Covenant Network sets timetable for seeking change in ordination standards

“I can see the hurt, the pain and the frustration every single year,” as the ordination question comes before the General Assembly, and “I find that almost abusive and self-mutilating to do that every single year,” said one seminary student during a question and answer session at the Covenant Network’s national meeting, held Nov. 6-8 in Washington, D. C.

But the next speaker responded that “my approach is not strategic … As a matter of witness it is important to me to make the argument every chance, every place we have to make it.”

The leadership of the Covenant Network has struggled to decide what’s the right strategy — and how to keep the fire burning under the ordination question while also giving the theological task force space in which to work. The goal is to work for change “without destroying the church we love,” said Eugene Bay, a pastor from Bryn Mawr, Pa., who is co-moderator of the network along with Joanna Adams, a minister from Chicago.

There’s also an unspoken underlying question. The Covenant Network has said publicly it will push for a change in the ordination standards in 2006. What happens if the task force — whose members say they’re listening for the guidance of the Holy Spirit — comes up with a different recommendation? In other words, what if the Holy Spirit takes them to a different place? Covenant Network board members say they can always change their minds, but in the meantime, they’re not willing to do and say nothing.

Chris Glaser, a gay Presbyterian who preached during the opening worship that “a whole segment of the church is being stooped by an unjust law,” put it another way during a workshop. “God’s in charge of the timing,” Glaser said. Yet “we also say we’re going to wait until ’06 to let God do it.”

While it waits for the task force, the Covenant Network board has several strategies in mind:

• At the 2004 General Assembly, the Covenant Network will push for the removal of the authoritative interpretations that were in place before the PC(USA)’s Constitution was changed to the current ordination standards, which limit ordination in the denomination to those who practice fidelity if they are married or chastity if they are single. According to Covenant Network board member Doug Nave, the argument goes that those old understandings — that self-affirming, practicing homosexuals couldn’t serve in ordained ministry — preceded the constitutional change, so they are no longer binding. And a decision that an authoritative interpretation no longer applies can be made by a General Assembly, Nave said — it doesn’t have to be submitted to the presbyteries for a vote.

• The organization will try to use the time between now and 2006 to try to change hearts and minds. Covenant Network has hired Lou McAlister East to organize support in the southeastern United States, where, it was mentioned repeatedly, those who favor gay ordination didn’t carry a single presbytery the last time it was voted on. Progressives are being urged to initiate conversations with conservatives in their presbyteries — to some extent, a modeling of what the task force is doing — with the hope of building relationships and perhaps softening the opposition. The Covenant Network plans to hold what it calls “major theological conferences” on sexual ethics next year, on Christian discipleship in 2005 and on the meaning of ordination in 2006.

• And there is a concerted effort to tell the stories of gays and lesbians and their impact on the church. Macky Alston, a filmmaker from New York, collected e-mail addresses and phone numbers at this meeting from people willing to talk of their own experiences — of people who’ve left the Presbyterian church because they couldn’t be ordained, of parents who saw things differently after a son or daughter told them they were homosexual, of gays and lesbians who are convinced that God is calling them to ministry, of heterosexuals who once opposed gay ordination but changed their minds. Alice Anderson, a minister from National Capital presbytery, helped lead a workshop called “Counting the Cost,” which included excerpts from a book that’s being developed to tell other stories. The idea: that, all across the United States, attitudes about homosexuality are shifting (“the train has left the station,” is how some in the Covenant Network put it) and that it will happen in the church too, story by story, one person at a time.

One family to whom that’s already happened showed up at this conference: a mother and father, and their gay son, who asked that their names not be used, because they haven’t discussed the matter with some family members. After the young man came out, the parents — the father was a four-term elder — felt so uncomfortable in their church, where they’d heard people make disparaging remarks about homosexuals, that they left. “These people have known him since he was born,” the father said. But when the parents spoke to one of their pastors about what was happening in the family — picking the one they thought would be most receptive — that minister told the young man that homosexuality was wrong and that he could change if he only wanted to. The father said that when the family left the congregation, despite their many years of service, not a single person said they were sorry or asked them why.

“The Holy Spirit is shaking the foundations of the church, forcing us to get off our butts and shake with Christ,” Ken Kovacs, pastor of Catonsville church in Baltimore preached one morning. Using as his text the 24th chapter of Luke, where Jesus after his death appeared to two men on the road to Emmaus, who at first did not know him. When their eyes were opened and they recognized him, Jesus vanished immediately.

