— to speak not just about ordination standards but to become a voice for progressive Presbyterianism, to emphasize what the Reformed tradition has traditionally taught about working for reconciliation and about being, as Bay put it, “a church engaged in the world.”
Covenant Network leaders also say it’s time to interpret what the Constitution really is saying about ordination standards — arguing, for example, that the language does not prohibit gays and lesbians who live in committed partnerships from being ordained. Having not succeeded in convincing the church to change the Constitution, they are refining their tactics but not backing down.
Joanna Adams of Chicago, the other co-moderator, said one man asked her whether a broader mandate would bring a reduced sense of urgency for change. “I have a lesbian daughter,” Adams said, and the daughter and her partner “are not a part of the church, because” — she paused for a pained interlude, searching for the words. “Well, you know why,” she continued. For those who are frustrated, Adams asked them to lean on patience, hope and perseverance. “When the victory will come I do not know but that it will come, I know for sure,” Adams said. “The justice is there and the Presbyterian Church is going to find it.” When that happens, she said, “let’s throw a big party and invite everyone in.”
This gathering — which drew more than 500 registered participants on Nov. 7-9, 180 of them first-timers, and about 800 in worship — had its share of scorch — the paint preaching, mixed with theological presentations that explored what the Reformed tradition has to say for a denomination trying to find its way in a pluralistic world. For those looking for passion, the preachers delivered.
During opening worship, Curtis Jones, pastor of Madison Avenue Church, Baltimore, blasted the President Bush¹s policies, saying those who see Saddam Hussein as a threat “need to come to grips with the reality that Iraq is the second largest oil producer in the world and George Bush, who could not find oil in Texas” — here the crowd started clapping — “has his eyes on somebody else’s vineyard.”
Andrew Foster Connors, associate pastor at Idlewild church, Memphis, preached from the 11th chapter of Acts, drawing pointed parallels between what’s happening in the PC(USA) now and Peter’s explanation of why he had visited with the Gentiles. Peter must have known, Connors said, that “this is not the time to lobby for a more hospitable church” or for a “Gentile special-interest group.”
Peter offered what might have seemed like a “flimsy” reason for including those the church had excluded, Connors said — Peter told the apostles “the Spirit told me to go with them.” People might have wondered, “what kind of leader is going to let the law of the church get trampled like that . . . They just opened the door to Ethiopian eunuchs three chapters back,” so who’ll be next?
But when Peter explained, the church trusted and believed him, Connors said. And he asked why evangelicals in the church — he named the Presbyterian Coalition and Presbyterians for Renewal — won’t trust today when gays and lesbians say they are called by God to the ministry, pleading to serve the church even though, in many places, they know they are not welcome.
Peter was trusted and believed, but there’s a new generation in the PC(USA) that has never known trust in the presbyteries, Connors said. “We’ve seen candidates cut down on the floor for admitting their doubts,” or being asked questions about their personal lives “without a single question about theology or the Bible . . . We’ve watched big churches violate the rules again and again and get away with it because they can.”
In a marriage, people can only take that kind of treatment before one person says “I can’t take this anymore, I don’t deserve this,” Connors said. “Maybe divorce is not such a bad thing if you do it to protect your children from the ugliness.” And Connors said unity can come at too high a price — he’s not to put aside his convictions for the sake of unity or to purchase peace by walking over the bodies of gays and lesbians.
“Peter did not wait for definitive guidance on the Gentile issue,” or for a task force to act, Connors said. And “I do not think that Peter disrespects the authority of the church.” Instead, Peter tells the good news — that “even the Gentiles believe in Jesus Christ.” The Covenant Network has made its best theological arguments, and “there is nothing left to do,” he said, “but keep telling the church how we came to believe, what we believe, that the Spirit is telling us not to make distinctions between gay and straight.”
During this meeting, that’s part of what the Covenant Network tried to do — it brought in theologians and ministers to talk about how the church “came to believe what we believe,” and to explore implications of Reformed theology for the church today, from the difficult work of reconciliation to the question of Christian evangelism in a pluralistic world.
Shirley Guthrie, a professor emeritus of systematic theology at Columbia Seminary, said he considered what would be “most surprising” to speak with the Covenant Network about — and he picked evangelism. Guthrie said he suspects that “evangelism is not high on the agenda of members of the Covenant Network,” in part because “we are appalled by the kind of evangelism we hear on the radio and see on TV,” evangelism that’s intolerant and arrogant and self-righteous, which makes it clear that “only Christians worship the one true God.”
