Let me pray as we begin. Heavenly Father, we thank you for another Lord's Day to worship and gather and fellowship. We pray now as we consider your church in some more detail and our specific church and our family of churches, the Presbyterian Church, we pray that you would bless our time and our consideration of this. And may we see you in it as you are the one building your church ultimately. So we thank you for that. And we pray this in your holy name. Amen. All right, we are beginning a new section of Sunday School. We haven't had Sunday School in a little while, and we're gonna begin a new section. The way we're gonna attempt to do these is from February and March, this section will be its own section. And during that time, the topic we're gonna cover is American Presbyterian history. which I know is just the most exciting thing you've ever heard of in your life. Well, I hope it's exciting for you. I hope I can make it exciting. We do have a lot of ground to cover over the next several weeks. My goal over the course of these next several weeks is to cover the entirety of the 300 plus years of American Presbyterian history from the very first Presbyterian meeting in 1706 all the way up to today. We're gonna go through all of that and we'll see how far we get, but that's our goal. But for this class, today, what I wanted to do is take a look specifically at our church, and not just our church, but the PCA, and help to situate us in the time and place that we're in right now, and also how we fit into the larger body of Christ, if that makes sense. And I wanna read this passage I'll mention this book a little bit later. Let me read this paragraph though. This is from Sean Lucas, PCA pastor. He says that the common story for many PCA members is that they were raised in Baptistic churches, came to Christ there or in other venues, came to understand the doctrines of grace. They found those doctrines taught clearly in a PCA church, which they then joined. Yet, many of our church members, and even some officers, do not have a solid understanding of what it means to be Presbyterian. In exchanging one church for another, they have not yet learned the narratives, distinctives, and practices of their new spiritual home. As a result, our members often find themselves somewhat at a loss to explain to their friends and family why they belong to a Presbyterian church, and why their friends should come and join their church as well. So maybe you identify with that paragraph. Maybe you've been asked, wait, what kind of church do you go to? Or you've been asked, what is a Presbyterian? Maybe you've been wondering that yourself. And if so, this first class we're gonna do, I hope that this will be helpful to you. This class is gonna be the reason why we're gonna be looking at the history, if that makes sense. And we wanna situate ourselves first, like you go to the mall, there's a directory, there's a big map, there's a gold star that says, you are here. And this class is an attempt to help us figure out, here's where we are. This is the kind of church we're in. So it is going to be a fast-paced overview of church history. But for just this morning, we're going to focus on some of the unique qualities of a Presbyterian church. So before we get into that, though, a couple of housekeeping things. I mentioned it this morning that these classes are going to be recorded. So I am recording it with this little mic right here. And we're gonna upload them to our main podcast feed. We hadn't been doing this in the past. We wanna do this going forward. So if you haven't yet, you can find our main podcast sermon audio feed on any of your podcast platforms you want. You can search for Christ the King Joplin or go to our website on the resources tab. There's a link there to our sermons. You can find it there. And we're gonna plan on uploading our Sunday school classes to that as well. The plan for these Sunday school classes, what I want to do is try to talk for about 30 to 35 minutes or so and then leave the last 10 to 15 minutes. We'll have some Q&A or some discussion time there at the end. So I'm going to try to get through the material in that first majority of the class time. The other housekeeping thing, some recommended resources. So, the one I just quoted was from Sean Lucas, his book, On Being Presbyterian. This book is great. It is, part of it works through the, some distinctives of Presbyterian churches and theology, which is a lot of what we're going to talk about today. It also gets into some of the history of Presbyterianism in America. So bang for your buck, this is probably the best book to get if you're interested in getting a book. Some others that are very helpful, though, that I'll be referencing, one is Hart and Muther, Seeking a Better Country. This is great work on the entire history of the Presbyterian Church in the United States from the beginning up until the present day. This was written, I believe, for the 300th anniversary of the 1706 First Presbytery, which we'll talk about next week. And this other one also by Sean Lucas for Continuing Church. This is the history of the PCA, the Presbyterian Church in America that we're a part of, as it was formed in 1973 out of the Southern Presbyterian Church. And we're gonna talk more about that, of course, as we get into that part of the class. But this is a great book, so it walks through the lead up to it, especially in the 50s and 60s, into the 70s, and how the PCA was formed. So this is more specific about our denomination, if that makes sense. This is a general history of the entire Presbyterian Church that existed from the beginning. And this is your... just general introduction to the whole thing, which again, I recommend. If you only get one book, probably get that first one here. All right. Again, the goal for