Is your pastor a theologian?
A long time ago, when I was first at Princeton Theological Seminary, President James McCord informed incoming students that all pastors should consider themselves to be theologians. I was wise enough (or naive enough) to take his advice literally, and in my own ministry I have always tried to achieve the goal he set for us.
We all have memories, often treasured, of Christmas seasons past. First as children, then parents and grandparents in our older years, we remember the stories we heard first in our youth and have continued to read in our latter years.
We all remember Charles Dickens, who left us The Christmas Carol (1843) about the tightwad Ebenezer Scrooge, who was transformed by visits from the Spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Future. Scrooge finally got with it and celebrated the Yuletide by raising his clerk, Bob Cratchit's wages and giving support to Bob's crippled son, Tiny Tim. Dickens was an English author who set the standard for Christmas tales.
OUTLOOK readers ought to know that Presbyterians have contributed to our understandings about Christmas with their holiday stories.
Remember the parable of the talents in Matthew 25: 14-30? The servants who are rewarded are the ones who are given ten and five talents, and produce ten and five more. The servant who is chastised is the one who takes his one talent and buries it. Yes, yes, the 'talent' in the parable referred to a unit of money and not to individual ability. Nonetheless, it's irresistible for preachers and other well-meaning commentators to apply the metaphor of personal talents. The message would be something like, 'Use your gifts, especially if they can help someone else.'
Well, that's also the message of 'The Incredibles.' This is an animated Pixar feature, where the voices are notable actors, but it's all programmed into the graphics, just like the music soundtrack and the cutting-edge visuals. This is pure high-tech, because there's not a 'real' scene in it. But it's engaging, nonetheless, in part because of the compelling character development.
Much of the conflict involving the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and its policy involving Israel and divestment is being played out on the big stage -- at the national and even international levels.
But PC(USA) leaders are being reminded that decisions the denomination has made nationally are having repercussions too in local communities, for local churches.
"This Sunday we will have a squad car in front of the church I serve in Forest Hills," Charles Brewster, pastor of Forest Hills Presbyterian in the New York City area, said recently during the moderator's conference in Louisville -- a gathering of presbytery moderators and other regional leaders from around the country. Brewster, the moderator of New York City presbytery, was voicing concern about an anonymous letter threatening violence at Presbyterian churches in protest over the PC(USA)'s plan to consider selective, phased divestment involving some companies doing business in Israel. That letter was mailed from Queens, not far from Brewster's church, "and we take the threat very seriously and we are all frightened," he said.
Florence Henderson, an elder and the vice-moderator of Baltimore presbytery, said Presbyterians there have been "bombarded" with questions about "what has happened, why has it happened?"
Susan Wittjen, an elder and moderator of New Covenant presbytery, said Presbyterian and Jewish leaders in Texas have been discussing their discomfort with a recent trip the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy made to the Middle East -- a fact-finding tour that included a controversial meeting on Oct. 17 with Hezbollah leaders in Lebanon. Jewish leaders were unhappy about the Hezbollah meeting, and wanted more publicity for a letter that top PC(USA) leaders -- John Detterick, executive director of the General Assembly Council, Clifton Kirkpatrick, the denomination's stated clerk, and Rick Ufford-Chase, moderator of the 216th General Assembly -- issued calling that meeting "misguided, at best" (see OUTLOOK, Nov. 15 issue, p.7.)
'The Polar Express' is an animation film that features Tom Hanks voicing several roles on his way to making a Christmas movie that looks and feels really different, especially on IMAX.
Our unnamed hero is a little boy who's just old enough to start doubting Santa Claus. He overhears his parents telling each other that he's shared his doubts with his younger sister. The mother and dad say, 'This may be the last year of the magic.' The little boy falls asleep, and the next thing he knows, a big train pulls up in his front yard, where the conductor offers to take him to the North Pole.
'Finding Neverland' is the play within the play within the play that is really about finding the magic at the heart of imagination. And, fittingly enough, it's all about believing.
Johnny Depp plays J. M. Barrie, the playwright who wrote Peter Pan. It's London, 1903. The theater is the exclusive reserve of high society: reserved people in reserved seats. Barrie has enjoyed some success, but he'd not gotten in touch with his 'inner child' enough to pen the story that would immortalize him. Until he met the Davies family.
The Mom (Kate Winslet) is alone with her four sons, and somewhat destitute since her husband died. Her overbearing mother (Julie Christie) provides material relief, but emotionally, she's a dead weight. She constantly fusses about discipline and responsibility, and seriousness. As if, should there be any playfulness left in them at all, it would soon be snuffed out for lack of a belief that it was important. Sort of like Tinkerbell.
