PITTSBURGH, June 30, 2012 – The four candidates for moderator of the 220th General Assembly got an early shot at impressing the crowd at the Presbyterian Outlook’s lunch June 30 – an event that’s traditionally viewed as a General Assembly kickoff and which takes place just hours before the moderator’s election.
At the lunch, Outlook editor Jack Haberer also presented a major award to Laura Mendenhall, the former president of Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga., and a pastor with a long history of service to the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
Christopher Edmonston, pastor of White Memorial Presbyterian Church in Raleigh, N.C. and president of the Outlook Foundation’s Board of Directors, introduced more than a half dozen former assembly moderators. And Cynthia Bolbach, moderator of the 219th General Assembly, drew a sustained standing ovation when she was introduced to make brief remarks. At a time of immense change for the church, “we need the Outlook,” Bolbach told the crowd. “We need their analysis, their reporting,” as an independent journalistic voice.
Moderator candidates. The four candidates for moderator each were given four minutes to speak – with their speaking order determined by drawing straws.
Going first, Neal D. Presa, a teaching elder from New Jersey, spoke of the PC(USA) being like a household in which some family members have moved out, some are locked in their rooms and others plan to leave. He suggested it’s time for a family meeting with all at the table – like the tradition in South African, Korean and Filipino cultures of “gathering at table, feasting where all are welcome.”
Susan Davis Krummel, a teaching elder who serves as executive/general presbyter of the Presbytery of Great Rivers in Illinois, described how potatoes grow from a single eye of a potato left over from last season and cut up, then planted with hope. New life comes from “something that looks like it is all used up, that it is ready to throw out” – the same idea some have about mainline denominations, she said.
The PC(USA) needs to determine what part of the body of Christ it needs to be, Krummel said, “because we’re kind of turning into the appendix . . . People notice us only when we cause pain and nausea.”
Robert Austell, a teaching elder from North Carolina, referred to local congregations as being “the frontier mission of God’s work in the world,” saying that “we exist to do whatever God wants with us.” The PC(USA) deals with many controversial issues, but “they have eclipsed what is most important, which is to be the church in the world,” Austell said.
Randy Branson, a teaching elder from Texas, spoke about a Cherokee grandfather who told his grandchild a story of how each human is occupied by two wolves. One thrives on negativity – anger, greed, lies, jealousy – and the other on joy, peace, love and empathy.
“Which wolf wins?” the child asked.
“The one you feed,” the grandfather replied.
Ernest Trice Thompson Award. Haberer presented Mendenhall with the Ernest Trice Thompson Award, named to honor the man who founded the Outlook and served as its co-editor for nearly 60 years. Mendenhall is currently a part-time designated pastor of the Presbyterian Church of Lake Travis in Texas and is senior philanthropy advisor for the Texas Presbyterian Foundation. She has served the church at many levels, including as a pastor, a seminary president, a missionary co-worker in Africa, chair of the General Assembly Permanent Judicial Commission, as chair of the Committee on Theological Education and as a member of the Commission on Christians and Jews.
