Former moderator, Marj Carpenter, appeals
to Ecclesiology Committee on behalf of TTF report
BIRMINGHAM — They lined up 60 strong to have two minutes apiece to speak their minds.
And my, what they think about the report of the Theological Task Force on the Peace, Unity and Purity of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
It’s a miracle, an act of grace, a polarizing force. It’s a fresh breeze, a mirage, a “five pound rock going through the windshield of this church.”
The task force members are saints. The task force members are flat wrong.
“God love you. Aren’t you lucky the computer picked you to be on this committee?” former General Assembly Moderator Marj Carpenter asked the members of the assembly’s Ecclesiology Committee, who will be voting on the task force report.
For more than two hours June 16, the committee listened — hitting the mother lode of passion the report has aroused among some folks in the PC(USA).
Carpenter, for example, said she opposes ordaining gays and lesbians, “and I fight to the last ditch for what I believe. But I have fought in this ditch for 30 years and it’s getting deeper and deeper and deeper.”
She worries that the PC(USA) fights over homosexuality is affecting the parts of the church she loves best: mission, evangelism, new church development. “I’m ready for compromise if it will get us back to being a church,” Carpenter said.
David Bleivik of Pennsylvania described the task force report as “a monumental document that will do much.” If the assembly approves the report, the PC(USA) will see further polarization, Bleivik said, and the rancor at the national level of the church will transfer to the presbyteries, “where there will be bitter fights and bitter debates.”
Camille Cook, a candidate for ordination from Twin Cities presbytery, listened June 15 to the questioning of the four candidates for moderator of this 217th General Assembly. Cook made a list of the words people used to describe the denomination — among them, conflict, unrest, anxiety, turbulence, pain, hurting, hopelessness and despair.
As a young person excited about ministry, “these are not the words I want to hear,” Cook said. “This is not the gospel I want to preach.”
So she wants the PC(USA) to give the task force report a chance — to see if it might be a way for a denomination in chronic pain to heal.
The report has produced some strange bedfellows: its opponents include both conservatives who oppose ordaining gays and lesbians, and liberals who want the PC(USA) to throw the doors wide open to gay ordination..
Several speakers described the same-sex attractions they’d felt earlier in their lives — saying God’s love had later transformed their lives and snuffed out that desire.
Kristin Johnson of Long Island presbytery said she had been in a lesbian relationship, but to say that same-sex attraction can’t be overcome “is to deny the power and grace of Christ in people’s lives,” she said. “God is a God of healing and transformation.”
Others spoke of the injustice of the PC(USA) continuing to deny ordination to gays and lesbians. They can’t support the task force report because it asks the church to leave the ordination standards untouched for now.
Michael Adee, a gay elder from Santa Fe, said he once heard a woman say she was tired of the church’s endless discussions over gay ordination, saying, “I’m tired of beating this dead horse.”
Adee — who has fought through More Light Presbyterians to change the PC(USA)’s ordination standards — said he turned to the woman and said: “I’m the dead horse.”
The task force proposes no change in the current ordination standards, which limit ordination to those who practice fidelity if they are married or chastity if they’re single. But it would allow local congregations and presbyteries to decide whether to grant exceptions for particular candidates who say they can’t in conscience follow those standards — if it decides that such an exception wouldn’t violate an “essential” of Reformed faith or polity.
That idea — that the PC(USA) could have a standard for ordination, but the standard might not be followed in some cases — makes no sense to some folks.
“You could put in office an atheist,” said Robert A. J. Gagnon, a commissioner who’s an associate professor of New Testament at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and was speaking as an advocate for an overture from Pittsburgh presbytery that proposes a different approach. “You could do absolutely anything you want,” with enough votes. “Then the Book of Order becomes absolutely meaningless.”
At the open hearing, Kirsten Kingdom, an elder from National Capital Presbytery, got the last word.
She said she has three children: a daughter who’s involved with Presbyterians Pro-Life, a son who’s gay, and another son who’s moved away from the Presbyterian church, frustrated by “the warring church that has turned him off.”
Kingdom said she and her husband have not always agreed on how to raise their children — but she learned through years of parenting that the decisions they made after talking things over together were almost always better than the decisions she would have made on her own.
And in the Presbyterian church, “I am prepared to accept the possibility that by sitting down with the people who have been regarded as opponents” — something the task force suggests — “perhaps we can come up with some things that are better solutions than what we have come up with so far.”
