Editor’s note: This article is one response to POL-01, the “Olympia overture.” To read more opinions, click here.
“It’s déjà vu all over again.” So said Yogi Berra. So say us Presbyterians. But maybe not.
When, in 1954, Lefferts Loetscher published The Broadening Church, A Study of Theological Issues in the Presbyterian Church Since 1869, a broad body of the faithful celebrated his look back at the ever-widening, open door, welcoming trends within the previous 85 years of our denominational life.
What wasn’t known was how prescient he was foreshadowing the subsequent 70 years. The embrace of civil rights (see the Confession of 1967 and Belhar Confession), the rise of gender equality (in the Brief Statement of Faith), and the empowerment of varying gender orientations (Book of Order changes) have broadened the church further than Loetscher could have imagined.
Each of those acts of broadening has also exacted a price in the form of divisions of the house.
When it comes to POL-01 and the decision to amend the Book of Order, my prayer is that GA commissioners look to the past for the lessons it holds.
The 2001 General Assembly formed a Theological Task Force on the Peace, Unity and Purity of the Church (aka PUP) to push back against the tendency to divide and divide again. The GA assigned PUP to help us – the whole PC(USA) – to find a way to hold on to one another without letting go of our differing, sincerely held convictions.
One past act that the committee resolutely aimed to accomplish was to avoid repeating the mistake made in the early 1980s when, after decades of women’s equality had been affirmed, the denomination declared that nobody could be ordained to ministerial office without promising to participate in the ordinations of women. Those uninclined to do so had been allowed to continue in ministry as conscientious objectors without being coerced into conformity. Now no disagreement was allowed. Full subscription was required.
That new policy overreached. Net result: the Evangelical Presbyterian Church tore apart the UPCUSA less than a decade after the Presbyterian Church in America tore apart the PCUS.
Good riddance? Some may say so. But to those of us serving in the PUP task force, those splits meant that generations of school girls once growing up within a larger Presbyterian tent, and growing within the influence of the broadening body, were now exiled to communities having no doors open to a ministerial vocation or even ruling elder/deacon callings for their church service. Women’s subservience and exclusion have prevailed in hundreds of churches over these many years.
All this adds up to an appeal from one of those PUP Task Force members that the embrace and welcome of LGBTQIA+ persons not get set back by another overreach, putting into place the coercive requirement to 100% conformity. Doing so can only produce the welcoming of one group by the excluding of another.
May the commissioners and delegates to the 226th GA continue to extend an ever-widening, open-door welcome to many more persons God so loves, without pushing others out the back door.
While Loetscher’s historical summary proved to be prescient with regard to Presbyterianism’s broadening fellowship and leadership, he didn’t prove to be prescient with regard to Presbyterianism’s broadening reach, growth and participation. Just 10 years after publishing his book, the Presbyterian Baby Boom turned, and the denomination has been shrinking without relief.
When it comes to POL-01 and the decision to amend the Book of Order, my prayer is that GA commissioners look to the past for the lessons it holds. May the commissioners and delegates to the 226th GA continue to extend an ever-widening, open-door welcome to many more persons God so loves, without pushing others out the back door. We need no déjà vu like that one again.
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