Where have all the Presbyterians gone?

This is a thoughtful post by Bill Evans from his blog the Ecclesial Calvinist.

A while back my friend Anthony Bradley posted an insightful and provocative blog piece asking why the popular influence of conservative Presbyterians prominent a few decades back (e.g., Jim Boice, R. C. Sproul, Sinclair Ferguson, and John Frame) seems to have waned in comparison to Baptists of a broadly Reformed soteriological persuasion.  I posted an extended comment at the time, and thought I would expand on it here. 

There are at least two big issues in play—the Baptistic Reformed success as driven by institutions (e.g., Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, the Founders’ Movement) and gifted individuals (e.g., Don Carson, Al Mohler, Mark Dever, Mark Driscoll) on the one hand, and the apparent Presbyterian decline on the other. As a Presbyterian I’m not particularly well equipped to comment on the first, but I think I have something to offer about the second. 

Of course, the Presbyterian and Reformed tradition has been declining as a percentage of the American population since the nineteenth century.  But statistics available in resources like ARDA and the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches indicate that some of the NAPARC denominations are plateaued or in decline.  This is worrisome, and the reasons are doubtless complex, having to do with social as well as theological factors.  Below are five general observations from the “for what it’s worth department.”

Read the rest of the post here.

Homosexual Horror

This week the Boy Scouts of America announced that they are considering dropping the ban on homosexual scouts and leaders.

Let me tell you a story.

In the 80's a field-grade Army officer in our church came out of the tent.  Not the closet.  The tent.  A Boy Scout tent.  He came to the leadership of the church and we heard his horrific confession.  For decades he had, as Scout leader, been seducing young boys at Scout camp outs.  He was married with children himself.  He was a respected leader in the church.  He was a homosexual predator in secret.

What was most chilling about his confession to us was his description of how widespread this was in the Scouts at the time.  There was even surreptitious collaboration among homosexual Scout leaders about which boys were most vulnerable.  Crap like that makes your skin crawl.  I couldn't believe what I was hearing.  He was by his own confession quite successful in grooming boys fairly quickly.  It is often claimed that "grooming" a boy normally takes a long time. That's true in ordinary, day-to-day life.  But on campouts and extended retreats it can be done quickly because men and boys are together for long stretches of time and because the stressful challenges of the campout or retreat help to break down a boy's normal defenses, making him more vulnerable to intimate male "companionship."

This man was never caught.  He could have continued to seduce young scouts for years.  He was good at it.  But God wouldn't let him rest.  His conscience goaded him to come clean.

I vowed then and there that if the Lord blessed me with a boy, he would never be a Scout.

If I'm not mistaken, there was some sort of crackdown on this in the late 90's and early 00's. I think it was in conjunction with the pedophilia scandals in the Roman church, but I'm not sure.

So now we have the oh so wonderful news that the Boy Scouts of America may openly admit homosexual leaders and scouts some time soon.  But no one has to worry because local units could continue to exclude homosexuals.  Right.  For how long?

The idea that local clubs will be able to make their own decisions is worse than useless.  Forget about sending your boys to any kind of overnight function that includes other units.  You may have all the safeguards in the world in place in your local club, but all bets are off when your boy packs up for a regional or national summer camp out.

Just think about it.

Back in 1982, I read Enrique Rueda's The Homosexual Network.  At that time the homosexual "rights"  movement was just a blip on the horizon.  Reuda was prescient.  He saw what was coming.

I plan to aggregate articles related to this topic that you may find helpful:

Matthew J. Franck – The Boy Scouts and Neuhaus' Law (First Things)

Whom Should We Thank?

Rodney Stark comes out swinging right from the bell in "The Victory of Reason," his fiercely polemical account of the rise of capitalism. Stark, the author of "The Rise of Christianity" and "One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism," is sick and tired of reading that religion impeded scientific progress and stunted human freedom. To those who say that capitalism and democracy developed only after secular-minded thinkers turned the light of reason on the obscurantism of the Dark Ages, he has a one-word answer: nonsense.

 "The success of the West, including the rise of science, rested entirely on religious foundations, and the people who brought it about were devout Christians," he argues in this provocative, exasperating and occasionally baffling exercise in revisionism. Capitalism, and the scientific revolution that powered it, did not emerge in spite of religion but because of it.

Read the rest of the NYT article here.