Well, we return to this short history of the PCA. I apologize for sitting down, but I'm trying to give my back as much rest as I can. Last week, we looked at the split that took place in 1861 after the Gardner Spring Resolution. The Gardner Spring Resolution said basically that all Presbyterians had to profess unabated loyalty to the Union. And this is something that Southerners and those who were committed to states' rights couldn't tolerate. So when the resolution passed, the result was a split into two distinct Presbyterian denominations, one in the north and one in the south. And this is an important split in understanding the PCA's history because our roots really are in the Southern Presbyterian Church. You can see that split on the Presbyterian family tree in your handout. It's highlighted in blue. And this morning we're gonna walk through some of the events in the Southern Church after that split. that resulted in the formation of the PCA in 1973. So let's have a word of prayer and we'll get to work. Again, oh God, we thank you and bless you for your mercies to us this day. We're thankful to be able to study history and just what a valuable thing it is for your people. Certainly this is not inspired or infallible history in the sense that we can look at it and draw definitive spiritual lessons. But Christianity is an historic religion. It's grounded on historic facts, things that took place. And we certainly can learn as we see how our brothers and sisters have applied the historic Christian faith throughout the history of the church. So teach us this morning wonderful things that we might be a blessing to those around us and competent and effective and faithful disciples for the Lord Jesus Christ. In whose name we pray, amen. Last year, we looked at some of the main causes for the doctrinal decline in the Northern Church and the reasons the OPC split off in 1936, you'll remember, under the leadership of J. Grecia Machen. Here's a few of the causes for that split in the Northern Church. Again, this is by way of review. First, under the influence of Enlightenment thinking, the Word of God came under attack under the rubric of higher criticism. It was impacted by Enlightenment principles sought to understand Scripture through bare human reason. So that if a Bible doctrine couldn't be worked out through pure logic and extra-biblical history, well, the higher critical folks would say, that's a doctrine that has to be scrapped. Second, higher criticism wasn't the only intellectual challenge to the faith in the late 19th and early 20th century. At that point, the church was also being bombarded with Darwinian evolution. As you might imagine, those who were accepting of higher criticism were convinced that the church should accommodate evolutionary ideas. Third, the liberals in the Northern Presbyterian Church wanted to move away from the sharp edges of Reformed theology, especially in regard to the doctrine of God's decrees and the doctrine of election. To that end, in 1903, they added two chapters to the Westminster Confession of Faith, one on the Holy Spirit and one on the love of God and missions. And those two chapters that were added again in 1903 to the Westminster had the effect of making God's love, as defined, interestingly enough, by liberal theologians, making God's love the most essential doctrine for the church and the lens through which all other doctrines were viewed. And then fourth, it was the rise of the social gospel. It was the belief that man's problems are chiefly this-worldly, and therefore they primarily needed this-worldly kinds of solutions. That's what the social gospel sought to offer. And so the gospel that gathers and grows saints was replaced with a societal religion that fixes societal ills. Now, those four poisonous ideas were among the major factors that led to the decline of the Northern Presbyterian Church. And not surprisingly, those same poisonous ideas were being foisted upon the Southern Presbyterian Church, which is why I reviewed them. Now, I want to mention three men who sought to introduce these ideas into the Southern Church right at the cusp of the 20th century. And again, think about those four things, because these men I'm gonna mention, they were trying to bring those four things into the Presbyterian Church, and eventually they would. The Southern Presbyterian Church managed to stay faithful maybe 25, 30 years longer, but the same issues eventually encroached upon their orthodoxy as well. I wanna mention three guys. The first one's James Vance. Now Vance spent much of his ministry at First Presbyterian Church in Nashville, which was the largest Presbyterian Church in the South. Actually, I think at one point they had over a thousand members. So think about that. That's truly a mega church, right? So a massively big church. He first arrived at First Pres in Nashville when he was 32 years old. And in 1898, he preached a sermon on predestination in which he not only argued against the Westminster doctrine of predestination, he was actually flirting with universalism. And so he ended up grounding predestination exclusively in God's love. That's why I mentioned that and reviewed that in the Northern Church. In the sermon he said, God's decrees are not the manifestation primarily of power, wisdom, expediency, or foreknowledge, but of eternal and unchangeable love. The emphasis is his. He's the one who all capped that back in 1900. And listen to how he describes the