LOUISVILLE — Should a Presbyterian delegation that went to the Middle East last fall have met with leaders of Hezbollah? And should two of the denomination’s national staff members who went on the trip have lost their jobs because of that meeting?
The General Assembly Council got right to the brink of discussing that on March 31 — and then went into closed session.
Earlier, the chairperson of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy (ACSWP), Nile Harper, had presented a report which said in part that when the PC(USA) dismissed Peter Sulyok, who had been the advisory committee’s coordinator, that dismissal “was carried out without a just cause or appropriate due process.”
Kathy Lueckert, the council’s deputy executive director, also lost her job in the fallout from the Hezbollah meeting.
The advisory committee encouraged the council to reconsider its personnel policies, which allowed the council’s executive director, John Detterick, to end Lueckert and Sulyok’s employment by “unilateral action,” according to the report.
“ACSWP believes the church is called to model justice in its internal life as well as in the wider society,” the report states. “It appears to ACSWP that the review of the dismissals conducted by the GAC Personnel Committee did not seriously consider the issues, substance, circumstances or mitigating factors involved in the actions of Peter Sulyok and Kathy Lueckert. The Personnel Committee dealt only with the process followed by the executive director in making the dismissals. Authentic justice in the church always involves both proper process and moral substance.”
Two Presbyterians who made the 15-day fact-finding trip in October described some of what they’d seen and experienced — including the difficulty caused to the Palestinian people by Israel’s construction of a security barrier that’s intended to reduce suicide bombings but also is separating some Palestinians from their land, jobs and community.
The presentation, by Gordon Edwards of Oklahoma and Esperanza Guajardo of Texas, only briefly mentioned the Hezbollah visit. But when it was finished, council member Susan Andrews, a former General Assembly moderator, sought more details in a question-and-answer session. Andrews said she wanted to know “exactly what happened, how that visit came about” and what the speakers’ reaction to it was. “To hear it from somebody who was there would be helpful,” Andrews said.
Edwards responded that Hezbollah — which the U.S. State Department has listed as a terrorist organization — also is “a significant voice” in Lebanese politics, and the advisory committee made a point of meeting with religious and political leaders all through the region. The political strength of Hezbollah was evidenced by a powerful demonstration in March, in which hundreds of thousands of Hezbollah’s Shiite supporters poured onto the streets of Beirut in support of Hezbollah’s connections with Syria.
“We went to listen to significant voices and Hezbollah is a significant voice in Lebanon,” Edwards told the council. Edwards said Sheikh Nabil Qauq of Hezbollah “gave a very warm welcome in the name of the God of Abraham, the God of Jesus, the God of Muhammad,” and quoted from Scripture several times during the meeting at a former detention camp in south Lebanon.
When the sheik was asked his advice about the upcoming U.S. presidential election, he asked that all television cameras and tape recorders be turned off, Edwards said. Then the sheik looked at the Presbyterians and said “he would ask that we would go home and read our Bibles, that we would pray, and as we got ready to vote that we would remember on the judgment day Jesus Christ would ask us if we had voted for justice,” Edwards explained.
After that, one of the Presbyterians, Ronald Stone, a retired professor from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, made a comment that was widely broadcast on Arab television and that many Presbyterians wish he had never said — telling the Hezbollah representatives that “as an elder of our church, I’d like to say that according to my recent experience, relations and conversations with Islamic leaders are a lot easier than dealings and dialogue with Jewish leaders.”
A few weeks before that, Edwards said, Stone had participated in a stressful discussion with Jewish representatives who disagreed with the General Assembly’s decision last summer to begin a process of selective, phased divestment in some companies doing business in Israel, and some of whom had called the PC(USA) anti-Semitic. Edwards called Stone’s remarks “an honest statement but a very politically naive statement” that was widely broadcast in Lebanon on the evening news.
That evening, back in Beirut, the people the delegation spoke with “were very pleased that we had gone to see Hezbollah,” and considered it “a great gesture” to building bridges of understanding, Edwards said.
“I personally felt it was a good conversation,” he said. “We talk to people we don’t necessarily agree with. Talking doesn’t necessarily mean we condone. We went to listen.”
At that point, council member George Conn of Virginia approached a microphone and said, “It’s my sense that we’re teetering on the brink of very sensitive conversation” and “the elephant in the living room is the firing of Kathy Lueckert and Peter Sulyok.” Conn made a motion, which the council approved, to move into closed session.
One council member — John Bolt, a journalist from West Virginia — said he would not participate in a closed session, because he considered these to be significant issues about which the church needs to have an open discussion. Bolt left the room.
The rest of the council met in closed session for close to an hour, after which its chair, Nancy Kahaian, announced that no decisions had been made, and that the personnel committee would defer making its report until April 2, the next day the council is due to meet again in plenary session.
Earlier that day, the council had re-elected its current leaders — Kahaian of Indiana as chair, and Paul Masquelier Jr. of California as vice-chair — each to a second one-year term.
And it heard an update on the Mission Initiative: Joining Hearts and Hands fundraising campaign, which is trying to raise $40 million over five years for evangelism and new church development. So far, pledges have been received for more than $9.3 million, said Bill Saul, co-chair of the campaign’s steering committee
