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A Reluctant ARP Pastor's Take on Synod

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  I am a reluctant ARP pastor. Don’t get me wrong, I love being Presbyterian (see my love letter to Presbyterianism at https://seventeen82.blogspot.com/2022/09/i-love-being-presbyterian-james-mcmanus.html?m=1 ). Yet, in that love is some amount of reluctance.  When I say I am a reluctant ARP pastor, I am mainly thinking about the meetings of presbytery and Synod. My personality is very much geared to getting things done. When I go to a meeting, I want to get to work and get the work done so I can move on to what is next. If you are familiar with the workings of a presbytery and/or Synod meeting, you know that doesn’t always happen. It’s a time for every voice that wants to be heard, to be heard. It’s the occasion where when you speak, people have to listen (or at least pretend to). You can stand up and say the same thing you’ve already said before. You can say what the previous 16 people before you said. You can go to the mic and ask the moderator a question that has other people scra
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A Friendly Response to “A Reluctant ARP Pastor's Take on Synod” - Andy Webb

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(Note to Readers: authors who do not send a pic get my favorite pic of them as the pic for the article. Love you Andy)   Dear James,  I wanted to thank you for speaking so honestly in your recent letter/essay in  S eventeen82  and although I am on the other side of the female deacon issue, I wanted to offer some reasons why I wasn’t discouraged by the recent Synod and why I don’t think you necessarily should be either. Let  me begin by confessing that I too was once something of a reluctant presbyter. While I enjoyed most session meetings, for several years I found myself dreading going to presbytery meetings and absolutely hated going to the PCA General Assembly ,  which I found to be immensely discouraging year after year . One year I  actually asked  my session if I could give it a miss entirely, and they wisely answered, “No.” As a result , from the time I was first ordained as a Ruling Elder in 1997 till my departure from the PCA in 2020 ,  I believe I only missed  one  Assembly ,
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Evening Worship Services and the ARP by Rev. Benjamin Glaser

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Good Morning, Recently a friend of mine compiled a list of churches, presbytery-by-presbytery, in the Presbyterian Church in America who offer a second service (whether that be in the afternoon or in the evening) on the Lord’s Day. The PCA currently has 1,930 worshipping congregations. 238 of them have morning and evening services on the Sabbath, or roughly 11% of the denomination. Not to be left behind I went about and did my own sleuthing to see what the situation looks like in our beloved Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church. Similar work done for the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (the OPC) and the Reformed Presbyterian Church of North America (the RPCNA) showed in those respective communions a near/above 60% rate for evening worship. Our Dutch Reformed brothers (CanRC, URC, etc...) are closer to 90%. I figured we would not be anywhere near those numbers, and I was correct. As with all investigative reporting I am sure my findings are not 100% on the nose accurate, however, I thi
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