Gleanings from the Pastor's Perspective: Viewing Creation

The Pastor’s Perspective

Vol. 33 Num. 12

“Viewing Creation”

First Published: March 17, 2000

For the many families in our congregation with school-age children, I trust that you had an enjoyable and relaxing Spring Break. It was most gratifying to look out last Wednesday night and see the strong attendance. Our Minister of Teaching, Derek Thomas’s Wednesday evening series on prayer has been outstanding. His introduction to the Lord’s Prayer was inspiring, and I have been much encouraged by the robust praying of our people for the last several weeks at the Prayer meeting. If you haven’t been attending regularly, start this week.

By the way, also in the nature of encouragement, I have been meaning to mention to you, ever since the officer elections, how high was the number of people voting. The election managers indicated to me that the number of ballots cast was the highest in their memory, approaching 1000 in each of the rounds. Indeed, on the second Sunday of the elder election, we very nearly ran out of ballots! I thank God for your faithful and prayer participation. Do continue to pray for our newly elected officers and for the many fine men who went through the training. We have plans to begin some special discipleship activities for all of these brethren, especially in light of the role they have to play in the future health of our congregation.

On another subject, last week, I shared with you a bit about our work on the PCA’s creation study committee. As I said, there are at least four different views of the nature of the creation days on our committee (the Traditional view, that is 24-hour or normal day view; the Framework view, that is, that the days are literary devices to describe the real historical events of God’s creation but do not tell us anything about how long or in what order God actually made things; the Analogical view another figurative view, that says the days represent real events, and may even speak broadly to the sequence of creation, but are a literary device for establishing an analogy between “God’s creation days” and the days of our work week; and the Day-Age view which says that the days were long ages, aeons).

What I need to stress is that every member of the committee affirms the historicity of Genesis 1-3, the reality of God’s special creation of the world and rejects Darwinian evolution. The committee is desirous that the PCA would affirm a range of core commitments regarding the doctrine of creation that would allow for a limited, principled diversity on some matters relating to the doctrine of creation, while ensuring that secularism and naturalism gain no foothold in our circles. When the report is published, we’ll make it available for your perusal in the church library.

Perhaps next week I can share a little about my recent visit to Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

Your friend,

Ligon Duncan