Given our place — a sophisticated, enlightened New Jersey suburban community — I reveled in the advantageous assignment. I was representing the home team.
I prepared and presented my speech on the evils of slavery. Classmates nodded in agreement. Then Greg stepped up and argued not for the right to own other human beings, but for popular sovereignty. He opined that such regulations should be formulated by local folks rather than a centralized national government. Again heads nodding in agreement. We debated a bit. Then Mr. Warnaar handed out, and collected, ballots. To my horror and shame, Stephen A. Douglas won. Hands-down. The history of the western world collapsed on my failure to make the case against one of humanity’s supreme evils, or at minimum, on Greg’s success at making a compelling case for local option, for freedom and self-determination.
Through the ensuing two score and three years, I have been pressing the case on the denominational stage for doing the right thing and doing it together — relinquishing some of that popular sovereignty in favor of the bonds of unity in Christ. However, the heads nodding in agreement to my appeals often, in the end, cast their votes in favor of my opponents, the libertarian, fragmenting, freedom fighters — each one appealing to an instinctive desire in us all to spread our wings, to do our own thing.
Go ahead and say it: “Jack, you’re no Abraham Lincoln.” You’re right. I admit it. In fact, I also admit that I’m no Tom Taylor or Linda Valentine, no Maria Zack or Scott Sunquist, no Hunter Farrell or Setri Nyomi or Sherron George or Bill Young. These folks, along with several dozen fellow leaders, have successfully forged a compelling case for — yes, Abe, your legacy lives! — unity in mission.
Through recent decades we Presbyterians have been doing mission in increasingly fragmenting ways. A positive commitment to be good stewards of our resources has led many a church Session to invest its mission dollars into the service being offered by its own daughters and sons. Observable, local, hands-on mission projects have supplanted out-of-view overseas efforts. In turn, monies rising to the national level have thinned, international mission co-worker positions have been de-funded, and the resulting reduction in force has generated further disenchantment with doing mission via connectional structures.
But these several dozen leaders, representing both denominational structures and independent mission organizations, have articulated an alternative view. This past January they gathered and engaged together. They talked, complained, affirmed, then wrote, and finally signed a covenant signaling a new season of mission partnership.
Why write such a covenant? Because we are better together.
They didn’t call for a return to the good ol’ days of purely centralized programming. Rather they acknowledged that “God is calling us to new patterns of mission” and that we all, in turn, “must also be open to new patterns of collaboration” involving “ … new cooperation and partnerships within the PC(USA).” They specifically declared “our responsibility to each other by communicating openly, acting transparently, and speaking and hearing the truth in love.” And they promised to “celebrate and encourage diverse Presbyterian approaches and structures for mission while maintaining the unity of our participation in God’s mission.”
Finally, “With bold humility” they invited “those who would covenant with us to join in this new collaborative model of Presbyterian mission …”
So far 130-plus individuals and groups have accepted this invitation, and now it goes to the General Assembly to give its RSVP.
MEMO to the commissioners: Please do not deliver a perfunctory mom-and-apple-pie vote. Please do contemplate the watershed moment that awaits such an action, and give us a passionate, doxological, denomination-transforming, world-changing affirmation of covenant collaboration in mission. If you do, amid that great cloud of applauding witnesses, Honest Abe will be nodding his head in agreement.
— JHH
