by Michael A. Graham
In April 2023, I published a letter that Jack Miller wrote to the elders of New Life Presbyterian Church on December 8, 1989, laying out his reasons for recommending that New Life leave the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and affiliate with the Presbyterian Church in America. Readers can find it here: “If we don’t reach the cities of our land for Christ, we won’t reach the nation.” A Letter to New Life–Glenside on Leaving the OPC.
I have since discovered a second letter — one I wish I had found earlier. It is a four-page memorandum from Jack to the New Life elders, dated March 23, 1987, with the subject line: “Concerning Union with the PCA.” Jack was not a well man — he had suffered a massive heart attack in Uganda in the summer of 1983 — and he would soon be diagnosed with lymphoma.
In March 1987, Jack was making a theological argument to his fellow elders. He was not yet processing the grief of leaving the OPC that he expressed in the 1989 letter. He was laying out a framework.
This 1987 letter reveals that the real barrier to OPC-PCA union was not the Westminster Standards — both churches held them — but an unwritten standard of Reformed identity that operated above the confession. The OPC had begun to treat separation as more fundamental than unity, and biblical arguments for bearing with one another could not get a serious hearing. What Jack identified was a higher life theology in Old School clothing — and the remedy he offered was repentance, beginning with his own.
Why Jack Was Writing This Letter
The question of OPC-PCA union had been alive since the early 1970s, when Jack and Francis Schaeffer, among others, had encouraged a merger between the OPC, the Reformed Presbyterian Church Evangelical Synod (RPCES), and the PCA. The PCA declined, forming its own denomination in 1973.
In 1982, the PCA presbyteries voted to receive the RPCES — that merger went through — but the PCA voted against receiving the OPC in their General Assembly, largely due to the unresolved controversy at Westminster Theological Seminary surrounding Norman Shepherd’s teaching on the role of works in justification.
Jack had been centrally involved in that controversy as one of Shepherd’s principal opponents. The irony for Jack was sharp: the doctrinal fight he had been waging to protect the integrity of justification by faith was now the reason the denominational union he wanted could not happen. The OPC’s failure to settle the Shepherd question cost the denomination its first opportunity for union with the PCA.
Jack was more than disappointed. He was doing missionary work in Uganda, where OPC and PCA leaders were partnering effectively through World Harvest Mission, Presbyterian Evangelistic Fellowship, and Mission to the World in a far more difficult environment than anything in the U.S. He had to explain to Ugandan church leaders how these two virtually identical American Presbyterian bodies could work together on the mission field but could not settle their differences at home.
In 1984, the PCA reissued its invitation to join and receive the OPC. At the OPC’s 1986 General Assembly, the voting members rejected it.
This time the Shepherd controversy was not the obstacle — the OPC chose on its own terms not to unite with a virtually identical Reformed body. The first rejection had a doctrinal explanation. The second did not. The vote was 78 to 68 in favor of union — a clear majority of OPC commissioners wanted to join the PCA — but the proposal required a two-thirds supermajority and fell short.
Disappointed commissioners filed a formal protest, stating that the Assembly had communicated “an attitude of superiority” and had chosen a course that “looks backward instead of forward, inward instead of outward, and is exclusive rather than inclusive.”
As Jack wrote the following Spring, those who believed the union of these two virtually identical churches was a biblical imperative — made clear in our Lord’s will for Christian unity in John 17 and Ephesians 4 — had been very disappointed. The growing New Life family of churches and church plants now had a decision forced upon them in the absence of such union.
The OPC’s 1986 rejection of the PCA’s invitation triggered an exodus. Churches, pastors, and Westminster professors left the OPC for the PCA. The New Life daughter churches began to move. New Life Escondido formed as a particular church in the PCA without ever being in the OPC. New Life Northeast would transfer into the PCA in November 1987. New Life Fort Washington would organize as a PCA congregation. But New Life Glenside — the mother church and the largest congregation in the OPC — did not act until 1989.
It was in this historical context, with the OPC-PCA union now twice rejected and New Life’s daughter churches beginning to realign, that Jack sat down on March 23, 1987, and wrote to his fellow elders.
What Jack Argued
Jack opened the letter by calling the elders to their responsibility: “As elders in the church of Christ, we are called of God to consider what should be our relationship as a congregation to the PCA and the OPC. It is my desire to present these issues for our consideration in the light of the Biblical teaching about the unity and purity of the Christian church.”
He framed the entire question around two biblical principles — unity and separation — and his central claim was that they are not equal and opposite. In Scripture, the unity principle is more basic than the separation principle. The separation principle does not refer to separation from believers but to separation of the church from the world. And the opposition to church union in the OPC was based on a twofold misunderstanding: it presupposed the primacy of the separation principle over the unity principle, and it misunderstood the biblical teaching on separation.
