CHICAGO — The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) should enter a “season of discernment,” in which its ordination standards should not change, but local governing bodies should determine whether candidates for ordination have departed from those ordination standards — and whether a departure in a particular case “constitutes a failure to adhere to the essentials of Reformed faith and polity.”
The Theological Task Force on the Peace, Unity and Purity of the PC(USA) approved that recommendation unanimously on August 25, after three and a half years of intensive work and with several of its members expressing joy in the outcome and a certainty, as Sarah Grace Sanderson-Doughty put it, that “we are being incredibly faithful to Christ and to one another.”
The task force says the most important of its seven recommendations, the one from which all the others flow, is that Presbyterians learn to live in harmony with one another and “to avoid division into separate denominations.”
The task force contends that it’s not advocating “local option” regarding ordaining gays and lesbians, because the denomination’s national ordination standards — limiting ordination to those who practice chastity if they’re single or fidelity if they’re married — would remain in effect. To adopt local option would be a distinct change, “and it would be un-Presbyterian,” the report states.
Instead, the task force says it’s returning to historic traditions of Presbyterian life and trying to restore a balance that hasn’t always existed in the denomination’s recent conflicted days.
It asks the next General Assembly not to change the ordination standards for now, or to make other key changes on controversial matters.
It asks local governing bodies not to ignore the national standards and to conduct examinations of candidates with care and rigor. It says the question of whether a governing body has conducted examinations of candidates “reasonably, responsibly, prayerfully and deliberately” is subject to review by higher governing bodies.
And it asks individual Presbyterians to “outdo one another” in honoring decisions those governing bodies make, and asks them to initiate judicial or administrative proceedings “only when other efforts fail to preserve the purposes and purity of the church.”
The 39-page report talks about what would change, and what would not, if the General Assembly adopts the task force recommendations next June.
The PC(USA)’s ordination standards would not change — at least not for now.
The task force is asking the assembly in 2006 not to approve any overtures to change the ordination standards, although presbyteries already have submitted a number of them. And doesn’t want that assembly to reconfigure the playing field by adding or removing any authoritative interpretations regarding ordination — a recognition that, in 2004, a move to remove an authoritative interpretation which states that “homosexuality is not God’s wish for humanity” failed by just four votes. It’s well known that Presbyterians who want the PC(USA) to open ordination to sexually-active gays and lesbians planned to push for that change again in 2006 and that, as task force member Scott Anderson put it, some of them will be disappointed by the task force’s report.
The task force is asking the assembly to leave things exactly as they are, for now, except for adopting its proposed authoritative interpretation.
And in describing that recommendation, the task force is trying to argue both that it is recommending an important change that would bring more peace, unity and purity to the PC(USA) — and in some ways asking for no change at all.
The report says:
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The authoritative interpretation the task force recommends will clarify parts of section G-6.0108 of the Book of Order, added to the church’s constitution in 1983, that require candidates for office in the church adhere to the essentials of Reformed faith and polity, but also allows some freedom of conscience in interpreting Scripture, within certain bounds. It also requires the ordaining or installing bodies to determine the difference between “standards” and “essentials.”
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“Essential doctrines are those that are required for a person’s beliefs to fall within the bounds of Reformed understandings of Christian faith,” Standards, on the other hand, are things to which Presbyterians aspire to adhere, but no one does perfectly. And G-6.0108 permits departures from those standards that aren’t essential.
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If an ordaining or installing body finds that an officer-elect has not complied with the fidelity and chastity standard, it “must then determine whether this departure violates essentials of faith or polity.” If so, the candidate couldn’t be ordained; if not, the person could. In other words, “an authoritative interpretation binds how an ordaining/installing body interprets a standard, but it does not override the body’s power to judge which matters are essential and whether any departure from non-essentials is sufficiently serious that a candidate will not be ordained or installed,” the report states.
The report argues that its recommendations will affirm the PC(USA)’s ordination standards and that “local governing bodies cannot set their own standards or set aside the church’s standards.” It says they must determine, “on a case-by-case basis,” whether particular individuals “adhere to essential and necessary articles of doctrine, discipline and government.”
In recent years, the task force says, the implications of G-6.0108 have become muddled, as some governing bodies and local congregations have contended that the church’s constitution lets them overlook certain church-wide standards and others have tried to write their own versions of essential tenets.
But the balance between candidates being expected to conform to essentials of faith and polity while also exercising freedom of conscience within bounds dates to 1729, when the General Synod adopted the Westminster standards as the confessional basis for all ministers, the report states.
And G-6.0108 “put faith and polity — belief and behavior — on an equal footing, as they were in 1729, when scruples were permitted in matters of doctrine, discipline and government,” the report states. “Over time, an imbalance has developed, with flexibility afforded in matters of doctrine and strict compliance required on all points of conduct and polity . . . The proposed authoritative interpretation restores the balance, grounded firmly in the Reformed theological insight that faith and action are inextricably related.”
The task force also says the authoritative interpretation it recommends is meant to further the peace, unity and purity of the PC(USA) whatever ordination standards are in place — meaning it hopes the balances it’s trying to achieve would remain in place even if, someday, the ordination standards were to change.
But it also asks the denomination for time, to restrain itself from considering other changes, in order to give the task force’s recommendations “an opportunity to work.”
The 20-member task force also is asking Presbyterians to create discussion groups with theological diversity; to explore non-parliamentary forms of discernment and decision-making; and to study the theological portions of its report and other resources it has created.
“We have returned to the classical theological traditions of our church and have attempted to bring out their applicability to the current controversies,” task force member William Stacy Johnson said, in characterizing the report. “If the Presbyterian church is sort of like a sailboat that’s been adrift in the middle of the lake, we are simply, modestly attempting to help the church to catch the wind.”
