MEMPHIS -- Where do moderate evangelicals stand?
That's a question Jon Walton, a pastor from New York and co-moderator of the Covenant Network of Presbyterians, slipped into his remarks when talking about one of the biggest issues facing the General Assembly next summer in Birmingham: the long-awaited report of the Theological Task Force on the Peace, Unity and Purity of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
The Covenant Network -- a progressive group in the PC(USA) -- would love to know what moderate evangelicals think of the report, and whether they're willing to take a public stand on it. Such information would help the progressives know how solid their own footing is and what the prospects may be that the assembly will approve the task force report.
But there are other questions to ask as well -- including what Covenant Network supporters privately think of the task force report, whether there might be more support from them than seems apparent, and whether the church as a whole cares much about the positions all these special interest groups take.
Advent 2 - on Isaiah 40:1--11 and Matthew 28:16--20 "My way," at least Sinatra sings Or "by the way," as Jesus' last..
ATLANTA -- Kwame Bediako, a pastor and theological educator from Ghana, called it "a shift in the center of gravity of Christianity," a seismic lurch from north to south.
It means this:
· Asia, Africa and Latin America are producing many new Christians -- Christians who have their own understandings of faith and religious diversity and much to teach those who live in the north.
· More Christians from those countries are moving to the U.S., knocking on the doors of churches here, bringing with them their own cultures and experiences of God. Some see the secularized north as the next Christian mission field.
· And more people from other faiths are moving north as well -- meaning that even Americans who don't leave home will be much more likely to encounter Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and others, and will live out their faith in contexts in which Christianity can't be assumed as the norm.
At a global mission conference in Atlanta, Presbyterians -- most of them from North America, many struggling to figure out what the new configurations will look like -- considered some of the new realities.
(PNS) The Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy (ACSWP) got updates on several proposed policy documents, including four to be presented to next year's General Assembly, during a recent meeting here.
ACSWP, which develops social witness polices for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), heard presentations on three papers, on energy, economic security for older Americans and lending laws. The documents and recommendations are subject to ACSWP review and revision before they go to next summer's 217th General Assembly in Birmingham, Ala.
During the Oct. 20-22 meeting, the committee discussed a proposed policy statement on ministry to people with disabilities and a referral concerning a study paper on the value of human life.
ACSWP also welcomed its new coordinator, Christian "Chris" Iosso, and honored Gwen Crawley for her work as interim coordinator of ACSWP
Lord, sometimes I feel like I'm always preparing to live but never living. Other times I feel I'm poorly prepared, so don't..
ATLANTA -- With the center of Christianity shifting south in the 21st century, what can North American Christians learn from what's happening in Africa, Asia and Latin America?
What are the implications of the new alignments -- with pluralism and secularism increasing in Europe and the United States, while evangelical Christianity is booming in many places in the southern hemisphere?
There are many ways to answer those questions, but one common denominator is this: North American Christians need to be ready for change. Things are shifting all around them, whether they're prepared or not, and some of these realignments amount to dramatic reconfigurations. And with every change comes both some pain and new opportunities.
Presbyterians gathered in Atlanta Oct. 20-22 for a global mission conference called "From Everywhere to Everyone," sponsored by The Outreach Foundation, Presbyterian Frontier Fellowship and the Worldwide Ministries Division of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
"From now on Christianity is primarily a non-western religion," said Andrew Walls, a professor from the University of Edinburgh, who traced how shifts in migration patterns have affected missionary activity around the world. "Increasingly it will be shaped by the languages, the cultures, the music, the rhythms, the ways of thinking and choosing and doing things, the structures and networks of relationships of Africa and Asia and Latin America. ...They must increase and we must decrease."
The radio preacher is finding new life in cyberspace.
"Godcasting" is the latest advancement in online religion, in which preachers convert their sermons to audio to be heard on portable digital audio devices.
Using iPods, or any portable MP3 player, "podcasting" lets people download audio programs that can be listened to whenever they like. It's a form of audio syndication that musicians, businessmen, tech talk show hosts and political commentators like Al Franken have already adopted.
There's lots more God on iPod than jazz, theater or movie reviews. Pod preachers, including Christians, Buddhists and pagans, are among the most prolific users of the new technology. Just as sermons were among the first type of broadcasts when radio caught on in America in the 1920s, podcasting is creating a new form of wireless parson.
(PNS) The Board of Pensions (BOP) of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has implemented a plan to consolidate member services, centralize oversight of third-party providers, and provide for "succession management" in key leadership positions.
"Stewardship -- of people and financial resources -- is so important," BOP President and CEO Rob Maggs told the Presbyterian News Service (PNS) on Oct. 19. "It is critical to have strong management -- the right people doing the right jobs."
