That’s the recommendation — unanimously approved Sept. 21 — of a special committee that the General Assembly created in 2008 and which is to report to the next assembly in 2010.
The Belhar Confession’s call for unity, reconciliation, and justice involves “fundamental essentials of the gospel,” said J. C. Austin, a member of the committee.
It speaks “to the universal life of the church,” not only the specifics of apartheid. The Belhar Confession was adopted in 1986 as part of the theological response of the Dutch Reformed Mission Church of South Africa to the declaration by the World Alliance of Reformed Churches declaring apartheid to be a sin.
The white church in South Africa was providing a theological justification for apartheid “as essentially God’s will,” said Austin, director of the Center for Church Life at Auburn Theological Seminary. “The white church argued that race was an acceptable prerequisite for membership,” resulting in separate churches for people of different races.
What stood out for the committee, in part, were the confession’s Biblical faithfulness, and it’s the theological orthodoxy, Austin said, explaining the committee’s recommendation to the Executive Committee of the General Assembly Mission Council on Sept. 23. “It is a very rigorous Reformed confession,” he said — one made in a context in which the basic commitments of the gospel were being violated. The committee was struck by the “relentless faithfulness to those historic standards” in unwelcoming circumstances, Austin said.
The PC(USA)’s special committee on the Belhar Confession held its first meeting in June in Grand Rapids, Mich. — a location chosen to allow conversation with the Christian Reformed Church, which also is considering Belhar.
“We were particularly inspired by the work the Christian Reformed Church has been doing,” Austin said. While that denomination has so far adopted no confessions written beyond the 17th century, the PC(USA) committee heard that Belhar was having a “transforming effect” on that denomination, by inspiring conversation about ministry and church life “that simply weren’t happening before,” Austin said. In short: study of it was helping “the church to be church better,” he said.
Another reason to consider adopting it: “This is a confession from the global South,” Austin said. “It would be the only one in The Book of Confessions that comes from the global South,” and would strengthen the relationship of the PC(USA) with the fast-growing southern hemisphere church.
The committee’s recommendation that the PC(USA) amend The Book of Confessions to add the Belhar Confession will come to the General Assembly for a vote in July 2010 in Minneapolis. If the assembly approves that recommendation, the question would be sent to the presbyteries for a vote. If enough presbyteries vote then to approve the inclusion, the question would come back to the General Assembly again, in 2012, for its approval.