today, we want to situate the PCA into the larger body of Christ here in America. To do that, I want to look first at our understanding of church government, and then we'll consider some of our theological distinctives. So church government. There's generally three options. There's three basic ways that you can have a church structure. Now, what needs to be said though, what's true for all of these that I'll talk about, what's true for all of them is a belief that Jesus is the king and head of the church. That's not what's debated. What's debated is how then does Jesus actively run and govern his church? And there's three basic options for that. First option or one option is congregationalism. So on that option, as the name suggests, the seat of power is within the congregation itself. And historically, this was the reformed churches or some of them. So we have the English Puritans, we have figures like John Owen, we have the Puritans in New England, we have folks like Jonathan Edwards. So there's some historic congregational polity here in the Americas. And there's still several very historic congregational churches that exist today. So out in Boston, I lived out in that area for a while, they have the historic Freedom Trail, and on that trail is Park Street Church, which was a congregational and continues to be a congregational church that exists today. So, Congregationalism, though, it's local rule only. It's the congregation and the congregation, they vote on all matters. So, maybe you're most familiar with this form of government and the Baptist churches that practice it today. So, the Southern Baptist Convention is one of those churches, though it's a convention of churches. that include independent congregations. And here's how the SBC defines itself on their website. They say that the SBC, the Southern Baptist Convention, is a body of like-minded local churches cooperating together to reach the world with the good news of Jesus Christ. So they have a lot of key terms in there. It's a group of like-minded local churches that are independent that are then cooperating together. But other than that, other than just a voluntary cooperation, there's nothing that is connecting them together, if that makes sense. They also say on their website, they say, we recognize that in the New Testament, there was no centralized ecclesiastical authority, ecclesiastical meaning a church, no church authority over the churches that forced the churches into any form of compliance. There was encouragement, exhortation, and admonition, but there is never enforcement. We strongly adhere to that principle. Jesus Christ is the head of the local church. We are not. Each church is responsible before God for the policies it sets and decisions it makes. Okay, so we're not gonna get into that, there's a lot of good stuff in there, there's stuff that we disagree about in there, but you can hear the main thrust of their concept, that it's the local congregation, that congregation itself is independent, and congregations can cooperate together, they can make recommendations to one another, but they cannot enforce any ecclesiastical policy. non-denominational churches, there's a lot of those, and they also would have some form of this polity. as long as they have actual membership or something to that effect. But a lot of churches today don't have anything, and it's more of a corporate structure of government, for lack of a better word. They have some kind of shadow system, shadowy understanding of how that church is run. There might not be much emphasis on the local, the members of that church. Congregationalism at its best, is when members are actively involved in the life of the church and taking that responsibility seriously. So that's one option. Another option, on the other end of the spectrum perhaps, is a top-down, hierarchical, or Episcopalianism. That word, episkopos, is the Greek word for bishop or overseer. So in this system, then, you have a hierarchical structure going up to the bishop or the archbishop. Bishops at the top, they govern a local area, might be called a diocese. The bishops, they'd ordain priests or elders or deacons, however they might describe them. And then an archbishop would be above all of that. Examples of that, of course, the Roman Catholic Church, where you have deacons and then priests, and then you have bishops, you have archbishops above them, you have some cardinals above them, and then you have at the top the Pope, who is the vicar of Christ on earth. You also have churches like the Church of England, which is a Protestant church, but still an established church, and you have priests, or rectors as they're sometimes called, then you have bishops, above the bishops. And this is still true. Every county or every square inch of England is divided up under the Church of England. And you have the Archbishop of York. He's in the north of England. And then above him is the Archbishop of Canterbury. Which is actually vacant right now. And you can apply to be the Archbishop of Canterbury if you'd like to. There's a form online. I looked at it. I've already nominated Bruce. And above the Archbishop of Canterbury is, of course, the Supreme Governor, King Charles III. And he's there on the Church of England. So you have that structure. There's the Anglican Church in North America. They are very confusing. I actually don't know. I tried to figure it out. I've tried in the past. But, you know, they have a similar kind of structure. Lutherans have a similar kind of structure. Methodists have a similar kind of structure. So there are some differences, of course, in all of these things, but more or less there is some connectionalism, but also some hierarchy involved in those churches. So what's the third view? You probably already guessed it. A third way to govern