BY HONOUR AND DISHONOUR
By Ernest Brown
Evangelical Bookshop. 544 pages. £15
ISBN 978 0 952 266 228
By Honour and Dishonour is the story of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church of Ireland (EPC). The denomination is now 89 years old and Ernest Brown has written a fascinating book chronicling the ups and downs of the church.
I realise it’s a hard sell to encourage people to buy a 500-page book about a denomination they possibly have never heard of. However I think there are three very good reasons why this is an important book.
Firstly, the EPC of Ireland grew out of the heresy trial in 1927 of Professor Davey in the Presbyterian Church of Ireland. It’s fair to say that those who stood for the truth got absolutely trounced by the denominational machine. They were left with nowhere to go, other than to start their own denomination. There was a great cost to their separation.
Ecclesiastical meltdown
In our own day we are in the midst of ecclesiastical meltdown and have seen similar results recently in the Church of Scotland, when evangelicals have sought to stand for the truth in their denomination. One can envisage in the next ten years evangelicals within the Church of England facing similar difficulties.
Secondly the book traces the life of a small denomination: how it traversed its early years, set priorities for itself and sought to live out consistently its Confession. Ernest Brown is honest about the struggles and problems that the denomination has gone through, yet also sees the fruit of how God has blessed them.
Thirdly, the EPC has not gone on from one triumph to another, today it has around 600 in its constituency. Brown writes ‘Does this suggest that the Lord has withheld his blessing at a very basic level? Churches look for growth and interpret it as evidence of God’s favour. Other local evangelical churches have grown much more within the same period. But care is needed in assessing smallness in the work of God’s kingdom.’ (p.380). This book has reminded me that numerical growth is not the only type of growth we are to look for. The book is well written, meticulously researched, even exciting in parts and is well worth time and effort. Carl Trueman commends it, saying ‘This is a delightful book, of interest beyond the bounds of the EPC’. The book is available from the Evangelical Bookshop in Belfast.
