CHICAGO — Immediately after a discussion on global context, a conversation about how the preoccupations and work of Presbyterians in the United States fit into the larger concerns of the world, the members of the Theological Task Force on the Peace, Unity and Purity of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) went into another closed-door session.
They shut the doors on October 15 because they wanted privacy to try to figure out what to say to the PC(USA), particularly on the controversial question of ordaining sexually-active lesbians and gays.
They went from the big view, the international context, to the small: the infighting within the denomination.
Presumably, the conversation had to do in part with theology and in part with politics and power. These 20 people have theological views, convictions, but also in some cases alignments with those in the church involved in the political fight. They are weighing what they want to say in their hearts, what they can afford to say publicly, what the church can accept and what they feel would be prophetic to say. They have developed a deep affection for one another, but they also may want to convince some of their friends to move.
They want to say something that will have the ring of truth.
They want the Holy Spirit to speak.
They want to know how they will know if that has happened.
This was a day to acknowledge that while the PC(USA) fights fiercely and endlessly over homosexuality, people in other countries are starving and dying of diseases that are wiping out generations, are sleeping outside on the ground because they have no other place, are trying to elude the violence that has killed their families and their neighbors and taken their children. They are fighting for survival, not paying attention to the ordination standards of a shrinking, aging American denomination that has lost nearly a quarter of its members over the last 20 years.
At the same time, however, Barbara Wheeler, the president of Auburn Theological Seminary, voiced her conviction that the task force may indeed have a word to say to the broader world, not just to bickering Presbyterians.
“Sometimes it just seems there’s a quantum amount of hatred in the world and it’s unavoidable,” Wheeler told the task force. “The world is hungry, it’s pleading, it’s crying for examples” where people “dignify the differences” that exist among them. The task force’s main job is not to make things more comfortable or calmer in the PC(USA), she said. “It’s our mission to show the world that the gospel makes some kind of difference. That if you’ve got it, you don’t need to kill each other over differences.”
And Wheeler said: “Any group publicly finding a way to accommodate deep differences without giving up convictions, but without giving up each other, has an impact on the world.”
The task force’s global discussion grew in part out of a presentation Oct. 14 by Clifton Kirkpatrick, the PC(USA)’s stated clerk, who is also the newly-elected president of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches. Kirkpatrick described the council as no longer the “English-speaking club” it once was but a “truly global fellowship,” representing 220 churches with more than 75 million members, two-thirds of whom live in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
“All of a sudden we are in a new global order,” with tremendous advances in communication but also larger-than-ever gaps between the rich and the poor, Kirkpatrick said. A report on environmental and economic justice that the alliance’s General Council approved at its meeting in Ghana in August states that “we live in a scandalous world that denies God’s call to life for all. The annual income of the richest 1 percent is equal to that of the poorest 57 percent, and 24,000 people die each day from poverty and malnutrition.”
The report also states that the world’s disorder “is rooted in an extremely complex and immoral economic system defended by empire,” and says: “We reject the current world economic order imposed by global neo-liberal capitalism.”
Some task force members had trouble with the council’s statements on capitalism, although Kirkpatrick told them that at the heart of that report was “an important, profound truth” about inequities that go against God’s teaching and about the need for global economic change.
Mark Achtemeier, a professor of systematic theology at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary, told Kirkpatrick he worries that language which seems like it’s condemning capitalism will simply discredit the world ecumenical movement among grassroots Presbyterians, and said in this report “an awful lot of Presbyterians see a direct attack on the way they feed their families.”
The next day, John “Mike” Loudon, during the task force’s discussion on globalism said: ‘I would like to say a word on behalf of capitalism.” Loudon said the church where he’s pastor, First Presbyterian in Lakeland, Florida, is “filled with a bunch of capitalists, business people who make a lot of money and who lose money” and who, because of their faith, are generous with the church. Loudon said his congregation has a $370,000 annual mission budget funded by those tithing capitalists — mission work that couldn’t be done without the proceeds of capitalism.