The 216th General Assembly (2004) has sent sixteen proposed amendments to the Book of Order to the presbyteries for their affirmative or negative votes. Presbyteries may place some or all amendments in a consent agenda or omnibus motion following the instructions in the amendments booklet. Amendments 04-B.1 and 04-B.2 may be voted on as amendment B and amendments 04-E.1a through 04-E.9 may be voted on as amendment E, but presbyteries should follow the instructions for reporting votes.
Brief pro and con arguments are given for each proposed amendment.
As the first faint light of Christmas cast its imperceptible glow around the celebration of Thanksgiving, I preached and celebrated the Lord’s Supper in the renovated chapel at an ecumenical Christian community, Richmond Hill.
Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Is peace possible?
I have been increasingly troubled by our continued reliance on the “just war” theory as a path toward credible peacemaking. In the last three years, my chagrin has grown to an almost visceral discomfort with the rhetoric and the reality of the “war on terrorism.”
Union Seminary had let out for the 1957 Christmas holiday, and I had come home, looking forward to being with my parents, and to sharing the good news that I had "met someone" with whom I might get serious. As I looked about the neat little house my parents had just built in the York County, S.C. countryside, I noticed that there was a new woman keeping watch over the modest Christmas display.
A committee of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has announced six criteria it says the church should use in deciding whether to divest in certain multinational companies doing business in Israel.
The PC(USA)'s Mission Responsibility Through Investment committee, meeting Nov. 4-6 in New York, drafted six criteria to guide the denomination in its divestment decisions, while emphasizing that any decisions will be made in a careful, deliberate way. The PC(USA) holds more than $7.5 billion in investments through the Presbyterian Foundation and the Board of Pensions, and the earliest any stock could be sold as a deliberate divestment action would be after the next General Assembly meets in 2006.
The question of whether the PC(USA) should divest in companies active in Israel, in protest over Israel's treatment of the Palestinian people -- or whether such a proposal is anti-Semitic or a bad idea, as some have contended -- has been white-hot since the General Assembly authorized a process of phased, selective divestment by a 431-62 vote last June.
The fallout from Presbyterian actions involving the Middle East continues to rain down.
On Nov. 11, the denomination announced that it no longer employs two Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) national staff members who traveled to the Middle East last month and were involved in a controversial meeting with Hezbollah, a group that the U.S. State Department lists as a terrorist organization.
Gone are Kathy Lueckert, who as deputy director of the General Assembly Council was considered part of the top level of the denomination's leadership, and Peter Sulyok, coordinator for the past dozen years of the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy.
In announcing the departures, John Detterick, executive director of the General Assembly Council, did not make it clear if Lueckert and Sulyok resigned or were fired -- or say precisely why they no longer are PC(USA) employees, citing in a written statement their right to confidentiality.
But the Hezbollah visit, made during a two-week fact-finding tour by the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy -- a visit that also included high-level meetings with political, human rights and religious leaders around the Middle East -- had provoked strong and immediate criticism both from Jewish leaders already angry with the PC(USA), and by some from within the Presbyterian church.
Presbyterian-Jewish relations have been tense since the General Assembly's decision, last summer, to begin a process of phased, selective divestment in some companies doing business in Israel, in protest over Israel's treatment of the Palestinian people.
In Meredith Wilson’s enchanting musical, “The Music Man”, Prof. Harold Hill comes to River City and tricks the whole town into buying his mail order musical instruments for a new children’s band. The parents are dubious, but the kids are excited. On the day of the promised delivery, they wonder in song if there is anything coming “for me”.
Editorial note: Retired Presbyterian pastor Ralph Bucy in the December 20/27 2004 issue of the OUTLOOK in his opinion piece "Beyond Reinhold Niebuhr" writes about Christian Realism and current events. It responds to an OUTLOOK editorial of November 1 entitled "Where is Reinhold Niebuhr?" by O. Benjamin Sparks. Since this editorial appeared while the OUTLOOK web site was inactive, it and Bucy's response appear below.
on Isaiah 9:2b-7 and cities of no refuge:
Tehran, Baghdad, New York, Sarajevo, Beirut, Hanoi, Selma, Nagasaki…
The warriors’ tramping boots their martial cadence count
dawn to day to dusk to dark by sighs.
