We praise God for a good congregational meeting here at Clearnote Church, Bloomington, considering and voting on joining Evangel Presbytery. The discussion was thorough and helpful. We’d had several congregational meetings over the course of the past couple months that were informational about Evangel Presbytery, and last night finished up the questions and comments.
Then the vote was taken and passed with only two or three negatives or abstentions. The pic above is Pastor Jody Killingsworth leading the congregation in worship just prior to adjournment.
This is the culmination of much work of many men over the course of three or four years, now. Five to ten churches’ elders and pastors have been laboring over our Book of Church Order, Rules of Discipline, and Directory for Worship, and there’s still work to be done in a number of areas where no one is quite satisfied yet with the wording. But as we all acknowledged last night, there comes a point where the perfecting has to stop long enough to charter the organization, and when two more churches vote as we did last night, Evangel Presbytery will be chartered.
Please give thanks with us for God’s kindness in allowing this serious step to be taken in a way that I think everyone present would characterize as “it seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us.” Our sermon yesterday morning was on Acts 15, by the way, and it was a helpful text to examine as we approached our final discussion and vote on this matter.
A number of pastors and elders and churches have expressed interest in this work and if you’re interested, do feel free to contact us. The essentials are that we will be united under Westminster Confessional doctrine, the observance of historic Reformed worship and sacraments, and historic presbyterian polity. The one area which is not simply historically Reformed is our commitment to freedom of conscience in the time and mode of baptism to the end that congregations which are Reformed and credo-baptist will be welcome.
With that single exception, it is our goal to live together in doctrine and practice that would be perfectly acceptable to five centuries of our Reformed forefathers. Please pray for us.