Other task force members, however, spoke of other global realities — among them, that the United States is resented in many countries around the world.
Jong Hyeong Lee, a pastor from Chicago, said that many in South Korea — whom some might consider natural allies — find American wealth and power to be a barrier to friendship.
Churches in the U.S. depend on the wealth generated by the capitalist system, “so we utterly cannot critique that system,” said Scott Anderson, executive director of the Wisconsin Council of Churches. “For centuries, we have confused national imperialism with evangelism.”
José Luis Torres-Milán, a minister from Puerto Rico, said he lives an island that belongs to the U.S., but people there cannot vote in the presidential election. ‘More than 50 percent of our 4 million people live below the poverty line, only 28 percent speak English, and the predominance of employment on our island is part-time at places like Wal-Mart,’ he said. The PC(USA) sends money for mission overseas, but doesn’t help Latino churches in the U.S. and Puerto Rico, Torres-Milán said.
In some places in the U.S., people of color are becoming a majority, but some Presbyterian churches don’t know how to deal with that or how to respond to immigration. “I live in a part of the country where globalism is here,” said Gary Demarest of California, the task force’s co-moderator, along with Jenny Stoner of Vermont. The Presbyterian church looks different in northern California than in southern California, Demarest said, and different in Iowa than in California.
But the PC(USA) still tends towards “one-size fits all,” Demarest said. With all those differences, “how do we be faithful to a theology and a polity that really sort of says we all have to do it the same way?”
Some Presbyterians of color want churches not just to be welcoming, but also to share power and responsibility equally. “There’s a connection between racism and sexism and classism,” said Lonnie Oliver, a pastor from Georgia. Achtemeier said he spoke recently with a Korean-American pastor who was angry that the PC(USA) spends so much time debating the ordination of gays and lesbians and resented that “your only interest in us,” as the pastor put it, is in which side Korean churches will take in the ordination dispute.
Lee said Korean churches are struggling to find second-generation leadership, in part because some pastors preach from the pulpit that the “PC(USA) left the Bible,” so young people refuse to be involved in the denomination.
And Kirkpatrick said he’s heard resentment that some in the PC(USA) are trying to involve the world church in the ordination debate — they told him, “Quit having people from your church try to draw us into your battles.”
There’s also the question of how, in times of division, the church knows when it’s really listening to God.
Throughout this October 13-15 meeting, Frances Taylor Gench, who teaches New Testament at Union Theological Seminary and Presbyterian School of Christian Education in Richmond, led the task force in study of passages from the Bible involving the Holy Spirit.
She explained how the gospel of John refers to the Holy Spirit in multiple ways — as God’s enduring presence, as teacher, as testifier and witness. “I will not leave you orphaned,” Jesus told his disciples before his death. Gench described the Holy Spirit as ever-present, accompanying all believers, leading them into truth.
In the book of Acts, Luke presents the Holy Spirit as “the enabling presence of God,” the power that sweeps down and puts God’s divine, redemptive plan into action, Gench said. “The Spirit sweeps in at these decisive moments,” she said. And Gench told the task force: “I’m hoping that wind is going to sweep in decisively for us in the next two years,” in the PC(USA).
But Gench also led another discussion, on the epistles of John, which she said were written about a decade after John’s gospel and describe bitter divisions within the church over ethics and interpretation of Scripture. She described the books of I John, II John and III John as “loud, angry little letters” in which Christians call each other anti-Christ and basically say, “You aren’t nothing but a zit on the body of Christ.”
Disagreements within the church — arguments within the family — can raise questions about how one can test what some claim is the guidance of the Holy Spirit. When there’s a battle among the believers, Gench asked the task force, how can one know when it’s God’s voice that’s calling and when it’s something else?
The task force is next scheduled to meet March 2-4 in Dallas. Its report to the church is due in September 2005.
