This week a letter titled The State of the PCAwas published by Bryan Chapell in By Faith, the denominational magazine of the PCA. This public letter is another of the many takes in recent years on our denomination from the perspective of a senior statesman with progressive leanings. Few readers will disagree with Bryan's mapping of the three main factions in the PCA. As a committed confessionalist, I find however that this letter does not shed as much light as its author may have hoped. In the spirit of increasing understanding and of sincere communication, I offer this public letter of response with a prayer for a charitable reading not only by Bryan personally but by all those whose perspective may be different from mine.

Dear Bryan,

Like so many others, I read with interest your open letter on The State of the PCA. I am heartened by your hope that our common engagement with a post-Christian culture may bring us together. However, I have to admit that your letter actually increases my sense that our divisions are likely to be more pronounced in the emerging environment. In saying this, I am reflecting primarily on the assumptions that seem evident in your perspective, at least as I try to understand them. Taking your open letter as a sincere attempt to communicate into the PCA's current state, please receive this response as a sincere attempt to communicate back as a representative of the confessionalist wing. In doing this, I would highlight a few assumptions which I think mark our significant differences.

There’s a sort of American Christian (almost always white and middle-to-upper class) who seems to think that the American church’s biggest problem at the moment is the previous generation of the American church.

There are various sub-groups within this broader camp. The radicals, of whom Matt has written in the past, want to critique the suburban comfort of the previous generation and replace it with a Christianity focused on doing hard things and rejecting the supposedly easy life of material affluence embraced by the previous generation.

The progressives, meanwhile, tell us that “Jesus Needs New PR” and seem to think that Rachel Held Evans, Nadia Bolz-Weber, and Matthew Paul Turner are the ones to lead the rebranding campaign.

That said, you can find a similar way of thinking about the previous generation with more conventional, orthodox evangelicals as well. Consider this piece written by former Covenant Seminary president Bryan Chappel on the state of the Presbyterian Church in America:

Perhaps nothing better illustrates these generational differences than the way many Christian leaders feel about major figures in prior conservative Christian movements. To mention Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Jim Dobson, James Kennedy, and Chuck Colson is to identify the heroes of the 50-plus generation. Church leaders of that generation are shocked to discover that younger leaders consider these figures exemplars of failure, representing attitudes and approaches that have led to the church’s cultural ineffectiveness.

The Roman historian Tacitus described Emperor Nero’s persecution of Christians: “In their very deaths they were made the subjects of sport: for they were covered with the hides of wild beasts, and torn to death by dogs, or nailed to crosses, or set fire to, and when the day waned, burned to serve for the evening lights.”

In spite of what you may have read or heard, the recent Pew Research Center report “America’s Changing Religious Landscape” was better news for Christians than this. “Is Christianity in America Doomed?” asked one headline, about a faith with which 71 percent of Americans still identify.

Most of the actual decline in believers from 2007 to 2014 was concentrated among Roman Catholics and the Protestant mainline, and among those most loosely tethered to religious faith. Evangelical Christians held pretty steady, which set up an odd chain of reactions. Secularists were pleased about the decline of Christianity. Some conservative Christians were pleased about the decline of theological liberalism. The latter is evidence of an old grudge.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the Protestant mainline decisively won the battle for cultural preeminence — triumphing in public battles such as the Scopes Trial and leaving fundamentalists to retreat into a subculture. So the mainline’s comeuppance is met with uncharitable satisfaction in some conservative circles — call it William Jennings Bryan’s revenge. The language of “decline,” however, is imprecise. The mainline has not so much declined as faded into the broader culture. “Liberals have learned that it’s difficult for the church to survive,” says historian George Marsden, “if there’s nothing that makes the church distinct from culture.”