Presbyterians

Turns out Glenn Reynolds aka Instapundit is a PCUSA presbyterian. He also has issues with the growing anti-semitism of the PCUSA church that I mention here.

Long story short I was once PCA presbyterian. I agree with most of their doctrine and practical theology. I have since diverged a bit to the point that I am no longer a 5 point Calvinist. Thats why I'm not in the League of Reformed Bloggers for instance.

I ended up going Baptist because of church governance. In the presbyterian system, the denomination has strong control. For instance in a Presbyterian church, the pastor is employed by the presbytery not by the church itself. I'm guessing that this is so the presbytery can get rid of a pastor who breaks with doctrine whether his actual church wants it or not. I can appreciate that even though some people may think it is high-handed. Basically they can cast out a pastor, but try to keep the church.

The problem in my case was that the presbytery really didn't know what was going on in the church. About a third of the church membership and leadership started having serious concerns about our senior pastor. However 33% of a congregational vote is not enough to alert the presbytery to a problem (that requires a simple majority). Now when the church membership started plummeting, then the presbytery noticed. At that point it was too late to do anything other than damage control. When the ship has sunk, changing its captain isn't going to do a damn thing.

Anyway I went from there to a Baptist church. We don't have that problem since baptist denominations tend to be looser affiliations of doctrinally similar churches. Less than a year into going to my current church, they started having problems. Things were simply brought up openly during services and the pastor handled it well. While some people did leave the church, the numbers were small and they left as friends. I can't say that this was just because the pastor reported directly to his congregation, but it certainly didn't hurt.