In keeping with the journalistic tradition of looking back at the recent past, we present the top 50 stories of the year that were read on The Aquila Report site based on the number of hits. We will present the 50 stories in groups of 10 to run on five lists on consecutive days. Here are numbers 41-50.

In 2023 The Aquila Report (TAR) posted over 3,000 stories. At the end of each year we feature the top 50 stories that were read.

TAR posts 8 new stories each day, on a variety of subjects – all of which we trust are of interest to our readers. As a web magazine TAR is an aggregator of news and information that we believe will provide articles that will inform the church of current trends and movements within the church and culture.

In keeping with the journalistic tradition of looking back at the recent past, we present the top 50 stories of the year that were read on The Aquila Report site based on the number of hits. We will present the 50 stories in groups of 10 to run on five lists on consecutive days. Here are numbers 41-50:

50. Targeting Transgenderism: Two Overtures to the PCA 50th GA

In my opinion, the BCO is not the main issue. The issue is not simply women in the pulpit, nor the sexual mutilation of children, nor even the legitimacy of homosexuality (in some form or another).  The issue is transgenderism.  The issue is men and women giving in to sinful impulses that cross the lines that God drew in creation when he created male and female and assigned them their roles in the world he created.

49. Why Some Evangelicals Are Embracing Racism

Sin is sin, on the right or the left. Kinism is just as evil as critical race theory. So Kinists are not our allies. They’re just as opposed to Biblical views on race as critical race theorists.

48. A Confession Rejected and a Denomination Undone

For Southern Baptists, adopting a revised and expanded version of the New Hampshire Confession of Faith was not an act of division but a means of ensuring unity. As Mullins explained, he believed it would “clarify the atmosphere and remove the causes of misunderstanding, friction, and apprehension.” The differences between Northern and Southern Baptist Conventions over the past 100 years can be explained many ways—but they cannot be explained apart from the question of confessionalism and the need for doctrinal fidelity.

47. Officials Charge Retired CRC Pastor In 1975 Cold Case Murder Of Delco 8-Year-Old

Gretchen Harrington, 8-years-old, disappeared on Aug. 15, 1975, while on a walk from her Marple Township home to a Bible school less than a mile away. Stollsteimer said that, at that time, Zandstra served as a reverend at Trinity Christian Reformed Church, one of two churches that Harrington regularly attended. As she walked to Bible camp alone, Zandstra pulled alongside her in a vehicle and offered her a ride, Stollsteimer said.

46. We Are Already Defeated

Young seminarians are being steeped—in seminary—in an expressive individualism that is contrary to the gospel of Jesus Christ and that will, if it’s not nipped right in the bud, lead actual people into hell.

45. Why The Gospel Centered Movement Failed

Fast forward to 2020; there’s no need to recap everything but you’ve got Covid, BLM, mask and vaccine mandates, etc – you remember, you were there. Anyway, here we have a key moment in time when the practical instructions of the Bible, God’s laws, become absolutely essential to how the church should respond. Startled and harassed bodies of believers across the world, under pressure to conform on all sides, actually needed to know what to do. They needed to know this in detail, with clarity and with conviction. And because of the lack of attention paid to God’s law, this gospel-centered movement didn’t have a great answer.

44. Covenant Presbytery Denies Appeal of Jonesboro 7 Finding No Errors in Session Trial

It is a most remarkable providence; if one reads the protest against Presbytery’s action to preserve the church plant, the signers represent the elders from Covenant Presbytery’s wealthiest and most influential churches and committees. Yet the speech of a largely unknown, retired former Arkansas church planter was powerfully used by God to change the course of the debate, save the little church plant from dissolution, and preserve a witness for Himself in Jonesboro.

43. 3 Wrong Reasons to Leave Your Local Church — and 5 Right Reasons to Stay

It’s been commonly said that we don’t choose the people who sit next to us in the pew, but God does. Love requires, in response to the gospel, that we invest in the lives of those who are often most difficult and unattractive to us. It’s one of the saddest things to witness someone throw away their entire local church family for selfish reasons. Is our love sincere and absent of hypocrisy? This is an important question when it comes to church membership.

42. Retraction Refused: The PCA’s Magazine Stands By Its Claims in David Cassidy’s “Prayer and Work in the Face of Violence”

If this were an isolated occurrence it would be one thing; regrettably, this does not seem to be the case. If one were to summarize the crisis of evangelicalism in America today, he could probably do so best by saying that its internal struggles arise because its institutions do not represent the vast majority of its people, and that their actions do not put into practice the beliefs or preferred actions of those people.

41. A Political View of the PCA Jubilee General Assembly

Another critical issue was related to the use of the term “pastor” as being reserved for ordained teaching elders.  It seems that the modern evangelical church tends to label everyone contributing service to the Lord’s work as pastor.  From nonordained youth “pastors” to nonordained music “pastors,” it has become a very generic term.  This has contributed to much confusion in the wider church.