opc.org: Resources for the Visible Church
Gregory E. Reynolds
Avoiding “Discarnation”
No, you won't find the word "discarnation" in an ordinary dictionary. I can still remember my dismay in 1998, as I was doing research for a book on preaching and its relationship to the electronic media, when I discovered the First Church of Cyberspace. In 1994, the PCUSA founded this unusual "church" (at godweb.org). Despite its bold assertions of the virtues of the "virtual church," the reality is that the Internet is the perfect medium to transcend the nasty imperfections encountered in the real church. This "church" offers the complete escape from space and time. The site audaciously announces: "We are the first to organize within cyberspace itself ... making connections, building relationships, supporting people who are interested in growing in faith and understanding." One church website designer makes the extravagant claim that "all elements of congregational life can be experienced through the Internet."1 This is precisely what McLuhan meant by "discarnate." This danger represents a modern version of the ancient heresy of Gnosticism. Gnosticism was a syncretistic religion of self-illumination that viewed the material world as evil and thus something to be transcended.
Equally serious is the arrogant "trendier than thou" attitude that getting one's church on the Internet is keeping pace with the so-called real world. The First Church of Cyberspace announces its presumptuous motto: "Building a Church for the New Millennium Now." C. S. Lewis's "chronological snobbery" sums up this pervasive mentality nicely. We live in a world that falls in love with the latest thing, while disdaining everything else. The "Minister of Technology" of a Presbyterian megachurch opined that a failure to come up to speed technologically will render the church "completely irrelevant."2 The irony here is that the church that is addicted to novelty and relevance tends to make itself irrelevant because it conforms itself to the very world it is called to transform.
By consecrating opc.org to the service of the church's Lord, we hope not only to avoid the Internet's tendency toward "discarnation" and naïve optimism, but also to communicate the great heritage with which we have been entrusted. The Website Subcommittee seeks to assist the Orthodox Presbyterian Church to be a good steward of the Internet through its website. Our ecological approach to the medium constrains us to be thoughtful in assessing its benefits and liabilities and in appreciating the message(s) and tendencies built into it.
In doing so, we always need to be asking how this particular medium enhances or diminishes our humanity in relation to God and others. Our church's approach to being on the Web has, from the inception of opc.org, been precisely that. We have proceeded slowly on the assumption that something may be new without necessarily being improved. We are daily learning to ask the difficult questions in order to implement an approach that we believe glorifies God by helping build the visible church of his incarnate Son.
Promoting the Power of the Incarnation
The visible church is called to be the body of Christ, his embassy on earth, the community of believers. Our Confession says that "the visible church" consists of "all those throughout the world that profess the true religion; and of their children: and is the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ, the house and family of God, out of which there is no ordinary possibility of salvation" (WCF, 25.2). This implies something that was assumed by all generations until the invention of the telegraph—that face-to-face, space-time relationships are the fabric of human life, conceived as covenantal. Even as the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, so the church, as the people of God, is the steward of the mystery of this Incarnation.
Thus, visible is not synonymous with visual, but rather with historical, space-time reality. Even when pen and ink were the only means of long-distance communication, John understood that nothing replaces face-to-face communion with others. "I had many things to write, but I do not wish to write to you with pen and ink; but I hope to see you shortly, and we shall speak face to face. Peace to you. Our friends greet you. Greet the friends by name" (3 John 13–14 nkjv). The very word communication, which means "communion or fellowship among persons," alerts us to the biblical importance of personal presence. So we wrestle with the electronic challenge to face-to-face communications and relationships.
Let's look briefly at two important features of opc.org—one a good deal more interactive than the other.
Questions and Answers
The challenge of being good stewards by asking the difficult questions is never more obvious than in the "Questions and Answers" feature at opc.org. It provides a way to answer basic biblical and theological questions. When questioners seek, wittingly or unwittingly, to undermine church authority or supplant the benefit of face-to-face personal ministry, we direct the questioner to a local church and its pastor. We view matters of church discipline, disputes, or debates to be beyond the scope of our work. We recommend that questioners present their concerns in these areas to the appropriate judicatories of the visible church. In most cases, this will be to a local pastor, elder, or session. We do not want the website to replace, but rather to enhance, personal involvement in, and commitment to, the local church. We are aware of several people who have become members of local OP churches as a result of the Q&A feature.