the church is Presbyterianism. And this, we believe, is a biblical view that is a balance between these others. So power is not in the hand of a single bishop that can then just decide by the own power he has vested in him. Neither is the power left entirely to the congregation. But power is then vested in men who are elected and chosen by the congregation, but then given the power to serve together in the ministry and the governance of the church. So Presbyterianism then is a representative form of government. The elders are the representatives of the congregation. to then serve that congregation. The Greek word presbyter is the word for elder. We also believe, it's part of our belief, that there's three Greek words that show up throughout the New Testament to talk about this office. So there's the word we mentioned, bishop. That's the Greek word episkopos, which is translated to be bishop or overseer. There's the word presbyter. There's also the word for pastor or shepherd. And our belief is that each of those three words are describing the same office. They're talking about the same person or group of people that we call elders, but they serve each of these different functions. They are overseers, they are shepherds, they are elders in the church. So all those terms refer to the same office. So in Presbyterianism, we believe in a plurality of elders at every level. So our churches are connected together, but at the local church level, at the level of Christ the King here in Joplin, we have what's called a session, and that is a group of elders. And this local church is governed by that session, and the elders of the church The congregation, they call the pastor, they call and vote on their officers, and then those officers govern on their behalf. The elders are given the responsibility for the ministry of the church, for overseeing the word and the sacraments. They're the ones that welcome new members into the church through interviewing them. They're the ones that exercise church discipline. They're the ones that oversee the service, congregational care, all of these things. Whereas in these other models, it might be a bishop that would handle certain cases or even I know in some of the very strong congregational churches, the congregation itself would be, they would vote to receive new members. They themselves together would vote to exercise church discipline. Whereas we invested that authority to the elders of the church. There's a level above the local congregation and that is the presbytery. And the presbytery is responsible for a geographical area and all the churches and ministers that are within that geographical area. So, our presbytery that we're a part of is called Hills and Plains. It oversees Oklahoma, Northwest Arkansas, and then our little corner of Southwest Missouri. I was actually just at presbytery yesterday out in Owasso, which I think is near Tulsa or something like that. Can't even remember it. Oklahoma. I don't know what to say. Yeah, so I was just there yesterday. What does Presbyterian do? What did we do at Presbyterian yesterday? We reviewed the minutes of all of our local churches, the local churches and the sessions of those churches have to keep a record of what they do because they're accountable to their brothers in the church and their brothers out of love review what they've done so that there's some accountability to that. The presbytery is the one who examines and approves pastoral candidates. We approved two men, we actually licensed two men yesterday to preach in our presbytery, which is a step toward ordination. So a church can't just say, I want so-and-so to be our pastor, and we call him, and now he's our pastor. Well, you can't do that because presbytery has to first examine that man to see if he's qualified to be a pastor. And only if he's qualified to be a pastor Can you then call him to be your pastor? Presbytery also establishes, they're the ones who establish new churches. So we're planning a church in Springfield with Dustin Ray's, the church planner there. Dustin didn't just start that church on his own, but Presbytery, they established, we call it a mission church. They established a church plant in Springfield. And then Presbytery called Dustin to go and to be the church planner of that church. And that's the process of establishing new churches. This is all gonna come out as we go through history, the church history, because this process, as you can imagine, takes time. And that's some of the reason why, as the country moves west, westward expansion, Presbyterians were slow moving. And a lot of the quicker churches like the Methodists and the Baptists, they swept in a lot quicker than we made our way in. But I'm getting ahead of myself there. So Presbytery, they governed the local churches. And then above that, the entire church is governed by the General Assembly. The General Assembly oversees the work of all the Presbyteries. All the presbyteries appoint representatives to go to General Assembly. Every church is allowed to send representation to the General Assembly based upon their size. And at General Assembly, the purpose of that is to do the kind of work that is best done by the church working together. So what is that kind of work? Well, they do work of administration, of making the church run well. They have discipleship work, so they produce publications, Sunday school curriculum, things like that, that any local church could do. But together, there's more resources, more opportunity to develop good curriculum that way. Our missions agency, Mission to the World, is handled at the general assembly level, because that's where the majority, that's where all the churches are working together, pooling resources to then train and send out missionaries. That's true for work here in the States as well. There's