SACRAMENTO — Four members of the Theological Task Force on the Peace, Unity and Purity of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) came to tell the church more about their “remarkable spiritual journey,” as co-moderator Gary Demarest put it.
And they contend that keeping the church together doesn’t have to come at the price of sacrificing what one believes most deeply — that it’s possible, the words of task force member Barbara Wheeler, to “hold on to each other and our convictions about the truth at the same time.”
Demarest, a retired pastor from California, made the argument that “the world is watching” as the Presbyterian church and other denominations fight out their differences in public, and that the best way to make a compelling testimony to the power of the gospel is to let the world see that what binds Christians together in Jesus Christ is much more powerful than what divides them.
The four task force members spoke Sept. 22 to a joint gathering of top Presbyterian groups meeting in Sacramento — the General Assembly Council, the Committee on the Office of the General Assembly, the Presbyterian Foundation, the Presbyterian Investment and Loan Program, and the Presbyterian Publishing Corporation. This is one of many places the 20 task force members will go in the coming months to try to build support for their report and recommendations before the General Assembly votes on it in Birmingham next June.
What the Presbyterians in the audience thought of the task force report was not made clear — there was not an opportunity for them to ask questions of the task force members, or to offer own opinions about the report’s recommendations.
The task force began its work in December 2001 and released its recommendations August 25. The most important of them, task force co-moderator Jenny Stoner of Vermont said, is “that the church stay together.”
But among the most controversial is the recommendation asking the assembly to approve a new authoritative interpretation under which local governing bodies would determine whether candidates for ordination have departed from the ordination standards, and whether a departure in a particular case “constitutes a failure to adhere to the essentials of Reformed faith and polity,” or would not be so significant as to bar ordination.
The task force also is asking the assembly not to make any changes in 2006 in the PC(USA)’s ordination standards, which limit ordination to those who practice fidelity if they’re married or chastity if they’re single. Instead, it’s calling for a “season of discernment” — that’s the title of its report — in order to give the task force recommendations a chance to work.
Mark Achtemeier, who teaches systematic theology at the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary, said “there is passion across the board on the task force for this report,” which he described as “not an ultimate solution” to all the PC(USA)’s problems, but “a step towards a more faithful church.”
And “the stakes in this work are very high,” Achtemeier said.
He contended that “the way Presbyterians have been conducting themselves as a church is not sustainable” — that when Presbyterians treat each other with such “bitter disdain,” that puzzles the secular world and makes people question the meaning of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And “this is quite literally a matter of life and death,” he said, as the PC(USA) tries to find a way to witness to a world that desperately needs to hear God’s word.
Achtemeier and Barbara Wheeler, the president of Auburn Theological Seminary in New York, both said they were surprised and delighted to find that the task force members, a group chosen intentionally because of their different views, were all able to stand together and confess a common faith. That’s significant, Achtemeier said, because it shows that the passionate arguments in the church is not “a contest between the Christians and the infidels,” but between honest disciples who disagree.
Choosing up sides and leaving “is a bad Presbyterian habit,” Wheeler said. But one of the good Presbyterian habits is to create “a pattern of balance,” she said — in this case exercised by turning to the classic tradition of having “standards set by the whole church balanced by local discernment” of how to interpret those standards.
When the task force recommendations were released, within hours “there were cries of protest from both ends of the theological spectrum,” Wheeler said. And that wasn’t surprising, she said, because along the way, the task force considered two potential literary parallels to their work.
In one, as a Shakespearean ending, one person wins “and everybody else is dead on the floor.”
In another, as in Chekhov’s work, at the end “everybody’s alive and a little disappointed.” If the task force’s recommendations are accepted, “none of us in the church will have everything we want,” Wheeler said. “But we will have one another.”