Here is an example of how one of our responders recently answered a troubled person who had a very serious problem to deal with:
_______, you are obviously struggling with a very painful situation. I want you to speak with your pastor about this matter. If you do not have a church home, would you tell me what city you live in? I could then give you the name of a local pastor who can provide you with godly counsel.
I was grateful for the opportunity to pray for you today. Please, if you do not have a church home, let me know. I will do my best to help you find a strong local church.
The Website Subcommittee has also developed responses to other questions that go beyond the scope of the Q&A mission or transgress the ethical boundaries of godly communication.
The Q&A page (the third button down on the home page menu bar) is well organized, so that the visitor may view the question of the "previous week" and the question "coming up next week." Two comprehensive indexes are provided: chronological and topic. Only a small number of all the questions are posted for public consumption. These are edited to remove all personal references and to make the questions and answers more useful to a larger audience.
Beyond helping random inquirers and Web surfers find out more about the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, the Q&A page is an excellent resource for the local church. Leaders and members should use it often as a resource for inquirers and as a resource for well-articulated answers to difficult questions. Ideally, one could read and digest the answer to a particular question and then give it in one's own words to an inquirer, since face-to-face communication always represents our incarnate Lord best.
Trinity Hymnal Concordance
The Trinity Hymnal Concordance page (reached by the fifth button from the bottom on the home page menu bar) provides a powerful resource to aid the church in its most important activity: public worship. Choosing psalms and hymns that reinforce the theme of the sermon is a major weekly task for the minister of the Word, for he understands that congregational singing is an important extension of that ministry. The concordance offers a powerful search engine to help locate hymn texts (in the original edition of Trinity Hymnal) by word, phrase, or hymn number. One may also listen to the tunes provided in midi files. This is an enormous help for learning the rich and vast heritage available in our hymnal. The committee, along with its administrative and technical staff, is working on getting the revised edition of Trinity Hymnal online.
No website can in any way replace the visible church. However, with a biblical doctrine of the church it may be used as an invaluable informational resource in building the body of Jesus Christ. If you have not explored opc.org, please do so today.
1. Darryl Hart, "No Assembly Required," Nicotine Theological Journal 3, no. 3 (July 1999): 1.
2. Ibid. I owe the apt phrase "trendier than thou" to the late Charles Dennison, historian of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church.
The author is the pastor of Amoskeag Presbyterian Church in Manchester, N.H., and a member of the Committee on Christian Education.
Disciple-Making with a Difference
Thomas R. Patete
What makes a Sunday school curriculum Reformed? Is it the biblical content presented or the teaching methods employed or the way lessons are illustrated? Certainly these elements are driven by and reflect the publisher's theological standards. But it goes much deeper for us here at Great Commission Publications. We operate with the conviction that nurturing covenant children in the faith is a crucial part of Christ's mandate to be disciple makers. And that mandate must be carried out in sync with our heritage and the distinctive doctrines of grace.
The Whole Counsel of God
Before we write a single lesson, we begin with an attitude toward Scripture. Our approach is to regard it as "the whole counsel of God." It is important, we believe, to see the entirety of the Bible as God's complete, unified revelation. Every small piece of biblical truth is part of a whole, and all the pieces ultimately fit together perfectly to comprise the message that God wants to convey to us.
There are two practical implications to this underlying perspective. First, we examine each part of Scripture in light of the whole. Second, we teach children the story of the Bible, along with teaching them the stories in the Bible.
In a catalog of principles that we use in GCP's editorial process, we express the following commitment:
Under the conviction that the Word of God is verbally inspired and infallible, we seek to handle Scripture as a whole and each individual passage with great care—not adding or deleting, not speculating or embellishing, emphasizing both by content and means of teaching that these are God's words and not ours.
Godward Focus
Reformed theology constantly redirects our attention to God as the sovereign Creator, Redeemer, and King. When we open his Word, we should always be alert to what we can learn about who he is, what he has done, and how we should respond. Such a Godward focus colors Bible study at every level. For kids in Sunday school, it means that we regularly connect the dots between the divine truths they learn and the character of the God from whom those truths come. The bottom line is to ask Shorter Catechism Question 1, "What is the chief end of man?"—and to be sure the answer is solidly grasped: "Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever"!
