103 articles from 57 issues, 1996 to 2026
Why does Presbyterian identity feel so vague and contested? Drawing on Charles Taylor’s “authenticity” and “the buffered self,” Joseph Small diagnoses the culture behind the disarray and points toward koinonia and shared theological work.
The PCUSA constitution added two new categories this year and a new examination requirement that's already baffling presbyteries. Andrews offers pastoral guidance for sessions and committees on what's actually changed, what hasn't, and how to act faithfully without either overreach or quiet capitulation.
At the close of his seventh decade, Burgess takes stock alongside the Bonhoeffer of the prison letters, asking the same question Bonhoeffer asked: who am I? The address is a meditation on identity, ministry, and what we hope to leave the generation that follows.
Two PCUSA amendments are heading to presbyteries for ratification, and Andrews lays out exactly what they say, what they don't say, and what's at stake. Drawing on his father's prayer that he be wise as a serpent and innocent as a dove, he urges presbyters to be both.
The Presbyterian ChurchThe Westminster Confession is unambiguous: God alone is Lord of the conscience. Goodloe shows how the Olympia Presbytery's overture to the 2024 General Assembly threatens that bedrock principle, and why every Presbyterian, whatever their view on the underlying issues, has reason to defend it.
Nixon walks through what actually happened with POL-01 (the Olympia Overture) at the 2024 General Assembly, why the split-vote outcome is more ambiguous than either side claims, and what congregations and sessions need to think about as the amendments now move to the presbyteries.
Theology Matters joins a public pledge for Presbyterian officers facing an overture that would compel them to affirm what they do not believe. Reading like an open letter, the piece calls clergy and elders alike to stand on the historic doctrines of creation and redemption rather than yield.
A century ago Harry Emerson Fosdick stood in a New York Presbyterian pulpit and preached against ordination standards he considered illiberal. Burnett returns to that famous sermon for its centennial, asking what it set in motion, what it cost, and what it still tells us about American Christianity.
Church-leadership conferences offer endless cures for stagnant congregations: webinars, restructuring, mergers, branding consultants. Ray draws on John Leith and a long memory to question whether any of these have actually produced what they promise, and to point toward what historically has.
The third and final part of Laverentz's series on the elder as shepherd. Drawing on the original 1788 PCUSA Constitution, he sketches what eldering as soul-care could look like in a twenty-first-century congregation, and what's at stake when the office shrinks to corporate-board duties.
Part two of the elder series opens with an 1898 Kansas City session quietly addressing one of their elders' moral failure with the kind of pastoral seriousness modern church courts have largely abandoned. Laverentz reads the case as a lost grammar of shepherding.
What does it mean to be an elder? Laverentz argues that for most of Presbyterian history, an elder was a shepherd of souls, deeply enmeshed in people's lives. Part one of his series looks at how that understanding has nearly disappeared in a single generation.
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