So what happens when a pastor-theological-task-force-member tries to don a pastor-editor hat? Simple answer: It raises boundary issues.
I've spent two-plus decades quickly changing in the roles and tasks of the normally complicated pastoral ministry. Now I'm simultaneously wearing two particular hats: editor and theological task force member. Doing so raising questions about how to respect the integrity of each role.
In September of 2001, the Clear Lake Church Session and I prayed as we sought God's wisdom, regarding the possibility of my serving on the Theological Task Force on Peace, Unity and Purity of the Church. Together we concluded that God was calling me to serve as a minister-member of the TTFPUP. They believed God was calling them and the congregation to commission me to join with 19 others in search of better ways for Presbyterians to hold on to one another while holding on to their differing convictions.
In September of 2005, the Presbyterian Outlook Foundation board of directors and I prayed as we sought God's wisdom regarding the possibility of my serving at the Outlook. Together we concluded that God was calling me to serve as editor-in-chief. They believed God was calling them to commission me to join with thousands of readers in the Outlook community to help Presbyterians catch a fresh vision for dynamic ministry, strengthen efforts in cultural transformation, deepen spiritual vitality, and find better ways to hold on to one another while holding on to their differing convictions.
"Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely." Clichés are clichés, and truisms are truisms. But Lord Acton's most famous cliché posits enough truth to cause any thinking American to tremble with fear.
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, most westerners rejoiced. This symbol of Soviet totalitarianism had crumbled, and freedom was singing a new song. However, a handful of those rejoicing also began to tremble. They asked, "What will become of America if it remains the lone superpower in the world? Will she muster sufficient character and courage to contain the corrosive effects of unchecked power in this new world?"
When the earlier Bush government felt compelled to send troops to Kuwait to defend its ally against the Iraqi invasion there, it achieved its basic goals. The military withdrew, encouraging the hope of other nations that we would not over-assert our power.
Then 911 happened. The appearance of invulnerability was shattered. Americans were taken hostage by fear of further attacks. Ends now could justify means, that is, if the ends in view included the preservation of American's freedoms. And what of those means? What about a second invasion of Iraq driven by a complicated mix of incomplete espionage regarding alleged weapons of mass destruction over there, alongside a hunger for justice (vengeance?) over here. Would dubious ends justify the means of a new war? What should we do with the resulting prisoners of war? Could we extract information from them that might avert more terror-caused carnage?
So we know that the Scriptures are inspired by God and are authoritative for the church's faith and life. Does that mean that the words in Scripture uttered by angels are just as inspired as those spoken by God or humans? Do their words carry clout, or can we dismiss them as being platitudes? Getting specific, what's to be made of the angels' song to the shepherds, 'Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace..." (Luke 2:14a)? If the chief end of humans is to glorify God, then the first line of the angelic song sounds substantive. What about the second line, the one that sings the promise of "peace?"
Granted, modern translators differ as to who should receive the peace promise. Is peace to be experienced by "all people?" Is it intended for "all people of good will?" Or is it being offered only to "those on whom God's favor rests?" What's for sure is that the peace is to be experienced by many, including at least all recipients of God's saving grace. It may be intended, as suggested in other biblical passages, for all persons created by God. Indeed, given the plan for the wolf to lie down with the lamb, it appears that God promises peace for all creation.
What about that peace? Holiday carols sing its melody. Christmas cards echo its refrain. But do we really want it?
Deck the halls with expectation. 'Tis the season for anticipation.
The original lyrics better fit the tune, but these words do fit the season. Children dream sugarplum dreams. Soldiers count down the days to a holiday leave. Shoppers look forward to a smiling friend unwrapping that perfect gift. Worshipers sing of the arrival of the Savior.
Why such December expectations, Advent anticipations?
The answer--God places them in the hearts of believers. They prompted landlocked Noah to build a boat, and elderly Sarai to decorate a nursery. They moved Ruth to leave the green fields of Moab and David to sing songs. They spoke to Mary treasured words of shepherds and angels. They emboldened Peter and John to command, "Rise up and walk."
Sadly, in post-Watergate America and in the post-reunion Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), cynicism--anticipation's dread enemy--seems to be out-shouting the more hopeful voice. Alongside impatience, apathy, certitude, and self-importance, cynicism has been waging war on the more hopeful Christian virtues of faith and trust. Of course, sinning ways of sinful people continually pump more helium into the balloons of disappointment in the church, but the resulting pessimism misses the point of Christian faith.
