Those who seek stability and unity [in the PCA] would do well to set aside their preferences and rely on the plain reading of our standards, without resorting to word games or excessive subtlety. Pushing the practice envelope and engaging in ecclesial disobedience in protest of our agreed polity cannot promote peace; these things can only provoke.

At the end of the first paragraph of Christianity and Liberalism, the quotable Machen spun out a sentence for the ages, a statement striking rightness:

“In the sphere of religion, as in other spheres, the things about which men are agreed are apt to be the things that are least worth holding; the really important things are the things about which men will fight.”

Machen fought unbelief and an encroaching non-redemptive religion that often denied the supernatural, the deity of Christ, and the scriptures. God be praised, these are not the casus belli for what we witness in the online digital ether or in the offline courts of the Presbyterian Church in America today. The PCA is fighting about liturgy and polity, and the intersection of the two. To oversimplify, the PCA is beefing about worship and women. To adapt a contemporary acronym, the PCA is duking it out over DEI—doxology, ecclesiology, and inclusion.

It may be helpful to view the Reformed church as a three-legged stool. The seat is the stool’s purpose: supporting the sitter. The purpose of the church on earth is to make disciples and provide a home for them as they glorify God and begin to enjoy him forever. In this home, they are protected, work, learn, and grow, just as in an earthly family home. The fact of the church—its existence—is almost inseparable from its mission; the church is, and the church does.

The three legs support the being and mission of the church:

1. Worship & Sacraments—We place these first because Calvin, in his work The Necessity of Reforming the Church, put them ahead of soteriology/doctrine as one of the two “things chiefly (by which) the Christian religion has a standing existence amongst us and maintains its truth.”¹ Note well: proper, biblical worship supports and maintains the truth that the church proclaims and applies. Calvin placed the sacraments after worship, but a developed understanding of the ordinary means of grace suggests that these two should go together.

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