Candidates reveal their visions for the PC(USA)

Editor's note: The four candidates running in the election for moderator of the 217th General Assembly have responded to several questions from the Outlook.

In your opinion, what is the most significant matter to come before this General Assembly and how do you propose that the Assembly respond to it?
What are your goals for your moderatorial years and what strengths do you bring to the task?
In your opinion, what is the most urgent need in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) over the next five years?

Voices

What’ll be brewing in Birmingham?

Login for a printable General Assembly scorecard from the Presbyterian Outlook. This grid contains a brief summary of the hot-button topics facing our denomination and room to track the results.

Voices

CPCA: “Whosoever will may come”

Editor's Note: This year the General Assembly of the PC(USA) will meet concurrently with the GA's of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church and the Cumberland Presbyterian Church in America. This is the second of a two-part series of articles on those sister denominations.

It was May 1869, the War Between the States had concluded, and everything in Murfreesboro, Tenn., was different than it had been just a few years before. When the Cumberland Presbyterian Church (CPC) gathered for its annual General Assembly, they knew things had changed, but one big change sprang upon them before they could barely call the meeting to order. Two folks refused to sit in their assigned balcony seats.

Voices

An immodest Proposal

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), for more years than we care to recall, has been fretting about the loss of church members.

Ecclesiastical shrinkage is a complex problem, but I have discovered and hereby propose a simple solution. We should stop counting members and do away with membership rolls.

Such a proposal will doubtless elicit a collective gasp from the bureaucracy, so let me quickly point to the biblical justification for such a move.

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Mission Presbytery says “no” to atheist; “not yet” to itself

After a heated two-hour debate, the Mission Presbytery voted June 9 to direct the St. Andrews Church in Austin, Tex., to remove self-professed atheist Robert Jensen from its active member rolls and to move him to their baptized member rolls. In a surprise move, near the end of the two-day meeting, the presbytery also voted to issue a 45-day stay of implementation.

To be moved to the rolls of baptized members would make Mr. Jensen, who is a professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin, equivalent to a child who has been baptized but has not made a profession of faith.

Book Reviews

The Teaching Ministry of Congregations

by Richard Robert Osmer. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005. ISBN 0-664-22547-0. Pb., 347 pp. $29.95

Last fall my daughter entered her senior year of high school and with that came the extracurricular activity of filling out college applications and writing application essays. Though each school has had its own list of suggested topics, most of them have included an option that goes something like this, "If you could invite any three guests, from any time in history, to a dinner party, whom would you invite and what would you want to discuss with them?"

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Two Presbyterian groups announce missionary-sending plans

In the wake of budget cuts at the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), two Presbyterian groups have announced they will be sending their own missionaries overseas, probably starting this year.

Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship www.pff.net/ and The Outreach Foundation www.theoutreachfoundation.org/ issued a joint statement June 12 saying that "the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) faces a missionary sending crisis. The number of PC(USA) missionaries continues to shrink at a time when global partners are telling us that more are needed."

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Valentine officially nominated; GA to vote in Birmingham

CHICAGO -- The General Assembly Council has nominated as its new executive director Linda Bryant Valentine, a lawyer who says she likes to bring "clarity to complexity" and who thinks the Presbyterian church has "fresh and exciting stories to tell."

At a May 23 meeting in Chicago, the council voted 41-13 to nominate Valentine, following more than a year of work by a search committee. If the General Assembly agrees and elects Valentine when it meets in Birmingham in June, she would begin work July 1.

Valentine will succeed John Detterick, who is retiring this summer after serving as executive director for eight years. She would be paid $160,000 a year.

Many of the questions council members asked Valentine before they voted concerned her vision for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), which has just endured a $9.1 million downsizing, and the differences between working for large corporations, which she mostly has done, versus an organization built around religious faith.

Editorials

Divestment: A conflict of values

Let's get clear what's at stake. What's at stake is not clear.

We love our Jewish neighbors. Any lack of love any of us harbors toward any of them is sin. Our faith is rooted in Hebrew soil. Given the long history of Christian mistreatment of Jews, we bear the primary responsibility to rebuild trust between our communities.

We support the right of the nation of Israel to live in freedom with safe borders.

We love our Palestinian neighbors. Any lack of love any of us harbors toward any of them is sin. We feel a special affection for our ecumenical partners, the Palestinian Christians. Given that an international concern for justice led the United Nations to grant a homeland to the Israeli people, we bear a corresponding responsibility to promote justice for the Palestinians displaced from much of that land.

We support the rights of the Palestinians to live in freedom with safe borders.

Voices

Israel, Palestine, the General Assembly, and personal perception

As Presbyterians, the General Assembly is our continuing symbol of unity as church and the embodiment of the practice of representative government. Our denominational name alone indicates the seriousness with which we take shared leadership and public decision-making. Respect for the General Assembly loosely translates into respect for the whole church as well as a trust that God's Spirit is known not only locally and personally but also globally and in the public arena. Thus it is good to get overtures that put significant issues before the Church through its most encompassing governing body.

