Much of the conflict involving the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and its policy involving Israel and divestment is being played out on the big stage — at the national and even international levels.
But PC(USA) leaders are being reminded that decisions the denomination has made nationally are having repercussions too in local communities, for local churches.
“This Sunday we will have a squad car in front of the church I serve in Forest Hills,” Charles Brewster, pastor of Forest Hills Presbyterian in the New York City area, said recently during the moderator’s conference in Louisville — a gathering of presbytery moderators and other regional leaders from around the country. Brewster, the moderator of New York City presbytery, was voicing concern about an anonymous letter threatening violence at Presbyterian churches in protest over the PC(USA)’s plan to consider selective, phased divestment involving some companies doing business in Israel. That letter was mailed from Queens, not far from Brewster’s church, “and we take the threat very seriously and we are all frightened,” he said.
Florence Henderson, an elder and the vice-moderator of Baltimore presbytery, said Presbyterians there have been “bombarded” with questions about “what has happened, why has it happened?”
Susan Wittjen, an elder and moderator of New Covenant presbytery, said Presbyterian and Jewish leaders in Texas have been discussing their discomfort with a recent trip the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy made to the Middle East — a fact-finding tour that included a controversial meeting on Oct. 17 with Hezbollah leaders in Lebanon. Jewish leaders were unhappy about the Hezbollah meeting, and wanted more publicity for a letter that top PC(USA) leaders — John Detterick, executive director of the General Assembly Council, Clifton Kirkpatrick, the denomination’s stated clerk, and Rick Ufford-Chase, moderator of the 216th General Assembly — issued calling that meeting “misguided, at best” (see OUTLOOK, Nov. 15 issue, p.7.)
Hoping to calm the waters, Presbyterians and Jews together spent thousands of dollars to take out a half-page ad in the Houston Chronicle to bring more attention to the letter, Wittjen said. In Texas, “a number of Presbyterians are quite upset about this — it’s not just the Jewish community,” she said.
So the repercussions of what’s happened are continuing to spread throughout the PC(USA) — with some voices from within the Presbyterian church now calling for a reconsideration of the divestment strategy, and others urging the denomination to stand firm.
Some presbyteries and local church sessions have started to pass or consider resolutions of their own — some in response to the divestment issue, others involving the Hezbollah meeting and what happened to two national staff members, Kathy Lueckert and Peter Sulyok, both of whom lost their jobs with the PC(USA) after participating in the meeting. Lueckert was deputy director of the General Assembly Council and Sulyok had been coordinator for the past dozen years of the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy.
Some Presbyterians have argued for accountability for those involved in the Hezbollah meeting — suggesting, as did Jeff Bridgeman, a California pastor and former General Assembly Council chair in a letter to the Outlook, that “we lose a staff person or two” instead of losing more angry Presbyterians from the pews. But others have raised questions about whether Lueckert and Sulyok were paying the price for the actions of elected staff members — and whether Detterick and Kirkpatrick themselves could have done more to prevent the meeting, if they knew about it in advance and thought it was wrong.
Some congregations are speaking up, perhaps hoping to influence the General Assembly Council to say something about divestment and the Middle East when it meets again next spring.
The session of River Road church in Richmond, for example, passed two resolutions — one recommending “the strongest condemnation and censure” of the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy, saying that comments made in connection with that meeting “encourage terror tactics against Israel and the Israeli people.”
A second resolution from River Road asks the General Assembly or General Assembly Council to “suspend, renounce and nullify” any effort to proceed with divestiture. The General Assembly voted 431-62 last summer to authorize selective, phased divestiture of some companies doing business in Israel. But the River Road resolution says that action “was instituted capriciously and with misguided intentions,” and says it “singles out Israel for rebuke largely because of its effort to defend the people of Israel . . .”
The PC(USA)’s Mission Responsibility Through Investment committee, meeting in New York in early November, drafted six criteria to guide the denomination in its divestment decisions. It emphasized there would be no across-the-board divestiture and that any divestment action would only be considered if attempts to influence the companies through negotiation and shareholder actions had failed. The PC(USA) holds more than $7.5 billion in investments through the Presbyterian Foundation and the Board of Pensions, and the earliest any stock could be sold as a deliberate divestment action would be after the next General Assembly meets in 2006.
The divestment criteria also reflect the recognition that many multinational companies active in Israel do not have direct involvement with the political troubles there. So the criteria for considering which businesses to approach try to take into account whether the business those firms are conducting have any links to the Israel-Palestinian conflict.
Some PC(USA) staff members involved with the denomination’s Middle East policy are urging the church not to back down in the heat. “I deeply hope the church can proceed with its prophetic voice,” said Elizabeth Sanders, a missionary-in-residence in Louisville who, with her husband, Marthame, until recently served in the West Bank. “The world is listening,” she told the presbytery moderators in Louisville on Nov. 20.
