Reunions. What a waste of time.
If you served on the reunion planning committee for the class of ’97, or ’87, or ’77, or any other seven, you spent countless hours tracking addresses for former classmates, struggling to set a date, arranging accommodations, negotiating the price of the banquet, booking the entertainment, and harrumphing over the sluggish responses. You swore you’d never do it again. At my last high school reunion, half of the planning committee members refused to attend out of sheer disgust over the exercise.
The effort expended to reunite the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A with the Presbyterian Church in the U.S. was arguably a waste of time, too. The 1947 editorial of my predecessors (facing page) took 36 years to materialize. After aborted attempts, the successful reunion negotiations took 14 years.
What a waste of time.
The whole effort to reunite was arguably barking up the wrong ecclesiastical tree. The “homogenous unit theory” was already circulating, with church growth experts claiming that only single ethnic group churches grow. To take a diverse denomination and add further diversity — especially in the South where the PCUS churches were mostly white and the UPCUSA churches were mostly black — would surely distract the churches from reaching out to the people they knew best.
The reuniting effort promised to monopolize staff time, pulling them away from their regular missional responsibilities in favor of organizational restructuring.
The effort to develop new relationships among ministers and elder colleagues in local presbyteries would also distract from the frontline efforts of local church ministry.
What a waste of time.
Add the fact that a culture clash would overwhelm on every front. From a widened theological diversity to different ways of structuring national agencies, from merging separate offices in New York and Atlanta, to mixing regional thinking — the Pennsylvanians, the Californians, the Texans, the Carolinians, the New Englanders, the Coloradans — it would prove complicated, to say the least. Indeed, the convergence of cultures did prove far more complicated than anybody anticipated.
And, we all know that the already-shrinking church membership has continued its downward trend.
What possessed these folks to undertake such a problem-potholed journey? Simply put, it was the right thing to do.
It was the right thing to do because our separateness screamed to the world around us that the Christian message of reconciliation is a chimera. What the taking up of arms could resolve in a few years via the Civil War, the peaceable work of God could not resolve in a century?
It was the right thing to do because any attempt to speak to the broader culture on behalf of justice or moral issues was compromised by putting forth a multi-vocal, uncertain sound — a dissonant witness.
It was the right thing to do because — despite the empirical research offered by some church growth experts (much of which is now disputed) — Jesus did not form a segregated church. From the diversity of races and cultures filled with the Holy Spirit on Pentecost to the intentional inclusion of Gentile peoples through the New Testament era, the obedient church of Christ unites. It does not divide.
It was the right thing to do because the resulting diversity has made us a better church. Not an easier church, not a less conflicted church. But a better church — broader in perspective, deeper in theological understanding.
It was the right thing to do because Jesus prayed that we would be one. And while you and I were born into a fragmented church, and cannot quite imagine our way into one united worldwide denomination, nevertheless, it just stands to reason that we ought to be working to unite the church, not glibly rationalizing its divisions — or worse, further compounding them.
Nevertheless, the process of reunion taxed our resources and left us — to this day — some unfinished assignments. We offer our readers this special edition of The Presbyterian Outlook to provide a few insights that, perhaps, can help us be a reconciling, reuniting people in this new century.
Reunions. What a witness for Christ!
-JHH
