The Church in Exile: Recovering a Reformed View of the Displaced Community
Western Christianity is increasingly described as a community in exile. McNutt asks what the Reformed tradition has to teach a displaced church, drawing on a tradition that has known persecution, dispersion, and the long discipline of being a minority before.
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Calvin and Barth on the Unity of the Church
Calvin once wrote that he would gladly cross ten seas if it would help mend the church's torn body. Burnett puts that ferocity in conversation with Karl Barth, and asks what the two together have to say to a denomination tempted to treat division as routine.
Recovering the Office of Elder – The Shepherd Model, Part III
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.
Rediscovering the Office of Elder. The Shepherd Model, Part II
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.
Spiritual Friendship – The Evangelical Brotherhood in Colonial America
Princeton was founded in 1746 by a group of Presbyterian clergy and laymen bound together by what they called spiritual friendship. Longfield traces that brotherhood through Belcher and Edwards into the eighteenth-century awakening, and asks what kept the network theologically coherent across distance and time.
A Critique of the Proposed Replacement for the Form of Government in the Book of Order
What would presbyteries be approving if they replaced the whole Form of Government? Carol Shanholtzer reads the new Foundations section, the rewritten chapters and the advisory handbook, and warns of a more hierarchical church and a loss of ordination standards.
Canon: A Moving Target?
Bart Ehrman and Dan Brown have made the New Testament canon a contested question again, presenting it as a top-down decree imposed on the early church. Hobson goes back to the actual history and shows that councils didn't decide the canon; they recognized what had already become Scripture by use.