Book Review: For a Continuing Church

This book review was included in the September 2018 Meadowcroft Monthly. For an archive of all book reviews, click here.

We need good, honest history that highlights the achievements of our predecessors as well as their weaknesses and blind spots. Such history helps us to remember God’s faithfulness and inform our present situation. Sean Michael Lucas accomplishes this with For a Continuing Church - a history of our denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA).

Lucas clearly lays out why our denomination was so necessary. The mainline Presbyterian Church was drifting away from the truth of Scripture. While many leaders tried to stay and positively influence the denomination, eventually the time came to start anew.

But this isn’t a book simply of heroes and villains. As usual, history is more complicated than that. Accordingly, Lucas is honest about some of the failings of those who wanted to start our denomination.

Politics were important to these founders. Conservatives were often cautioning the church to stay out of politics on certain issues (especially Civil Rights), but did not hesitate to speak out on issues like communism or even overseas wars. One prominent conservative (Nelson Bell, father-in-law of Billy Graham), went so far as to advocate that the atomic bomb be used to end the war in Korea! Regardless of the legitimacy of his political/strategic point, it is instructive that the church’s call to “avoid politics” often meant to “avoid liberal politics.” As churches like ours consider our relationship with political figures and parties, reading this history can help point out some of our inevitable blind spots.

The church’s dealings with politics dovetail with the denomination’s complicated (and at times shameful) relationship with issues like segregation and racial intermarriage. These sections of the book are, frankly, hard to read. Because Lucas is honest about these things, the book makes for an important backdrop against recent and current discussions of racial reconciliation in the church.

You might not think the history of a denomination would be much of a page-turner, but Lucas’ book is interesting and easy to read. While ancient church history is important, recent church history can also help us as we consider God’s calling on our church in the 21st century.