The moderator of the Presbytery of the Cascades shares his thoughts

Introducing Robert Bulkley - the new moderator for 2009-2010.

Let me begin these thoughts by expressing my appreciation for the opportunity to be the moderator of this presbytery. I have been involved in various presbytery activities for over twenty years and have gained a great deal of respect for its members, churches, and staff. It is an honor to be chosen to preside for the next year.

In this blog I intend to raise some issues that are facing the presbytery in the hope of stimulating a useful discussion. I will start with an aspect of what I think is the primary issue facing the presbytery: the steady decline in the membership of most of its churches. I will not deal with such issues as church organization, music, or methods for reaching people; the presbytery is already working on those things and at this point I don't have anything to add. Rather, I want to focus on barriers that popular misunderstandings of Christianity place on our ability to bring people into conversation with us.

If my personal experience is any guide, the most significant barrier may be the popular misunderstanding that Christians must accept the creation stories of the early chapters of Genesis as literally true, thereby denying biological evolution and the big bang theory, among other scientific concepts. That misunderstanding leads to the necessary corollary that Christians must deny not only many of the fundamental discoveries of modern science but the scientific method itself as a way of learning about the physical world. Many thoughtful people--encouraged by proselytzing atheists like Richard Dawkins who have no understand of the Bible--reject the Christian message with no further inquiry because it appears to require them to check their brains at the door.

Of course we know that our church finds scientific discoveries to be fully compatible with a proper understanding of the creation stories. The old northern church essentially resolved the issue during the 1930s, while the old southern church took a little longer; the PCUSA website has a copy of its 1969 statement on the subject:

http://www.pcusa.org/theologyandworship/science/evolution.htm

I've also found two helpful websites created by Christian scientists; the first appears to be directed primarily to mainline Christians, while the second is directed primarily to evangelical Christians:

http://www.butler.edu/clergyproject/rel_evol_sun.htm
http://www.biologos.org/

The question that I would ask is how we can best get across to the non-Christian culture that, while the Biblical creation stories are fundamental to our understanding of God's relationship to the world and of God's relationship to humanity, at the same time we do not see any conflict between that understanding and the scientific study of the physical world. That seems to me to be a particularly difficult task in the highly secular society in which this presbytery exists, where a few loud voices may be the only contact with Christianity that many people have. I look forward to your thoughts.

Posted by Robert Bulkley