A Reason to Leave the PCA— Tighter Focus on Mission
The PCA was founded to be faithful to the Scriptures, true to the reformed faith and obedient to the Great Commission. I think that by forming our own Canadian denomination, we will be better positioned to accomplish the third of those principles.
Here are my reasons:
- Focus
As any organization grows, complexity rises alongside growth. You have more opinions from more people. You get more overtures that are increasingly niche (pronounced nee-sh for all American readers). You have an annual assembly that takes full time staff and many hundreds of thousands of dollars to run. I understand why all of this exists, but no one could visit a PCA General Assembly and come away thinking that the denomination as it stands is a lean, mean, church planting machine.
As Canadians, we are swept up into the bigger picture of a largely American denomination, with all of its side projects.
Leaving the PCA to form a new Canadian denomination will allow us to put aside many of the intramural debates and constant tweaking of the BCO for edge cases and allow us to spend our time and energy renewing the Canadian church.
Increasingly, the PCA feels dominated by lawyers and lawyer-ly types. The debates are complex. When I explain our current debates to the people ‘back home’, they are either baffled why this is even an issue or are confused about what we are trying to do.
For instance, in Canada, background checks for vulnerable sector work are mandatory in everything from little league coaching to food bank volunteer to church ministry. The fact that the PCA has spent years debating whether or not to mandate background checks is embarrassing to most Canadian churches, not to mention that it feels like a large waste of time for something that should be a no-brainer.
A smaller denomination with a national vision for Canada will allow us to focus on the Great Commission.
2. Urgency
When you plant a church, one of the greatest drivers of momentum and effort in the early days is the urgency of knowing that if you do not grow, you’ll die. This isn’t just about the pastor or church planter, but all the people in the pews feel it as well. They know the current version of the church won’t last forever. It’s grow or close.
When I go to the PCA General Assembly, it is hard to feel the urgency. I sit in a room of hundreds and thousands of pastors and elders. There is infrastructure and history and if I were to leave, the denomination would barely notice. Indeed, our denomination could decline by 5% each year and still live a long time. There simply isn’t much impulse to grow outside of the Spirit urging us onward.
In contrast, if Canada were to form its own denomination and the 25-ish Canadian PCA churches were to sit in a room together, there is a very obvious sense of urgency. We need each other and we all need to be pulling in the same direction and we need to plant new churches or this thing will fall apart.
Sometimes smallness is a gift.
Because it makes us see our part in the kingdom of God and lights a little fire underneath of us to forge ahead.
3. The Needs of Canada
As the MNA chair for Eastern Canada, I have been doing some work on refining a vision for our presbytery and it (again) shocked me on how many churches need to be planted to simply have a PCA church in every city over 100 000 and in every province and territory. We need 20 more churches in Ontario alone and need to find some French speaking church planters and someone to move to Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island.
There are immense needs in Canada to have a functional national PCA-like denomination. But, because of the presence of our bigger brother in the USA, we don’t like much about those needs. Our attention is diverted by hundreds of pages of RPR reports that need to be carefully sifted.
Starting our own denomination will allow us to focus on the very pressing needs of Canada.
Conclusion
I think this is the strongest reason to leave the PCA and it’s why I started here. A new national denomination might be a better way to focus time, attention, energy and urgency on reaching the people of Canada.
I’d love to hear your thoughts. Please reply below or hit me up on X/Twitter.
