Pastor’s Corner June 2005

The following was published in our monthly newsletter, the Redeemer Report.

Pray for the PCA General Assembly June 13-17 in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

In December 1973 (when I was almost two years old…) delegates, representing some 260 congregations with a combined communicant membership of over 41,000 gathered at Briarwood Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, Alabama, and organized the National Presbyterian Church, which was renamed the Presbyterian Church in America two years later. These churches had separated from the Southern Presbyterian Church in opposition to the long-developing theological liberalism which denied the deity of Jesus Christ and the inerrancy and authority of Scripture. In 1982, the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod, joined the Presbyterian Church in America. This was a group of churches, primarily in the north, that had their roots in the fundamentalist-modernist controversy that divided the Northern Presbyterian Church in the 1930’s. Since then the PCA has spread to every state but Alaska and Maine, with churches in six Canadian provinces and one in Grand Cayman Island. Today, the PCA is one of the faster growing denominations in the U.S., with over 1400 churches and missions and 330,000 communicant members. Redeemer is one of 5 PCA churches in the Kansas City area and we are overseeing the planting of a sixth in the Northland, newly named “Christ Covenant Presbyterian Church”.

We are in a solid denomination, for all its human imperfections, because it has made a firm commitment on the doctrinal standards which had been significant in presbyterianism since 1645, namely the Westminster Confession of Faith and Catechisms. These doctrinal standards express the distinctives of the Reformed tradition. Among the distinctive doctrines of the Westminster Standards and of Reformed tradition is the unique authority of the Bible. The reformers based all of their claims on “sola scripture,” the Scriptures alone. This included the doctrine of their inspiration which is a special act of the Holy Spirit by which He guided the writers of the books of Scripture (in their original autographs) so that their words should convey the thoughts He wished to convey, and be kept from error of fact, of doctrine, and of judgment- all of which were to be an infallible rule of faith and life.

The PCA maintains the historic connectional polity of Presbyterian governance set forth in the Book of Church Order, namely rule by presbyters (or elders) and the graded assemblies or courts. Our local Session, your elders, are the first “court” of our governance. Our geographically ordered Presbytery is the second court, comprised of representatives from the PCA churches in Kansas, part of Missouri, and Nebraska. The third and final court is the General Assembly, comprised of representatives from all PCA Churches in North America.

This month, Elders Bob Reymond and Mike Preston will be serving as Redeemer’s representatives at General Assembly in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Pastor Nathan and I will also be attending as representatives of Heartland Presbytery. If you would like to learn more about the ministry business that is conducted at this annual meeting, go to the PCA’s website at any time www.pcanet.org, there will be a live telecast of the Assembly for you to view also. We’ll be sure to wave to you all!

Please pray for a God-honoring and ministry-enriching Assembly.

In the Lamb,
Pastor Tony Felich