myrna 🇺🇸

#BREAKING A bizarre and developing situation is unfolding on McDonald Avenue between Kings Highway and Avenue S, near Kosher Corner Supermarket. Video shows approximately six individuals emerging from a manhole at around 2:00 a.m. after reportedly spending nearly two hours underground - with the cover closed and a person standing watch nearby. A massive NYPD investigation is now underway, and the entire area has been closed off as authorities work to determine exactly what happened.

So at the risk of embarrassing a solid brother, it’s starting to look like @ZGroff is the George Bailey of the PCA. If you don’t get the reference, look up “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

I’m not the only one who has been warning about this kind of lawfare being deployed in the PCA, but these recent cases are exactly what many of us have been talking about. Consider two examples: Burke Parsons and @ZacharyGarris. I would be surprised if either suspension ultimately stands if appealed all the way through the process. But that is exactly the problem. The process is long. In the meantime, these men are suspended from office. They are sidelined from pastoral ministry. Their churches are disrupted. Their people are left without their shepherd. Even if the suspension is eventually overturned, the process itself becomes the punishment. That creates a dangerous incentive structure. Men can use the courts of the church to temporarily remove pastors over charges they likely know will not hold up under final review. The accusations are often tied to elastic applications of ninth commandment violations, claims of “harshness,” or other highly subjective standards. Take Garris. He was suspended for poking fun at Dr. Anthony Bradley by saying there are some things so complex that even a PhD cannot understand them. Frankly, that is funny. Dr. Bradley regularly invokes his credentials in ways that invite that kind of jab. To have a church lose its pastor, even temporarily, over something like that is absurd. This kind of judicial maneuvering does real damage. It chills ordinary pastoral speech. It rewards strategic accusations. It destabilizes local churches. And it sends a clear message to younger men: enter this denomination, and you may find yourself sidelined for months over charges that will eventually be overturned. If the older conservatives in the PCA do not step up and use their authority to stop this sort of procedural abuse, younger men are going to ask a very reasonable question: Why would I come into, or remain in, a denomination where the process itself can be weaponized against faithful pastors? This is not mainly about whether these particular men win on appeal. It is about whether constitutional process in the PCA will be used to secure justice or to exercise ideological control by other means. #SavethePCA

I appreciate @barrelagedfaith 's irenic discussion of the teaching of @douglaswils —my old teacher while I was a seminarian and then pastor in his denomination. Doug tries to argue that apostates were (a) in the body of Christ, but (b) not in a salvific way—which makes no sense.