On October 31, 1986, then D.Min. candidate Mary Naegeli interviewed J. Randolph Taylor regarding his journey through the reunion of 1983. Taylor was president of San Francisco Theological Seminary at the time. The Outlook publishes never-before-excerpts of their conversation as part of this 25th anniversary look back. The Outlook is grateful to Mary Naegeli, now member at large of San Francisco presbytery, for sharing this transcript with our readers.
The conversation began with questions regarding Taylor’s background.
RT: “I was born in China of missionary parents and my mother died when I was three. So I returned with my father and three brothers to the South where our home was and lived in Charleston, S.C., and Nashville, Tenn. My father after a few years became the executive of our [PCUS] Board of World Missions, which was based in Nashville. So my childhood was spent in a kind of global awareness. While it was very southern, and I am distinctly southern, I was always aware of the fact that the church was much larger than the Presbyterian Church U.S. I instinctively knew that you could not do global mission just with Presbyterians. So that argued by implication that certainly Presbyterians ought to get together.”
After seminary at Union in Virginia and earning a Ph.D. at Aberdeen, he was called to the Church of the Pilgrims in Washington, D.C.
RT: “What that did was to force this southerner into Washington during the 50s and 60s. I became very much aware of a whole lot of things, one is the whole Civil Rights Movement struck there. … “There were two lessons primarily. … One is I fell in love with the parish and with the urban parish particularly. And I fell in love with the dynamics of the church at work in its immediate world. And, we were engaged in all sorts of international programs with international students and all that sort of thing. It was exciting in every respect. But a second thing I learned was that I was part of a divided family. I was the southern Presbyterian Church’s representative in the national capital, and it didn’t make any sense that the Presbyterian Church had not gotten its act together.”
The city grew into the suburbs.
RT: ” … The Washington City Presbytery of the old UPCUSA and the Potomac Presbytery of the PCUS, of which I was a part, ended up buying lots across the street from each other out in suburban Virginia. And that was for me a kind of Rubicon. I said, ‘This simply won’t do. We cannot minister to the nation with a divided church. … ‘ In reflecting back on it, it was good for me to be thrown into that millstream for a lot of reasons, not the least of all for what it taught me about the necessity of unity for the purpose of mission.”
Dr. Taylor recounts how the successful reunion of the UPCNA to the PCUSA to form the UPCUSA in 1955 — the PCUS vote fell short of the needed majority.
RT: “(It) grieved me intellectually. And increasingly as I lived in Washington next to this reuniting process it grieved me existentially. … But I didn’t see it as a missional issue until I got into the nitty-gritty of Washington and became aware that they were getting their house in order and we were not in it.
” … [A] long about 1960, the PCUS, left out of the reunion by its own inability to get a vote, began a negotiation with the Reformed Church of America. … I hosted the first gathering of this group. … I never was a real advocate of the union for this reason, that I thought it diverted our attention from what our real purpose was, and that we did not come to turns with the fact that we were a church in schism.
” … We had missed out on the creativity of reunion, and so what we really did, as I look back on it, was we looked around and said, ‘OK we’re not part of that; who are we? And … with whom can we identify? We don’t want to be a regional church simply.’ And it was a way of getting out of (the) regional trap without confessing our sin of schism.
” … The vote was finally taken in 1968 and … we voted for reunion … with an overwhelming majority of our presbyteries, and the RCAs turned us down. And so this was a moment of truth for us.”
Things started getting serious with UPCUSA.
RT: “Absolutely, that’s the necessary prelude to understanding how reunion took place. … In the meantime, the Civil Rights Movement … the South was in ferment. Selma, Montgomery March, all the rest of that. … the PCUS had to get absolutely honest with itself. We couldn’t go off and demonstrate somewhere else to satisfy our needs. When we demonstrated, it was our own elders and deacons we were demonstrating against.
” … By then I had moved to Atlanta, Ga., and was pastor of Central Presbyterian Church in Atlanta. Now Central Church is one of the best-known churches in the PCUS. It’s known as a kind of scout ship, the one that would get out and experiment with urban ministries and all that. … It’s had a history of that. I didn’t bring anything to it other than a commitment to what they were already doing … but I loved it and got thoroughly involved in Atlanta. … And we had come to terms with the fact that we were … had to be an interracial church.
