This key question arises in many discussions related to restructuring at the denominational offices in Louisville, a global economic recession, reviews of the PC(USA) Washington Office as well as a review of the relationship between the Advocacy Committee for Women’s Concerns (ACWC), the Advocacy Committee for Racial Ethnic Concerns (ACREC), and the Advisory Committee for Social Witness Policy (ACSWP). These discussions are adding to perennial theological debates about the church’s social mission.
My response to the question could simply be “yes.” Recognizing the need to take seriously the current context of these conversations in church and society, I want to offer three reasons why we as a denomination cannot afford to lose advocacy groups.
Advocacy groups were formed to assist our church in reaching out and looking in
Every confessional statement included in The Book of Confessions makes the claim that God is the “Maker of heaven and earth” and that we are God’s children. To confess that God is creator of all is to say that there is nothing in our common life that separates us from God’s presence. Therefore, we, as Christians, are called to engage the world.
In Always Being Reformed: Faith for a Fragmented World, theologian Amy Plantinga Pauw comments on a “worldly spirituality.” Worldly spirituality, Pauw writes, is responsive to God’s continually creating presence and “has to do with the things of the world: material reality, bodies, communal issues of power, money, gender and race.”1
Pauw names communicative and critical practices among three practices that churches need to cultivate in order to foster a worldly spirituality. “The communicative practices of the church are directed outward. They counter the church’s tendency to what Karl Barth calls ‘pious egocentricity’.”2 Gospel stories invite Christian communities to reach out beyond their own walls by listening, giving, and continuing acts of healing; these acts are both charitable and political by nature.
Critical practice is a second practice that Pauw describes. “It has been one of the special tasks and privileges of the Reformed tradition to insist on the peccability of the church, that is, the church’s proneness to sin. The church as the body of Christ on earth is a broken and diseased body, mirroring the ills and division of the larger society.”3 Critical practices invite the discernment of the larger community and encourage churches to look in and to examine carefully the ways that churches themselves sometimes miss the mark.
Pauw points out, “Faithfulness sometimes requires resistance to established beliefs, policies, and rituals of the visible church.”4 This has been true for Reformed communities from their very beginning. For example, John Calvin personally reached out and helped to begin industries for unemployed, introduced ways to regulate commerce to protect the weakest members of society, and established free education and city run medical services. Many of the reformers, including Martin Luther, Katherine von Bora, and Calvin worked to provide relief services for refugees. Calvin also examined church practice, opposed the use of images in worship, and argued against clerical celibacy.
The advocacy groups that we know today received their current form in 1993 to assist the PC(USA) in reaching out and looking in by “providing advice, recommendations, resources, information, or counsel” to the larger church. As we increase our awareness of the social, economic, and political problems that we are facing in the United States and as a global community, we also become acutely aware that the problems are too large for any one person, office, or organization to address. We need advocacy groups to work on our behalf, to monitor what is happening, to nudge the church’s social conscience, and to keep us informed.
There is still reason to be concerned about justice
No one could deny that some significant progress has been made in both church and society related to justice for people who live on the margins of church and society — women, peoples of color, persons with disabilities, many people living in poverty. Women now have the right to vote. Women have served in nearly all levels of government office in the United States. Civil rights for African Americans have been won. As a nation, we have provided for some important protections for people with disabilities and those who live in poverty. Women can now be ordained in the PC(USA) as ministers and elders and many presbyteries have created initiatives to expand racial ethnic ministries. Some will argue that since we have experienced such progress we no longer need to do advocacy work. Other issues, such as the decline in denominational membership and giving, are more important.