But the New Testament insists that Christians “go make disciples of all nations,” to practice what Guthrie called “authentic Christian evangelism.” Authentic evangelism is not self-congratulatory or self-aggrandizing — Christians talking about “how sinful, miserable and lost they used to be” and how blessed they’ve been since they found Jesus, and how great it is to be a Christian — but talk of “what a great God we worship,” Guthrie said.
It’s fine to share one’s faith journey, but it’s also important to “set our little stories in the big stories,” Guthrie said, anchoring our own experience in the stories of Moses and Abraham, Joseph and Mary, Peter and Paul. And “the main reason Jews can never be the target of evangelism,” he said, “is they were the people of God before we Christians came along.”
Authentic evangelism bears witness to God, not just to the Christian community, Guthrie said. And it bears witness to the love of God for all people and to the saving grace of God through Jesus Christ. Guthrie talked about grace — about what John Calvin called the two-fold grace of God, both about the benefits of being forgiven by God through Jesus but also the importance of being disciples, of trying to live in this world as Jesus did. It’s not enough to talk about the benefits — that if people believe in Jesus, “they shall be blessed, their problems solved . . . their souls saved,” Guthrie said. “We desperately need an evangelism that invites us not just to get the goodies, but to follow Jesus in the world.”
And God’s grace is for the whole world, Guthrie said. “According to the B-I-B-L-E,” he said, God’s chosen people “are not chosen to be God’s privileged elite . . . The risen Jesus is alive and well and at work in the world,” outside the church. “We don’t have to wrap him up and sell him to the world; we go to meet the risen Christ out there.”
Cynthia Jarvis, of Chestnut Hill church, Philadelphia, explored what Jesus meant when He said, as is recorded in the 10th chapter of John, that “I lay down my life on behalf of the sheep” but also that “I have other sheep also that are not in this fold.”
Although God is free to act, “human beings have always wanted to limit God’s freedom” according to our own understandings, Jarvis said. But some have wondered whether God might have “happy private arrangements” with non-Christians, with the sheep outside of the church — whether Jesus might be at work in their lives so “we will be one flock when the kingdom comes,” she said. “The honest answer is, ‘Who knows?'”
There’s also the question of whether Christians can recognize God’s presence in people who do not confess Jesus as Lord (perhaps that’s “God’s hidden agenda with us,” Jarvis said). If all that is true, “the next question often is `So why be Christian?” — if we’re all one big happy family, what difference does it make, she said. It does matter, she said, because if we are Christians, “we dwell among those who know the voice of the shepherd” and we live consciously and intentionally under God’s care and guidance. So how should Christians treat those of other faiths, or of no faith at all? Perhaps — if there is just one flock and one shepherd, Jarvis said — “we ought to behave with each other as though we were stuck with each other around one table, eternally.”
Anna Case-Winters, an associate professor of theology at McCormick Seminary, spoke of what she knew were difficult questions — not just “Does God exist,” but what she called the prior question, “What do we mean by God?” If one were to ask atheists what they mean by God, “you will find that you do not believe in that God either,” Case-Winters said. “They may describe a Santa Claus or a judge and punisher or a great puppeteer in the sky, pulling all the strings.” But Christians believe that “God was in Christ” and that revelation about Jesus gives clues to God’s nature, she said — and that leads to some complicated questions about Jesus and gender (as Rosemary Ruether has asked, “Can a male savior save women?”); about the atonement; and about the meaning of the Lordship of Jesus Christ in a pluralistic world.
For Christians, that “Jesus is Lord” is the oldest and most central confession of their faith — and while some are more comfortable with the language of the uniqueness or singularity of Jesus as the only savior, and others who would be more reserved about knowing the mind of God, insisting that “God is free in these things,” the Bible and the Confessions leave room for both, Case-Winters said.
She said she agrees with Guthrie — “I’m in the odd position of being zealous about evangelism and reluctant about proselytizing,” because “in Jesus Christ I have found the words of eternal life” and “I am going to want to share that with every breath and every act. There is a world out there that is hungry and hurting. If we have Good News, why would we not share it?”
But Case-Winters said she does believe that God is acting in the world, and that in sending out missionaries “we’re not taking God to people. We should rather be prepared to find God out there already at work.”
In medieval times, she said, churches were built with Holy Spirit holes in their ceilings — dramatizing through architecture the openness of the church to God. “I wonder if we’ve not made a mistake in closing the Holy Spirit holes in our churches — and I’m not talking about architecture here,” but leaving room for the Holy Spirit to get in and to move about.
In the end, “when we have said all we can say about Jesus of Nazareth, we have not told the whole story,” she said. It may be that Jesus Christ needs to break free of “our theological constraints, our limited imagination and our small hopes.”
