How did I become a Presbyterian?
I
am grateful to God that I was raised in a godly, Bible-believing, Baptist home
in West Virginia. My parents took me to Baptist churches until I left for
college. I came to Christ under Baptist
preaching, and I was nurtured in my faith throughout my teen years in a Baptist
youth group. My dad is a Baptist
minister. My closest friends to this day
are still Baptists. I hold nothing
against the Baptists, and they will always hold a special place in my
heart.
My
journey to Presbyterianism began when I went left my home and church to attend college. During my first
weeks, an upperclassman recommended that I read The Reformed Doctrine of Predestination by Loraine Boettner.[1] It was the first theological book that I ever
purchased (or read, for that matter), and it changed my life. It introduced me to
a way of understanding Scripture that I had never learned as a Baptist. It explained the “Doctrines of Grace”—sometimes
called Calvinism or Reformed Theology.[2] After college, I went to seminary to prepare
to be a preacher. From the reading of
that book and on through seminary, I was a Baptist who was “Reformed.” During seminary, as I learned to study the
Bible word-by-word and verse-by-verse, I came to believe that churches should
be governed by elders instead of lone pastors, and that no church should be
independent from other churches. I became convinced that local congregations
should unite themselves as much they can to the larger Church. Before I finished seminary, I had taken two
important steps toward Presbyterianism—I was a Calvinist, and I embraced Presbyterian
polity.[4]
Not
only had I been raised a Baptist, but I had also been raised a
Fundamentalist. Fundamentalists are
separatist Christians who are often accused of legalism. They tend to embrace certain rules for living
that end up isolating them from others who do not follow those rules.[5] I became disillusioned with fundamentalism when
I was encouraged to separate from many other God-fearing, Bible-believing
Christians over things that I did not feel were important. After I got married and started having
children, I dropped out of seminary. My disillusionment left me with little
incentive to become a preacher. Instead I became a school administrator in a
school run by a fundamentalist church.
During my two years there, the church leadership got wind that I was a
Calvinist and began a process of separation from me. This process was very painful for me and my young
family.
During
this difficult time, I reached out to a local Presbyterian pastor hoping to
find comfort and encouragement. The pastor spent many hours listening to and
encouraging me. When I finally quit my
job, he created a staff position for me at his church so that my family could
recover from the damage done at the fundamentalist church. In this Presbyterian church, I was introduced
to grace like never before. Although I
had been taught the Gospel throughout my life, it was not until I was swimming
in grace that I learned how the Gospel really saved me and freed me from sin
and guilt. I had studied the Doctrines
of Grace on my own, but now I finally got to see what they looked like when they were preached and
applied in church consistently.
It
was not long before I took a third and final step toward Presbyterianism. Infant Baptism was the only thing standing in
the way of my being a completely convinced Presbyterian. At first I had a difficult time seeing the
doctrine and practice in the Bible. But
I learned quickly that it had been staring me in the face all along, hidden by
years of Dispensational[6] teachings.
After my wife and I became convinced that infant baptism was biblical, we joyously
had our own young children baptized and purposed to become and remain
Presbyterians. I have been a
Presbyterian ever since.
After
I attended Presbyterian churches for nearly a decade, God reignited my desire
to become preacher, and I was ordained a Presbyterian minister. My first church was a small congregation in a
coal-mining community in my beloved West Virginia. As a former Baptist, I was able to see that
even this small Presbyterian congregation was strongly influenced by the Baptist
teachings that had settled over many generations into the hills and “hollers.” I
encountered many of the same questions that I myself had wrestled with over the
years, and I saw the need help others understand Presbyterianism as I had come
to understand it.
[1] Boettner, Loraine. The
Reformed Doctrine of Predestination. Philadelphia: Presbyterian and
Reformed Pub. Co, 1932.
[2] These terms will be
explained in the chapters that follow.
[4] “Polity” is a word
used to describe how a church is structured—in this case, the church has more
than one elder, and the church is united together with other churches to form a
larger church organization.
[5] This is a very
simplistic explanation of what fundamentalism is. Fundamentalism is much more complex than
this. But this is not a book about
Fundamentalism, so a more detailed explanation will have to await the
publication of mine and Steve Crawford’s manuscript Fleeing Fundamentalism Without Forsaking the Faith.
No comments:
Post a Comment