No King but Jesus

The Black Robe Regiment was the name King George's officers called colonial pastors who were preaching self-governance from Scripture and, in their view, stirring up a rebellion they couldn't explain, because they didn’t understand men who answered to a higher authority than the Crown. King George III reportedly blamed the entire war on what he called a "Presbyterian rebellion”.

On the night of April 18, 1775, when Paul Revere made his famous ride into Lexington, he wasn't headed for a military commander's house. He rode to the home of Pastor Jonas Clark, where John Hancock and Samuel Adams were sheltering. When they told Clark the British were marching toward Lexington and asked whether his men were ready to fight, Clark didn't hesitate: "I have trained them for this very hour." The next morning, Clark stood on the Lexington green with his congregation when the first shots of the Revolution were fired. Seven of his men died there. He'd spent years preaching that their covenant stood first with God, and that no king had authority to override what God had already declared. 

John Witherspoon, a Presbyterian minister and the president of what is now Princeton University, was the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence, and he was advocating openly for independence from his pulpit before the Continental Congress adopted a Declaration. The British didn't create the Black Robe Regiment as a compliment. It was their way of naming the thing they couldn't defeat, which was a generation of men who had settled the question of ultimate authority long before muskets were involved.

We live with two covenants now, a vertical one with God that every man in our tribe understands, and a horizontal one with institutions that don't always agree with the first. The founders didn't think those two things were in tension, because they had already worked out which one was primary. Your family needs a man who is clear about whom he serves, and the same holds for your church and community, because the men who know whose authority they're actually under are the ones who show up when it costs something.

Sheepdog