However, there is still reason for concern. In the United States, women are still underpaid when compared with men working the same fields and with the same level of experience (earning about 77 cents on the dollar in comparison to men according to the U.S. Census Bureau). Almost 25% of women between the ages of 18 and 65 have experienced domestic violence. Larger proportions of African Americans and Hispanic people earn poverty-level wages in the United States. A stained glass ceiling for women still exists for women in our church; only 48% of members in PC(USA) congregations are comfortable with women serving as head of staff in a multi-staff congregation.5 People in our churches continue to experience discriminatory behavior and harassment because of their race (46% of pastors, 36% of specialized clergy, 16% of elders, and 13% of members report observing “discriminatory behavior, or harassment toward, or heard prejudicial statements about a person or group of persons in [their] congregation based on their racial or ethnic background.”)6
These statistics serve only as small examples and don’t really even graze the surface or touch upon issues faced in the larger global community or the exploitation of our natural environment. More work needs to be done to increase our understanding of why such problems persist, and, for Christians, more work needs to be done to understand God’s vision for justice today.
Advocacy groups help to cultivate and equip leaders for church and society
The urgent need for the PC(USA) to identify, cultivate, and equip strong leaders for churches has been a recurring theme in Presbyterian publications recently. Advocacy groups play an important role in cultivating leaders for church and society among both laity and clergy. Kennedy McGowan, pastor of First Church, Hollywood, Fla., supported the Coalition for the Immokalee Workers and the PC(USA)’s Campaign for Fairer Food with a petition for fair wages that they were circulating. Members of his congregation traveled to Immokalee to learn about the circumstances in which the workers were living. McGowan was quoted by the Presbyterian News Service as saying that the experience was “powerful, informative and transformational.”7
Carol Howard Merritt comments in her book Tribal Church that finding ways to respond to social justice issues is particularly important for younger generations — our next generation of leaders. “For younger generations, ‘mission’ is more of a verb than a noun. Rather than referring simply to writing a check, it means getting out and doing something like feeding the homeless in soup kitchens, caring for the sick through AIDS teams, cultivating a community garden, or working with Habitat for Humanity.”8 Through these practices we find ourselves face-to-face with structures of social injustice. We also need to challenge ourselves further to learn new practices of advocacy and witness that will enable us to engage the very structures that continue to entangle and push people to the margins of our society. Advocacy groups cultivate and equip leaders who will roll up their sleeves, engage in justice-oriented work, educate them about strategies to create change, and have the potential to help people build relationships with those living on the margins.
New Questions Emerge
Advocacy groups do important formative and transformative work by raising consciousness about the social problems before us and asking questions that encourage us to examine social and ecclesial practices and beliefs. The PC(USA) has an impressive body of social witness policy at least in part because of the work of advocacy groups such as ACWC, ACREC, and ACSWP. Our long and strong history of social witness is something to celebrate.
Rather than asking whether or not we need to be involved in advocacy, I think that other key questions must be brought to tables for discussion:
• What would happen to our church’s public witness if we lost advocacy committees? If we had not been engaged in such work in the past would we so clearly have been able to stand against slavery, torture, and the exploitation of our environment, and to witness for the provision of health care, quality education, family-sustaining wages, and civil rights for all people? Would we have the foresight to address the social problems of tomorrow or lose our distinctive voice as a church on social justice issues?
• How can we strengthen our advocacy committees and networks to address the problems that we will face in the 21st century?
• How do we begin to consider advocacy that will invite people from the margins to our own tables for discussion?
My hope is that congregations, presbyteries, and other denominational organizations will continue this discussion at their own tables and consider the importance of communal discernment for advocacy in the PC(USA) on all levels of the church.
Elizabeth Hinson-Hasty is a member of the theology faculty at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Ky. She is a PC(USA) Minister of Word and Sacrament.
1 Amy Platinga Pauw, “Church Practices for a Worldly Spirituality,” in Always Being Reformed: Faith for a Fragmented World, edited by Shirley Guthrie. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2008, 106.
2 Ibid., 109.
3 Ibid., 113.
4 Ibid.
5 The Women in the Church Survey, Research Services, November 2007.
6 The Racism and Racial Justice Survey, Research Services, 2000.
7 “Coalition of Immokalee Workers to Submit Petition Signed by Faith Community to Florida Governor,” Presbyterian News Service, March 6, 2009. Accessed on June 1, 2009 via Internet at https:// www.pcusa.org/pcnews/2009/09179.htm.
8 Carol Howard Merritt, Tribal Church: Ministering to the Missing Generation. Herndon: The Alban Institute, 2007.