Jack defined the two principles as follows:
The unity principle. Jack grounded this in Ephesians 4:3–6 — one body, one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all — and in the prayer of Christ in John 17. He wrote: “This unity is a gift of God’s grace through the work of the Spirit, for ‘by one Spirit where we are all baptized into one body’ (I Cor. 13). It is this gift of the Spirit living in us and making us one that constitutes us as full members of the house of the faith. Therefore, anyone who has the Spirit belongs to Christ and is a member of his body having the full rights as sons and the full privilege of fellowship with other Christians (Gal. 3:28,29).” The unity of the church is not an aspiration but a gift of the Spirit, already given. The task of believers is to keep it (Eph. 4:3).
The separation principle. Jack grounded this in 2 Corinthians 6:14–7:1. The call to “come out from among them and be ye separate” is, in context, a call to separate from unbelievers — from idolatry, from the worship of those who do not know God. “In our worship we are not to be unequally yoked together with unbelievers by serving idols.” Separation exists to protect the unity of the church, not to narrow it. The church separates from the world so that it may be one in Christ.
Jack’s central claim was that whenever a denomination puts the separation principle over the unity principle, the result is a process of fragmentation which cannot be reversed without the rediscovery of the priority of the unity of the church.
Then Jack named what was happening in the OPC — not between the OPC and the PCA, but inside the OPC itself. In the discussions about Joining and Receiving, one side had favored the unity principle and the other the separation principle. But the separation side had been intensifying. Jack wrote:
“In the minds of many in the OPC, there is an increasing desire to separate from fellowship with any Christians who appear to be doctrinally weak or doctrinally in error and failing to practice strict doctrinal adherence in the life of the church. What has resulted is a process of separation that has been increasingly intensified by some within the OPC. It is not enough to separate from modernism and liberalism. The next stage is to separate from those who have not clearly separated to the degree we have from modernism and liberalism.”
He gave examples: the widespread Reformed refusal to participate in Billy Graham’s evangelistic campaigns because of Graham’s inclusion of theological liberals, increasing disassociation and criticism of Arminian evangelicals, a trend for some to separate from Reformed people seen as associated with Arminians, and even a trend toward disparaging Reformed believers who were less than enthusiastic about the apologetics of Van Til.
Jack was careful about what he meant by separation:
“When I speak of ‘separation’ in this way, I don’t mean full ecclesiastical separation necessarily but the development of a mental attitude and a practice which excludes from fellowship those who are not seen as part of the truly reformed movement. In essence what you have … as a matter of deep-seated attitude, is the denial that every born-again Christian is a full son of God and a true brother.”
And then he pressed the biblical point home:
“There is a failure here by some to recognize that separation is to protect the unity of the church. We are to separate from the world so that we may be one in Christ. We are not called to separate ourselves either ecclesiastically or in fellowship from other brothers and sisters as though they were an inferior grade of Christians. Whatever weaknesses and sins that we see in other Christians does not justify us in virtually disfellowshipping with them. If they have the Spirit, they have an equal standing before God with us. They belong to Christ, and they are one with us.”
Jack then stated his conviction: “whenever a denomination puts the separation principle over the unity principle, the result is inevitably within that denomination a process of fragmentation which cannot be reversed without the rediscovery of the priority of the unity of the church.”
What Jack Saw Inside the OPC
Jack pointed to the Plymouth Brethren as a warning: “In their early history what came to matter most was separation rather than the life of oneness in Christian community. The divisions multiply almost endlessly in their assembly, and there seem to be no way of stopping it because the separation principle was given priority over the unity of the people of God.”
He believed the OPC had come to a similar stage. The prevailing mood was for choosing separation over unity. At the General Assembly, “the separation principle had so controlled the minds of many brothers that they could not take seriously arguments for church union based on the Biblical teaching of the unity of the church.” Jack was not claiming this was a majority of the leaders — but “it represented a strong trend which seems likely to lead into increasing fragmentation of our denomination and self-defeating conflicts of the sort that characterize so much of the history of the Plymouth Brethren movement.” His impression was that “the prevailing minority had in it at least a core of men who are so committed to the separation principle that they are determined to press the conflict on every front. In effect, their zealous commitment to an unbiblical separatism has already for all practical purposes turned the OPC into two denominations.”
Then Jack described what happens when the sectarian spirit gains its full momentum: “the inner circle of the pure really begin to take the place of Christ. There is little felt-need for repentance. There is a great deal of self-satisfaction over faithfulness to the truth, and generally the worship of the tradition of the church. Often the agencies in organizations of the church are then seen as having all the sanctity and authority of Christ. The church loses its ministerium, its servanthood, and becomes a magisterium, a kingly church.”