“We’re facing into the storm, friends,” said Jay Rock, the PC(USA)’s coordinator of interfaith relations. He said the divestiture vote has upset many Jews “at the deepest level, often not even on a rational level.” They see the Presbyterian church as “engaged in an aggressive attack on them, on Israel, therefore on the Jewish people, therefore on them as individuals.”
The strategy of some Jewish organizations is to take the conversation to the local level and to pressure Presbyterians locally to push the PC(USA) “to change our minds,” Rock said. “The purpose of engaging us is to change our minds about the divestment issue . . . to create a climate in which the action can be overturned.”
In their remarks to the moderators, the staff members essentially were providing talking points — ideas to convey in their conversations with Jewish leaders back home. Rock, for example, urged Presbyterians to educate themselves on the issues, to meet with Jews on a congregation-to-congregation level and to consider involving Arabs and Muslims in the conversations as well. And he said it helps to stress the PC(USA)’s policy statements condemning terrorism against Israeli citizens as well as to talk about the Israeli occupation .
Marthame Sanders told the moderators that in his view, “balanced is absolutely not the right approach” — meaning equal balance in how the PC(USA) approaches Israel and the Palestinians. “Principled is the right approach,” he said, because in the Middle East “there is no balance. Israel is the stronger party by far.”
As Rock put it: “There is a moral problem with terrorism and there is a moral problem with occupation. Let’s not talk about equivalency.”
Instead of talking about balance, Victor Makari, the PC(USA)’s regional coordinator for the Middle East and Europe, urged Presbyterians to think in terms of justice and moral witness. “How people make their money is a matter of stewardship and justice,” as is how they invest their money, Makari said. As for Israel, “we wish them only well-being, peace and security, a shalom that God has promised them,” Makari said. “We wish no harm to the state of Israel.”
But the PC(USA)’s church partners in the Middle East “look to us with hope, so as not to send ambiguous messages or equivocating messages,” Makari said, but to stick with “the stance of courage” the General Assembly took with its divestiture vote.
Questions also are being raised about Lueckert and Sulyok, and why they no longer work for the denomination. Citing confidentiality concerns, Detterick isn’t saying much — including whether they were fired or asked to resign, or why they left.
On Nov. 19, Mid-Kentucky presbytery — which is based in Louisville, where the PC(USA)’s national offices are located and where many members of the denomination’s national staff live and worship — voted to send a pastoral letter to the General Assembly Council regarding the departures of Lueckert and Sulyok. There was considerable debate and certainly no unanimity at the presbytery meeting — but the discussion reflected some of the concerns that have been swirling through the PC(USA)’s national offices since Lueckert and Sulyok departed.
During the presbytery meeting, some current or former national staff members expressed concern that Lueckert and Sulyok may have been held accountable or punished for the actions of elected members of the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy — people whose actions they presumably could not control.
Detterick said during that meeting that he could not comment on why the advisory committee met with Hezbollah, but said there were questions raised about the visit “before they went.” If Detterick or Kirkpatrick knew about the meeting in advance and if they didn’t or couldn’t stop it, several people asked, then why should Lueckert or Sulyok lose their jobs?
Some also raised questions about whether certain General Assembly committees or networks should be prophetic — doing what they think is right, without fear that staff members who work with those groups might lose their jobs if the committee does something risky or unpopular.
Another question brought up: How much should the PC(USA) listen to the advice of partner churches? When should it follow their lead and when should it not?
And “what if visiting Hezbollah was a good idea?” one person asked — especially since this was a fact-finding trip, Hezbollah is active in Lebanese politics and a PC(USA) church partner in the region suggested the visit.
The pastoral letter from Mid-Kentucky presbytery to the General Assembly Council states that “we do not write to advise you on recent actions, current policies, or to suggest strategies for handling these difficult matters,” but rather to seek reconciliation and healing. Among the national staff, the letter states, “in the wake of these recent events the lack of understanding, sorrow, anger, and low morale are all palpable.”
In an addendum, the letter lists “questions and concerns” that the departures of Lueckert and Sulyok have raised — among them, what message their leaving was intended to send (and what message actually was conveyed).
The addendum also states that “we recognize that the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has taken a prophetic role on the study of a divestment strategy regarding Palestinian-Israeli issues and that that decision created a furor in some religious sectors and was met with profound appreciation in others. Is the departure of these two staff people a sign that we are backing off our prophetic witness?”
To add yet another layer of complication, Linda Culbertson, general presbyter of Presbytery of The Pacific, raised the issue of economic accountability of Presbyterians themselves. Culbertson said she’s found that not all congregations are talking about the divestment proposal — in her part of California, “it is our more affluent congregations that are having this discussion,” they’re the ones who care most about divestment, Culbertson told the moderators. In some places, she said, “money speaks louder with Presbyterians than sex.”
So on it goes, with the debate continuing and with Presbyterians in their own communities deciding where they stand.