our University Outreach Program, Reformed University Fellowship, that's also handled at the General Assembly level. So, what is a Presbyterian Church? Very simple answer is that it's a church consisting of individual congregations that are united together and governed by a plurality of elders at every level. It is a church governed by elders, a plurality of elders. So that's how we define ourselves in terms of how our churches are structured. Let's consider then now some of the theological distinctives and beliefs that a Presbyterian and Reformed church would have. And again, some of these are talked about in the beginning of his book here on being Presbyterian. First of all, I want to acknowledge, and I just want to say, that we are part of the larger Protestant tradition. One of our foundations here at Christ the King is our Reformed and confessional heritage, and the creeds and confessions are something that we value. It's not something that we invented, it's not something that was invented at the Reformation, but a lot of these Creeds of the church go back to the very early ages of the church. And then we have these conventions that were developed within the Reformation. And we are downstream of that. We are part of this long stream that flows all the way back to the early church and to the apostles. So we are part of that. We're also not the churches of John Calvin. He is, of course, one of the most influential figures in church history and in our Reformed tradition. But we're part of the Protestant Reformation, and by and large, historic Protestantism agrees with a lot of these points we're going to talk about here, that we'll discuss in a moment. There are differences in church government, there's differences in some theology, but by and large, a lot of this All, what I'm saying is these things weren't invented yesterday. They weren't invented by the reformers themselves, but they're retrieving historic Catholic, lower C Catholic, apostolic teaching and doctrine, bringing it in through the Reformation. We are downstream of that. So we're not a small offshoot of the Protestant church. We are part of the major branch or the major stream of Protestant teaching. So with all that said, Let's begin with reformed worship. And each of these points, I wanna try to situate ourselves with some of the larger and other traditions. So, reformed worship. Compared to modern-day big megachurch, light show, or Pentecostal charismatic churches, Reformed worship is simple in contrast. It can be liturgical, it can be somewhat formal, but it's very simple. You know, we don't we don't need much of anything to be able to worship. We can worship outside if we needed to. We can we have everything that we need. And biblical worship was central to the Reformation. It was central to John Calvin. It was so important for him and his and his. I think an argument can be made that that was one of the controlling features of John Calvin's thought is that he he was concerned about proper worship of God. That's also true of the Westminster Assembly. So the Westminster Assembly started meeting in 1643. That's where we get our Westminster Confession of Faith, our larger and shorter catechisms. But the first document they published out of that assembly was a directory for the public worship, which is, this is how you should do worship on Sunday morning, on the Lord's Day. That's the first thing they published because it was so central. Worship is so central. So it's always been central. In our churches, we talk about the regulative principle, which simply says that God is the one who decides how God wants to be worshipped. And God gives us that in his word, the principles for how we should worship him. A lot of times in our culture, spontaneity is viewed as synonymous with being spirit-led. So when we have any kind of formalism, that's viewed as bad or a dead kind of formalism or quenching the spirit or anything like that. And so we want to find a balance between saying emotions are good, they're God-given, but emotionalism is dangerous. It can be very bad at times. So we have all, you know, the reformers, they wanted to get rid of all the pomp and show of the Catholic mass. Today, we have the light shows, we have the fog machines, we have all of that. And we need to be wary and avoid that as well. At best, these things are distractions from the pure spiritual worship of God. At worst, they become idols, they become things unto themselves. It becomes a form of will worship, self-worship. We go to a concert to be entertained rather than going to worship, worship God. So I had a professor, I saw him post this on Facebook, Bill Griffin, my Hebrew professor at Evangel. He said, don't make, don't mistake sensory overload for the Holy Spirit. I thought that was pretty good. So there's a range of differences within the PCA, but by and large, the RPW principles are there. God regulates our worship for his glory and for our good. So worship is one distinctive. Another is the sovereignty of God. And this distinctive in contrast to Arminianism, in contrast to Wesleyan holiness and theology, in contrast to more of the Methodist churches, When people think about reformed churches or they hear the word Calvinism, they are immediately jumping to predestination. That's the thing that comes up. And again, predestination was not Calvin's favorite doctrine. It wasn't his controlling, it wasn't the controlling doctrine in his system. And, and again, I think, I think worship could be argued really was, but Calvin, he certainly taught predestination, but that doctrine was not invented by him. And that just needs to be said. And it's a biblical doctrine. So it's not a matter of, of if you believe in it, it's a matter of what you believe about it because it's, it's there in scripture. And Calvin did certainly