Semper Reformanda: Apply Liberally

by on September 8, 2025 | 1 Comment

The Latin expression semper reformanda is frequently invoked but rarely understood. Baptists and Pentecostals invoke it to say that Reformed Christians should continue their journey to their traditions. That application reflects a misunderstanding of the original and true sense of semper reformanda. Were we to follow their counsel we would actually be practicing semper deformanda. As I explained in 2014, semper reformanda is really a call to recover the Reformed confession.

The recent revelations about a worship service in which a PCA Teaching Elder (TE or minister) announced his forthcoming conversion to Roman Catholicism, which was followed by his administration of communion, and his dismissal to Rome to by members of the congregation would seem to provide an excellent opportunity for the congregation and presbytery to practice semper reformanda.

PCA ruling elder (and HRA board member) Brad Isbell summarizes the facts:

  • A PCA minister is leaving for Rome to serve in some sort of lay order. He claimed to have long been influenced by Rome.
  • He was allowed to address his congregation during a Lord’s Day worship service, preached, read a letter (correction: quoted portions thereof) to them, served the Lord’s Supper, and gave the benediction. (Read an account of the entire service here.)
  • The minister, also a musician, performed a keyboard piece with the church band at the end of the service and was rapturously applauded. Hoots and hollers abounded. His children and wife smiled as they stood before the church.
  • The coordinator of the PCA’s home mission board was present and participating in the service (he lives in the area), and at the end of the service called forward the church’s elders and “shepherdesses” to lay hands on the man to send him on his Romeward way with what appeared to be a blessing. He said about the family, “. . . this is just ‘see you soon,’ not full goodbye”—a curious statement.
  • A church communication suggests that the congregation has now lost all of its ministers, and their future is uncertain.

On his X account (linked above) Brad gives a more complete account of the service. He describes the minister as wearing “a black habit and Roman collar with a green stole.” Part of the service featured a “shepherdess” (this is a term used on the church’s website to describe what seems to be a quasi-ecclesiastical office in this congregation) leading the offertory prayer. At the end of an eighteen-minute homily the TE spoke “of his decision to join the Roman church, saying the last several months had been ‘a time of real revival, basking in the blessing of the Lord and of redirection . . .’ to the Roman Catholic church, ‘a tradition that has shaped and formed me for such a long time.'” The minister noted that he had been “working with the Archdiocese of Washington, DC.” After the announcement, he administered the Lord’s Supper to the congregation. There are several things about this episode that merit discussion but let us focus on three: vows, doctrine, and offices.

Ministerial Vows

First is the fact that a minister in a NAPARC congregation, which confesses the Westminster Standards, for some time after his convictions had changed, did not demit the office of Teaching Elder in the PCA but rather continued to serve even though his convictions were no longer aligned with those of the PCA.

When a man is ordained to the ministry of Word and sacrament in a confessional Presbyterian and Reformed (P&R) church he takes certain vows. These vows are fairly similar across NAPARC. The second vow taken by an ordinand in the PCA is similar to vows taken by P&R ministers everywhere:

Do you sincerely receive and adopt the Confession of Faith and the Catechisms of this Church, as containing the system of doctrine taught in the Holy Scriptures; and do you further promise that if at any time you find yourself out of accord with any of the fundamentals of this system of doctrine, you will on your own initiative, make known to your Presbytery the change which has taken place in your views since the assumption of this ordination vow?

Did this minister fulfill the second part of the vow? During his homily, as part of his explanation of how his views had changed, he confessed that he had been “working with” the Roman Catholic diocese in Washington D. C. This seems to be a confession that his views had been out of alignment for some period of time before his announcement to the congregation. Did he make those changes known to his presbytery? If not, why not? Did he not vow before the Lord and the church to do just that? If he did, why did his presbytery allow him to continue to minister in the congregation?

How can a man pretend to minister Word and sacrament in a PCA congregation when he no longer believes the PCA to represent the Christian faith as he understands it? Is the Catechism of the Catholic Church not clear about why they believe that the Roman Catholic Church, as distinct from the confessional Reformation churches, is the church?