As a still-new staff person in Louisville, with work that relates to the social witness of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), I am pleased by the number of overtures coming to this summer's assembly. A quick review of these overtures shows that they fall into several categories, somewhat reflective of the concerns of organized groups within the denomination. Thus we have a number of overtures for and against certain standards for ordination, plus several on marriage and abortion that oppose previous General Assembly stands. Conscience is a major theme of the Peace, Unity, and Purity report, as it has been in relation to problem pregnancies and several other issues both personal and social. One of the strengths of that Task Force's work is its not limiting conscience to an un-Reformed image of purity; another strength is simply in its taking enough length to lay out its arguments fully before the commissioners.

Uncategorized

PC(USA) life and ministry after downsizing

So where does the church go from here?

The recent $9.1 million downsizing of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A)'s national staff and the reorganization of what's left leaves people asking questions.

Among them: In a shrinking denomination with fewer members and less money, but with significant enthusiasm for mission work at the grassroots, what's the role of the national church structure?

And specifically, where do Presbyterians want to focus their energies in evangelism and international mission work?

Editorials

Peace and common good

Editor's Note: This article is based on the text of a roundtable presentation at a meeting of the Presbytery of Philadelphia on April 23, 2006. Used by permission.

"As a means of pursuing peace and the common good of Israelis and Palestinians, the 2004 General Assembly adopted a seven-part resolution that affirmed its longstanding opposition to the Israeli occupation and took action to demonstrate the depth of its conviction, instructing Mission Responsibility Through Investment (MRTI) to start a process of 'phased selective divestment' consistent with General Assembly policy on responsible investing."

--PC(USA) Web site

Four basic issues arise when deciding the moral appropriateness of an action like divestment.

Voices

Servant Leadership, Pakistani style

With all the orientation and reading we did before we came to Pakistani as Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) mission co-workers, we were simply not prepared for some aspects of life in Pakistan. One of the most difficult things for us has been the matter of employing household staff. I've been raised in the strong Dutch Calvinist tradition of hard work and self-reliance; my parents have always told me that my first sentence was 'I do it myself!' And while our flat with 12-15 ex-pat teachers in Cairo where I taught as a young adult mission volunteer was carefully tended by Abdel Zaher, he was employed by the school rather than us personally.

Uncategorized

Presbyterian Global Fellowship organized; mission focus

Saying that Presbyterians should turn their attention away from denominational struggles and back out towards the world, a group of more than a dozen congregations are announcing the creation of the Presbyterian Global Fellowship (https://www.presbyterianglobalfellowship.org).

While the exact shape of the endeavor is still being formulated, the new fellowship is intended to connect Presbyterian congregations in pursuing mission work and to encourage them to support the work they consider vital through designated, targeted giving.

Its organizers -- who have been praying and talking about this for the last several months -- include Michael Walker, executive director of Presbyterians for Renewal; D. Scott Weimer, senior pastor of North Avenue Presbyterian church in Atlanta; and Vic Pentz, senior pastor of Peachtree Presbyterian church, also in Atlanta.

Book Reviews

Jesus, the Bible and Homosexuality: Explode the Myths, Heal the Church

by Jack Rogers. Louisville: WJKP, 2006. ISBN 0-664-22939-5. Pb., 176 pp. $17.95

You are invited to travel with Jack Rogers on a life-changing, personal journey as he moves from being a conservative evangelical who viewed homosexuality as a "sin" to a progressive evangelical who now promotes the acceptance of homosexual orientation and practice.

Dr. Rogers, the Moderator of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) General Assembly in 2001 and former professor of theology at Fuller and San Francisco Theological Seminaries, was asked by his pastor, Dean Thompson, in 1993 to participate in a Bible study about homosexuality. The group took seriously the seven official guidelines of the Presbyterian Church for Biblical interpretation. The first of these is "To recognize that Jesus Christ, the Redeemer, is the center of Scripture." The seventh guideline is to "Seek to interpret a particular passage of the Bible in the light of all of the Bible."

Uncategorized

Russell Nichols to retire as Hanover president

Hanover College President Russell Nichols will retire June 30, 2007, following his 20th year as president of Indiana's oldest four-year college, according to an announcement May 13.

Uncategorized

Presbyterian Coalition, TTF discuss report ramifications

CHICAGO -- Folks were civil and respectful -- no one screamed and no one threw dishes. But a blunt exchange on May 10 between board members of the Presbyterian Coalition and five members of the Theological Task Force on the Peace, Unity and Purity of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) revealed some enduring differences of opinion about what the task force is trying to accomplish -- and about what it will mean for the church if the General Assembly approves the task force report in June.

Coalition leaders have been energetically critical of the task force report, as have others from the evangelical wing of the church.

