This twinge of fear was the latest in a long line of red flags that as a church, the PCA is less and less confident in the power of the Holy Spirit, and more and more reliant upon the wisdom of the age; less and less committed to Christ’s design for the church, and more and more striving for a designer church; less and less content with whatever the Lord may bring, and more and more anxious to produce the outcome that we think is best.

As a brown PCA minister in an 80% Dutch ethnic town, I was interested to read an article, over at the denominational magazine, on how the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) needs to equip itself for the ethnic shifts coming to our country.

This, unfortunately, is more of the same sub-Christian mindset that I first recognized in the Strategic Plan of a few years ago. In the Strategic Plan, we had the language of “more seats at the table.”

At that time, I thought it strange, because it isn’t our church, it isn’t our leadership table, and the seats aren’t ours to give. It’s Christ’s church. It’s Christ’s table. And both by the commands of His Word for the operation of His church, and by the almighty providence of His Spirit in whom He brings to Himself, He is the One who arranges the seats at the table.

Now, the urgency of the article exposes where all of this pragmatism is leading us. If we are a true church, with true preaching, true worship, true sacraments, true discipleship, then we will indeed–by the Holy Spirit’s almighty power–continue to survive and even thrive regardless of what happens demographically.

The Lord may build us into a Revelation-five-imitating multi-ethnic church. Certainly, the gospel is described as having this power in Scripture, and has been demonstrated to have this power in history. The Lord may choose to keep us predominantly white as He uses this providence to train white believers how to live in love and obedience to Him as a minority. Or, perhaps the Lord simply is going to do differently than the demographic prognosticators anticipate. But, if we are Christ’s church, doing it Christ’s way, with Christ’s commands as our “strategic plan,” then we look forward with confidence and even anticipatory joy at what our Lord will be doing in the decades ahead of us.

He is the Lord, and we are glad for Him to do as He will. He is the Lord, and so we are glad to put our energy not into “diversity preparation,” but in preaching the gospel to every creature, in teaching disciples to keep all that Christ has commanded us, in doing good to all and especially the household of faith. As the old Scots Presbyterian saying goes, “Duty is ours; events are God’s.” And we are delighted to leave things with our church just that way.

The difficulty with this approach is that following it means actually having to walk by faith and not by sight. It means actually having to depend upon Holy-Spirit-power to produce something that only God knows what it will be. For us, it is more attractive to depend upon ourselves, and to produce an outcome that is already tangible.

For me, the most difficult thing in the article wasn’t anything that was being proposed. It was the twinge of fear in the urgency of the article. This twinge was the latest in a long line of red flags that as a church, the PCA is less and less confident in the power of the Holy Spirit, and more and more reliant upon the wisdom of the age; less and less committed to Christ’s design for the church, and more and more striving for a designer church; less and less content with whatever the Lord may bring, and more and more anxious to produce the outcome that we think is best.

So, are we really a true branch of the church of Jesus Christ? Then let us repent of our self-reliance, our self-will, our self-determination. And let us be instead a church of Holy Spirit power.

James N Hakim is a minister in the Presbyterian Church in America is pastor of Harvest PCA in Orange City, Iowa. This article appeared on his blog and used with permission.