Throughout the biblical record and pervasive through church history the refrain is sung, "Have faith in God!" Bold faith animates the stories told of the first century Christians. Deep trust radiates from the lives of millions of faithful through the centuries, and for good reason. God has come through for them. The one who promised to build a church against which the gates of Hades would not prevail has overcome time and again.
In this season of Advent, in a time when many Presbyterians are warning of the demise of the church, how can we recover the vibrant faith of our forebears? Might we dare believe again that the best is yet to come?
As I listened to John Bell's sermon (link) I thought I was being ushered back into the remembered richness of the Presbyterian/Reformed tradition that nourished my beginnings as a pastor, a tradition that the Outlook has maintained fearlessly over many decades. That emerging tradition was patiently replacing a spurious ecclesiology that supported social injustice. The Outlook was courageous in that enterprise, and was willing, for the gospel and the church's sake, to "be shown the door" if necessary, to speak the truth about church and society.
Ernest Trice Thompson and Aubrey Brown, the first two editors of this paper, in teaching, preaching, and writing, helped to establish in the warp and woof of the church the overturning of the noxious doctrine of the "spirituality of the church" that had become the confessional stance of the PCUS (Southern Church) when we broke away from the national body. As we formed the new denomination in 1861 at Augusta, Ga., we declared that the church's vocation was not to be concerned with the outward condition of human beings, but with their souls only -- which were destined for salvation or damnation. That "faith statement" set the church on a course separating not only charity from justice, but even of separating charity from evangelism. And it was a long, hard road on which to return to the whole gospel for the whole church, and officially to repudiate (in the 1930s) that separation.
Some years ago John Burgess wrote an essay for The Christian Century in which he described the drain on the ordinary life of the PC(USA) by coalitions with "reform" agendas for the denomination. To whichever coalition or covenant group you belonged, the dedication and resources with which you once strengthened the church for mission, service, and witness, now went into lobbies that were hungry for power, for theological dominance, or for political control. Burgess' article was written in the '90s. Has anyone calculated the hundreds of thousands of dollars which, since then, have been contributed to the Covenant Network, the Presbyterian Coalition, PFR, and the Confessing Church movement, and the like -- in staff salaries, speakers' fees, and travel for conferences, phone bills, office equipment, and the like? If those sums of money were prudently managed and spent, they might eliminate AIDS in a medium-sized African nation.
I stirred up a controversy with an editorial on Commissioned Lay Pastors and Interim Ministers. I haven't tallied the "Amens" and the "No ways," but I am grateful that discussion has opened on these topics, as well as on the hand-wringing assertion that we have (or are about to have) a minister shortage.
One respondent found my editorial confusing; some of you were "hurt" by what I said. I am not against Interims or CLPs, but there is serious weakness in the church's use of both positions that has led to loss of membership, the demoralization of Ministers of the Word, and confusion about the role of pastors.
CLPs are particularly useful when such persons emerge from indigenous congregations or communities, receive theological and ecclesiastical training, and then serve in those communities to build up a congregation until it calls a Minister of the Word. On the other hand, I think it is bad policy (and bad faith) to take good elders from strong churches and train them to be lay pastors in churches that cannot afford a "real pastor." Why don't the rich churches in a presbytery give enough so that every congregation (or linked congregations) has (have) a Minister of Word and Sacrament? Are rural churches any less deserving of a Minister of the Word than those large churches that can afford three or four? What is the presbytery's role here; do they continue to be market driven? It takes no imagination to follow a McDonalds strategy of New Church Development. It takes faith and reason for a presbytery to "cover" a region or urban area with the good news of the gospel lived out in Presbyterian congregations. Those who defend the presbyteries for the wrong reasons ought to ask churches of 2,000 members to hire CLPs to lead them.
The paragraphs below begin a sermon by William L. Hawkins on Christian disestablishment, preached at a meeting of New Hope Presbytery on October 15. In a time of increasing, irreversible religious pluralism, Hawkins exalts the value of congregational life. He argues that because we have long been unable to rely on the institutions of government or education to under gird a Protestant or Christian culture, the congregation has become the place where everything we do matters as it never has before. You will read this engaging, inspiring sermon next week in the Thanksgiving issue of the Outlook. But it is the origin of our nation and Constitution, described here, which illumines the present religious divide that troubles our nation's soul.
Though our U.S. Constitution was produced by a congress consisting mostly of Christians, the first clause of the First Amendment prohibits the establishment of an official religion. The apparent irony goes deeper when we acknowledge the contributions of Christians in the formation of our government, beginning with the revolutionary war itself. This was something particularly true of Presbyterians. Historian Lefferts Loetscher said that the fires of the American Revolution were fanned from Presbyterian pulpits sufficient for the British to describe it as "the Presbyterian Rebellion."
