Two Differing Viewpoints from the Presbyterian Coalition

Jin S. Kim is a third-generation Korean Presbyterian who’s convinced that Howard has it wrong, and that evangelicals can never have an effective witness to the world until they start paying attention to the racism in their own congregations. What some see as the glory days of the PC(USA) — when the pews were full and the gays weren’t demonstrating — Kim sees as a time when people like him, people who weren’t white, weren’t welcome either. And gracious separation, Kim said, will go the wrong way — swimming away from the rich current of multicultural ministry and resulting in splinter groups that would be 99.9 percent white.

Bob Howard and Jin Kim.

Two men, both committed and Bible-believing, both prayerful, both asking God to lead them in the right direction, both full of conviction and speaking strong words.

Each coming down in a different place.

Bob Howard: Time for a Radical Change

A lot of people came to the Presbyterian Coalition Gathering in Oregon knowing that Howard, who once favored “stay-fight-win,” meaning the evangelicals would fight until they took control of the denomination, had changed his mind. He now favors some sort of negotiated settlement or “gracious separation,” by which those who disagree over ordaining gays and lesbians, and over other matters of theology, would hammer out a way to divide up the PC(USA)’s assets and go their separate ways.

On Oct. 7, Howard, a lawyer from Kansas and former chairman of the board of the Presbyterian Lay Committee, got a chance to make his case. Gracious separation is “not a declaration of war,” Howard told the gathering. “It’s a strategy for peace” for a denomination that’s in the midst of a culture war. “This family no longer shares a common understanding of the saving work of Jesus Christ,” and is not committed to church discipline, to requiring obedience to the will of God.

Howard was careful to point out that the Coalition has not endorsed the idea, and that “it doesn’t come from the Lay Committee,” but he also contended that “gracious separation can occur if we put our minds to it; it can be done.”

And Howard argued that choosing gracious separation — to divide the denomination — “is not a repudiation of our ordination vows, it’s a fulfillment of them, because our first loyalty is to Jesus Christ and the proclamation of his word for the salvation of mankind. Our first priority is not to preserve our denominational structure.”

Gracious separation “is not euthanasia of our sick and dying mother” — a metaphor he’s heard used, Howard said — but a corporate reorganization.

“It is not abandonment of the church we’re called to serve, because we’re called to serve the true church. We’re not called to be an indentured servant to a particular denominational structure.”

Howard was followed by Rick Wolling, pastor of Beverly Heights church in Pittsburgh, who said “I am finished” with trying to reform the PC(USA) from within. Wolling said he’s attended renewal meetings for 40 years and “I have been to consultations, conferences, General Assemblies, network meetings, celebrations, gatherings.”

Wolling said he’s frustrated by General Assemblies that are theologically inconsistent — waving a green flag one year, “the up year for Jesus,” and the next year a red flag, because “we’re not really for Jesus this year.” He said he was raised in a church that taught him to set aside everything except Jesus Christ, and that he now ministers in a denomination that won’t affirm that. “The greatest thing that keeps Beverly Heights from growing in membershp statistics,” Wollling said, “is the sign out front that says Presbyterian.”

Wolling also said he’s angry, and he knows what it feels like to be rejected and demonized and abandoned. He’s been ordained 28 years and has never been chosen as a General Assembly commissioner. Five weeks ago an associate pastor and three elders took 40 families with them to start an independent church just three miles down the road. Wolling said his executive presbyter has told him he has an “anger management problem” that’s destroying his family, his congregation, his career.

But Wolling said what he’s angry about is his denomination’s approach to Christology. The executive presbyter “tells me the appropriate response is to go away” and “he’s warned me, do it quietly, don’t make it a big deal in the presbytery . . . and Louisville will never allow Beverly Heights to leave with its property.”

So Wolling said he’s decided it’s not worth trying to stay and fight to bring the denomination to obedience. “Now I believe it’s disobedient and unfaithful to stay.”

Jin Kim: No Going Back to the ‘Glory Days’

Kim, the newly-elected president of the board of Presbyterians for Renewal, spoke a direct challenge to this gathering, chastising them for being comfortable in their mostly segregated congregations and for pining for the glory days of the 1950s when the denomination was strong and growing and the Bible was taught, but to which he never wants to return.

That was also a time, Kim said, before the U.S. opened its doors to significant immigration from the Far East, and when blacks and Hispanics and others of color were not allowed in all-white Presbyterian churches. “For people who were not white, those were not such good times,” he said. “You can go there, not me. I don’t want to get hosed down and restricted in our opportunities … told I can only use this bathroom here.”

Call him an evangelical — evangelicals are concerned about salvation, Kim said. But never call him a conservative — he doesn’t want to go back to the past.

Kim also made it very clear that racism is today’s problem in the Presbyterian church. It’s not a distant reminder, it’s not something in the past. Even evangelicals who pride themselves on spreading God’s message to the world have not figured out how to follow Jesus’ teachings about loving the poor and the outcast — those who do not look like us.

Kim grew up with a Korean perspective, more influenced by Confucian thought than by Plato, knowing that Presbyterian missionaries to Korea taught that the gospel of Jesus transcends race and culture, that they preached an orthodox gospel. But they also reached out to the Korean people, building hospitals and working with leper colonies and starting schools for girls, unheard of in that patriarchal culture. And then he saw, in the United States, that Koreans were more or less expected to attend Korean churches, that the doors weren’t flung open and there were stereotypes that gave “a horrible witness” — that Presbyterian churches were for the educated, Methodist for the less-educated, Baptist for those without much education at all.

The high school he attended in Atlanta was 95 percent white when he was there, but now is 95 percent black, as people of color have moved out from the inner city and whites have fled farther out to escape them. They’re worried about declines in their property values, and that “it’s not going to stop until they’ve pushed out into Tennessee.”

Kim currently is pastor of Korean Presbyterian Church of Minnesota, but is becoming the organizing pastor of the new Church of All Nations, an English-speaking Korean church that’s being started to minister to second-generation Koreans and to others.

He’s heard a white pastor from a church in the Twin Cities suburbs say it’s not his fault his church is all white — so is the neighborhood around him. But the pastor also acknowledged that his congregation doesn’t have a plan for what to do when the neighborhood changes again, when there is more racial diversity, and that that change is coming before long.

“There is no church in America that is exempt from talking about its racial issues,” Kim told the gathering. The United States is a country with a racial caste system, where whites enjoy higher property values “just because they’re white,” where the churches are largely segregated and where the congregations are silent about it all.

It’s time for evangelical Presbyterians to ask, “What are we white people doing about it?” Kim said. “What do we have to say about that injustice” — about the systematic injustices that daily confront people of color.

The Presbyterian debate over ordaining gays and lesbians “is a luxury debate,” when people don’t have enough to eat or a decent place to live or good schools for their children or are being harassed because they’re immigrants or not white, Kim said. And “the evangelical conservative community has been largely silent on these issues that are day to day life and death issues for us.”

And Kim said he can’t support gracious separation because it says nothing about the segregated church or racial injustice — and because the PC(USA), which has so few people of color now, would be divided into smaller groups with even less racial diversity in them.