Archives for April 2015

Brett A. McNeill writes:

You may wonder why we in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church believe that a person must be a member in good standing in a Bible-believing, evangelical church before he or she may partake of the Lord’s Supper. That’s a good question, and one that I’ve been asked many times. Our practice strikes many people as new and unusual because the more common practice in North American churches is to leave the decision whether to participate up to each individual.

Why then do we require people to be members in a local church before they may come to the Lord’s Table? In a nutshell, we believe that is what God requires. That may seem to be a bold claim, so let me try briefly to defend it. If this answer is a bit long, I apologize, but a good question deserves a good answer.

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Tim Challies writes:

We are at an interesting point in history. I guess there’s never really a boring point in history, but there are definitely times when things advance or unravel in a hurry. And today we are seeing the full-out charge of a new kind of morality. We see it playing out in the media just about every day, and Nancy Pearcey’s book Total Truth is still one of the most helpful guides to understanding what is happening around us.

Our society insists that there needs to be a radical split between two different spheres: the private and the public. In the public sphere we have society’s great institutions: the state, academia, multinational corporations, the mainstream media, and the like. In the private sphere we have the family, the church, and personal relationships. We are told that these public institutions are based only on what is scientific and objective. Meanwhile, the private sphere is composed of all those things that are subjective or based on personal values; we are allowed to have them, but they are less important than the public sphere and must never be allowed to influence it.

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