Jack acknowledged that “these negative qualities are in all of us. On my part I have been increasingly trying to get the log out of my own eye.” But the log-and-splinter examination led him to two conclusions: first, that those caught up in the spirit of separation had already, in effect, created their own denomination and would continue deepening the separation; and second, that their commitments to separation were so deep that in the years ahead it would lead to self-defeating conflict and hindrance to the ministry of Christ.
“If I am correct, then, there are already two denominations in the OPC, and for us to unite with the PCA would be simply to recognize what has already taken place and be faithful to our calling to endeavor to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.”
Jack knew this perception could be misunderstood. He did not desire it. But he believed it was a fact: “our New Life congregation has almost no fellowship and shared life with the leading OP congregations that are nearby. Such fellowship is virtually impossible because of their view of separation and our view of separation and our stress upon the unity of the church.” In their youth ministry, New Life was involved with a variety of churches, and nearby OP congregations could not accept that breadth of fellowship. Those congregations would have had great difficulty fellowshipping with New Life and the ministry of WHM. “Just to avoid the wear and tear of unnecessary conflict, we have stopped bringing WHM missionaries to the Presbytery of Philadelphia.”
Jack took denominational membership seriously — he agreed with those who argued that it is covenantal. That is precisely why the evidence that the covenant had already been broken on the ground weighed so heavily on him. The OPC — or at least the congregations nearest to New Life — had already left him. The bond of peace that Paul commands believers to keep had been broken — by those who had made separation the condition of belonging. Jack was making public what was already true in practice. He was arguing that without repentance — on both sides — the differences between emphases calcify into identities, and once they become identities, fellowship becomes impossible. What Jack would later write in December 1989 applies here: when complacency, rigidity, pride, and defensiveness overtake a denomination, and repentance becomes a thing of shame, the Spirit’s work moves on. The issue was repentance.
A Higher Life Theology in Old School Clothing
Critics of Jack Miller and Sonship had long accused him of higher life tendencies — of importing Keswick-like categories into Reformed theology, of promoting something akin to a second blessing or a deeper experience of the Spirit beyond justification. The accusation was false. Jack taught against that theology throughout his career. But the accusation is revealing, because the critics were able to see a “something more” pattern in others that they could not see in themselves.
If the confession is the standard, then the confession is the standard. The OPC and the PCA held the same one. The OPC’s own ecumenicity committee report, which laid out the rationale for the 1986 vote, listed the PCA’s perceived weaknesses: “danger of loose subscription by officers,” “selective discipline,” “uneven indoctrination of new churches,” “methods of evangelism,” “involvement with non-Reformed foreign mission agencies.” None of these are confessional differences.
The Westminster Confession itself distinguishes between how believers should relate to weaker brothers and how they should regard the papacy. Chapter 20 defends liberty of conscience. Chapter 26 teaches the communion of saints and the obligation of believers to maintain “a holy fellowship and communion in the worship of God” and to be “helpful one to another, in all outward things, according to their several abilities and necessities.” The Confession envisions a church that bears with weakness. Its sharpest condemnation is reserved not for imprecise brothers but for the Pope, whom it identifies as “that Antichrist, that man of sin and son of perdition” (WCF 25.6). The Confession’s own separation principle is directed at apostasy, not at fellow subscribers to the same Standards. Jack was not a latitudinarian. He was reading his own confessional tradition carefully — and the tradition itself teaches that the unity principle governs relations among believers while the separation principle governs the church’s relation to what is outside the faith.
The confession could not explain the division. Something above the confession was operating — a standard of proper Reformed identity, theological and cultural, that went beyond what the Westminster Standards require. That standard functioned in the same way the Keswick second blessing functions: as a layer above the agreed-upon basis of fellowship that becomes the real measure of faithfulness. The critics who were so sensitive to this pattern in Sonship may have recognized it so readily because they were living inside their own version of it.
OPC and PCA leaders worked together on the mission field in Uganda through WHM, PEF, and MTW — planting churches, training leaders, in circumstances far more demanding than suburban Philadelphia. The partnership was not without difficulty — WHM and the Presbyterian Church in Uganda had a significant conflict over finances during this period — but the OPC and PCA groups continued to work together on the mission field. For years, MTW — the PCA’s own missionary sending agency — sent its missionaries through Sonship leadership training, the very program the OPC’s doctrinalist wing regarded with suspicion. The unity Christ prayed for in John 17 was visible on the mission field. It was visible because the mission stripped away whatever was preventing it at home. The confession couldn’t explain the difference. Something above the confession was suppressing at home what the gospel was producing abroad.