The Covenant Network of Presbyterians, which wants the PC(USA) to ordain gays and lesbians, has been more positive. And on May 9 its board of directors released a statement https://www.covenantnetwork.org/news/time4hope.htm saying it won't offer advice to General Assembly commissioners on how to vote on the task force report, saying "we trust that the voice of the Holy Spirit may be heard more clearly if the voices of partisan advocacy are still."

At this day-long gathering at a hotel in Chicago, a quarter of the 20 task force members took shots at answering a volley of questions from the Coalition -- about why they met so much in closed session, about whether the presbyteries should get to vote on what the task force is proposing, about whether they're in essence trying to "trump" the denomination's constitutional standards regarding the ordination of gays and lesbians.

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Service honoring Bill Thompson held May 13; Sermon by Kirkpatrick

A memorial service for William Phelps "Bill" Thompson, former stated clerk of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), was held May 13 in First Church, La Grange, Ill.

Current PC(USA) Stated Clerk Clifton Kirkpatrick paid tribute to his predecessor in a sermon "A Life Worthy of its Calling" based on the Bible passage Ephesians 4:1-7, 15-16.

Editorials

Bill … Jim … Linda

You barely have a chance to say farewell to Jim Andrews, and you have to say farewell to Bill Thompson, too. As the final stated clerks of the southern and northern streams, Jim and Bill together helped engineer the reunion--at the cost of one's continued ecclesiastical employment. Two decades later, their entry into the church triumphant just a few weeks apart assures that the former counterparts are both employed again, partnering in the promotion of God's reign through the cosmos.

Their legacies of leadership challenge their successors of today and tomorrow to excel

Uncategorized

True blue Cumberlanders

This summer (June 15-22, 2006) the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and the Cumberland Presbyterian Church will hold General Assemblies in Birmingham, Ala., at the same time. This planned event reminds us of a long history of our denominations.

It all began with the organization of the first General Assembly of the PCUSA in 1787-88 and the adoption of the Westminster Confession and Catechisms as the doctrinal standards of the denomination with their decided predestinarian flavor, or so some believed. Presbyterians were moving westward and southward, into Kentucky territory with its forests in the western section of the Appalachian Mountains. The territory was very cumbersome for travel and building churches.

Uncategorized

Linda Valentine nominated for GAC executive director position

Linda Bryant Valentine, a businesswoman and Presbyterian elder from Illinois, is being nominated to replace John Detterick as executive director of the General Assembly Council of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)

Voices

Great Revival sparks development of Cumberland movement, church

Editor's Note: This year the General Assembly of the PC(USA) will meet concurrently with the GA's of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church and the Cumberland Presbyterian Church in America. This is the first of a two-part series of articles on those sister denominations.

On February 3, 1810, three riders left Logan County, Kentucky. Their destination was Dickson County, Tennessee. Specifically, they sought the farm of Samuel McAdow near Burns, Tenn. Two of the riders, Finis Ewing and Samuel King, had been ordained as ministers by the Presbyterian Church since 1803 and 1804, respectively. Ephraim McLean, the third rider, had been a probationer since 1803. Samuel McAdow had been a Presbyterian minister considerably longer. Although the exact date of his ordination is unknown, McAdow had been ordained by 1796, possibly before. The dates of ordination of these frontier preachers are significant, as are the circumstances in which they found themselves in 1810.

Editorials

Church meetings, then and now

Acts 15: 1Then certain individuals came down from Judea and were teaching the brothers, "Unless you are circumcised according to the custom of Moses, you cannot be saved." 2And after Paul and Barnabas had no small dissension and debate with them, Paul and Barnabas and some of the others were appointed to go up to Jerusalem to discuss this question with the apostles and the elders. ... 4When they came to Jerusalem, they were welcomed by the church and the apostles and the elders, and they reported all that God had done with them. 5But some believers who belonged to the sect of the Pharisees stood up and said, "It is necessary for them to be circumcised and ordered to keep the law of Moses."

Let's shift the issue before that body, ever so slightly. Let's focus, not on circumcision, but on another important issue for the Jews.

Editorials

What alternatives?

As the General Assembly receives the report of the PUP Task Force and starts to discuss it, one simple question ought to be on our minds: What are our alternatives?

One, the GA can approve the report. This could lead to pressure for schism and anger breaking out because now Presbyterians will essentially permit an action that by vote of presbyteries three times in the last twenty years we have refused to approve.

Movie Reviews

The Da Vinci Code

For the churchgoing Christian, there's plenty to like about "The Da Vinci Code": The whole time, people are talking about the faith. The important places are locales like museums, libraries, and sanctuaries. Knowledge of ancient languages, (Western) history, culture, and art is essential. And it's oh, so literary, even to the point of playing with words, so that the keys to the puzzles lie with being able to figure out the clues within the words. Just delicious.

Ah, but for the churchgoing Christian, there's plenty not to like, as well.

The Presbyterian Outlook

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