From Leslie Scanlon's review of the Committee on the Office of the General Assembly's decision to close the Montreat Historical Society for financial reasons, we learn that a storm has been whipped up. The destruction of that storm will be felt far beyond Montreat. If that location is closed, 30,000 visitors a year to that small town nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains outside Ashville, N.C., will morph into a much wider community of disgruntled Presbyterians, not only across the South, but from all over the United States and in other nations.
Consider the ill-tempered mood of the church regarding our major disagreements: divestment, the ordination of gays and lesbians, and beliefs about salvation in the name of Jesus Christ alone. In our agitated state, we lose 40,000 plus members a year. Is it not odd, in those circumstances, that COGA voted to close the Montreat center on the report of a committee of three persons, not one of whom is from the Southeast or "represents" Montreat? Do they knowingly invite us into another fray guaranteed to provoke persistent irritation and anguish to thousands of Presbyterians, whose support is needed for the church's future, as well as for the preservation of this collection in optimal form?
In his prophet's call to repentance in Matthew and Luke, John the Baptist warns those who have been drawn to his revival not to place their hope in their ancestral connection to Abraham, for "God is able from the stones to raise up children to Abraham." (Mt. 3:9)
I thought of that warning as I read an article by Mark Lilla in the New York Times Magazine (September 18, 2005) called "Getting Religion, My long-lost years as a teenage evangelical." This University of Chicago professor tells of his awakening to the Scriptures through one of the small groups that proliferated in the "Jesus Freak" movement of the 1970s, and of his eventual fall out of faith. He grew up Roman Catholic in a monotonous blue collar Detroit suburb, and at age 13 he decided he was an atheist. A year later he attended a Christian rock concert and on the way out was given a colloquial translation of the New Testament, which he sat up all night reading. That New Testament opened his mind to a new world. Immersion in that New Testament also began the transformation of his intellect.
I heard the story of a particular presbytery meeting hot on the heels of four glorious September days in "graduation exercises" with the second Cohort of the Company of New Pastors. (The Company of New Pastors -- formerly Excellence from the Start -- is the Lilly Endowment program out of Theology and Worship that involves pairs of Pastors mentoring new seminary graduates who are in their first called positions.)
The four days were a "debriefing" on more than three years of semi-annual meetings for worship and study, reading books related to ministry and delivering papers in our small groups. The assumption is that community is formed and mutual professional support occurs -- not out of therapy or skill development -- but when it is grounded in theological reflection on the practice of ministry. At "graduation" we were privileged also to reflect with Eugene Peterson, author and pastor, on the life and work of a pastor.
Last week in New Orleans ... nobody took control. ... The rich escaped while the poor were abandoned. ... Partisans squabbled while the nation was ashamed. The first rule of the social fabric -- that in times of crisis you protect the vulnerable -- was trampled.
I have pondered these words by David Brooks on the Sunday (9/4) New York Times Op-Ed page almost relentlessly. After 23 years as pastor of a downtown church, I know the names of Richmond's vulnerable too well for comfort. Our congregation, together with more than 100 churches and synagogues in the city, has ministered to them, sometimes with opposition from the city and the powerful. We have served them lunches, listened to their woes, celebrated their joys, seen the plight of their circumstances in adult homes, and directed them to medical care or emergency assistance. We have preached their funerals. We have sheltered them and visited them, and with many agencies, have tried to keep them from homelessness. Their faces are the faces of those multitudes abandoned by the authorities in New Orleans.
I rattled a few cages when I questioned those in non-parish settings who do not regularly preach and celebrate the sacraments, which is the primary function of Reformed pastors--not editing a magazine, not heading a non-profit, not pastoral counseling, valuable as those things are to the life of humankind and the church. But preaching, teaching, celebrating the sacraments, and pastoral care in a congregational setting are what build up the church, and empower it to witness to the kingdom of Christ. This is a classic -- not just a Reformed -- no-brainer since the church does not exist or thrive without book, water, and table.
A call to ministry is nourished in the soil of the church. There we learn that the vocation of all Christians is to serve the Lord in daily life -- whether at home or in the law firm, as social worker, police officer, doctor or CEO, or some patched - together combination of hearthside and curbside activities to sustain self and family. Disciples of Jesus are expected to ask what God wants from them -- not as customers, shoppers, consumers, or those to be entertained -- but as persons called to reflect the glory of God.
