The Reformed Presbyterian Church isn’t the Ferrari of church denominations. It’s more like a heavy duty truck. If you want to get something done quickly and efficiently, the church courts of the RPCNA are going to cause you frustration. If you want something that will last, well, the RPCNA has a good track record.

The presbyterian system isn’t built for efficiency. God intended it that way. In civil government, despotic rule is efficient. One person decides, and it is done. Dangerous, but efficient. Democracies take a lot more time and can be frustrating, but compare the fruits. So, in church government, I’ll take the heavy duty truck.

Twenty years ago the RPCNA decided it was time to update its Directory for Worship, and a committee was formed to do the bulk of the work. Eight years later that committee requested to be dismissed without a new directory being approved. The committee cited the many divergent opinions over its work, doubting that a 2/3-majority vote on a new directory was likely. The committee said that in some cases it was being seen as a judicial body to resolve current worship disputes, and also that it was being asked to dictate on some matters that should be reserved for session decision.

I thought of all the intense and thorough work those committee members did over 8 years, the fervent prayer, the time away from family. At the time the committee was dismissed, it all seemed for nothing.

That same year, however, in response to worship questions by Pacific Coast Presbytery, a new committee was formed. Five years later the product would be an official Synod position paper on worship.

Even then, no one knew for certain what the lasting benefits would be. But they prayed and labored for progress. The discussion and passage of that paper helped to unify the Synod and served as the foundation for discussion of the new Directory of Public Worship.

The Ferrari side of us is tempted to say that it took 20 years to do what some people could have accomplished in a small fraction of that time. But when you take a realistic look at the amount of work accomplished over those years, the careful consideration by dozens of elders, the tremendous progress toward unity, those are things that couldn’t have been accomplished by a few people in a few days. A Ferrari would have taken thousands of years to carry the load that our heavy duty truck carried in just 20.