October is Pastor Appreciation Month: time to tip our hats to the pastors who shepherd us. Time also to tip our hats to the pastor who has shepherded the denomination these past nearly 12 years. Thank you, Clifton Kirkpatrick, for your service as Stated Clerk of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
Cliff Kirkpatrick is an authentic Christian churchman. The bureaucratic experience has dissipated the faith of many a godly person, but not so for Cliff. He believes, he preaches, he passionately promotes the Gospel. And when he shakes your hand, whether you be a world leader or a child in church school, you feel the embrace of a person of sincerity, tenderness, and godliness.
His pastoral leadership has exercised great restraint. Some have wished he would act like an attorney general, prosecuting cases against anyone suspected of violating church law. However, while he has vowed to uphold and defend the Constitution, his job description provides him only two tools for doing so: offering interpretations to teach the meaning of our defining documents, and clerking for the meetings of our church’s highest governing body and judicial commissions.
He has interpreted and taught the Constitution by publishing “advice and counsel” and “polity reflection” papers. Some of those papers have annoyed many of us.
For example, his advice and counsel to middle governing bodies regarding churches wishing to withdraw with property from the PC(USA) has been circulated widely and criticized severely.
Then again, polity reflection papers published in 1997-98 angered those wishing to soften the fidelity-chastity ordination requirement found in G-6.0106b. Those polity reflections reaffirm the policy adopted by the 1993 GA, that ” … self-affirming, practicing homosexual persons may not be ordained as ministers of the Word and Sacrament, elders or deacons.” Those papers specifically disqualify for ordination any person ” … living an unchaste life as a single person or living outside of a covenantal marriage as defined in W-4.9001 even in a faithful relationship whether heterosexual or homosexual … “ A few widely reported challenges to that interpretation have led to criticisms of laxity on Cliff’s part, but truth be told, most governing bodies and judicial commissions of the church have followed his counsel, like it or not.
Cliff the shepherd has delivered difficult words of truth in love, even though he knew that some of his sheep would be annoyed and angered.
Cliff also has elevated our vision, as a good pastor must, to see a world larger than that closest at hand. As chief ecumenical officer for a denomination too self-focused, Cliff has taken us to the mission outposts, the tent meetings, the war-torn regions, and the catastrophe-suffering corners of the world. He will retire from his role as Stated Clerk next June, but his leadership role as an ecumenical ambassador will continue. When the history books are written, he will be remembered as one of the most visionary ecumenists of our era.
The one great struggle Cliff has suffered has been the indignity of false accusation. Many a local church pastor has suffered the effects of slanderous gossip and backbiting, of dismissive judgment and grumbling. It stings to be blamed for actions outside your control. It hurts to hear lies spread about you. Serving as chief lightning rod singes your hair and scalds your soul. Cliff has endured a relentless string of accusations throughout his tenure, leveled most often by pastors who know what it’s like to be falsely accused by their own church members.
Somehow he has mustered the grace and courage to respond with magnanimity and forgiveness. He has refused to defend himself against such accusations, and huge numbers of us have interpreted his silence as a tacit admission of guilt. Shame on us. We have allowed Cliff to become a victim of his own humility.
Now that he has decided to pass the baton to a successor to be elected at next June’s General Assembly meeting, it’s high time for us to beat our rhetorical swords into the plowshares of uplifting appreciation. In this pastor appreciation month, and indeed for all the months leading up to the GA, let us follow the counsel of Scripture that the elders — including both ruling elders and teaching elders, both local leaders and national, including the Stated Clerk —
” … be considered worthy of double honor, especially those who labor in preaching and teaching … “ (I Tim 5:17). And let us obey the admonition, “Never accept any accusation against an elder except on the evidence of two or three witnesses” (5:19).
JHH