How can a man who now presumably believes that, at consecration, the bread and wine become literally the body and blood of Christ, that, in the mass, the priest is making a memorial, propitiatory sacrifice of the body and blood of Christ, administer holy communion in a congregation that denounces “the popish sacrifice of the mass (as they call it)” as “most abominably injurious to Christ’s one, only sacrifice, the alone propitiation for all the sins of his elect”?1 The communion to which this TE is now professing allegiance practices the very sort of things he himself said, at his ordination, he rejected: “worshiping the elements, the lifting them up, or carrying them about, for adoration, and the reserving them for any pretended religious use.” All these, the PCA confesses, “are all contrary to the nature of this sacrament, and to the institution of Christ.”2

The Doctrine Of Salvation

During the Second Vatican Council (1962–65) the Roman Catholic Church declared:

For it is through Christ’s Catholic Church alone, which is the universal help toward salvation, that the fullness of the means of salvation can be obtained. It was to the apostolic college alone, of which Peter is the head, that we believe that our Lord entrusted all the blessings of the New Covenant, in order to establish on earth the one Body of Christ into which all those should be fully incorporated who belong in any way to the People of God.3

According to Rome, those who were born into the Protestant communions are not themselves guilty of the sin of schism and “many elements of sanctification and of truth” are found in them. Despite their separation from Rome, “Christ’s Spirit uses these Churches and ecclesial communities as means of salvation, whose power derives from the fullness of grace and truth that Christ has entrusted to the Catholic Church.” In other words, insofar as the Protestant communions have what Rome characterizes as “subsidiarity,” salvation still occurs but to the degree this is true, these very facts “are in themselves calls to ‘Catholic unity.'”4

The PCA confesses that sinners are justified before God

not by infusing righteousness into them, but by pardoning their sins, and by accounting and accepting their persons as righteous; not for anything wrought in them, or done by them, but for Christ’s sake alone; nor by imputing faith itself, the act of believing, or any other evangelical obedience to them, as their righteousness; but by imputing the obedience and satisfaction of Christ unto them, they receiving and resting on him and his righteousness, by faith; which faith they have not of themselves, it is the gift of God.5

The PCA confesses the instrument of our justification before God is “faith, thus receiving and resting on Christ and his righteousness.” Whereas Rome makes faith into faithfulness, the Reformed confess that faith, as defined in the Confession, “is the alone instrument of justification.”6

In contrast, the Roman communion confesses, “justification is not only the remission of sins, but also the sanctification and renewal of the interior man.”7 It is, Rome says, “conferred in Baptism, the sacrament of faith. It conforms us to the righteousness of God, who makes us inwardly just by the power of his mercy. Its purpose is the glory of God and of Christ, and the gift of eternal life.”8

In other words, a PCA minister, who has accepted doctrinal claims made by Rome, which are in direct and obvious conflict with the confession of the PCA, delivered a homily and administred communion in a PCA congregation. This is a bizarre and irregular procedure to say the least.

Ersatz Offices?

Finally, another of the other issues arising from this episode is the fact that, in this same congregation, there are women who are described on the church’s website and who were described during the worship service in question as “shepherdesses.” They were called forward to participate in laying hands on a minister who is in the process of renouncing the jurisdiction of the PCA. Again, this seems highly irregular.

God’s Word does speak specifically to the role of “older women” in the congregation:

Older women (πρεσβύτιδας) likewise are to be reverent in behavior, not slanderers or slaves to much wine. They are to teach what is good, and so train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled. (Titus 2:3–5)

Nowhere, however, does Scripture ever speak of “shepherdesses” in the church. Rachel is described as a shepherdess (רָעָה) in Exodus 29:29, but that metaphor is not used of females in the New Testament. Psalm 23:1 describes Yahweh as a shepherd, but the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible (the LXX), which forms an important part of the background of the New Testament, uses a masculine noun (ποιμήν), poimen. This is the New Testament word for pastor, which is the Latin word taken over by English for pastor. In John 10:11 Jesus declared himself to be “the good shepherd.” Hebrews 13:20 calls hin the “Great Shepherd of the sheep.” Peter calls him the “Shepherd and overseer of your souls” and exhorts the elders in the churches of Asia Minor (Turkey) to “shepherd the flock of God” (1 Pet 2:25; 5:2). In Acts 20:28 the Apostle Paul exhorted the elders (masculine) to “shepherd the church of God.” In Ephesians 4:11 Paul speaks of “shepherds and teachers.” Nowhere in the New Testament do we see anything like a quasi-ministerial office of “shepherdess.” So, it is quite understandable that the word shepherdess does not occur in the PCA Book of Church Order.

