Editor’s Note:  Word spread during the day on Tuesday that Wes White was closing down his blog.  Here is his final post.

Dear friends,

Thank you for the hundreds of thousands of visits to my blog over the past couple years. It has been a lot of fun, and I appreciate you. I know I have offended some, and I’m sorry for that. I hope that you will forgive me. I know I have made mistakes, and I have repented for many of them. In time, I’m sure God will show me more that I’ve made.

I have always viewed my site as a temporary one, and I was waiting for God to call me back to a more exclusive focus on local ministry. Now is that time. I would appreciate your prayers as I begin a new season of ministry.

Before I go, let me sum up what I have said or would like to have said over the course of the life of this site. I love the Presbyterian Church in America. I can’t think of any denomination that has more potential to be a denominational that is truly Reformed and truly evangelical. Sadly, I think our greatest danger is in losing our evangelical identity. I think we could do this in at least the four following ways:

1. Modernism: when Christianity is adapted to the desires and philosophies of the modern world. When we do this, we end up turning salvation into changing the world in this life, and we lose the foundation for our faith, the infallible, inerrant Word of God.
2. Sacramentalism: when baptism replaces the need for conversion experience. That conversion experience may be like mine: I never remember a time when I did not see my sin, trust in Jesus, and desire to live a godly life (with many sins and falls along the way!); but we need to experience it. Baptism is not the point of conversion.
3. Reformedism: when our Reformed identity becomes more important than our evangelical identity. Reformed theology and practice is what our elders subscribe to, and it forms the framework for our ministry. But it is not what forms our congregations. Our congregations are formed by a simple, credible profession of faith in Jesus Christ alone for salvation. When we emphasize our Reformed identity over our evangelical identity, our churches become more about making mature Christians and Christian leaders than making Christians and nurturing Christians of all stages.
4. Distractions: when anything else other than the simple offer of salvation through Jesus becomes the heart or center of our ministry. Reformed people are filled with good ideas, and they’ve come up with a lot of bad ones. When anything other than the simple preaching of Jesus Christ offered to sinners and received by faith alone for new life and forgiveness becomes the center or heart of our ministry, whether its politics, worldviews, Calvinism, the regulative principle, family, or anything else, then we will inadvertently teach our people to focus on something else other than Jesus. All other good things we do must center in the proclamation of Jesus to lost sinners.

So, I hope to avoid these errors. I hope the PCA does, too. I’m not going to write about it or speak about publicly, probably not for a long while. But I will pray about it. I’ll be praying that God preserves a church that is truly Reformed, truly evangelical, and truly evangelistic.

Yours in Christ,

Wes White

Wes White is a Teaching Elder in the Presbyterian Church in America. He is currently serving as the Pastor of New Covenant Spearfish Presbyterian Church, Spearfish, South Dakota. This article originally appeared on his blog and is used with permission. 

[Editor’s note: the original URL (link) referenced in this article is no longer valid, so the link has been removed.]