Last week it became our Presbytery’s time to vote, not that our vote would matter, the manipulators and schemers had, during the General Assembly Meeting last July, already put into effect the Authoritative Interpretation that negated any real power to divert or correct the plunge of the Presbyterian Church USA into apostasy. However, it was the final shot we could fire in the war against those determined to steal the church, denying its history, and corrupting its faith. We had to try, but sadly when the time to fight came, only two pastors stood to raise the flag of objection.

There have been few times in my life when I have been truly soul sad. As a Pastor, I have stood by the bed of dying patients and encouraged them to hope in Heaven when earth offered them none. I have held the hands of mothers when their cries had no comfort, because the terminally ill child in their arms would be the pain of unfulfilled dreams. I have listened to the hurt of children betrayed, seen the terror of marriages destroyed by temptation, and cried when good people have made devastatingly bad choices. For these my soul has hurt, being soul sad is a state in which you mourn for something you have lost knowing it can never be replaced and its loss will change the very fiber of your life.

I was soul sad when my father died at the age of forty and left a thirteen year old son to make it on his own. I knew my life had changed and nothing in life would ever fill the void. Over the years I have missed so much in life he could have shared with me or taught me. When they closed the casket on my mother’s face my brother and I knew the family was forever changed and no matter what we taught our children they would never know the richness of the home we had once known. We were soul sad.

I felt the deep loss of being soul sad this past week when the belief and dedication to the Bible died in the Presbyterian Church USA. The death had been coming for quite some time, but finally it came to a vote. A simple vote over whether the Bible was to be obeyed or whether we as a people could determine, apart from the scripture, what was right or wrong. The focal point was the amendment changing the definition of marriage. Jesus had declared marriage to be when a man left his father and mother and clung to his wife. The church now describes that as being any two consenting adults, traditionally a man and a woman.

Last week it became our Presbytery’s time to vote, not that our vote would matter, the manipulators and schemers had, during the General Assembly Meeting last July, already put into effect the Authoritative Interpretation that negated any real power to divert or correct the plunge of the Presbyterian Church USA into apostasy. However, it was the final shot we could fire in the war against those determined to steal the church, denying its history, and corrupting its faith. We had to try, but sadly when the time to fight came, only two pastors stood to raise the flag of objection. With a final vote of sixty favoring the amendment to change the definition of marriage, the faith and convictions of the forty-two commissioners voting against were discounted, no longer heeded as being valid or desired in the future of the progressive church. I knew then what I spoke on the floor of the Presbytery was a prophesy which will be fulfilled.

I said to them, “It is a sad thing that we are called to take a vote on the validity of changing the definition of marriage. I want you to look around, look at your friends gathered here to constitute the Charleston-Atlantic Presbytery. No matter what way you vote this day, you will be saying good by to some of them, because they believe strongly whether they are Progressives or Traditionalists. This vote will draw the lines of separation.

Read More