Ecclesia Reformanda

Disorder, irregular practice, and even corrupt practices have always afflicted Christ’s church. The Apostle Paul wrote multiple epistles to the church at Corinth. In the providence of God we have only two of those epistles but about fifty years later (most likely) a ruling elder wrote a lengthy epistle that we call 1 Clement. It addressed some of the same issues to which Paul spoke. Fifty years after that, a document that we call 2 Clement, by another author, probably a pastor, reflects a sermon to that same congregation, addressing the same issues. One of the earliest post-apostolic documents we have is, in part, a Church Order known as the Didache. Church orders are intended to address and/or prevent disorder, chaos, and confusion in the church. Sometimes the church order is neglected and worship becomes corrupt. 2 Chronicles 29 tells the story of Hezekiah’s restoration of divine worship under the types and shadows. The creation of the irregular office of “shepherdess,” however well intended, is without warrant either in God’s Word or in the PCA BCO. Obviously, this practice is in need of reformation.

The corruption of worship and practice in the church is a deformation that calls for reformation—that is, a returning to the biblical and confessional norm. The slogan semper reformanda (always reforming) was intended to describe the process of recognition and renewal in the church. When we stray from our confession, we, corporately, must be called back to God’s Word as we confess it in our standards and apply it in our church order. If, over time, we have adopted false doctrines or practices, the principle of reformation calls us to repent of those and to return to the Word of God as confessed by the churches.

Should a minister stray from the norm in doctrine or practice, the confessional P&R churches have procedures for dealing with them. They are to go their consistories (e.g., in the URCNA) or to their presbyteries (e.g., in the OPC, PCA) and come clean about their doubts or their change of convictions. If a minister has already come to firm convictions so that he no longer believes what the churches confess, then he is no longer a minister and must resign the office. If he will not resign, then most P&R church orders call for him to be removed from office by his presbytery or consistory. If he impenitently seeks to unite himself to a communion that practices what we confess (e.g., Heidelberg 80) to be idolatry (e.g., the veneration of the elements or the doctrine of propitiatory eucharistic sacrifice), then he should be not only removed from office but suspended from the table in hope that the Lord might use discipline exercised in love to soften his heart and draw him back to the Christ of Scripture, to the gospel, and to the church. Certainly an impenitent man may not continue in the office of minister when, in reality, he is no longer actually a minister of the gospel as recognized by the P&R churches, and certainly the church is not authorized to commission or send him to the Roman communion in an ersatz ordination ceremony.

Considered against the broad sweep of the history of the church, this episode is not all that unusual, but that is no ground for ignoring it. It is like graffiti in the neighborhood. At first it might seem harmless, but if the neighbors do not see to it and clean it up, the hooligans who did it will find other ways to deface the neighborhood. Just as a neighborhood can be cleaned up, so too disorder in the church can be cleaned up and practice brought back into conformity with God’s Word as confessed and applied by Christ’s church.

notes

  1. Westminster Confession of Faith, 29.2.
  2. WCF 29.4.
  3. Quoted in Catechism of the Catholic Church (Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1993) §816.
  4. Catechism of the Catholic Church, §819.
  5. WCF 11.1.
  6. WCF 11.2.
  7. Catechism of the Catholic Church, §1988. Emphasis added.
  8. Catechism of the Catholic Church, §1992.

©R. Scott Clark. All Rights Reserved.

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    Post authored by:

  • R. Scott Clark
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    R.Scott Clark is the President of the Heidelberg Reformation Association, the author and editor of, and contributor to several books and the author of many articles. He has taught church history and historical theology since 1997 at Westminster Seminary California. He has also taught at Wheaton College, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Concordia University. He has hosted the Heidelblog since 2007.

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