On the Supreme Court's docket for the current session is a review of the Ninth Circuit Court's judgment of the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. If that phrase is removed, it would return to the version I memorized in public school. During World War II no one complained about a deficiency in the 29 words we voluntarily repeated during our daily flag raisings. Our generation swelled with patriotic pride and could hardly wait to enlist in our armed services to help topple those totalitarian regimes intent on conquering other European or Asian nations.
Please don't call me contentious. Don't call me disloyal. I'm just confused over the conviction deeply held by some of my dearest friends about their right to withhold or redirect funds that normally would go to the denomination. What I hear them saying is that the church courts have affirmed our legal right — which is accorded us by our polity ...which is based upon our theology — which issues from our God-endowed freedom — to determine where our money goes. Where all of our money goes.
Surely by now it is clear that we are standing under the judgment of God. Nothing else could account for the precipitous and calamitous decline of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) over the last 40 years. And while we stand under the judgment of God, this indeed is our only hope: the judgment of God is righteous.
Mel Gibson's labor of faith is not a popcorn and candy movie. It's gruesome, it's brutal, it's bloody, and it's sobering. For the faithful, it's a stark reminder of just how much Jesus sacrificed, and at what great cost our redemption has been paid.
"The Passion of the Christ" depicts the last 12 hours of the life of Jesus of Nazareth (played by Jim Cavaziel), from the arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane to the tomb.
As a Presbyterian who claims but also hopes to transcend the label "liberal," I was heartened by The Outlook's reports (Nov. 3) of two addresses offered at the recent Presbyterian Coalition Gathering in Oregon. Jin Kim, newly-elected board president of Presbyterian's for Renewal, challenged his audience to look forward to a more racially/ethnically inclusive church, not backward to the supposed glory days of our 1950s segregated congregations.
As Western North Carolina Presbytery prepares to vote Jan. 31 on a recommendation not to revalidate the ministry of Parker Williamson with the Presbyerian Lay Committee, the present struggle for the soul of the Presbyterian Church is looking like a replay of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the 1920s. If the editor of The Layman eventually loses his ordination because of his encouragement to sessions to withhold per capita contributions, the decision would mirror the 1935 defrocking of J. Gresham Machen by New Brunswick Presbytery over his leadership of an independent mission board that appeared, like the Layman, to threaten the purse of mother church.
Across the denomination there is much interest concerning Western North Carolina Presbytery's Jan. 31 meeting, when the peers of Presbyterian Layman editor-in-chief and CEO Parker Williamson will consider a recommendation that his ministry with the Lay Committee not be revalidated.
With other news and controversial issues taking up much space in Presbyterian publications, I would like to call our attention to one of the amendments that is being sent down for vote by presbyteries. Amendment 03-G will require a minister or church employee to be placed on immediate administrative leave as soon as a sexual misconduct complaint is filed with the clerk of the governing body when the issue involves someone under 18 years or who is mentally unable to make decisions for him/herself.
I read with interest William H. Harter’s guest viewpoint entitled, De-Triumphalizing the Gospel. I commend him for his efforts both to be a Christian friend to Jewish persons and to humbly recognize that Gentile Christians have been grafted into Israel. However, I find myself disagreeing with him in his assertions that Christians should not seek to evangelize Jews and that trust in Jesus as Messiah, for a Jew, is apparently not a completion of what God always intended for Jews.
The serious problem posed by denominational funding of the Avodat Israel congregation in Philadelphia Presbytery has significance far beyond what Harold Kurtz describes as a "splash" (in "De-Westernizing the Gospel").
This congregation understands itself as part of the self-described "Messianic Jewish" movement. This nomenclature is distressing and demeaning to Jews because messianism has always been and continues to be central to Jewish self-understanding as well as to Christian.