gospel call. The gospel call closed the human will with ability to accept if he chooses to do so and enter into life. So again, a person can believe those things and be a Christian, but you can't believe those things and be a Presbyterian. So that was part of the issue. Vance's sermon was reviewed in The Predatarian Quarterly by James Blackburn who summed this up this way, justice nowhere appears, all reference to justice is studiously avoided, it's love, love, love, nothing but love, no justice, no righteousness, no holiness, except that emanate from love. By the way, doesn't that sound familiar? I mean, that's very similar to what we deal with today, right? The only doctrine that matters when you're engaging the world That's all they want to hear. At least we're told that's all they want to hear. I think you mentioned that that is what Tim Keller was about. He wouldn't preach when he was exegeting the scriptures. He would skip, if I remember correctly, that he would skip over God's justice and those passages about his judgment and wrath and things like that. Is that fair? Is that what you told me? Well, you know what? He was really good with typically with things like justice and judgment. But if he was preaching through 1 Corinthians and he came to 1 Corinthians 6, what it taught about homosexuality, he would certainly skip over those. Or the passages that had to do with sexual immorality, he would often blow right through them because, again, this is going to sound horrible, but it was common knowledge that a bunch of the young single people in Manhattan that were attending his church were shacking up together. And his thinking, and he articulated this, his thinking was, let's help him get the gospel right and that'll work itself out. The problem is, you need God's law to get the gospel right. Not that the law saves you, or has any power to convert you, but you need the law to get the gospel right. to love, love, love. Yeah. Just looking at the years, he had a long tenure there of almost 40 years, but there's a 10-year gap. What happened? Yeah, yeah. Interestingly enough, he took a call in 1900 to a flagship church in the RCA. And assuming it, presumably it was because sort of the heat got turned up over this sermon in the South. So he went to New Jersey and served a church up there for, again, just about 10 years. That's the gap that I laid out there. Was it in the New York, New Jersey suburbs? Or was it? You know what? If you don't know, that's fine. Oh, I'm trying to think. I'm sure I read it, but I can't access the file. But yeah, I know it was in New Jersey, though. Well, he returned, as you mentioned, he returned in 1910. And when he returned, he, at that point, began to advocate very quickly for social justice issues and other liberalizations within the church. So that's one guy I want you to be aware of, James Vance. A second person sort of following some of the dangerous trajectory of the South was Walter Lingle. Now, after graduating from Union Seminary, he served churches in Georgia, then in South Carolina, and then back to Georgia, where again, he actually served one of the most prominent churches, Presbyterian churches, in Atlanta. And while he was in Atlanta, one day he went to Carnegie Library, and he came across the writings of Walter Rauschenbusch. I don't know if you remember, we talked about him last year. He's sort of the godfather of the social gospel movement in the Northern Presbyterian Church. He's the minister who was in Hell's Kitchen, New York, saw all the poverty, all the despair, and decided again, we need this worldly gospel. And so Lingle came in contact with Rauschenbusch's teaching, and almost as soon as he started reading him, he was hooked. Now, in fairness, L'Engle didn't go quite as far as Rauschenbusch did down the social gospel rabbit hole. Dr. Shawn Lucas makes the point this way, L'Engle would never be comfortable with the more radical approach of Rauschenbusch. Am I saying that right? Anyone who knows German, Rauschenbusch? By the way, what is... Are you German? Huh? That's German? Isn't it? It might be Northern Italian. Liggett would never be comfortable with the more radical approach of Rauschenbusch, questioning his understanding of biblical inspiration, biblical criticism, and the deity of Christ, as well as an apparent embrace of socialism. Rauschenbusch was like the motherlode of bad ideas. Still, he continued to find things to appreciate in Rauschenbusch's vision. And he found ways to communicate the core ideas of social Christianity in a more acceptable form for southern Presbyterians. Kingdom of God, laws of the kingdom, and the application to businesses and social relations. But I think that what Dr. Lucas is describing here is early on in L'Engle's career, as time progressed, he became more and more influenced by Rationbush. In fact, at one point L'Engle lamented that Roshanbush was on a trajectory of doctrinal apostasy, but it didn't matter. He was so enamored with his commitment to social issues that he vigorously promoted that teaching to his students at Union Theological Seminary, and even began teaching sociology courses to men training for the ministry. That's almost a clue in. If ministers are being taught sociology in seminary, it's problematic, just as a rule of thumb. Anyway, very practically speaking here, just about every issue the church faces in every generation comes because men who are faithful, or at least moderately faithful, see some