The Need for Dialogue

He asked me about the issues in my home church. I told him how our (still) tortured debate over the ordination of practicing gays and lesbians dominated the church press. He exploded at me. How could we even debate what is sinful in the eyes of God? Why aren’t you preaching against it every Sunday?

I recalled that conversation when I read about the Presbyterian Church of East Africa, and its action toward one of its own presbyteries’ partnership with National Capital Presbytery. This four-million-member denomination has forbidden its presbyteries to be in partnership with any PC(USA) presbyteries that openly advocate for the ordination of practicing homosexuals.

I also recalled my embarrassment at a front page of The London Times following the Accra conversation. Headlines reported full disclosure of the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky relationship. An article on the same page recorded reactions of an American Anglican bishop to the African bishops’ protests over the homosexual issue in London. Ordination conflicts dominated the news during the entire 1998 Lambeth Conference. The embarrassing comments were made by John Shelby Spong, an American Southerner and no stranger to Richmond, Va. He had given courageous leadership here in the 1960s in civil rights for African Americans. Now Spong, who grew up in segregated Charlotte, N.C., was quoted as saying that we cannot listen to Africans. They are “pre-Enlightenment,” immature. They would finally “grow up” to see things our way.

To my Southern ears, that sounded like what I’d heard all my life as an argument against integration, even in the shadow of my own church in Atlanta. There one Sunday, I listened as a former mayor told black students that they were not welcome in our church until they went back to their own community and cleaned up their “illiteracy, their venereal disease and their filth.” Similarly, to paraphrase the comedian Dick Gregory’s words about Brylcream — Bishop Spong was saying “just a ‘little dab’ of the Enlightenment will do it.”

I do not make light of this conflict. It is as deep as the ocean and wide as the river, and might well intensify in the months to come. I applaud the wisdom of Stated Clerk Cliff Kirkpatrick, who, in touch with the moderator of the PCEA, calls for conversations, and for not breaking fellowship. As Kirkpatrick says, this action has enormous ramifications.

Indeed it does. How can we, who argued vociferously not two decades ago for funding Christian liberation movements in Africa and Central America because we were in solidarity with brothers and sisters in Christ against the policies of our own government, suddenly refuse to hear what partner churches are saying to us? How can we, as Reformed Christians — who have declared for centuries that we are part of the holy, universal church — dismiss African brothers and sisters who challenge our divisive debates over ordination? Many African believers have paid a price for their faith, their theology, and even their existence as Christians.

This sort of confrontation drives me to my knees before the living God, and causes me to realize that the church everywhere is a flawed and broken vessel with no correct, sinless answers to any the questions that vex us. Can we start there?

After the editor in Accra calmed down from his diatribe against us, I raised an issue that had the potential to split the PCG: the admission of baptized polygamists to the Lord’s Supper. The church had, years ago, reached a compromise that was now coming apart. Polygamists were welcome in the church, but not welcome at the banquet of Christ. It settled our conversation down.

If we “mean business” about Christian unity, within our own church and among the churches, then we have serious work to do in dialogue with one another. Those of us who differ sharply over ordination need to sit down and talk, as Moderator Susan Andrews has invited us ceaselessly to do. As she says, we cannot sit idly by and wait for the report of the Theological Task Force on the Peace, Unity and Purity of the PC(USA) to provide the solution. Looking toward 2006, let us heed that call. I welcome all reports of dialogue groups underway in presbyteries across our denomination.

O. Benjamin Sparks is interim editor of The Outlook and pastor, Second church, Richmond, Va.