In his Oct. 13 weekly letter to board members and other church leaders, Maggs acknowledged that financial pressures were a factor in the reorganization. "We must keep our ... annualized increases in budgets at about 3 percent or less," he said, adding that the board's operating costs will show a year-to-year decline in 2006.
MEMPHIS -- "We do not know, but we are not lost."
That's a line from a poem that Kathleen Norris's husband wrote, after the two of them sat talking at the kitchen table one night about what she thought about angels and he thought about numbers and what all that might say about truth.
That question came from a man who Norris described as a "recovering Catholic;" a man she knew was ready to talk about religion when he would say things to her such as, "Doesn't it matter that none of it is true?"
But Norris persuaded her husband to think a little as she does, that mystery may be at the heart of Christian discipleship. Our most important relationships all involve mystery, she said -- when people vow during a wedding to stick together for better and for worse, for example, the promise is made without knowing much at all about what surprises that journey will bring.
But we can approach these mysteries as disciples, Norris said -- as people of faith, willing to learn.
DUBLIN -- Two prominent Northern Ireland clergymen chosen to monitor a key part of an internationally-backed peace process say that, "beyond any shadow of doubt," the arms of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) have now been put beyond use.
The clerics, the Rev. Harold Good, a Methodist, and the Rev. Alec Reid, a Roman Catholic priest, witnessed the IRA's recent act of decommissioning, in which the armed group put all its remaining weapons down, after decades of violent struggle.
However, the Rev. Ian Paisley, the founder of the Free Presbyterian Church and leader of the largest political party in Northern Ireland, the Democratic Unionists, rejected the declaration on Sept. 27.
Paisley said, "(The IRA's decommissioning) illustrates more than ever the duplicity and dishonesty of the two (British and Irish) governments and the IRA." He said the clerics who witnessed the decommissioning "were approved by the IRA and therefore ... in no way could be independent."
For some folks, sitting on a rocking chair on a front porch in Montreat, N.C. calls back a lifetime of memories and connections. They hear in those hills the footsteps of Presbyterians from their own families and others they know and revere, saints of the church who served God in congregations throughout the southern United States and on mission assignments around the world.
What's the value of someone being able to come to the archives at Montreat and find her grandmother's name listed as a Sunday school teacher in the records of her childhood church?
It's hard to know how to put a dollar value on that. What's the right amount to pay to preserve such memories? When does that price become too much?
That bone-deep love for a place and a heritage is whipping up a storm in Montreat, where the Committee on the Office of the General Assembly (COGA) has decided that, for economic reasons, for the sake of other priorities in the financially-struggling Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the Montreat Historical Society should shut its doors.
(PNS) Lawyers representing two factions of a bitterly divided, 2,700- member Korean congregation in Torrance, Calif., are trying to negotiate an agreement to share the church building while a civil court decides which group is entitled to the property.
"I am overjoyed that these conversations are finally happening," said the Rev. Syngman Rhee, a former General Assembly moderator who is working informally -- as "pulpit supply" -- with the loyalist faction of First Church of Torrance. "Some kind of peace is needed."
Rhee was appointed by the group that now governs the congregation, an administrative commission formed by Hanmi Presbytery and the Synod of Southern California.
The congregation split last spring after it tried to call the Rev. Song Kyu Pak as pastor. Because Pak was the subject of an administrative inquiry in Olympia Presbytery, where he had been pastor of Joong-Ang Church in Tacoma, Wash., Olympia could not release him to accept the Torrance call. For the same reason, Hanmi Presbytery could not receive him as a member.
On April 24, Pak announced that he had renounced the jurisdiction of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and a majority of the Torrance church voted to leave the denomination and affiliate with the Korean Presbyterian Church in America (KPCA). The breakaway faction seized control of the church's property.
(RNS) The Episcopal Church has flatly rejected a church-based movement to pull investments from Israel, instead choosing a strategy of "positive investment" among Palestinians and "corporate engagement" with Israel.
The church's Social Responsibility in Investments committee said the church should keep investments in the region and not follow the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and others who are seeking to divest from Israeli companies. "The goal is for selected companies to change behavior resulting in a more hopeful climate for peace," the committee's 12-page report said. "If the church simply divests, nothing positive has happened."
The standard litany goes something like this: Presbyterians go to church, bring their children, the children grow up, go off on their own, forget about church. Charles Wiley, who's with the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)'s Office of Theology and Worship, said recently that one test of Presbyterians' commitment to ecumenism is that they're ecstatic if their adult children go to church, practically any church, once they leave home.
But the stock wisdom only goes so far.
Recent surveys show that many college students do in fact have an intense interest in spiritual matters and that many of them believe in a higher power and pray regularly. On college campuses, groups interested in religion -- from Buddhist meditation circles to "alternative spirituality" groups to evangelical Christian Bible studies -- meet all over the place, all the time. During Ramadan at some campuses, students who aren't Muslim join in the fasting, out of solidarity with what they affirm as a spiritual way of life. And many classes in religion are packed, as students try to understand the complex relationships between religion and politics in a world in which suicide bombings and violence in the name of religion make the news nearly every day.