worldly idea that they think one of two things happens. They either think the world is presenting a challenge to Christianity that Christianity can't overcome unless they tweak it, or they see a worldly idea that they think would be so valuable to the Christian church that they want to tweak those ideas and force them into orthodoxy. In both instances, both of those trajectories always lead in the same place. And I mean, you can literally go back to the first century of the church and walk forward and see those two plans, and every single time they lead to apostasy, and yet every generation, a crop of young men say, but we can do it. And I appreciate the idealism of youth. I'm sure I had it 40 years ago. But man, it always ends, and it destroys souls. Well, England... Todd, I'm sorry. Do you know what Rauschen means in... I was going to ask you. You told me once before. Intoxicated. What does it mean? Intoxicated. Rau is out and Rauschen is intoxicated. That makes sense. See, now that I know that, I might be a little more inclined to his teaching. Beth was just telling me how important bourbon is to ministry. No, I'm just kidding. I have a hunch the recording is not going to work. Anyway. Well, Lingle became convinced the only way the church could enact this progressive social agenda and really make an impact on the world of culture was if the church united. So he was a major advocate for the Southern Presbyterian Church to reunite with the Northern Presbyterian Church. And Lingle ended up being a transitional figure, an important one, in moving the Southern Presbyterian Church off the commitment to the spiritual mission of the church. We learned what that is. It doesn't mean the church shouldn't have an impact on the culture, but when we talk about the spirituality of the church we're saying the church's mission is primarily spiritual because of the weapons and the ministry God's assigned to the church. By the way, this is what ultimately got L'Engle booted. He wasn't willing to let it go. He was committed, the churches have to come together, they have to join. Even though, again, at this point, the Northern Presbyterian Church was barely a viable church. Well, it seems up to this point, the conservatives in the PCUS, the Southern Denomination, They seemed to think these kinds of men that were cropping up were anomalies, that they were outliers who represented such a small number of actual supporters that they didn't have to be worried with. The problem is both of those men were strong, popular teachers in seminaries, and they were teaching students who would be future ministers and future leaders in the denomination. And there is a truism that the church needs to have engraved in her collective mind. Slight errors left unchecked become significant errors, and significant errors left unchecked become apostasy. And it's to our spiritual peril when we forget that. So, works out that way again every single time. Well, this process of working toward apostasy and leaving errors unchecked gives us an occasion to mention the third person I want to draw your attention to, Ernest Trice. I think I may have written Thrice. At least I did in my notes. But it's Ernest Trice Thompson. He was ordained in 1917, so we're about a generation later, and he began teaching at Union Theological Seminary shortly after apparently a super super gifted man, prolific writer. He spent over 10 years as the editor of the Seminary Journal. Now, the reason that's important is that that meant he had final say on the kind of books that were reviewed and the kind of articles that would be published in the Seminary Journal. Sometimes we take those little posts for granted. And that was bad because he was sort of squirting out a little bit of poison in these articles, spreading out through the denomination. Thompson ended up leading the charge to overtly introduce higher criticism into the church, which as I've said before, is nothing less than an attack on the inerrancy of Scripture. Again, Thompson had no use for the doctrine of the spirituality of the church. He considered L'Engle a godsend and an innovator. And again, whatever L'Engle did in terms of sort of subtle ways to promote the social gospel, Thompson became sort of a full-bore promoter of the social gospel. In his teaching and preaching, he openly taught in opposition to the Westminster standards. He pressed for confessional revisions. He wanted to add those same two chapters that the Northern Church had added, co-figure. And he thought that the current standard that the Southern church had in terms of a ministerial subscription to the confession, that is actually expecting ministers in the Presbyterian church to believe what Presbyterians believe, he thought that was too strict. He was also, by the way, an early supporter of women's ordination for the pastorate, so think about that. In short, he completely embraced the modernism that had infected the Northern Church, and he saw nothing wrong with the trajectory of the Northern Church. In fact, he was really a guy who longed to join with them. Dr. Darrell Hart kind of captures this well, he writes, In 1931, Church historian Ernest Trice Thompson at Union Seminary in Virginia posed this question in the title of a Union Seminary quarterly review article. Again, he's the guy who gets to pick which articles go out. Is the Northern Church theologically sound? He gave the Northern Church a clean bill of spiritual health and urged the Southern