Why I Left the Presbyterian Church in America

The Alternative to the Church Initiating Conflict with the Perishing World is Letting the World Perish

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.

One of those is calling David a rapist from the pulpit. We can all agree that David’s acts toward Bathsheba and Uriah were abhorrent. He could rightly be accused of at least committing adultery, murder, despising the word of the Lord, and neglecting his duties to God and to those for whom he was responsible. But nowhere in Scripture can I find any support for the charge of rape. I can, however, find support for that claim in the MeToo culture where consensual—though sinful—sexual encounters are turned into rape based only on the premise that the man has “abused his position of authority.”

Other recent events reinforcing my concerns about the PCA include:

• The treatment of the “Jonesboro 7” by Covenant Presbytery (though I’m grateful that the PCA’s Standing Judicial Commission reversed the Presbytery’s actions).

• Continued attacks on faithful brethren who attend churches belonging to the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, who want to apply God’s Word to public policy, or who believe in the historic, biblical doctrine of postmillennialism.

• The decision to host a panel at the PCA’s 2024 General Assembly on the topic of “How to Be Supportive of Your Pastor and Church Leaders in a Polarized Political Year” that included New York Times columnist David French.

• The decision of a former PCA General Assembly moderator and the current coordinator of the Presbyterian Church in America’s Mission to North America to speak at a blacks-only gathering at a PCA church in California so that black worshippers could bond with one another and appreciate their black culture and their identity in Christ.

• The “inability or unwillingness” to understand and act on the concerns of many inside and outside the PCA about the blacks-only gathering by the PCA’s former Stated Clerk, the previous Moderator of the PCA’s General Assembly, the Mission to North America’s permanent committee, and the 2025 General Assembly (which renewed the coordinator’s contract).

• Publication of various articles from byFaith, the PCA’s official publication, such as one that claimed the Western church “adopt[ed] unbiblical cultural and anthropocentric practices during the [COVID] pandemic such as devaluing public health recommendations and disregarding means of common grace such as vaccines, antivirals, and masks.”

• The adoption of a study committee on Christian Nationalism by the 2025 General Assembly. The original draft of this overture makes it clear that it was aimed at “Moscow Theology and Postmillennial Theonomic Reconstructionism” and those who, because they agree to some extent with those concepts, “have disrupted the peace, purity, and progress of a significant number of families, churches, and sessions within the PCA.”

My concerns about the PCA might be best explained by examining this criticism of postmillennialism made during a discussion between five PCA pastors on an episode of The Westminster Standard Podcast:

We are talking about a postmillennialism that views the kingdom as being progressively built by confrontations that the church initiates with society and culture.

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. It is as if they have forgotten that God told the serpent, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel.” When they do acknowledge the conflict, it is often blamed on those inside the church who are “fostering dissension and discord.”

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. Conflict is inevitable. God used conflict to establish His people in the Old Testament (Exodus 7-12) and to build the New Testament church (Matthew 28:19-20; Acts 12:1-5).

To the complaint that the church “initiates” the conflict, consider how the church initiated conflict in the New Testament era. Peter and the apostles came into conflict with the rulers of Jerusalem for “teaching and preaching that the Christ is Jesus” (Acts 5:42). Christians came into conflict with Nero and the Romans for saying “Jesus is Lord” but not adding “Caesar is Lord.” Jesus initiated conflict by telling the rebellious religious (and political) leaders of His day that they were “like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean.”

The only way for the church not to initiate conflict with the culture is to stop doing what God instructs us to do in Scripture; in other words, to stop acting like Christians. Which helps us see that the alternative to the church initiating conflict with the perishing world (1 John 2:17) is letting the world perish; ordaining female deacons, telling people it is okay to be a gay Christian, holding seeker-friendly worship services, or calling yourself a racist because you are white will not save the world.

One author recently tried to make the case that those concerned about the PCA are claiming it has “suddenly gone liberal, progressive, soft.” His rhetorical device is clever but misses the mark. The drift has happened over time, as far back as the 2000 Creation Study. And I believe it has happened because of the failure of a number of elders and members in the PCA to affirm in exegesis and application what they affirm by confession: the inerrancy of Scripture. Sometimes the plain meaning of Scripture is so contrary to what the culture believes an exegete will go to great lengths to find another, more compatible meaning.

I am still a Presbyterian and am grateful for the years that the PCA was our home. My prayer is that the PCA will address its issues and remain a home for the faithful for many decades to come. But I led our family to a CREC church because I believe it is a better place for us to flourish in the knowledge, worship, and service of God and in fellowship with other Christians. I concluded that we had done our best to fight the good fight in the PCA but it was time to finish our race elsewhere.