The purpose of the effort was to develop a vision of the way in which the Presbyterian Church should encounter the world in its proclamation of the gospel, specifically, how it should speak to those of other faiths in our communities, and to those of no faith.
Isn’t that the ultimate role of the church of Jesus Christ in every age: to proclaim the gospel to all people and to exhibit the love and compassion of our Lord to all?
The most vexing question facing the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) today is not sexuality — that matter will eventually be resolved — but rather the understanding of the person and work of Jesus Christ and the church’s call to proclaim the gospel to all people.
If, indeed, Jesus Christ is the sole mediator appointed by God and the one through whom reconciliation with the world has already been accomplished by his birth, life, death, resurrection, and if there is no salvation apart from Jesus Christ, then the role is clear. And the church’s mission is most succinctly stated in the Great Commission.
And this is where the rub comes: the fact that some of us, living at the end of the 200+ years of Enlightenment, cannot bring ourselves to affirm publicly that this is true. But it is either true or not true.
It is not an affirmation that can be proven by reason or logic, and certainly not by Scripture, though Scripture bears witness to this truth through the eyes of faith, aided by the work of the Holy Spirit. Rather it is an affirmation, a deep conviction, born out of an individual’s own experience of the grace of the Lord Jesus — one’s own experience of grace that comes through the gathered people of God through in Word, Sacrament and prayer
This knowledge — faith — is the gift of God; it is not something we arrive at on our own. The knowledge comes to us over a lifetime, as we come to the deep and abiding conviction that the God who created the Heavens and the Earth and who gave himself for us all through the life, death and resurrection of his only Son, knew us by name before we born, brought us to faith, sustained us through all our days, has forgiven us and called us to be numbered among his people
These are deep truths which cannot be proved. They will be a scandal to the “enlightened” world; they will result in rejection and a life necessarily lived in the same modest and self-giving way as the Lord whose disciples we are.
The rational mind can concede that God may have ordained other paths to God and to salvation, but we who belong to Christ, who have been saved by grace through faith in him alone, have no other witness to offer than the one entrusted to us.
And such a witness can only be the result of a community that lives together in the Lord, in joy and peace, and which knows its own salvation and desires the same for all people.
The witness is not something that humans plan or devise. This witness is given; it cannot be withheld and it is made, against all odds, in every age at whatever cost.
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