colleagues to pursue reunion. Our sister denomination is fundamentally sound in the faith, he concluded, and is just as likely to remain so as our own. That was probably true, unfortunately. And Thompson was writing this because he was aggressively trying to promote a union between the northern and southern bodies. And that's exactly how history remembers him, as a great unifier of those two bodies. When he died, there were obituaries of his death in all the major newspapers around the country. So he was a prominent public figure. The first line of the New York Times obit was this. Dr. Ernest Trice Thompson, a theologian who led a move that reunited the southern and northern denominations of the Presbyterian Church, died Friday. He was 90 years old. That's how he was remembered and undoubtedly exactly the way he would want to be remembered. He was the uniter of these two churches. So when he made that comment that he sees no problem with the northern Church the Northern Presbyterian Church Nobody's from solid guys from the southern didn't kick him out didn't confront him didn't you know? What no no punishment no nothing nothing was done Well, they did give me just a minute, and I'll come back to that so yep I have an illustration here if you're wondering how bad things were in the 1930s in the Northern Presbyterian Church. There's an account I want to share. I may have shared this before, but on June 26th, 1932, a liberal Presbyterian Church in Germantown, Pennsylvania announced a topping for the young people's meeting that evening. It was, how I know that Jesus is not the son of God. and how I know that the Bible is not the word of God." So this was being taught to the children, right? The speaker assumed that everyone present agreed with his heretical ideas, but there was a young woman in the group named Edith Seville who was there and she was actually ready to challenge the speaker. She listened carefully to his presentation, making careful notes and preparing herself for herself a substantial rebuttal to push back. A young Miss Seville thought that she was the only Bible-believing Christian in the room at that meeting. But just as the speaker finished, and before she could get to her feet to confront the teacher's errors, another young man popped up on his feet, and he said, my name's Francis Schaeffer. And I want to tell you Jesus is the Son of God, and He is my Savior. And the moment he got that out, she popped up, jumped to her feet, and she offered a well thought out defense for the truthfulness and trustworthiness of the Bible. That's the night they started dating. And ended up getting married a couple years later. But think about that. 1932, and the Northern Church is teaching its youth to disbelieve the Bible. And Thompson wants to join with them, right? In just a moment, we'll see how those trajectories were impacting the youth in the Southern Presbyterian Church. to Jeff's question, how did the church respond to Dr. Thompson and other liberal embraces of heterodoxy, which is strange teaching, false doctrine? Well, they did seek to remove him from places of influence and the denomination. The conservatives were trying to push back, but they made the same mistake conservatives always make. They assume that people in all of the congregations are pretty solid. But the problem is, if they've been setting for 10 years or 15 years under the ministry of someone who's not, it's unlikely they are. Right? Because if they were, they couldn't remain there. It's that simple, you know? So from basically 1934 through 1940, he was repeatedly brought up on charges of denying his ministerial vows, cheating things against the confession, la, la, la, la, la. And the General Assembly kept dismissing the cases. Because at that point, And something that happened right about the probably 1939, 1940 timeframe, it began to dawn on the conservatives that at that point the bulk of the denominational structures, and I'm not talking necessarily about congregants throughout the denomination, but the denominational structures, they'd been taken over by progressives, right? So obviously there was pushback on Thompson and others of the kind of modernistic ilk But now conservatives knew the denominational muscle was against them. And again, you're like 1940, early 40s. One of the things that would happen is that the conservatives would eventually learn that Dr. Thompson had been a man who founded a secret organization known as the Fellowship. of St. James. And the purpose of this secret organization was to rearrange the church from the top down, to put liberals and progressives on important committees that would make them friendly to liberal causes, right. You can glance there at the way this eventually was described This will come out in an article a little later in the 60s. Very few laymen are aware of the fact that over the last 15 years there's been a secret organization or church working quietly behind the scenes to gain control of the political machinery of our denomination. This group, composed mostly of ministers, called themselves the Fellowship of St. James. This relatively small but determined group influences and seeks to control the various agencies of the courts of our church. In recent years, they have succeeded in electing enough men of their choosing to enable them to control many of the important committees of the various church courts and to have effective majorities on the governing bodies of many of these