next couple of weeks,
we’ll spend some time unpacking.
What are those abiding beliefs?
How did we get Presbyterian theology?
What does it mean,
theologically speaking, historically speaking, to talk about yourself as Presbyterian?
And how do those things continue to guide us?
And maybe in what areas have we shifted and we’re now thinking differently?
Well, friends, we hope that there’s been something in this conversation that is interesting.
As we continue through this series,
we would welcome any questions or comments that you might have.
You can drop that into the comment box wherever you’re watching this video.
You can send us an email at the church at fpcspiritlake.org.
We would love to address maybe some things.
Maybe you’ve been going to a Presbyterian church for a long time or for your entire life,
and you wonder, why do we do this thing?
This is a great opportunity to have those conversations.
So put those in.
We look forward to continuing the next conversation on Wednesday at 9 o’clock.
I am Central Standard Time on Facebook and anywhere else you might want to join us.
Thanks for listening.