With this issue The Presbyterian Outlook introduces the columns of Ron Ferguson, who was a journalist before attending divinity school and becoming a Presbyterian minister. He studied at St. Andrews, Edinburgh, and Duke Universities. Ron began as a pastor in a huge public housing area in Glasgow, Scotland, called Easterhouse (a place more like Gethsemane and Calvary than Easter).
Editor’s Note: This presentation was made at the recent Dialogue on Anti-Semitism at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif. The speaker, Sari Ateek, was presenting the night’s dialogue participants, Rabbi Dr. Elliott Dorff and Fuller President, Dr. Richard Mouw.
Before I introduce our two speakers for the evening, I’d like to share with you a few personal remarks. When I was first asked to do the introductions for this dialogue, I have to admit that I found myself initially hesitant for at least a couple of reasons.
A presbytery cannot require a congregation to pay all of its per capita or to fulfill a mission pledge in order to receive financial assistance from the presbytery, the General Assembly Permanent Judicial Commission has ruled.
The ruling helps answer the ongoing question of what presbyteries can do -- or not do -- when congregations refuse to pay all or part of their per capita assessments, often to protest positions taken by the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). And it affirms a decision issued last April by the Permanent Judicial Commission of the Synod of Mid-America.
The General Assembly Permanent Judicial Commission, the PC(USA)'s highest court, had earlier ruled, in July 2003 in the Minihan v. Scioto Valley Presbytery case, that a presbytery can't force a session to pay per capita, the per-member assessment that the General Assembly sets, and it can't punish a session for failing to pay per capita. While paying per capita is not mandatory, in a connectional system it is strongly encouraged, the judicial commission ruled in that case, stating that withholding funds "as a mean of protest or dissent" is "a serious breach of the trust and love with which our Lord Jesus intends the covenant community to function."
Celebrate, Celebrate, Celebrate said the words of the theme song for the 24th General Assembly of the World Alliance of Reformed Churches (WARC) held in Accra, Ghana, July 30-August 13, 2004. It focused on the Scripture assuring life in fullness (John 10:10). The words and the tune reverberated throughout the campuses of University of Ghana, Legon and the Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA).
Gratitude, if and when it does arrive,
seems very seldom centered on the meal itself.
Yes, the sacred bird with all its panoply
is blessed in solemn, if embarrassed grace.
Reformation Day (which this year – perhaps too appropriately – fell on Halloween) provides a needful occasion on which to reflect on the role of Scripture and preaching in the Presbyterian Church. The matter is made urgent by the recent election that sacrificed (at a cost of 600 million dollars on the presidential race alone) substantive debate about the serious issues before this republic on the altar of entertainment, spin, and downright dirty lies.
Does there come a time for everyone
when looking forward yields
to looking back; when fond memory
takes over from anticipation
and what has been holds pride of place
(PNS) The General Assembly Permanent Judicial Commission (GAPJC) of the Presbyterian Church (USA) has ruled that a session's failure to pay its per capita apportionment cannot be the sole factor in the presbytery's determination whether that congregation is eligible for requesting financial assistance from the presbytery.
In it's Oct. 18 decision in Johnston, et. al. v. Heartland Presbytery, the commission also ruled that a congregation's failure to pay its per capita apportionment and mission pledge could not be the determinative factor in a presbytery's refusal to grant assistance to that congregation. At the same time, the GAPJC determined that "a congregation's effort to pay its full per capita apportionment and to fulfill a mission pledge is clearly relevant as one factor among many others that a presbytery may consider in exercising its stewardship responsibility to allocate limited resources in action upon a congregation's request for assistance."
It's the sermon pastors hate to preach, the ones congregations hate even more to hear.
It usually comes in the fall, and it's when they ask, cajole, even plead for ... money
And, theologically, it's all about God, our relationship with money, and thanksgiving.
"Gratitude is at the heart of our spirituality in the Reformed tradition," Tim Hart-Andersen, pastor of Westminster church in Minneapolis, preached last spring at a Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) gathering on stewardship. "There is no other human response to God more basic than gratitude, a deep thanksgiving that wells up from within . . . Our churches and those who inhabit them need such a rekindling of biblical stewardship, where we learn again what once we knew so well: `The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof.' " (Psalm 24:1)
The PC(USA) lost two outstanding leaders almost exactly a week apart with the deaths of C. Kenneth Hall on October 15 and Shirley Guthrie on October 23 (see obituaries in the November 8 and today’s issues of OUTLOOK). Both exercised extraordinary spiritual gifts in lives wholly committed to the gospel of Jesus Christ and to ministry in the Presbyterian Church (USA).
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