Concerned by the direction of the EPC, Christ Alone Church in Green Bay, Wis., voted in May to leave the denomination and become an independent Reformed congregation.
“I have many friends I love in the EPC but there is a sense that the denomination is drifting,” said TE John Cory, pastor of the 40-member congregation. “In order to grow, we must show that we are in line with Scripture.”
Cory said his elders were distressed by many issues in the denomination, including the Pastoral Letter of Racial Lament and the formation of the Ad Interim Committee on Same-Sex Attraction. In addition, Cory said his elders believe the EPC is not taking effective steps to reverse a steady decline in membership.
“When we attended presbytery meetings and General Assembly, it seemed very self-congratulatory,” said Cory. “But when I began to do some research, I discovered that membership of the EPC peaked in 2016 and has been declining since then.” As a result, he began to question if the evangelistic programs of the EPC have really been effective.
“The videos that we get from the Office of the General Assembly are like clever trailers for a bad movie,” said Cory. “They’re trying to spin things in a manner that everything is fine.”
Cory said his church participated twice in the EPC church health and refocus programs, but with negative results. “The first time we went through it, we lost one-third of the congregation,” he said. When the church enrolled in the program a second time, Cory said it fizzled out due to a lack of follow-up and support from the church health coordinator.
“Where is the empirical evidence that this stuff works and has value?” said Cory. “To our elders, it seemed more like a business model than a spiritual model. We gave it a shot, but the content didn’t remotely fulfill its promise.”
In recent years, the Green Bay church has shifted to a complementarian position of male-only leadership. The shift has resulted in the loss of several female leaders who ended up leaving the church.
“We had a ton of people come to our church during the COVID epidemic, but we lost most of them because we were not complementarian,” said Cory. “They didn’t consider us a biblical church because we didn’t hold to a complementarian view.”
The Pastoral Letter of Racial Lament was another issue that caused the church to lose confidence in the EPC.
“When I got that letter, I almost lost it,” said Cory. “It was written from a perspective of white guilt and a Marxist cultural tone. My elders were shocked that the EPC would put forth something like that.”
Another concern, said Cory, was the shift to a more hierarchical style of leadership in the EPC. “It seemed like an inversion of our polity, operating in a way that was top-down instead of coming from the grass roots,” he said.
Controversy over Greg Johnson and the issue of ordaining pastors who identify as homosexual was another major issue, said Cory.
“When I took this back to our elders, they couldn’t believe it,” he said. “What you’re saying is its okay to be unrepentant. Obviously, a person who identifies as homosexual is unrepentant.”
The Green Bay church followed the constitutional process for disaffiliating from the EPC which requires two congregational meetings. According to Cory, the church experienced no resistance or opposition from Rivers and Lakes Presbytery.
When Cory shared his reasons for leaving the EPC, one presbytery official seemed sympathetic.
“He urged me to stay and fight for change,” said Cory. “But at some point, you see that you’re not winning anything. I hate to say it, but as other pastors who have left the EPC have told me, it seems a lot of this stuff is predetermined at a higher level. That is what we were bumping up against. It seems they are squelching discussion in order to fast track things in the way they want to go.”
For the time being, Christ Alone Church has chosen to remain independent.
“We’re feeling gun-shy about reaffiliating with anyone right now,” said Cory. “We’re just taking a breather to see how the Lord leads us.”
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