That shattering experience threw them into crisis and chaos, into “the start of something radically new,” Kovacs preached. They understood in a flash that God was at work doing a new thing. He urged the crowd of about 600 to consider the Holy Spirit as kinetic power, a provoker, an afflicter pushing the church to new understandings. And Kovacs said he does not want to be part of a church “that cannot be clear about God’s radical, inclusive love.”

Relations with ‘The Three Sisters’

How radical to be — how pushy, how soon — is clearly something with which the Covenant Network is struggling. There were some hints that relationships may be improving between Covenant Network and the “Three Sisters” — More Light Presbyterians, That All May Freely Serve and the Shower of Stoles — all of which have been more aggressive in the past year about insisting on change now. But there are still tensions.

The current ordination standard “is wrong and we want it out,” Tricia Dykers Koenig, Covenant Network’s national organizer, told a workshop session. “Our goal is the quickest possible route to removal … We need to change the church.”

Koenig also pushed people at the conference to take responsibility, to not complain that things don’t change if they’re not willing to do the work. “People don’t live in a national church, they live in presbyteries,” she said, urging to organize local Covenant Network chapters and telling them, “Don’t expect change in the church to happen by some magic formula if where you are, you’re not working to change the church.”

But there was also public discussion of what strategy is best — of whether it’s better or worse to push for another vote now when that might bring another loss, of what’s the best way to change people’s hearts, of what the cost is in the lives of those whose ordination is being denied.

Cheryl Pyrch, a lesbian, asked Koenig how specific she should be in discussing her personal life if she’s being examined for possible ordination. Koenig responded that she wouldn’t advise Pyrch to talk about her sex life, although “we don’t think that’s a disqualifier” — the question of whether “chastity” and “celibacy” are the same thing hasn’t been judicially determined, Koenig said.

And “you can’t ask one category of people about their sex lives unless you’re going to ask every candidate for ministry about their sex life,” said David Colby, a Covenant Network board member and a pastor from Minnesota. “I don’t think this is a church that wants to ask that.”

But not everyone agreed.

One young man, who is married, said he wants a church that does hold him accountable for sexual responsibility — that’s willing to hold him to his marriage vows and to talk about Christian sexual ethics.

A woman from California said gays and lesbians in committed relationships are often afraid to even refer to a partner, even though heterosexuals do that routinely. She pointed out that Colby had mentioned during the introductions that he recently was married, and another man spoke of celebrating his 45th wedding anniversary.

And Pyrch said that knowing she won’t be asked about her sex life “is not the same thing as having the freedom to tell.” And “if I choose to tell, where will people be behind me?” she asked. “Will you say I shouldn’t have told,” even if you think the current ordination standards are wrong?

During another workshop, people were asked to list the pros and cons of the two approaches — pushing for change now, or waiting for the task force. One woman said she sees Covenant Network standing inside the church, trying to push the doors open, and the Three Sisters on the outside, pulling from the other side. “I’m hoping,” she said, “that we’re not fighting over the doors and keeping them shut.”

Other Issues

This meeting wasn’t all about homosexuality and ordination: its theme was “The Church We are Called to Be, and to Become,” and people spoke of other visions too.

Bruce Reyes-Chow, in describing the multicultural new church development he pastors in San Francisco, called Mission Bay, said he was disappointed to look out at the Covenant Network crowd and see almost all white faces. Reyes-Chow said he thinks about the church his three daughters will inherit when they grow up — a place where they can understand and experience God — and “this is not the church I dream about.”

Susan Andrews, moderator of the 215th General Assembly and a former member of the Covenant Network board (she resigned after she was elected), spoke of her hope for a Presbyterian church that’s multicultural, evangelical and “purposefully paradoxical.” The PC(USA) has a goal of at least 10 percent racial-ethnic membership by 2010, but for that to happen, Andrews said, things have to change. For example, she said, none of the multicultural worship services she’s attended so far have lasted less than an hour and 45 minutes.

(Andrews also pointed out during a small-group discussion that many Asians, Hispanics, and African Americans are conservative when it comes to homosexuality: they often don’t think gays and lesbians should be ordained. Speaking to a group of young adults, Andrews said one Korean-American minister who supports gay ordination told her “I was not allowed to breathe that to any of the other Korean-American pastors or they would never speak to him again.”)

One of the last day’s speakers was Patrick Henry, executive director of the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research in Collegeville, Minn., described a church as he envisions it that is faithful to the Christian gospel but has a fresh perspective, that is neither “churchy” or “Christian-y.”