According to one progressive pastor,  “…there’s a far deeper, more organic challenge for our denomination. Many of its leaders at both the local and national level are no longer in synch with any semblance of orthodox Christian creeds and doctrine.” 

I recently came across a remarkable piece of revisionist church history:

In 1930, when PC (USA) voted to allow women to be ordained elders, it did not demand that all its member churches ordain women elders. Indeed, our own church did not ordain a woman elder until the 1970s!

Likewise, when PC (USA) voted to allow churches to perform same-sex marriages and to ordain gay pastors, it did not order all of its member churches to comply. It merely acknowledged that some faithful churches have come to the conclusion that such allowances are God’s will.

Churches that believe the opposite are encouraged by PC (USA) to continue to adhere to their own beliefs on the issue.

Claims that it’s “just a matter of time,” before PC (USA) makes same-sex marriage a compulsory rule ignore more than a century of our church’s experience and the denomination’s history and precedent.

Within the PC (USA) denomination, our church is free to decide for itself what it believes in matters of disputed Scriptural interpretation.

This statement on the ordination of women may be demonstrated false simply by appeal to the ecclesial case of Walter Kenyon.

In 1973 Kenyon was denied ordination by Pittsburgh Presbytery on the basis that he personally did not endorse the ordination of women, but would happily serve along side a woman and would not oppose the ordination of women in the presbytery of his membership.

The highest Court of the Presbyterian Church ruled:

The question of the importance of our belief in the equality of all people before God is thus essential to the disposition in this case. It is evident from our church’s confessional standards that the church believes the Spirit of God has led us into a new understanding of this equality before God.

From that moment on there is has been no freedom of conscience for ordinands to personally scruple the ordination of women. This controlling rationale above is essentially the same one that has been proffered in recent changes to ordination standards.

It is the same controlling rationale that is driving the overtures to the next General Assembly asking the Presbyterians to apologize to GLBTQ for the damage that has been done to them.

To summarize, there are examples across the denomination that demonstrates significant theological drift and also that our system of examining ministers is flawed:

• The belief that there is no God
• The belief that Jesus was simply a man and not God –
• The belief that Jesus was not raised from the dead
• The belief that Jesus’ death was unnecessary
• The belief that all people are already saved

The only required belief is that women should be ordained to all offices of the church. 

Everything else is optional.

Consider this conversation from 2015 about the theological reality in the PCUSA. According to one progressive pastor,  “…there’s a far deeper, more organic challenge for our denomination. Many of its leaders at both the local and national level are no longer in synch with any semblance of orthodox Christian creeds and doctrine.” 

[Editor’s note: This article is incomplete. The source for this document was originally published on jeffgissing.com – however, the original URL is no longer available. Also, one or more original URLs (links) are no longer valid; those links have been removed.]