” … Suddenly all these ideas fell out on the floor of the GA of PCUS in 1969 in Mobile, Ala. From the standpoint of the PCUS that was the most significant assembly we had until the conclusion of the life of that denomination. … All these ideas were on the table, and we wanted to do them all, so we appointed — in our days we called them ad im committees. We appointed an ad im committee to do all those things and then somebody … a young man … caught the mood of the Assembly and got up and made a motion, a commissioner’s resolution … that we enter into negotiations with the UPC, looking for the reunion of the Presbyterian family.”
Randy was appointed by that Assembly to be a fraternal delegate to the UPC’s GA, and along with Moderator Matthew Lynn, communicated the action to that body.
RT: “It was an emotional moment when we two southerners arrived in San Antonio and presented our readiness to enter into reunion negotiations. The UPC was more ready than we were. They jumped to their feet, and said, ‘Right on! We’ll have at that.'”
” … As a result of this it almost fell out of that process that Matthew Lynn asked me to be the Chair of the reunion committee from the PCUS. So I began my work with this joint committee — it began as a committee of 24 in 1969. … [This] has become for me a missional issue … and it was a moral issue because they [UPCUSA] were largely black in the South and we were avoiding racial reconciliation by ecclesiastical division. So that this was not for me any longer an academic concern. I knew this thing had to be done. I thought it would be easy to do.
“[But] … The way our people feared the social activist(s) of the UPC the UPC feared the fundamentalist spiritualism, pietism of the PCUS, the same issue holding back reunion. … We were scared of being swallowed up nationally, [a] 3 to 1 difference, but when in the local situation, which is where people lived, it was the UPC that was frightened of being swallowed up, particularly when they were almost all black, which was true in North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and Georgia. … [Plus] in the South, particularly the church in the South, had to come to terms with some basic issues of conscience. In other words, what had happened to us was that … the PCUS was a different church because of the Civil Rights Movement. We were divided and polarized into parties, so called conservative and liberal, conservative meaning segregationist, liberal meaning integrationist. Didn’t have anything to do with theology, except as you define the people of God. There were theological underpinnings, but the battle was over cultural factors.
” … We began to get our acts together. … And the result of that was that PCUS people began to relax about what this meant and UPC began to say maybe we can trust these people. Maybe they’re not going to swallow us up.
” … At the end of the ’70s the people who rose up were the conservative evangelicals who said everybody’s in there but us! And so we added conservative evangelicals to the joint committee … [and the plan then added] … a confessional base and [a] commitment to evangelism.”
There was a compromise on the women’s issue, on theological grounds.
RT: “That’s right. … Once you take the conservative evangelical position seriously, it does two things. It alters your theological breadth. It broadens you really, it affirms diversity. And secondly, it makes you make your polity more conditional and less mandatory. Because you do run into the conservative evangelical who on grounds of conscience will not participate in the ordination of a woman. What do you do? Well, we figured, you know, you’d better give him (and they were all hims) … some time and some educational processes to think that one through, and you’d better not just mandate that he has to do that.”
Even in 1986, Taylor saw possible problems ahead.
RT: “Oh yes, continuing problems. Yes I do. … [T]there is a tension in the church between mandatory and persuasive language. Now I think it’s a healthy tension, because I think there are a few things that we have to insist on, for example, the Lordship of Jesus Christ. But we probably need to be very careful about making too many things mandatory because not only in the old PCUS but also in the former UPC church, there are a great many people who need time to adjust to new patterns. And while it’s much more efficient to say, ‘Let’s everybody do it this way,’ it’s probably not more effective. Now in the plan, there are a lot of tolerances. And the tendency of the church is to say, ‘Let’s make that mandatory.’ And one of the dynamics that’s in there is to keep as much flexibility as possible. And I look to the future to lose some of that.
” … Church reformed and always reforming, you’ve got to allow the flex there, that you honor the tradition and you insist on it where it’s important, and you open up to the future and you don’t assume that we know what that future holds. And so, that’s a different way of polity, and it’s got some landmines in it. That’s a lesson out of reunion.”
