I am recovering from a devastating downsizing of our national offices in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) We have just gone through a drastic restructuring familiar to many people who live in the corporate world. And this downsizing was done with all the corporate tools available to this mindset. The exception was the worship services we held as a community of faith, but even those services were tainted with corporate residue.
(A Prayer For G. A.) They lost mine on the wayto Birmingham - I think it was -left me with a stack..
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.
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.
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.
The GAC's formal recognition that the divestment issue has created deep divisions among us is welcome. Their suggestion to establish a small work group on the issue is wise and pastoral. In effect, the GAC recommends setting up a process that should have been employed prior to any vote on divestment in 2004.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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