Reformed and presbyterian council wrestles with some big questions

While NAPARC isn’t a household word, that group of 12 Reformed and Presby-terian denominations represents over a half million people. It continues to grow. Several years ago NAPARC represented just 5 denominations, including the RPCNA, one of the founding members. With its current 12 member churches and 3 observer churches, there are nearly 1 million people connected with NAPARC.

NAPARC is the North American Presbyterian and Reformed Council. That council gathered for its 37th annual meeting on Nov. 15-16 in Atlanta, Ga., at the headquarters of the Presbyterian Church in America. Each member church, including the RPCNA, was represented by up to four delegates.

The emphasis of this year’s meeting was a consideration of what organic unity means and how it could be accomplished. NAPARC’s primary goals are to facilitate cooperation and to emphasize the need for organic union. Over the life of NAPARC, much more time and emphasis have been placed on cooperation than on union, according to some veteran delegates. Two years ago NAPARC created a committee to make recommendations about how it could make greater progress on that second goal.

NAPARC’s constitution states that it is to be “a fellowship that enables the constituent churches to advise, counsel, and cooperate in various matters with one another and hold out before each other the desirability and need for organic union of churches that are of like faith and practice.” The second goal is similar to the wording of the RPCNA’s Covenant of 1871: “We will pray and labor for the visible oneness of the Church of God in our own land and throughout the world, on the basis of truth and of Scriptural order.”

One result of NAPARC’s intention to “hold out…the desirability and need for organic union” was that Dr. Robert Godfrey (president and professor of history at Westminster Seminary California), who has been an advocate of uniting NAPARC denominations, was invited to be the keynote speaker at this year’s meeting.

A Reformed Dream

In 1997 Robert Godfrey wrote an article in a small magazine called Outlook that was titled, “A Reformed Dream.” People paid attention, and the article was reprinted in Modern Reformation in 2005. Godfrey’s dream is that the NAPARC denominations would unite in one general assembly, with each denomination retaining its own constitution “as separate synods that never interfered with one another’s work.” The new structure, he asserts, would create a means for greater cooperation and unity, including in our testimony to the watching world.

Negotiated union can be a great thing, he said, but hardly ever happens. Godfrey made it clear that he is speaking of a true union on a scriptural basis. He said that some division is good, since there exist both true and false churches. And we acknowledge that there are other true churches with whom we are not fully united. But the NAPARC churches, he said, are confessionally united, in that they adhere to equal confessional standards (the Westminster standards and the Three Forms of Unity). We should not allow our significant degree of unity to make us complacent in working toward greater unity, he said.

In a discussion time following Godfrey’s speech, there was much excitement about Godfrey’s idea and also much concern about how it could be implemented. Delegates agreed that NAPARC has no independent authority, and so any union would have to be a union of the member churches and not something instituted by NAPARC itself.

Godfrey was appointed as an ex oficio member of NAPARC’s goal-review committee to see whether there was merit for any concrete proposals to NAPARC.

Other Work

The meeting of NAPARC provides both official and unofficial times for discussion, cooperation, and fellowship. All 6 members of the RPCNA’s Interchurch Committee were present, having met in private session the day before the NAPARC meeting. Over the two days of NAPARC, the RPCNA met with delegations from the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, the Canadian Reformed Churches, the United Reformed Churches, and the Heritage Reformed Churches. There was productive and specific discussion about how these denominations could work more closely.

All member and observer churches provided reports to NAPARC. There was significant interest in the RPCNA’s position paper on sexual orientation, since many of the NAPARC denominations are working on similar papers or dealing with similar issues. There was also much interest in the Covenant of 1871 when a passage was read aloud during the RPCNA report.

All 12 member and 3 observer denominations plan to meet again Nov. 13-14, 2012, in Indiana. NAPARC’s official web site is www.naparc.org.