The reality is that liberal and conservative Christians need each other, and the sad polarization we see in American Christianity today began in earnest when liberals and conservatives largely stopped talking to each other and ceased to learn from one another.  Apart from those needful conversations, Protestant liberals often lose touch with the tradition and tend to wander off the reservation; apart from those conversations, conservatives become weird and turned in on themselves.  Perhaps the greatest need today is for those meaningful conversations to take place once again.  

This blog is entitled “The Ecclesial Calvinist.”  Readers will rightly surmise that I am self-consciously located in the Reformed tradition of theology and that I care deeply about the church (ecclesia is the NT Greek term for “church”).  This post is longer than usual and is also the most autobiographical post I have ever written, so please bear with this apologia pro vita sua.

When I was younger I enjoyed reading the “How My Mind Has Changed” series of articles in the Christian Century magazine, as prominent theologians and church leaders explained significant changes in their own viewpoints. Well, this has been a time of change for me, both practically and intellectually.  I have recently retired as the Younts Professor of Bible and Religion at Erskine College, in Due West, South Carolina.  I am deeply grateful for the 31-year career at Erskine (from 1993 until 2024), and for the many students I’ve taught over those years.  It was a good run, but all good things come to an end. Rest assured that I wish my former colleagues and students God’s best as we move forward in faith.

It is also a time of change in denominational affiliation. For the past 32 years I have been a member of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church—a Presbyterian denomination that traces its roots back to the 1782 union of Scottish Covenanter and Seceder elements in this country.  I joined the ARPC in 1992 after I discerned that the Dutch-Reformed Christian Reformed Church was not going to be a permanent church home.  I will, however, be forever grateful to the congregants of Faith CRC Church in Nashville, TN for allowing me to explore my ministry gifts and sense of calling there while I was in graduate school at Vanderbilt University.  I am also grateful to the Prosperity ARP Church in Tennessee for receiving me as a member and to Tennessee-Alabama Presbytery of the ARPC for ordaining me to a call to Erskine College.  Here I should note that I joined the ARP Church in 1992 because I sensed that it offered a meaningful third way between mainline liberalism and conservative Reformed sectarianism (both of which I knew well). In the early 1990s that was not an unreasonable take on the situation.  Alas, it did not turn out that way.

By 2010 or so, however, I sensed that the ARP Church had lost its sense of identity and direction.  When I served as Moderator of the ARP General Synod in 2005 I warned the body that a dire situation awaited if the church did not recover a coherent identity and sense of mission.  Serving on the subsequent General Synod Vision and Strategic Planning Committees reinforced the sense that we were wandering in the weeds and on the edge of precipitous decline.  As a church historian I knew the story well—that ARP identity had historically been predicated on certain praxis distinctives (exclusive psalmody, non-instrumental worship, strict Sabbatarianism, and closed communion), and that by the mid-20^th century all of that had dissolved and the church was searching for a new identity.  From 2004 until 2012 I had written/edited the ARP Adult Quarterly Sunday-school curriculum, but beginning in 2012 I began to pull back from my denominational involvements to concentrate on scholarly writing and research.

During this time, I also noticed that the ARPC was becoming more rigidly conservative (largely because of the decline of Erskine Theological Seminary and the rising influence of Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte, NC) even as I was growing older and a bit more flexible theologically.  A clarifying moment occurred in the last few years when I chaired a Synod committee to study the issue of women serving in the diaconate in the ARPC.  The Committee presented a sensible report noting that the current policy of allowing women in the ARPC to serve as deacons has worked well for decades, that Scripture can reasonably be read either way, and that no one’s conscience is bound by the current policy.  The floor debate on the report was disheartening, and it was evident that a large minority of the court wanted to do away with women on the diaconate completely.  Particularly clarifying for me was an obviously premeditated speech by a younger minister asserting that those in favor of women in the diaconate were capitulating to the feminist and transgender agenda!  No one called him to task, and I realized at that point that the Overton window had shifted to such a point that I was in the wrong church!

Most recently, ARP Church experienced a collective paroxysm of conflict that resulted in the dissolving of my own Presbytery.  Suffice it to say that I was horrified by what I saw unfolding at the 2024 General Synod Meeting and at a subsequent called meeting of Second Presbytery, which can only be described as almost five hours of unremitting warfare.  Given my contacts in the broader conservative Reformed world, I was also aware of other unseemly episodes and conflicts, and I concluded that something has gone seriously wrong in the world of conservative Presbyterianism.

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