boards, agencies, and other institutions within the church. And so this put the conservatives, by the way, we've had this in the PCA, right? There was a group that was called the National Partnership that sprung up, I guess, almost a decade ago. And they were doing the same kind of thing. The larger churches were paying elders to go to General Assembly and they'd send out texts to tell elders how to vote on issues, right? Because of technology being what it is and Presbyterians in the contemporary world inclined to blabber, it kind of came to light, thankfully. And so it's pretty much been expunged and they've had to work more out in the open now. But it was, again, those who are more progressively minded and liberally minded, they see politics as a tool in the same way conservatives see truth in the scripture and the confessions as a tool. And it's a different way to view it. And that's why at the end, conservatives will almost always lose. Because it not only matters what you do, but how you do it, right? Anyway. So the conservatives realized they've kind of lost influence in the denomination. And since it was clear they couldn't win these theological battles in fair courts of the church, they began to establish their own conservative journals and periodicals, right? Because that's the only way they could reach the people. So in 1942, Dr. Nelson Bell, a prominent Southern Presbyterian and a medical missionary, along with some other concerned men, founded a publication entitled The Southern Presbyterian Journal. And by the way, you might not be familiar with Dr. Bell, who was a well-known missionary, medical missionary to China. But you may have heard of his daughter, Ruth Bell. And if you're not familiar with Ruth Bell, you're almost certainly familiar with her husband, who was Billy Graham. So Billy Graham had great affinity here in his early days for the Presbyterians, you know, because, yeah, again, his father-in-law was an evangelist in his heart of hearts. So anyway, the first issue of the magazine went out on May of 1942, and its purpose was to be a lay-oriented magazine designed to call the Southern Presbyterian Church back to faithfulness around the word of God and the confessions of the church. In 1958, Reverend William Hill founded the Presbyterian Evangelistic Fellowship. And the purpose of this group was to restore the importance of biblical evangelism in the church, and to that end, to return to a robust understanding of the doctrine of the spirituality of the church. And let me insert this. The early founders of the PCA, they actually imagined that the PCA would be a mainline denomination. And we're taught in our generation to think mainline equals bad, but they weren't. Mainline didn't necessarily mean bad. What they meant by mainline is a denomination that can be impactful to our nation and be a benefit to our nation. So they wanted that, but they understood the only way they could do that in a way that's effective is if they were faithful to the spiritual mission of the church, right? Otherwise God wouldn't bless it, so. Anyway, I mentioned that the James Fellowship was this sort of secret organization and wasn't really discovered until in the 60s. And the church realized at that point that they that the James Fellowship had been playing behind the scenes politics with the denomination. In response to that, in 1965, the conservatives founded a group called a Concerned Fellowship. And it had to very quickly change its name for legal reasons to Concerned Presbyterians. But this was made up primarily, this group of ruling elders. Southern Presbyterian Journal, that was to laymen. This is primarily for ruling elders. And incidentally, they were intentional in their efforts to be out in the open. This was a newsletter. Everything they thought and believed, they sent it out for everybody to read. There was no secret, you know, secret language, or secret codes. I mean they were very forthright with this. It was called, Concerned Presbyterians. The first edition went out in March of 1965 and explained the reason for the group in the newsletter. I think for time reasons I'm going to skip over this, but you might want to go back and read it. It's a wonderful declaration to basically say they were greatly concerned. They were concerned Presbyterians. Because everything the Presbyterians hold near and dear were being challenged and set aside, and they wanted to change that. Now, as this is going on, as they start to create these publications and push back with some vigor, history tells us it was too little too late, but as they start to push back, the progressives started fighting more and more. And what happened is, as grave as the situation was, one of the things that really started to take things to a whole new level for the conservatives was the kind of material that was being produced to teach the young people in the Southern Presbyterian Church. Again, think about what was going on in the Northern Presbyterian Church in 1932. I'm borrowing here from Kenneth Keyes, who, interestingly enough, was one of the founding members of this group, Concerned Presbyterians. He's still alive, by the way. He writes, in 1968, more than 400 students attending a youth convention in Atlanta during the Christmas holidays. And the liberal teachers who sponsored this conference had the young people sing this blasphemous song from a song book published by the National Council of Churches. This I am going to read. The words