teach it. So what is predestination? Well, it's the doctrine of God's sovereignty over all things, including our salvation. And this is a very large area of difference between the Presbyterian reform world and much of the churches, especially as they exist today in American Christianity. We don't have time to, I need to skip over the history of all that. And maybe we'll have time to talk about TULIP a little bit at the end. Much more can be said about that, but we do believe in the sovereignty of God. That is a distinctive of Reformed theology. God is sovereign. He is Lord of salvation. He is sovereign over all of it. Sacraments are another major area of difference, and you can view this in distinction to Baptist churches and A lot of the non-denominational churches that really don't value the sacraments, they don't even use that word. They would use a word like ordinance because they don't see any sacramental value in the sacraments themselves. But let me read what our catechism teaches us. Larger Catechism 161, it asks, how do the sacraments become effectual means of salvation? The answer is the sacraments become effectual means of salvation, not by any power in themselves or any virtue derived from the piety or intention of him by whom they are administered, but only by the working of the Holy Ghost and the blessing of Christ by whom they are instituted. So in other words, what that's saying is baptism in the Lord's Supper do something. They become effectual means of salvation. They do something. But again, it's not because the sacrament itself does something. It's not because the minister that I'm doing anything, but because Christ in his spirit. He's making promises and He's using these things as means unto salvation. So here's how our Confession of Faith explains it. It says, Now some helpful clarifications. So it'll go on to say that for baptism, for example, we should never neglect baptism. However, grace and salvation are not so inseparably tied to one another that no person can be saved without baptism or that all people who are baptized are undoubtedly regenerated or brought to faith. Those were some helpful clarifications because We believe baptism does something, but we don't believe in the Catholic doctrine of baptism. Or to a certain extent, the Lutheran doctrine, which does assert that baptism saves by the application of it. Which is to say, a person is saved in the moment they are baptized by the working of the sacrament itself. That's not what we believe. That's not the Reformed understanding. Baptism does not save in that way. Rather, baptism saves, we can say, when Christ by His Spirit makes it effectual unto the person's salvation through faith. And we can never remove that word faith from that. So it's not tied to the specific moment in time when baptism is administered. There's no power in the minister doing anything, or in the water that's doing anything. Christ is working through it, making an effectual means unto salvation through faith. So in other words, an infant, well we confess an infant can be truly regenerated, even in the womb. We see biblical examples of that. It could be in the moment of baptism. Or it could be 50 years later. But what's true of all of that is that God is the one at work. And he's the one accomplishing that. He's the one that is keeping, being faithful to the promises he makes in baptism. In the same way, the Lord's Supper also is effectual to us. We do truly partake of Christ's body and blood. But how do we do that? Not in a carnal manner. It's not that the elements change in substance like the Catholic Church teaches. It's not that Christ that His physical body is present, as the Lutherans teach, but rather by faith, again, faith, a controlling word, and in the Spirit, we do truly spiritually receive and feed upon Christ in the sacraments. So that is a distinct and reformed understanding of the sacraments that we confess. Some other distinctives, covenant theology, we don't have time to get into that, but But covenant theology, there is one people of God throughout history. This is in contrast to very popular dispensational forms of theology that are popular today. So we don't believe that there was once a people of God called Israel, and now there's a people of God called the church. And then sometime in the future, God will restore the nation of Israel or anything like that. Rather, Israel was the church under age, as it were, the language we use. The church is Israel. There has only ever been one people of God. The Old Covenant believers were saved by Christ the same way the New Covenant believers were saved by Him. There's only one mediator between God and man. Everything in the Old Covenant foreshadowed and pointed ahead to Christ. So what does that mean for us today? Well, you know, there's all kinds of stuff in the news about Israel, and I won't get into all that today, but I like to tell people that you can have any geopolitical opinion you might want about the nation of Israel that exists today, and you might agree or disagree with our foreign policy, of our country in regards to Israel, but we shouldn't have a biblical or a theological position about the modern nation of Israel, because they are not a unique people of God, but the church is Israel, Israel is the church, and we want them, as Paul prayed so often, that they would also come to faith in the Messiah, who is Christ. And covenant theology helps us see that very well. All right. What about Tulip? Well, we're not going to talk about it. Tulip can be somewhat helpful as a summary of the Doctrines of Grace or the Five Points of Calvinism. Again, Calvin didn't develop those five points. He certainly taught all the substance that are contained in those five points. Calvinism is much larger than that. Reformed theology is much larger than just