For a while I considered entering a monastery, but I came into contact with evangelicals who displayed intellectual strength and spiritual vigor. Through their influence I determined to study theology and entered Westminster Seminary in the mid-1950s. Westminster exposed me to a fascinating array of Reformed theology and church history. I sensed a certain spiritual dryness in the presentations, and a sharp judgment against other streams of Reformed teaching. But I was exposed to the Puritans and Jonathan Edwards, and I determined to continue study of the history of revivals at Princeton Seminary in the early 1960s.

Princeton was in some ways a shock. The professors were obviously more closely connected to the evangelical tradition than I had expected. They were the sons and daughters of fundamentalists. They displayed a warm pastoral concern. It was as though I had been given a map at Westminster that did not fit mainline Presbyterianism. Professors told me, "We like evangelical students. We don't have to explain the Reformation to them."

Very reluctantly, I began to do youth work in a friend's United Presbyterian Church. It was six years before I dared to be ordained in Elizabeth Presbytery, in the mid-1960s.

Fellow presbyters were a puzzle. One month they would be enthusiastic about Billy Graham; the next they would be interested in the then-fashionable Death of God theology. But in dialogue, they always responded to me with respect, when I treated them with love and respect. I felt that I was dealing with genuinely "called" Christian ministers who had been seriously handicapped by their theological education. Though I knew my own weaknesses, I sensed that I had been given a handful of trump cards in a theological game in which biblical faith was trump. I soon found that there was much I could learn from these pastors, whose preparation had made them far more sensitive to social and ecumenical issues, which I was discovering were unusually important to evangelicals during the Awakening periods.

The 1960s was a bad era in theology, as the second generation of Neo-Orthodoxy collapsed toward secularism. President James McCord of Princeton said, "Theology is in a shambles."

Still there was a revival of new spiritual life among Presbyterian teenagers. My own youth fellowship formed a Witness Team and attended a synod youth camp. We found the staff in charge celebrating the death of God and advising the young people to ease up in their religious commitment. I protested with a letter to Presbyterian headquarters at 475 Riverside Drive, expecting nothing to happen. Strangely enough, headquarters responded by firing the staff of the synod camp and making me director!

My youth Witness Team worked in the synod camp during succeeding years, stirring up interest and conviction among other young people. I preached for commitment to Christ, and the response was extraordinary. These young people showed no sign of ever having heard the Gospel of Christ personally applied to their lives, and yet they responded in huge numbers. I would estimate that 80% accepted the Lord Jesus as Savior.

Why did this happen? Why was this group of teenagers so responsive to the Gospel? I believe it was because, whatever the state of their parents, they had grandparents and great-grandparents who clearly believed in Christ. They were in the covenant line; God had promised to reach them with the Gospel.

So I stay in the great Presbyterian stream, for the sake of the covenant children and great-grandchildren who remain in that sheepfold and are unlikely to leave it. Likewise, I pray for renewal in the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches. They may be full of toxins, but they also contain responsive covenant descendents who are unlikely to be reached outside these folds.

To add some further perspective, even before the emergence of the homosexuality issue, the United Presbyterian Church was in theological disarray. For instance, in the late sixties I lectured to a synod gathering against the Death of God theology, and a leader in the Evangelism Division of the denomination met with me privately to admit that he had trouble believing in a personal God. "You're working in Presbyterian Evangelism?" I asked him. "You have a vocational problem."

In the 1970s Presbyterians United for Biblical Concerns leaders met with the heads of denominational mission of the church and found that they lacked a concept of evangelization: Everyone was saved anyway, they thought, so proclaiming the Gospel was unnecessary, and the main concern of the church should be to promote social justice.

But in 1976, a seminary president approached me privately and asked for help. "Richard, the homosexual movement is going to destroy the church. You evangelicals have got to help us!"

So the head of Presbyterians United for Biblical Concerns and I met with two top leaders at Presbyterian headquarters. They were very direct: "How can we help you evangelicals?" The Presbyterian center, which had bonded with liberals against fundamentalists in the late 1920s, was now rebonding with a new crop of evangelicals, under pressure from an increasingly wild Left Wing. Thus, it was not surprising, then, when four evangelicals with doctorates were appointed to the Homosexuality Task Force in 1976. Their product--the Minority Report adopted at the 1978 General Assembly--called the church to double repentance: from homophobia and from homosexual practice.

Our struggles since that date--over establishing biblical sexual morality in our constitution, ruling against goddess worship, and seeking a solid Christology--these battles have taken time and energy, but they have brought us to the position of being on record as the most confessionally sound historic mainline church. Orderly controversy has been the stimulus for theological reform, the way infections produce antibodies.

Our administrative center is not perfect, but it involves theologians who believe the confessions, and missionaries who promote evangelism. Denominational seminaries are stronger, and the evangelical schools are still pouring new candidates into the ministry. As a recent article in Christianity Today pointed out, liberals are getting older, and the younger evangelical troops will soon enter their prime.

Amazingly, some evangelicals talk about walking away from this hard-won progress. Sometimes they cite the Reformation as a divisive movement, which we need to repeat.

Luther and Calvin were forced out of the church by restraint of their ministry. They also felt that the Roman Church was at that time possessed by the spirit of Antichrist. Both Reformers spoke out strongly against schism--"the Donatist heresy," rooted in spiritual pride and judgment against those less holy or less orthodox. This is not our situation today. We are not sailing under heretical flags. Presbyteries may be boring or annoying to us, but they rarely hinder the explosive growth of evangelical churches.

Decades of research have convinced me that splinter groups remain weakened fragments, while the great historic church bodies still are moving onward, often attended by dozens of renewal movements. They may at times be spiritually threatened by heresy, but God is faithful to renew them in response to prayer, because he promised to reach covenant descendents with the Gospel, and we are the essential witnesses to accomplish that.

There is no biblical warrant for schism. In 2 Corinthians 6:14ff, Paul is exhorting Christians to separate from pagan idolatry, not from the church, as Charles Hodge points out.

As for Paul, he chose to stay with the sheep and bark at the wolves. His program for renewal involved drawing together, not separating, as Eph 4:11-16 indicates. There he urges us to come together and stay together, "speaking the truth in love," so that the whole body may grow to maturity.

I believe that the center of mainline Presbyterianism is still aligned with evangelicals, with those who will approach others with respect and charity. When we challenge other Christians with grace, we are going to gain an audience. We are gifts to renew the larger church.

And that is why I remain a mainline Presbyterian.

Richard Lovelace is Professor Emeritus of Church History at Gordon-Conwell Seminary.