are printed out for you. Again, these are Presbyterian children, well, young men and women, high schoolers. It was on Friday morning that they took me from the cell, and I say they had a carpenter to crucify as well. You can blame it on Pilate, you can blame it on the Jews, you can blame it on the devil, it's God I accuse. You can blame it on Adam, you can blame it on Eve, you can blame it on the apple, but that I can't believe. It was God that make the devil, and the woman and the man, and there wouldn't be an apple if it wasn't in the plan. Now Barabbas was a killer and they let Barabbas go, but you're being crucified for nothing here below. But God is up in heaven and He doesn't do a thing, with a million angels watching and they never move a wing. To hell with Jehovah, to the carpenter I said, I wish that our carpenter had made this world instead. Goodbye and good luck to you, our way will soon divide, remember me in heaven, the man you hung beside. This was the chorus, it's God they ought to crucify instead of you and me. I said to the carpenter, I'm hanging on the tree. You can get a feel for, we're not talking about people at this point who were slightly veering off course. This is just flat out blasphemy, right? Anyway, in 1970, the Church's Board of Christian Education joined with the Northern Presbyterian Church and the United Church of Christ in publishing a monthly magazine called A Colloquy, which is geared toward teens. I'm not going to read those quotes, but they basically promoted Among teens, experiment with drugs, experiment with alcohol, experiment with sex. Premarital sex is something that's beautiful. You just need to practice safe sex, use the proper, you know, whatever. They supported abortion, all kinds of stuff. Basically, they did everything in their power to shipwreck the faith of young men and women. Well, as this is going on on the liberal side, another organization rose opposing this nonsense in 1969 called Presbyterian Church Being United. And again, this group was founded to be a resource and support primarily for pastors. And the encouragement was needed because the faithful pastors that were still in the Southern Presbyterian Church and didn't go along with this sort of radical liberal agenda, they were being called schismatic, mean-spirited, hard-hearted, And of course, Pharisees, naturally. You can't properly insult a minister unless you call him a Pharisee. So they started producing this letter for pastors called Contact. By the way, you can get those on the PCA History website. You can get all these letters and read them out. They're really fascinating. Well, now these three organizations, the conservative organizations, they were trying to push back. And just so you know, they weren't isolated from one another. As I said, they were each trying to deal with specific areas, to laymen, to ruling elders, to teaching elders. And so in 1971, at that General Assembly, and we're getting close to 1973, so I've got to go quickly. 1971, at that General Assembly, the conservative groups decided to make an all-out effort to elect conservatives to the permanent nominating committee, which is a really important committee, again, because it's charged with putting people forward to fill various roles on different other committees in the denominations. So, the conservatives put forth three nominations. In response, the liberals nominated a layman from Charleston, West Virginia who had given the church $50,000 to start paying for abortions. And this is before it was legal, by the way. We're talking 1971. The second person they put forward was a minister from San Antonio who held a liquor party in his room every night and invited the youth delegates to come in, and a couple of them got so drunk they had to be hospitalized. And then there was another liberal woman from Texas. It was the most radical group they'd ever put forward as a slate, and all three of the liberals were elected. So a couple weeks after that disastrous assembly, Delegates from these conservative groups that I've mentioned, they met in Atlanta and they decided they just couldn't fight this battle in the PCUS any longer and they voted 25 to 1 to begin the process of leaving the denomination and forming a new one. In August of 1971, the steering committee made this public announcement. I will read this because it's important. It was entitled, Untolerable Situation. We've reached the point where the situation in our beloved Church has become intolerable to thousands of loyal Presbyterians who love the Lord and want to serve Him in a Presbyterian Church which will be true to His Word. We feel that we can no longer be part of a denomination in which the Board of Christian Education publishes literature which violates our confession of faith and encourages our young people to experiment with sex and drugs in a denomination in which the Board of World Mission no longer places its primary emphasis on carrying out the Great Commission. and a denomination with seminaries which train ministers who substitute social and political action for the preaching of the word, and a denomination where presbyteries violate our Constitution by receiving ministers who refuse to affirm the virgin birth, the bodily resurrection, and other cardinal doctrine, while denying membership to faithful ministers who stand firmly for these doctrines which they vow to uphold. Especially do we feel that we can no longer subject our children and grandchildren to