12.  Not very many CEC ministers start their own denomination when their current sect criticizes them.  Conservative Presbyterian denominations are notorious for their strict discipline, but it appears as if rules are broken left and right in Wilson ’s Confederation of Reformed Evangelical Churches.  See http://dougsplotch.com/index.html.

DW: The problem here is that the formation of our presbytery had nothing whatever to do with any controversy. But to buttress his claim that in our presbytery "rules are broken left and right," Gier refers us all to that unimpeachable web-site dougsplotch.com. This is a website you can rely on -- it is what they call a smear-reviewed journal.

NG: According to standard conservative Presbyterian rules, elders, such as Roy Atwood, who lose control of their children must be removed from their office.  In the Morton Street Casino scandal this did not happen.  I grant that Dougsplotch is not a refereed journal, but neither is Credenda Agenda or Canon (Vanity) Press, but it contains documents, most on Christ Church letterhead, which Wilson has not denied or disputed.

13.  Most CEC pastors would respect other CEC colleges, but Wilson believes that very few of them meet his standards of true Christianity.  Wilson states that “evangelical establishment, particularly the evangelical establishment as now represented by its flagship colleges and publications, is completely adrift” (Credenda Agenda 17:1).  See also his “Classical Learning and the Christian College ” at http://www.canonpress.org/pages/pdf pgs/quest.pdf.  Finally, check out his article “Why Evangelical Colleges Are Not” in Chronicles (September, 1998).

DW: When it comes to colleges, I am critical of the mainstream evangelical establishment. That is true. I am. Is that bad?

NG:  Once again Wilson has confirmed the fact that he stands apart from most CECs.  These fine Christians send their children and their financial gifts to these well respected liberal arts colleges, where I have had the privilege to lecture and whose faculty I meet every year at meetings of the American Academy of Religion and the Society for Biblical Literature.  They have my respect and admiration; Wilson does not.

14. Most CEC theologians would reject Wilson ’s “Federal Vision” in which the individual self is supplanted by a collective self and where women would lose their right to vote.

DW: I am terribly interested in how Gier concluded that the individual self is supplanted by the collective self in the Federal Vision, and I am further interested in why he, a student of Buddhism, would have a problem with it. Couldn't it just be a John Knox meets Siddhartha kind of thing? But it isn't, and Gier's dog is biting the tires of the wrong car again. And on women voting, Gier also has it wrong. In our church polity, we have a system of household voting, and we have women who vote. Gier needs to do some actual research before pronouncing on things like this.

NG:  If Wilson will withdraw his omelet analogy that he uses to explain the Federal Vision, then I will reconsider my objection.  (Obviously, individual eggs do not preserve their identity in the mix.)  But we now have it on the film Our Town that he, along with Steve Wilkins and George, believes that only propertied males should vote.  Wilson 's example of a few female heads of households voting in his church is better evidence for his clever definition of democracy: two coyotes and a lamb deciding what to have for lunch. Furthermore, households are abstract collectives not real individuals. In my church all members, real individuals, get to vote.