In addition to this general emphasis, certain topics that underpin a God-centered life show up repeatedly across the GCP curriculum. For example, we treat the creation account in Genesis at several age levels, believing that children must get these facts straight in order to be equipped to know God as he intends and to be armed against the prevalent philosophies of today's culture. Also, there are three quarters on worship, two on the Ten Commandments, and a high school course on knowing God. In lesson artwork, we further seek to honor our heavenly Father by not depicting him with any earthly image.
Show Me Jesus TM
The diverse writing in the Bible have an all-encompassing, unified theme: the unfolding story of Christ, the promised Savior. From Genesis to Revelation, we see Jesus both foretold by God's messianic promise and fulfilling it. Dr. Edmund Clowney, one of the architects of GCP's original curriculum, states, "To teach the Bible story we must present the Savior." He exhorts us to avoid the trap of moralism, whereby biblical narratives and characters are used as models for telling children to be good or as warnings not to be bad. All of our Sunday school lessons, taken together, from toddler to high school, "present Jesus Christ as the Revealer of the Father and the Savior of his people ... [and] children are pointed to Jesus to know and trust him."
We acknowledge that covenant children are noncommunicant members of the church, and that as such they have "interest in the covenant and right to the seal of it [i.e., baptism] and to the outward privileges of the church" (the OPC's Directory for the Public Worship of God, IV.B.2). In a very real sense, we regard them as believers unless they show clear evidence to the contrary at an appropriate age of accountability.
Nonetheless, parents and teachers must look for every opportunity to make the gospel clear to children under their care. Our Show Me Jesus curriculum supplies the Christological story line to promote understanding, and even assent, as children mature. Our prayer is that each one of them, at the right time, will make a formal profession of faith and graduate to communicant membership.
Covenantal Perspective
Covenant theology, covenant family, covenant children, and the covenants of life and grace are important truths of our Reformed faith. The idea of covenant is important because it explains how we relate to God and God to us. Therefore, it is to be a part of our daily lives. When children receive the sacrament of covenant baptism, we promise to teach them what that sign and seal is all about as they grow. Starting with Adam and Eve, expressed more fully in Abraham, Moses, David, etc., and then accomplished in Christ's atoning work, covenant is the thread on which the story of salvation hangs. The apex of the Show Me Jesus curriculum is the junior high course, in which God's covenant is brought to light as the common denominator that helps put all the pieces of Scripture together.
GCP materials are characterized through and through by a covenantal focus. That translates into teaching that is moving toward the goal of body building—building the body of Christ, that is. As we confront students with their individual relationship to God through his faithful covenant promises and the ensuing spiritual connection to others, the communion of the saints becomes a dynamic reality to them and helps identify them with the corporate church.
The Home Link
Finally, we believe that the mission of passing our faith on to the next generation calls for a collaborative effort involving both the home and the church. Believing that parents are primary to the spiritual nurture of their children, we provide lesson components to facilitate a partnership with them. The goal is to reinforce the teaching that children receive at church.
In the younger age levels, GCP's weekly "At Home" papers summarize core elements of the lesson, including the central Bible story, and give parents ideas to use informally or in family worship. The classroom music is available, as well, to use at home. A Sunday school lesson by itself is not enough—the follow-through during the week makes lessons increasingly real for kids and helps them in their daily practice of faith. At the older levels, we encourage students to read and study the Bible on their own. In addition, we advise teachers to communicate with parents to ensure that they are aware of what their children are learning and are thoroughly engaged in the discipling process.
Psalm 78—sometimes called the Christian education Psalm—speaks of generational succession in the faith. In seeking to be obedient to every aspect of the Bible's instructions for kingdom building, we dare not overlook our responsibility to covenant children. In fact, this is where we begin.
Keeping our publications on a consistently Reformed track is not rocket science. It's simply making sure our purpose and our execution are rooted firmly in the Westminster standards. The proof will be in the lives of those who "grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ" (Eph. 4:15).
The author, a PCA minister, is the executive director of Great Commission Publications. Reprinted from New Horizons, April 2005.