But, even after nearly two years, it’s still too soon to say where this trip will end up. The task force is sorting through how decisions will be made — whether consensus decision-making would be better, more open to the leading of the Holy Spirit, more respectful of minority opinions, than strict parliamentary procedure. There’s how to decide and there’s what to decide, in part on whether the PC(USA) should ordain gays and lesbians; and as engaging and intense as some of these conversations have been, it’s hard to tell whether this group is making an exquisite banquet or a mud pie.
There is trust and mutual respect within the group. But some say they’d still be willing to write a minority report if necessary, “even if I’m a minority of one,” said Houston pastor Jack Haberer. Demarest said he’s open to discovery and learning, to having his views shaped and corrected by the group. But his instinct is also to say, “I’m a mature evangelical Christian and I’m not going to change my mind about any of these things. I’ve already worked it out.” What he does know, Demarest said, is that the 20 members of the task force are being faithful to one another and to the work they have been called to do.
There also is a recognition that the rest of the denomination has not come on this journey with them — at least not yet — and may not end up in the same place. Barbara Wheeler, the president of Auburn Seminary in New York, spoke of the need to “create a mindset,” to be exhortative, “to call the church to its best self. And to remind the church that we are not the Mr. and Ms. Goodwrench of the Presbyterian Church.”
But that’s part of the problem. The task force is trying to exhort the church — toward what? They’re still on the journey; they don’t know yet. Right now, the best they can do is to show people some of what they’ve learned about how a confrontational approach may not be the best way (even though Presbyterians have raised denominational infighting to a high art); about how intense and significant theological conversation can take place among people who reach different conclusions about what the Bible says; about how this isn’t the first time Presbyterians have faced theological divisions and how this may not even be the worst.
These folks also are aware of the politics and realities of the world around them.
The conversation in Dallas took place at the same time, Oct. 15 to 17, as Anglican leaders were meeting in emergency session in England to decide how to respond to the election of V. Gene Robinson, a gay man living in a committed partnership, as a bishop in the Episcopal church in the United States. Some Episcopal dioceses have threatened to leave the denomination if he is installed in November and some predict that Robinson’s appointment could cause schism in the worldwide Anglican community as well.
Mike Loudon, a pastor from Tampa, said conservative Episcopalians from central Florida are among those on the verge of leaving. Many Presbyterians are upset too, Loudon said, and he feels the pressure of their wondering if he will stand with them.
Mark Achtemeier, who teaches systematic theology at the University of Dubuque Seminary, said being part of the task force has shattered some of his stereotypes about who believes what in the church — and “those stereotypes are very treasured possessions,” part of some people’s sense of identity. He wonders whether liberals and conservatives can agree on fundamentals of theology, for example, and he feels the heaviness of the burden of “speaking something other than the entrenched stereotypes and positions.”
Lonnie Oliver, a pastor from Georgia, preached during opening worship from the book of Job, where Job said, “I have not seen God.” Oliver spoke of people from his own congregation who have told him it seems at times that “God is silent, God is hiding.” A mother whose 26-year-old son was hospitalized with AIDS, a devoted Christian who fears her son might go to hell, told him: “I prayed and I prayed, but I can’t see God.”
Some Presbyterians have “this crazy, mystical idea” that God’s voice will be heard through the task force, and “others will say it’s the devil’s voice,” Oliver said.
But while God may at times be silent, “God has never been absent in our work,” he said. In the storms of life, many people feel God’s presence; they know God’s rules and God’s ways, Oliver said, even if they cannot clearly hear God’s voice. And God will be with the task force, he said, as it is “searching for God’s will to be done on earth even as it is in heaven.”
As has become its practice, the task force spent part of this, its seventh meeting, in Bible study led by Frances Taylor Gench, a New Testament professor at Union Seminary and Presbyterian School of Christian Education. Because the task force has spent time at previous meetings talking about grace, Gench presented them with James — a book of the Bible that makes some in the Reformed tradition wince. They see it as “the junk mail in the New Testament,” Gench said, because they don’t think it says much about evangelism or Jesus, and because it stresses the importance of works in salvation to a group convinced that grace through faith, not works, are what salvation is all about. Martin Luther, said Gench, dismissed James as an “epistle of straw.”
Gench advised the task force to remember that James’ intent was not evangelism, to bring people to Christ, but was an “ethical exhortation” to those who’d already become Christians on how to bring faith alive in their lives. He gave advice on how to live if they really wanted to put into practice what they said they believed. Gench described James as one of the most God-centered books in the New Testament — it’s one of the richest in describing God’s nature and how, through everyday choices and how they treat their neighbors, people ought to order their lives in relation to God’s sovereign nature.
“In everything, we are utterly dependent on the living God,” Gench said. And James tells people to “be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves.”
James speaks of the responsibilities those of faith have to care for the orphans and widows, to clothe the naked, to feed the hungry, how they should not fawn over the rich and disrespect the poor. (In a materialistic and celebrity-crazy world, the themes couldn’t be more contemporary, one person remarked.)
