What makes this language funny is the way “leader” and “leading” keep surfacing (providentially they avoided the dreaded “servant-leader” construction). It is as if putting the word “leader” before “church” automatically makes it so, as if the PCA, with roughly 300,000 members, is on the precipice of becoming one of the most visible and highly respected denominations. As the NTJ has remarked in the past, this kind of rhetoric is a form of Presbyterian self-delusion, one to which the much smaller Orthodox Presbyterian Church (25,000) might be prey if she ever broke six figures. It is so because, to use one example, the PCA is 100,000 members smaller than the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod, a church that most inhabitants of the United States have never heard of.

Truly innovative leadership development might address the problem of how few Presbyterians there are in the United States compared to Roman Catholics, Southern Baptists, and Pentecostals, and might involve adopting a strategy for a limited range of targets....

If I thought there was a proper form of polity that was a true mark of the church, I'd have [to] go with the episcopate. Good thing I don't believe there is such a thing, or I'd be in trouble.

One can distinguish between bishops and episcopal succession being of the essence of apostolicity (so that, if every bishop died, so too would the church) and their being the ordinary bearers and guardians of apostolicity among those baptized into the apostolic Faith, for the well being and full being of the church.

In the latter case, restoration of the historic episcopate to all parts of church would certainly be something to be striven for, but would not be regarded as the sina qua non of their being a church at all.

Hi, I'm an unabashed NON-admirer of Doug Wilson, and this is all I'll say.

When you spend your life writing and speaking in a half-cocked, shoot-from-the-hip fashion, publishing books on every topic under the sun, displaying not your universal expertise but your mediocre ignorance on a vast number of topics, in the process castigating everyone who thinks differently than you with biting and vicious sarcasm...you shouldn't be surprised that when you actually get a SERIOUS thought in your head, there will be nobody around to listen.

Jon [Barlow]'s on the right track: better get some new spokespeople.

Here, as I understand it, is the plan:

Steve Schlissel ("What Does the Lord Require?")
Respondent: Carl Robbins

Doug Wilson ("The Visible/Invisible Church")
Respondent: Morton Smith

John Barach ("The Covenant and Election")
Respondent: R. C. Sproul, Jr.

Steve Wilkins ("The Covenant and Baptism")
Respondent: Joey Pipa

Each speaker will give a 45 minute summary of his position, and then, after a break, there will be a 45 minute response, followed by a discussion (not a debate) between the speaker and his respondent.

I was reading some stuff that I accessed from Jon Amos' weblog the other day talking about how the centers for the faith are shifting from west to south and east, and I thought about this phenomenon. There are not yet any places that I am aware of where the gospel has taken deep root in a country, then been uprooted through apostasy, which has ever returned to the faith. Think about the area around the Med. sea, then northward into Europe and Russia, and now the west seems to be in serious decline. But "ever" is a long time...perhaps one should say, "yet."

The promise of God is that the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. It appears to me that the waters that sprang up in Palestine are working their way around the globe, but they are only ankle-deep yet. Sort of sloshing along. Maybe they will circle the world seven times till finally unbelief comes crashing down. Maybe we still are in the early church. That's what I think.

One of [Eugen] Rosenstock-Huessy's contentions is that the next thousand years will be a time of "regrafting the dead branches of humanity back into the Tree of Life." ERH has proven to be remarkably insightful so far, and I hope his prophetic mantel continues to bear fruit. I take him to mean Europe, and even more radically, the Middle East.

In terms of Europe, can "the last man" really be "the last man"? Did not Christ die to redeem him as well? The "last man" is a prodigal son who is still in the pigpen, and to date has determined to remain there.

Half of Christ's program has thus far been completed. Nature is dead. The "last man" is the man who has thoroughly seen through nature, but has not yet gone on to be reconstituted by super nature. Islam is simply a violent attempt to return to blood and clan. It is thoroughly reactionary, and I think now spent. Whatever violent convulsions are still in it, it is incapable of creating any kind of future at all.

I struggle with all these issues partly because of where I live. My town is almost nothing but a populace of prodigals wallowing in the swill. I wake up every day trying to find some way to help some to find their way home.

Here is where I see it at this point. Jesus said that if anyone wanted to follow him, he must "hate his father and mother, and follow him." When St. Francis walked naked away from his father in the 13th century, it was still a revolutionary act. But no longer. By the late 20th century and early 21st century, everybody hates their father and mother. It is no longer revolutionary, or even interesting. Blood ties are no longer adequate to define us. The only real way forward is through working out the meaning of baptism. Since this isn't done, the alternatives are, a) reactionary and dead Islam, b) thoroughgoing neurosis - that is, being very unhappy at the fact that blood does not satisfy, and spending most of my life carping about parents, etc., to some psychotherapist trying to make it pan out, when it never can, or c) Buddhism or eastern mysticism which tells me that all the old natural bonds were illusory in the first place. The other older options of large public ideologies (like Marxism or fascism) appear to be dead or at least non-functional at the moment. Hence, our mythologies are pretty limited and uninteresting. We are mostly reduced to family myths. The older larger ones were more interesting (i.e. communism or nationalism, or some other -ism). Now it's only my father's or big brother's or mother's fault instead of the Jews or the capitalists. Pretty boring. But also, perhaps a victory for Christ. Christ appears to have reduced all the large myths to nothing. Now, the only really interesting direction to turn is to Him [to] spiritualize and supernaturalize the old bonds of nature. Nietzsche foresaw how boring it was all going to become. Jesus is really the only exciting thing left.

"And in this mountain shall the LORD of hosts make unto all people a feast of fat things, a feast of wines on the lees, of fat things full of marrow, of wine on the lees well refined." (Isaiah 25:6, KJV)

The true view is that the Church is tied to baptism - no baptism, no church. And of course, the well-being of the Church is tied to office-bearers. But those office-bearers are appointed out of the midst of a "nation of priests," and therefore are not constitutive of the Church.

Apostolic pastors will sense a call to a city or region to pastor and reach it. They will pastor their local church, but they will also sense a responsibility to pastor and have an apostolic vision to reach and influence their city.

God has called us to carry out the Great Commission: to "make disciples of all nations." This calls for an overall plan; it is a huge undertaking. This cannot be accomplished without the apostle serving the churches and ministries so a unified force can be mobilized against everything which exalts itself against Jesus Christ. And it is through relationships that this is accomplished, not through a denominational structure or democratic polity. A denominational church or a democratically run church can have an apostolic vision to win their city, but it will take all the local churches working together to win that city; one church cannot do it alone.