The final report of the Task Force on the Peace, Unity, and Purity of the Church contains few surprises. The recommendations flow effortlessly out of the theological prologue that has been strengthened in its final draft. I do not mean that the recommendations were effortlessly achieved. I suspect they required negotiation and prayer, patience and longsuffering. But they demonstrate the same love for the church that characterize the prologue -- and for that, all Presbyterians may give thanks.
Faithful Presbyterians will profoundly disagree about some of them (see guest viewpoints in this issue). What is remarkable is that the same disagreements are incarnate within the Task Force itself, and yet they, after meeting for these past years, have invited the church to work for a more profound unity than we now know. The Task Force has given us the means to walk the walk that they have walked, and to stop tearing down rather than building up the Body of Christ, Presbyterian. They offer an "opportunity of discovering ways that the church can live more faithfully in the face of deep disagreements." And even in disagreement, they were able "to discern in their life together the outlines of Christian identity to which, we fervently believe, the church is called."
The report belies a theological orthodoxy and constitutional integrity that the church sorely needs to begin a renewed quest for genuine unity. It is from that foundation that we are asked -- not so much to eschew politics -- as to speak theologically and personally with our opponents for the sake of the church. Some presbyteries and sessions and congregations have already begun such mutual engagement. Governing bodies where minds are made up will need to reach out to those with whom they disagree if the process is to succeed. We are being called to personal responsibility, especially those of us who are elders, deacons, and ministers of Word and Sacrament.
When you read this, the final reports of the Task Force on the Peace, Unity, and Purity of the church will have been published. The PC(USA) has invested itself in this four year process, not because what it recommends will solve our problems re:scriptural authority and ordination, but in hope that a way forward will emerge from the battles ravaging the reunited church for at least two decades.
To anticipate the report, I remembered a sermon on Jesus' Parable of the Weeds in Matthew 13, the 16th Sunday in Ordinary Time. There is nothing ordinary about this parable, which speaks to the problem of evil -- not as out there to be restrained by the forces of righteousness in a weed-free church. Instead, the parable invites us to decide how we will deal with the weeds. The good farmer sowed wheat in his field. While he and his servants were sleeping an enemy came and sowed weeds. When the servants discovered it, they asked the landowner how it could have happened, and he replied, "An enemy has done this."
Last week I was overcome with rage and shame at the pitiful responses to the onset of hurricane Katrina and its watery aftermath. I was ashamed at the helplessness of the government of the United States. I was angry that neither the mayor of New Orleans nor the governor of Louisiana did anything initially except to criticize the federal government for its lack of response. How many lives would have been saved by the immediate response of which we showed ourselves capable after 9/11 in New York -- a disaster which we did not know was coming? The mayor and governor have power to evacuate people forcibly. The governor can order the National Guard to use whatever means necessary to stop violence, confiscate guns of looters, and protect hospitals and individual citizens. (In one hospital patients were moved to upper floors to protect them from looters who were attacking them.)
The non-response was a massive failure of legally constituted government at every level, but has its origins in decades of anti-government rhetoric, not the least of which is from those who preach Sunday after Sunday non-Christian apocalypticism. And we have paid the price, some citizens with their lives, all of us by the cheapening and denigration of human life. Where, in this pro-life administration that spent emotional and political capital on Terri Schiavo, is the outrage -- or better, the immediate deployment of law enforcement and other resources to save human lives? How many Terri Schiavos simply perished in New Orleans through lack of response? How can a president who vows to protect fertilized human eggs seem incapable (with his massive constitutional power) of protecting living human beings?
What kind of Jesus do we preach and teach?
No more important answer awaits the church in September as many of us get back to school and back to church. Living between Lynchburg (Jerry Falwell) and Virginia Beach (Pat Robertson) had not awakened me to the urgency of the question like an article by Bill McKibben* in the August Harper's Magazine called "The Christian Paradox, How a faithful nation gets Jesus wrong." In proper, smug Virginia, we pay scant attention to the mavens of fundamentalist (Jerry) and syncretistic (Pat) political power.
Yet McKibben carefully codifies what many of us perceive anecdotally: that there are quite different "gospels" preached in America, some of which are dangerous and idolatrous. He sees the mainline as "mostly locked in a dreary decline as their congregations dwindle and their elders argue endlessly about gay clergy and same-sex unions." Even if McKibben is too bleak in his diagnosis (though not about our numerical decline) he is on target when he writes that while 85% of us Americans call ourselves Christian, 75% of us believe the Bible teaches: "God helps those who help themselves." That is neither biblical nor Christian. Yet America is a nation saturated in Christian identity.