those five points. We certainly believe them. The problem with them, though, is with any acronym or anything like that, the language can easily become unhelpful, and I think that's the case with a lot of the, even the language that's used, especially the El and Tulip limited atonement. People hear that, and I think they hear us saying that God is somehow limited in His love or in His desire to save the world or or to bring people to salvation, or that we're doing some kind of injustice to God's character and His nature. And we certainly don't want to do that, and we don't assert that. But rather what we're asserting is that God particularly saves and redeems His people, and that's what the atonement accomplishes. So, unless you're a universalist and you think that everybody's going to be saved one day, you do believe in unlimited atonement to some extent. Either in the application of it or in the extent of it, you believe that the atonement is limited in some sense. So where do we find all these doctrines? Well, all of our doctrinal standards and beliefs are found in the Westminster Standards, which have three parts to it. The Confession of Faith, the Larger Catechism, and the Shorter Catechism. I need to replenish the supply of those back there, but we usually have some back there. If you haven't grabbed a copy, you can grab some of those copies. You can find them all online too, very easily. But that's the system of doctrine that we believe is contained in the Westminster Standards. All right, I'm already over the time that I promised, but I'm gonna keep going. I'm in charge, so I'm just gonna keep going. I wanted just to share briefly, this is always helpful demographically, our area of influence here in this country. So how does the PCA compare numerically to some other churches in America? Well, if you count all the Protestant churches together, it's by and far the largest group, The Catholic Church, 61.5 million or so people in the country. Non-denominational churches, 21 million. And those numbers are hard to figure at times. What is a non-denominational church? What is just a crazy group of wackos down the street? Do they count? I don't know. Southern Baptist Convention, 17.6 million people. Members the United Methodist Church 8 million. They're currently going through a split. So that that number is not accurate anymore other religious bodies the Mormons there's 6.7 million Mormons in the country 3 million Jehovah's Witness The Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod they have 1.8 million people and The Presbyterian Church USA, which is the mainline liberal denomination, they currently have 1.4, close to 1.5 million members. The PCA, or this is in 2020 actually, they had 1.5, in 2020 the PCA had 372,000. So that gives you a bit of some context of, you know, we're a pretty small group of people and we have some fellowships with other similar conservative confessional reformed churches. called the North American Presbyterian and Reformed Council, or NAPARC. We love acronyms, so NAPARC. Add all those up together, there's about 600,000 of us, a little more than that, so not a lot. And by a large margin, the PCA is the largest of that group. There's some other Presbyterian denominations we'll talk about as we go through the history. There's the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, founded in 1982. They have 121,000 members at present. And then ECO, which is an Evangelical Covenant Order of Presbyterians, by far the most confusing name of a Presbyterian church. They were formed in 2012. They have around 127,000 members or so as well. We'll talk about them as we go through the class, I'm sure. The PCUSA, which was, again, the mainline denomination, is continuing to shrink. They're losing about 70 to 100,000 members every year. At the merger, we're gonna talk about this, but the northern and southern branches of the Presbyterian Church merged together, and that's what formed the PCUSA as it exists today. At the time, when that happened, they had 3.1 million members. And over the years, 2000, they had two and a half million. 2020, they had one and a half million. The latest figure we have, 2023, they have just over one million members. And of that one million members, average attendance is around 400,000, average attendance. So less than half of what their membership rule states is who is showing up and worshiping on Sunday. PCA, on the other hand, is growing by around 8,000 to 10,000 new members every year. We are close, or we might have already crossed that 400,000 member threshold. We have 1,645 churches, and we have 289 church plants, or mission churches, as they're known. And that is compared to when we started in 1973, where we had around 260 churches with 40,000, 41,000 members. And the PCA has been growing steadily, slowly but surely. So I will end with that. I don't bring up those statistics to gloat or to show off by any means. Rather, this is just a constant warning for us that we must always stay committed to Christ and to his word because Jesus is the one building his church. And if we abandon Jesus and his word, then we have nothing to offer the world and we have no reason to exist. It must all be about Jesus. And as we go through the history of American Presbyterianism, we're gonna look at how our Presbyterian forefathers, they did, they waxed and waned in their biblical faithfulness. And it'll be really fascinating to see how Christ was always faithful in all these moments, in the splits, in the debates, in the divisions, even in the wars that raged across our nation during those years, Christ was faithful to all of it. So next week, we'll begin that discussion with early American Presbyterianism in the 18th century. So I know you can't wait, so make sure you mark your calendars. We're gonna start next Sunday.