the kind of youth leaders that those in control have seen fit to place in these sensitive positions. Young radicals who seem determined to lead our young people away from their faith in God. It really was an intolerable situation. And from December 4th through December 7th of 1973, The first General Assembly was held at Briarwood Presbyterian Church in Birmingham, Alabama. The new denomination called itself the National Presbyterian Church. Again, they thought that they would be a mainline denomination, but the name had copyright issues and so at the next General Assembly they had to change the name and they adopted the name Presbyterian Church in America, or PCA. The nomination began with 260 churches and about 40,000 members. And at the church's 50th anniversary, there are nearly 400,000 members. Here we are. I'll give you a moment if you have any questions. I apologize. I wanted to get through this. We won't have Sunday school for two weeks. The next week's Christmas. The week after that's New Year's. When we come back, we're going to be in the cannons of Dort. And I didn't, yeah, wanted to wrap this up. So I apologize for going fast. Any questions or? There was obviously a precipitous decline in the 30s and all that. Were the numbers also affected or was it, because now you see the disintegration, you know, really the beginning of the disintegration of these types of denominations, in my mind, at least. As the main lines? As the main lines. Oh, yeah. You know, the roots have been planted. Did they suffer in numbers or not really until Oh, oh, you mean like the mainline denominations, I'm sorry. Yeah. The northern and southern branches. Yeah, and interestingly enough, again, they came together in the 80s, and so that was a boon, and after that, for about five years, they had some pretty steady numbers. One of the things the mainline Presbyterian denomination had is a multi, multi-billion dollar endowment. Again, that's so heartbreaking because it's an endowment mostly made from hardworking men and women who just wanted to support their church, not support apostasy. But once the money was given, it was there. So about five years, six years after it formed, the numbers remained constant. In the 90s, they lost almost 600,000 members. It's dying. The only thing that's keeping them afloat is they got so much money once upon a time. You see, and some of that was not just from faithful, but you had guys like Carnegie who would pour in millions of dollars to liberalize the church and that sort of thing. So my question was, and I appreciate that, but more in the 30s, 40s, 50s, there was not a decline in membership. No, no. Not substantial, right? Because there was, Again, some of it was ignorance in the sense that it's not like today where, OK, this church is bad. I just Google another one. I mean, it wasn't quite as accessible. But yeah, it's a sad, sad story, and really a heartbreaking story to see this happen. But it'll continue to happen until the Lord returns. Eventually the PCA will go down that route. And that's not a criticism of the PCA. The OPC will go down that route. Eventually the URC will go down that route, right? Because the devil's determined. The good news and the comfort that we have is that God's faithful. He'll always have a remnant. They'll always split off. God will always plant them, grow them, bless them. But the process is going to continue. And I've shared this, I know talking with Jeff, when I was a little bit younger, and by a little bit I mean a few years ago, eight, ten years ago, I used to get really furious when I would study these things and I would see some of these things emerge in the PCA. And I still get angry and push back strongly as much as I can with my limited voice. but I also realize our responsibility is to be faithful where God's planted us, and push back as best you can, and realize that God will work, God will always be faithful to his own, so that's the comfort, so. Bless you. Any other comments? We did have something that almost shipwrecked the PCA with this whole Greg Johnson thing. That was a concern. Unfortunately, fortunately, the solid conservatives rose up and realized we stopped it. And I will tell you about, and I'll let's close after this, about five years ago, six years ago, PCA had quite a number of progressives on substantial committees. And they really made an effort in the last few years at the General Assembly to put some really solid guys on various important committees, and it's made a huge difference. Let's pray. Father, we bless you and thank you. We're thankful for this 50-year anniversary of the denomination that we belong to. We're thankful that it's a picture of your faithfulness and your kindness to your people. a demonstration that the Lord Jesus is building his church and the gates of hell will not prevail against her. And you will always be faithful, always have a remnant. We're thankful to be part of that remnant here and now. And we'd pray for our denomination that you would keep us faithful, that you would help men and women of God to be determined and steadfast in what they believe and uncompromising, especially in core and essential doctrines. And that for years to come, it might be a thriving and flourishing denomination. Lord bless us now as we gather together to worship you. Indeed, that's our high and holy calling, to ascribe glory and praise to your great name. So help us to that end. We ask all these things in Jesus' name, amen.