“…the majority of ministers and elders, while being personally men of great integrity and doctrinal orthodoxy, will tend to side with the left in the initial rounds of the struggle.”

In my last two posts, I have tried to suggest that the reasons for a church’s decline into liberalism are not always immediately doctrinal, but can actually arise out of a culture; and, by implication, the underlying story I am trying to tell is that sometimes (oftentimes?) churches go liberal without any initial intention of so doing. Indeed, I believe a functionalist, rather than an intentionalist, account will often provide a more adequate explanation of why a denomination loses the plot: the cumulative force of a set of often disparate circumstances and actions leads to a sudden collapse in orthodoxy, with the conscious intention of going liberal perhaps only emerging comparatively late in the process.

In this post, I want to address another of these practical, cultural phenomena. It is what I call the law of the included middle. In essence, it can be stated as follows: churches do not go liberal because the majority of the ministers and elders are liberal; they go liberal because the majority of ministers and elders, while being personally men of great integrity and doctrinal orthodoxy, will tend to side with the left in the initial rounds of the struggle.

This is often for the laudable reasons of desiring the peace and unity of the church, and of reading the left as charitably as possible. While I might criticise their wisdom, I find such motives to be admirable. Further, (let’s face it) the men on the right can be pretty obnoxious in their demeanour which can make it very hard to support them in public.

Sometimes, however, it is for less laudable reasons: they are simply intimidated by the nose-thumbing boot boys (see yesterday’s post) or take the attitude that `this is not a hill worth dying on’ or its close, venal cousin, `OK, as long as it is not happening in my back yard.’ The problem with that, of course, is that it may be an option for those with no ecclesiology; but thoughtful Anglicans and Presbyterians know that the church – the whole pesky denomination – is their back yard.

The best examples of this problem come from churches that have moved to ordain women. Typically, the process starts by a compromise being offered, a conscience clause that allows individual congregations to opt out. This is because the group committed to change knows that, by itself, it will find it hard to keep the church up and running without keeping on board as many of those with doubts about change as possible.

And, of course, it seems very reasonable to put a conscience clause on the table. The moderate conservatives consider their interests to be safeguarded as no-one is going to be imposing women elders on their congregations; and they are free to continue to preach as they wish

Now, before continuing this line of reasoning, I offer a personal anecdote which is illustrative of my next point. In the late 90s, I was sitting outside a café in Utrecht, chatting to a friend who was an ordained minister in a North American Reformed denomination. In the course of the conversation, he commented on how, after the recent decision of that denomination to ordain women, the conservatives who were strongly opposed to this had all left.

He named one such and, with a twinkle in his eye and a chuckle, asked me `Do you know what I find most hard to forgive about that man?’ I responded that I did not. `He has made me the right wing of my own denomination, and I just can’t stand that.’ he declared. ‘What did you expect?’ was the thought that passed through my mind; but I had too much respect and affection for my friend to rub salt into his wound.

This conversation pointed me towards something that is often missed in discussion of how churches change: when a change is introduced, those who are really strongly opposed to it tend to leave; and that alters the balance of power within the church and, more nebulously, changes the ethos of the denomination.

Suddenly, the old centre is now the new right, the overall numbers are smaller, and the need for the left to play nice and to build coalitions is proportionately diminished. In addition, the denomination may well now attract a few new people who are more radical and who have real agendas to push. For such activists, too much is never enough, and you have a recipe for increasing movement in a leftward direction.

That is why brokering a compromise deal with a conscience clause rarely does anything more than weaken the orthodox. Some of the conservatives pick up their marbles and head off to other playgrounds; those who remain soon find out who their real friends were — the guys who, while perhaps aesthetically rougher at the edges and a bit too strident in tone, were essentially pointing in the same direction

The churches that have moved to ordain women, and where the centre decided that this was not a hill on which they wished to die, are cases in point. Look at Anglicanism or the Church of Scotland or certain Reformed denominations in North America: within a few years, the conscience clauses are in practical terms not worth the paper they are written on; to refuse to ordain women is seen at best as a piece of barely tolerable obscurantism, more typically as bigoted, chauvinistic, oppressive and something against which it is probably necessary to legislate.

And those conservatives who remain suddenly find that not only are they now a lonely minority, but that women’s ordination is the least of their worries.

This is not to say that any on the left initially envisaged where this would all go, or that such developments represent the last moments in a chess game that was planned in detail right from the moment the first white pawn was moved. It is to say that interim deals where the left divides the moderate conservatives of the centre from the conviction conservatives of the right are never the end, whatever the sincerity of the intention of their framers.

Such deals change the theological demographics of a denomination and open up new questions and new possibilities, perhaps unforeseen and unimagined, and, combined with other elements, such as those I noted in the first two posts, this fact transforms the future trajectory of denominational decisions.

Indeed, while much has been rightly made of how the hermeneutics that lead to women’s ordination seem also to undermine any grounds for opposition to gay ordination, denominations are not changed simply because of hermeneutical moves.

Changes in theological demographics are just as important; and those in the centre who cut deals with the left really need to bear that in mind and reflect on who their real friends are.

This, of course, leads to one final observation on this issue. Those on the right also need to wrestle long and hard with the issue of when their responsibility to stay and fight ends and the need to leave begins. The most egregious examples of mass ecclesiastical exoduses are of those who bail out of churches for non-theological reasons, leaving the centre exposed simply because the right has a personal beef with a particular person or cultural issue. That is nothing more than modern day Donatism, itself an egregious error.

Yet, even when the matter is theological, it can be very tempting to jump ship at the first defeat; but such need to understand that they too must shoulder responsibility for future ecclesiastical trajectories, not only of the church to which they are thinking of going, but also of that which they are leaving. Sure, once the courts of the church are lost to the nose-thumbers, it is time to move on; but exactly when that happens can be very hard to discern in the early stages of a struggle. Some times churches go liberal because the men of principle and backbone bail out too early.

Carl R Trueman is Departmental Chair of Church History at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He has an MA in Classics from the University of Cambridge and a PhD in Church History from the University of Aberdeen. He is editor of the IFES journal, Themelios, and has taught on the faculties of theology at both the University of Nottingham and the University of Aberdeen. This article is reprinted from the Reformation 21 blog and is used with their permission. http://www.reformation21.org/blog/