Presbyterians need both long-term and short-term mission workers, and I call on Presbyterians to support both. We can afford both, if we renew our commitment and improve our stewardship practices. I also call on Presbyterians to improve what you do in short-term mission, and to update your understandings of what we do together through long-term service.
Dr. James Smylie’s article in this issue, looking toward the 250th Anniversary of the organization of Hanover Presbytery in 1755, reminds me of one of the losses of the 1983 reunion of the Northern and Southern Presbyterian denominations. “They” took away our name.
Dr. James Smylie’s article in this issue, looking toward the 250th Anniversary of the organization of Hanover Presbytery in 1755, reminds me of one of the losses of the 1983 reunion of the Northern and Southern Presbyterian denominations. “They” took away our name.
I thought about strategies of officer training when confronted by two quite disparate comments this week. Both of them rest upon distinctly "un-Reformed assumptions" about the character and conduct of human life in society -- not only the nation, but also the church. Enshrined in the comments is the inevitable conflict between respecting the right of individual conscience and the upholding the confessions, laws, bill of rights, etc., which, as citizens and disciples, we hold in common and which bind us together. One person, asked on what she based her arguments for intelligent design as scientific principle, said that her "Creator revealed it to me in my heart." The other assertion was quoted from a Supreme Court justice's majority opinion based upon the sovereignty of the individual.
What has the church learned from the explosive response to our actions last summer in Richmond on divestment? Granted this is not everyone's concern, yet by its action -- intentionally or not -- the General Assembly opened the door to widespread public discussion in every place where Jews and Christians have significant contact. We both initiated and contributed to a dialogue that has been sadly lacking in American political life. The General Assembly took heat for these and subsequent actions, one of which resulted in the firing of folk in the Louisville office.
Presbyterian and Davidson Colleges have been much in the news in the New South states of South and North Carolina respectively. Leslie Scanlon's article delineates the issue at Presbyterian for the OUTLOOK. We covered the controversial proposal one year ago this month (the June 7th issue). That proposal led to the appointment of a commission to study these matters, chaired by Allen McSween of 4th Presbyterian in Greenville, SC. Since religion is big news everywhere, the secular press has given this college conflict extensive coverage.
In the meantime, this past February, Davidson's trustees amended its statement of purpose (see Rob Spach's Oped piece for the Charlotte Observer, which defends the action) to allow (not recruit but allow) 20% of its trustees be of faiths other than Christian, or of no faith. That action has provoked dismay and heated criticism, even though there are by now scores, if not hundreds, of Davidson alumni/ae who are persons of other faiths.
I've always been suspicious of dividing things in two. Some of my earliest memories are of wanting the whole thing, but being told that my older brother and I had to divide it up. Cake. Candy bars. That last hamburger, sitting on the grill, begging to be eaten. Even Kleenex. Kleenex? Yes, we used them a half tissue at a time. After all, I was raised by the generation that sacrificed through the Great Depression. I would insist on the whole thing. Then I'd hear those dreaded words: "Boys, you're going to have to divide it in two!"
My childhood selfishness aside, church life in the early 21st century is regrettably full of false dichotomies. And at San Francisco Theological Seminary, we are learning to resist and reject false choices that would require us to embrace only one side of a complex reality. Instead, our goal is to put our arms around the whole big mess that is life in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). Liberal or conservative? Yes! We are all both, albeit in different ways and on different subjects. Small church or large church? Yes! God's purposes for service to the world require both, and everything in between. Traditional or contemporary? Yes! Faithfulness requires the best of both. Reformed or ecumenical? Yes! Each requires the other. Theoretical, spiritual, or practical? Yes! Pastoral preparation cannot be comprehensive without all three aspects of formation for ministry, and others as well.
What is your presbytery, session, or congregation doing to prepare for September 15? That day is not on any ecclesiastical calendar. Many congregations are in "start-up" mode after summer vacation. Christian Education and Stewardship dominate the attention of the local church.
However, as far as the PC(USA) is concerned, this is the day the Task Force on Peace, Unity, and Purity will release its report for consideration, discernment, and conversation. This early release date affords the church in sessions, presbyteries, and church school classes ample time for open, free discussion before the 217th General Assembly meeting in June, 2006, in Birmingham, Ala. That assembly will be asked to act on its recommendations.
© Copyright 2026 The Presbyterian Outlook. All Rights Reserved. Privacy Statement. Website by Web Publisher PRO