Jack saw this dynamic in the OPC. It is not denomination-specific.
How Jack Closed
Jack did not close with a program or a strategy. He closed with repentance — his own first. “But it does seem to me absolutely crucial that in any move towards the PCA, we should make sure that we have done everything we can to humble our own hearts and repent of any false separatism in us. For me this has meant an earnest prayer during the past several months for the leading opponents of J and R in our denominations and a decision to begin a dialogue with some of the key leaders along the lines of this memo.”
He said it did not seem right to him to leave the OPC without frank discussions with key people who were opposed to union with the PCA. “As I humble my own heart and see more of my own awfulness of my own sin before God, my own lack of love for all the people of God, that I take with increasing seriousness the sin which is involved and the neglect of the unity of the church.”
He thanked the elders for bearing with his memo and confessed his own lack of wisdom. “I know only God is wise, and his wisdom is revealed only to those who watch and pray.”
Why This Matters Now
Jack’s cancer diagnosis delayed Glenside’s decision. The elders spent two years deliberating before recommending withdrawal from the OPC in December 1989. The Presbytery of Philadelphia received New Life into the PCA on March 10, 1990. From the first merger discussions in the early 1970s to New Life’s departure, the process spanned nearly two decades. Jack was being obedient — slowly, painfully, over seventeen years — to the biblical teaching about the unity of the church. The Uganda mission field revealed that the unity the Spirit gives cannot be hidden when the mission strips away the extra-confessional layers that obscure it at home.
This 1987 letter reveals that Jack’s thinking was already fully formed nearly three years before New Life’s departure. He had already laid the biblical and confessional groundwork by March 1987. What the cancer and the intervening years added was grief — the grief of the 1989 letter, where Jack confessed that denominations, unless revived by repentance, usually fade after fifty to seventy years, and that admitting this was crushing to his pride.
The PCA was founded in 1973. It is now past the fifty-year mark Jack identified.
Jack described a process that intensified in stages — first separation from liberalism, then from those who had not separated enough, then from evangelicals who were insufficiently Reformed, then from Reformed people who associated with the wrong evangelicals. The progression has a shape. It narrows. And at each stage, the people doing the narrowing believe they are being faithful while the circle of acceptable fellowship shrinks around them.
Jack described separation by atmosphere — what he called “a mental attitude and a practice which excludes from fellowship those who are not seen as part of the truly reformed movement.” It operates through the assumption that certain associations, emphases, or postures disqualify a person from being taken seriously. Pastors and churches are made to feel unwelcome. They are told, in ways formal and informal, that they might be more comfortable elsewhere.
Jack described a denomination where the separation principle had so controlled the discussion that arguments for unity grounded in Scripture could not get a serious hearing — where the biblical case for bearing with one another was treated as a position to be suspected.
Jack described a church that loses its ministerium and becomes a magisterium — where there is “little felt-need for repentance” and “a great deal of self-satisfaction over faithfulness to the truth,” and where the agencies and organizations of the church come to be seen as having the sanctity and authority of Christ himself.
And Jack said, in the 1989 letter, that in the OPC it was not the accepted style to confess sin and weakness. In three instances where he saw repentance take place publicly, the repentances came under strong attack as doctrinally suspect. A denomination that treats repentance as compromise has lost the capacity to heal itself.
The PCA is past fifty years. Jack said denominations fade without repentance. The question is whether repentance is still possible — whether the denomination can hear a call to repentance as good news rather than as an admission that the cause was wrong.
A denomination that treats repentance as compromise has lost the capacity to heal itself. But the converse is also true: a denomination that recovers repentance recovers everything. Jack warned that when the sectarian spirit reaches full momentum, the inner circle of the pure begins to take the place of Christ, self-satisfaction replaces repentance, and the church loses its servanthood and becomes a kingly church. The way back from that is not a better strategy or a more precise confession. The way back is repentance — the kind Jack practiced in the closing lines of his letter, confessing his own sin, his own lack of love, praying for the men who opposed him. He told his elders that God’s wisdom is revealed to those who watch and pray.
Repentance unto life is not the admission that the cause was wrong. It is the discovery that the cause was never ours to defend — that the unity of the church is a gift of the Spirit, already given in answer to the prayer of the Son, and that our task is simpler and harder than we imagine: to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.
Michael A. Graham is the author of Cheer Up! The Life and Ministry of Jack Miller (P&R Publishing) and the founder of The Jack Miller Project (thejackmillerproject.com). He serves as Pastor and Teaching Elder at Boatswain Bay Presbyterian Church in Grand Cayman.
This essay was researched and drafted with the assistance of Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant, using Claude’s Cowork tools for document preparation.
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