As they walked on the beach, several of the founders of the PCA told the Doctor that they knew that they needed to leave the Old Mainline denomination and to start a new one, but that they feared that they would not have the resources to be able to do so. As the story goes, Lloyd-Jones told these men that they not only could leave and start a new denomination of churches that would be faithful to the Scriptures, true to the Reformed faith and obedient to the Great Commission, but that they must do so.

By the turn of the 20th Century, the greater part of the masses in the Western world had been stripped of any sense of biblical Christianity by the liberalism and pragmatism that had so infected the churches in England and North America. It is a sad fact that, in our day, those who attend so-called evangelical “churches”–spread out throughout the various parts of the Western world–have been subject to the effects of liberalism and pragmatism to such an extent that they do not know how to answer to the question, “What is the Church?”–let alone know how to the answer to the question, “What is the Gospel?”

In his 1969 lectures at the Pensacola Theological Institute of McIlwain Memorial Presbyterian Church, Martyn Lloyd-Jones set out to answer the question “What is the Church?”–insisting that in seeking to do so, the greater part of the masses of “church goers” arrive at inaccurate answers. Far too many, he asserted, are content to waste their lives sitting in the pews of churches that have utterly abandoned the Gospel.

Interestingly, Dr. James Baird–one of the founding members of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA)–recounted that it was at those 1969 meetings that he and a number of men–having had their hearts stirred by the messages given–met with Lloyd-Jones after the lectures to discuss the state of the Mainline Presbyterian Church in America. As they walked on the beach, several of the founders of the PCA told the Doctor that they knew that they needed to leave the Old Mainline denomination and to start a new one, but that they feared that they would not have the resources to be able to do so. As the story goes, Lloyd-Jones told these men that they not only could leave and start a new denomination of churches that would be faithful to the Scriptures, true to the Reformed faith and obedient to the Great Commission, but that they must do so. In a sense, Lloyd-Jones’ zeal to see the purity of the church, the preservation of the truth of the Gospel and the glory of the name of the Savior was instrumental in the founding of the PCA. Here is what MLJ had to say in one of those 1969 lectures delivered at McIlwain Memorial Presbyterian Church:

The question is, how do we approach this doctrine of the nature of the church? And there are certain important negatives. One fatal method is just to start from where we are and to see what modifications or accommodations we can make in order somehow to arrive at a church. Now that is exactly what is being done by the ecumenical movement. It starts from the present position, and then it more or less asks the different sections of the church to make certain modifications, perhaps even compromises, in order to produce one great world church.

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