Viewing posts by James Duguid
The Westminster Assembly and the Distribution of the Elements
by James Duguid | July 30, 2025
Recently, there was a discussion at the PCA General Assembly about who should distribute the elements at the Lord’s Supper. I argued that distribution belongs to all participants to the Supper, and I argued that point from Luke 22:17 (you can see that argument here). Since the Assembly, I’ve had a chance to spend more time looking into the history of the practice. I was honestly a little surprised at how clear the evidence is that both the Westminster Assembly and the Church of Scotland (who ultimately adopted the Westminster Standards) permitted the distribution of the elements by the whole congregation.
On the Mutual Distribution of the Lord's Supper
by James Duguid | July 2, 2025
This year at the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in America, Overture 12 sought to limit the distribution of the Lord’s Supper to church officers (the minister, ruling elders, or deacons). I gave a speech against the overture, based on my interpretation of Luke 22:17. The overture failed, but, since we seem to be headed into a bit of a period of liturgical reform in the PCA, it seemed good to me to expand my reasoning into a blog post.
The Ministry of Reconciliation
by James Duguid | January 2, 2025
This week, I am preaching on Paul's description of his own ministry as a ministry of reconciliation. Preaching this passage raises a question of application: how widely can we apply this language of the ministry of reconciliation? Is it just a description of Paul's own ministry, or possibly also of other leaders in the church? Or is there a sense in which every Christian should think of themselves as involved in the ministry of reconciliation? I will argue that there is. But first, a look at the passage in question:
Back in Action
by James Duguid | December 31, 2024
I created this site back in 2018, but I haven't added a post since May of that year. The site stopped working in December of 2021. I was pretty busy with my dissertation for this period. But I have now fixed the backend issues and given the site a new look.
Got Those Bidirectional Blues
by James Duguid | May 27, 2018
Anyone who has tried to work with mixed Hebrew and English text has probably had some difficulties, especially with punctuation (e.g., parentheses get flipped around, and show up in the wrong places). While Unicode bidirectional formatting is a wonderful thing, it has some trouble with characters which could be interpreted as requiring either right-to-left or left-to-right formatting. This post details a simple Unicode fix that should solve some of your problems.