“Think of James as a showcase of Christian living,” Gench said. “James calls us to behavior consistent with our convictions.” (Barbara Everitt Bryant, a research scientist with the University of Michigan Business School, described the message she heard this way: “Get off your butt and do something. Don’t just talk about it.”)
James also calls on people to “be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger” — not what’s always found in the PC(USA). Some of the hardest sins to avoid, Gench said, are saying what shouldn’t be said and talking instead of listening. Often we want to speak to God, but we don’t listen to God, said Jong Hyeong Lee, a pastor from Chicago. And even when we listen, we don’t like to follow.
Then there’s the money stuff. The PC(USA) is, by and large, mostly white and well-to-do. But James says some strong things about the economically comfortable. When one pastor read from James in Chile during the Pinochet regime, half the congregation walked out, Gench said.
“Come now, you rich people, weep and wail for the miseries that are coming to you,” Chapter 5 begins. And later: “You have lived on the earth in luxury and in pleasure; you have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter. You have condemned and murdered the righteous one, who does not resist you.” But James also says that “judgment will be without mercy to anyone who has shown no mercy; mercy triumphs over judgment.”
While James is often disregarded by the Western church, it is “one of the most popular books of the Bible in other parts of the world, in Africa, in Latin America,” Gench said. “No one in the New Testament treats the rich like this,” she said. “But there’s good news in these words if you’re poor.”
And the task force talked about the specific meanings of some of the phrases in the five chapters of James — of “the implanted word that has the power to save your souls” (implanted, deliberately put there, in so deep it becomes a part of you); or those who are hearers of the word but not doers being like those who look at themselves in a mirror. “When you look at a mirror, you take care of yourself,” said José Luis Torres-Milán, a pastor from Puerto Rico. “When you look at perfect law, you take care of others.”
The closing verse of Chapter 2 says religion that is pure and undefiled before God is “to care for widows and orphans in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.”
Loudon spoke of the dual need for justice and holiness; Joe Coalter, vice-president of library and information technology systems at Louisville Seminary, said, “You could drive a truck through that last phrase,” because we often don’t recognize what it means to be stained by the world, or when it’s happening. On the one hand, God’s creation of the world is good, Coalter said; but it’s also a place of temptation, and good people often disagree on what reflects God’s true intent and what’s a corruption of it.
Later, Achtemeier led the group in a discussion of “How Presbyterians Do Theology” — laying out what he called “core affirmations” (that, for example, theology is grounded in what God has done) and looking at some of the guiding insights of Reformed theology. It was a quick-hit reminder of some Reformed theological basics: that all are sinful, with “sin-tainted senses of discernment,” Achtemeier said, so people can’t always tell “which are the good parts and which are the broken parts.” But reading the Bible, he said, is like putting on glasses: it helps to make everything clear.
Achtemeier spoke of sources of authority, about the need for grace being universal, and how the Reformed tradition has been leery of leaning too heavily on any one person’s reasoning or life experience. But in reading the Bible, “we don’t just read the words off the page, we ask what God is up to,” Achtemeier said. (His shorthand phrase for that: “Holy smoke, use your noggin!”)
Although Achtemeier covered much more ground than that, part of what he did was lay a framework for a balanced approach to theological inquiry: discernment, led by the possibility that the Holy Spirit could provide new understandings in reading the Bible; but keeping the base firmly in Scripture, not on the flawed understandings of a sinful people.
John Calvin worried about how high the scaffolding of reason could be built, even if the floor underneath it was solid, Achtemeier said. Calvin thought experience could change biblical interpretation, Coalter said, ‘but he didn’t have any notion of the kind of quandary we’re in.”
So the journey continues; faithful, Demarest contends; with some in the room more hopeful and others more apprehensive; with this being just one room in a very big world. Oliver said he planned to go back home and, sometime soon, to preach a sermon he’s titled, “It’s OK to Be Gay” — a difficult sermon he hasn’t finished writing yet.
Scott Anderson, who’s executive director of the Wisconsin Council of Churches and who is gay, said he finds these discussions to be a “bifurcating experience,” that he sometimes feels he’s perched up high listening to “an intellectual and sterile conversation about something that’s so deeply personal and part of who I am.”
Sarah Sanderson-Doughty, a pastor from Lowville, N.Y., said she finds the points of reconciliation in the church’s history — sometimes a point of frustration for some who’d like more certainty, who point out, for example, that Presbyterians have often been unwilling to spell out what they mean by essential tenets of faith — to be exciting, because she sees ways of honoring divergent voices “without necessarily compromising anything.”
And Joan Kelley Merritt, former moderator of Seattle Presbytery, described these meetings as “safe territory,” islands of peace and of serious theological reflection in a very political sea. When she’s with the task force, “no one is handing me nasty messages from this group or that group,” Merritt said. “I do not have to take a side. I can explore with people who come from different situations. It’s like a sanctuary. But I know that never-never land doesn’t last forever.”
