Seven-hundred twelve commissioners, meeting on July 3 in the Minneapolis Convention Center, will cast their ballots once, twice, three times, maybe more, until one of the six nominees garners a majority of the votes.
Six candidates?
Whatever happened to the two-party system?
This is not unprecedented. Most years three or four candidates have stood for election. On occasion five or six have been nominated.
Voting becomes a challenge at a time like this. When you can separate the candidates into two parties — one promoting progress, the other guarding the tradition — you can vote for the party candidate of your choice.
Then again, such two-party voting inevitably ushers in lots of disappointments. Case in point: Barack Obama. Many supporters are finding him to be too excessive: too radical or too pragmatic, too much change or too much stagnation, too left or too right. Obama the president is more complicated and less consistent than was Obama the candidate — as is always the case when political aspirants turn into elected bureaucrats.
Lacking party affiliations, the six moderatorial candidates look pretty complicated. They will press the delegates and commissioners to resist the inclination to categorize them. That’s a good thing for the commissioners.
It’s a good thing for all of us.
For the past decade I’ve been railing against binary thinking: the tendency to boil all issues down to pro-con, left-right, either-or. That tendency gets fostered not only by our two-party political system, but also by press reporters who try to demonstrate balance by giving voice to “the other side.” It gets promoted by the use of parliamentary procedure: the deliberative process that drives all decisions to a yes-no vote. In reality, most issues possess multiple sides. Some have more facets than a cut diamond.
I came into such a discovery while stumping for votes during the fidelity-chastity amendment ratification process. My opponents in those debates kept presenting more coherent and Christ-centered arguments than I had imagined possible. My resulting book, GodViews: The Convictions that Drive Us and Divide Us, proposed a five-mindset paradigm, each perspective being shaped by differing ways we see God at work in the world, different ways we define the missio Dei.
That paradigm was affirmed and enlarged during the five year journey (2001-06) of intense discussion, deliberation, and discernment with fellow Presbyterians on the Theological Task Force on Peace, Unity, and Purity of the Church (TTFPUP).
Members of the press reported things said during the task force’s polity discussions, but their keyboards sat silent while we did our daily Bible studies. Readers missed the most important part of the process. Those studies, especially the ones led by Frances Taylor Gench, proved pivotal to the process, as she teased out of the group the insights and understandings that seminal texts opened before us. Each person’s insights prodded others’ thoughts. Consensus emerged not because of political manipulation but by the collective learnings that Scripture wrought among us.
To our surprise, many of those thoughts reflected not some party-line rhetoric but the attentiveness of disciples. The Word of God prompted stunning insights and clear marching orders that spanned the ideological spectrum.
General Assembly commissioners and advisory delegates will be granted a similar chance to explore the Word of God through the voices of the church. Yes, parliamentary process will drive them to a final decision of yes-or-no. But after choosing their Moderator, they will divide into committees where they will engage the nuances of many challenging topics. They will hear voices from around the church express their hopes and dreams. And they will talk and talk and talk together — all in search of the will of God to be discerned and implemented by us all.
May these elected and commissioned leaders show us the way — both by their process and their conclusions — and may all of us be supporting them in prayer.
—JHH
