“There are no PPPs. There are no Perfectly Pure Presbyterians in the world. The guts of the Gospel is that all of us in this room have warts. We have flaws. We have sins in our past. If you are perfect, you’re in the wrong place,” –Bill Solomon

A North Carolina Presbyterian church greeted 2012 with its first public worship service and joined a growing number of disaffected Presbyterians who are choosing to simply start new churches rather than contend with the various Presbyterian Church (USA)’s dismissal processes – processes unique to each presbytery that often strip fleeing congregations of property and leave churches with mountains of legal bills.

Wedged between an indoor swimming pool and an IHOP pancake house, a group of 25 people met in a Ramada Inn ballroom in Asheville for the inaugural service of New Horizon EPC Mission Church.

“You’re witnessing a new baby being born,” the Rev. Bill Solomon said as he opened the service.

Although several Presbyterian churches have sought dismissal from the PCUSA to join the Evangelical Presbyterian Church (EPC) or other denominations, many former church members are autonomously joining the EPC and starting non-denominational groups as new church plants rather than laboring through the PCUSA presbytery system.

Using both routes, a steady stream of church members are fleeing the PCUSA due to theological shifts within the denomination. Many have cited the 2011 approval of Amendment 10A and the passage of the new Form of Government (nFOG) as symptoms of a more serious underlying problem in the denomination: variant views of the authority of Scripture.

Amendment 10A deleted the explicit “fidelity/chastity” requirement from the constitutional ordination standard, and now allows the PCUSA to ordain of gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people as deacons, elders and pastors. The new Form of Government has raised concerns of a more “top-down” PCUSA bureaucracy and a universalistic theology.

For members of New Hope, the amendment’s passage represented an opportunity to start something new.

“Some people were very concerned over the years of the drift of the PCUSA from the inerrancy of Scripture,” New Hope core-group member Mary Louise Carpenter said.
Carpenter, along with four others, eventually left Oak Forest Presbyterian Church of Asheville after the PCUSA deletion of the chastity/fidelity ordination standards.

Following the passage of 10A, Carpenter, a former member of Oak Forest’s session, was asked by fellow members to research various options in response.

Ultimately, the church decided to remain with the PCUSA but, as a result of Carpenter’s investigation, a few members decided on a different course.

“We decided that perhaps it was time to step out in faith and start a church we felt comfortable with and that adhered to the inerrant word of God,” she said. “The EPC seemed the most like us,” adding that the core group made no effort to recruit Oak Forest members.

After meeting with EPC officials, the group convened in September to officially organize and elect officers. In October, they sent a letter of intent to the EPC’s Church Development Committee of the Presbytery of the Mid-Atlantic. The committee approved them as a mission group and deployed Solomon as the group’s church planter and consulting pastor.

A 72-year-old pastoral veteran with four church plants under his belt, Solomon said New Horizon doesn’t want to be a mega-church but rather wants to grow to a point that it can “hive off” into other small congregations in neighboring areas.

Read More

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