While many in the PCA try to find conflict inside the church behind every pew, throughout the last eight years I have seen numerous examples of elders in the PCA turning a blind eye toward the inherent conflict between the church and the world…What they fail to acknowledge (or perhaps understand) is that the church and the kingdom are built through conflict with the culture because the culture is in conflict with God.

At the beginning of this year, my family left the Presbyterian Church in America church we had attended for 27 years. It was a decision almost eight years in the making, a time that included gratitude for years of being loved by the body of Christ and shepherded by our elders, sadness over the idea of losing personal relationships, concerns about theological change in the PCA, and conflict. As I watched events unfold at the PCA’s 2025 General Assembly last month, it reinforced my belief that we’d made the right decision in finding a new church and new denomination.

When I came back to the church in the mid-1990s by the grace of God through Bible Study Fellowship, I went to what I’d known as a child, the Episcopal Church, where I was baptized at age 35. I liked much about it, but over the course of four years I came to understand I wasn’t being fully fed with God’s Word.

Some friends invited me to their PCA church and after one visit I never looked back. I had found a home with the worship, the people, and reformed theology. I also soon found my wife. And for the next 17 years my only complaint about the PCA was that some of the PCA churches we visited when traveling did not have weekly communion.

That changed somewhat in 2015 when I came across the PCA’s 2000 Creation Study Committee Report on the days of creation. I was not a literal six-day creationist when I joined the PCA, but it did not take long for me to see the clarity and logic of the Biblical passages on that topic. As opposed to some of the exegetical gymnastics I found in the committee’s report when discussing the Framework position:

Exegesis indicates that the scheme of the creation week itself is a poetic figure and that the several pictures of creation history are set within the six work-day frames not chronologically but topically. In distinguishing simple description and poetic figure from what is definitively conceptual the only ultimate guide, here as always, is comparison with the rest of Scripture.

Despite my disagreements with the study, it did not have much effect on me; it seemed a long way off. That began to change, though, a year or two later when other issues in the PCA—of which I had been blissfully unaware to that point—began to surface in our church. And they stayed in some form or another until we left.

Here are quotes from two sermons in our church that bookend the period during which it became evident to me it was time to leave the PCA:

“I was ashamed of my color. I was ashamed of my wealth. I was ashamed of my location” [as I watched blacks on the rooftops of their homes in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina]. – 2017

“If you know David’s story, he’s gonna murder. He’s gonna commit rape, he’s gonna abuse his power as king.” – 2024

During this time, I learned about how the PCA had become susceptible to being influenced by the culture around us. I believe this was happening because the tendency of bending Scripture to accommodate the culture I had first witnessed with advocates of the Framework position was ongoing and leading to other theological errors.

As a result, many elders in the PCA were embracing worldly concepts like an old earth, white privilege, egalitarianism, celibate gay Christians, and political liberalism, while exhibiting hostility toward those who disagreed them on these and other issues. I discovered that in the PCA diversity of opinion was often greatly valued until someone disagreed with the latest cultural fads.

By 2020—during the midst of the Revoice scandal, I had come to the point of writing a satirical essay on the collapse of the PCA into liberalism and its reunification with the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) in 2034. I’m glad most of the events depicted in that piece have not come true—and that improvements such as fighting back against the Revoice movement have occurred. Yet recent events lead me to believe that there are still valid concerns about the PCA.

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