Fall 2005 is notable for different reasons as many Presbyterian-related schools begin the new academic year. Let them share with you the new developments on their campuses.
SACRAMENTO - Amazingly, some people suspect there may be better ways of doing things in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)
So the General Assembly Council is thinking through some new models of funding the church's work and structuring the council itself -- brainstorming to see if alternate approaches might bring better communication, more efficient decision-making, a better relationship between the national structures and the church at the grassroots.
Several task forces have been meeting to consider this -- including one on funding and one on "governance" that's been considering such questions as how big the council should be, how its members should be selected, how often it should meet, and so forth.
Leaders of both say their efforts now are still "works-in-progress" -- nothing has been decided for sure, lots may still change. But the governance task force plans to come back with a recommendation at the council's next meeting, in February, and perhaps to suggest structural changes to the 2006 General Assembly. If those changes were approved, the shape of the council might start to change in 2008.
SACRAMENTO -- A potential difference of views is percolating between the Presbyterian Foundation and the Mission Responsibility Through Investment program of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) -- a situation with implications for the PC(USA)'s controversial plan to consider divesting in some companies doing business in Israel.
The discussion involves the question of who actually owns the investments of the church that are managed through the Foundation and its trust company -- and who has the authority to negotiate with companies if divestment is being considered and to decide what divestment actions to pursue.
In the past, that kind of negotiation has been conducted by MRTI, although the General Assembly has to approve any recommendation MRTI makes to divest. If the assembly agrees with the MRTI proposal, it passes a resolution urging the investing agencies -- the Foundation or its trust company or the Board of Pensions of the PC(USA)-- to divest, which so far the Foundation always has done.
This question makes three presuppositions:
"¢ there really is a being called God;
"¢ God wills good things for us;
"¢ we can know what this will is.
Without the knowledge of God's will it is difficult, if not impossible, to run a church successfully or powerfully. We may have the best administrative principles in place, be purpose-driven, have excellent preaching and full parking lots, but without knowing God's will and doing it, we will always have less than the full church of Christ.
SACRAMENTO -- There's been a lot of talk this week in California, as the General Assembly Council starts its fall meeting, about the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A) being on the verge of some kind of big, exciting change -- about this being perhaps a "tipping point" for the church, as General Assembly moderator Rick Ufford-Chase put it.
What do they mean?
First, several task forces are due to report this week on new ways of doing things. A governance task force is considering some kind of streamlined structure for the council itself -- considering different ways of selecting council members and organizing their work. A mission funding task force will discuss how the denomination gets the money to fund what it does -- what works in that funding system and what doesn't, and what needs to be done differently in a denomination that's losing members by the tens of thousands every year and in which there have been distinct shifts in the way that Presbyterians give their money.
Second, council executive director John Detterick, who's in his last year with the PC(USA), urged the council members during their opening session Sept. 21 to dream "bold dreams" and not to be afraid to take risks. But he also warned that more budget cuts likely are coming soon, along with more job cuts for the denomination's national staff in Louisville. Detterick met Sept. 16 with the staff to warn them of what lies ahead.
SACRAMENTO -- A feasibility study considering the future of the Presbyterian Historical Society has concluded that it's unlikely enough money could be raised to create a new center to study Presbyterian history in Montreat, N.C.
So the plan now is to consider creating such a center at Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur, Ga. -- it would be less expensive there -- and to close down the Presbyterian Historical Society office in Montreat, which some Presbyterians have fought passionately to save over the last year.
A report to the Committee on the Office of the General Assembly (COGA) states that those recommending that the Montreat historical society office be closed "appreciate the deep disappointment many people connected to Montreat will feel if these recommendations are adopted," but it also contends that the changes will "benefit the whole church."
The recommendations came from COGA members Cathy Ulrich and Steve Grace, who had been appointed to help develop a plan for the historical society's future.
SACRAMENTO -- He was a Presbyterian minister. He was, for many boys from Chinese immigrant families, a sort of surrogate father figure. He was charismatic, he was powerful -- and he is said to have sexually abused dozens of young boys over 30 years at the Cameron House ministry program in San Francisco.
His name is Dick Wichman and he is now in his 90s, living in a retirement home in Oregon. In the late 1980s, faced with allegations of sexual abuse pending in San Francisco presbytery, Wichman denied the charges and renounced his ordination in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) rather than face the action the presbytery was preparing to bring against him.
But that has not stopped the survivors of the abuse from speaking out plainly of how the betrayal of trust perpetrated by one minister has fractured their self-esteem, their ability to form close, caring relationships as adults and in some cases has driven them far from the church and any sense of God's caring.
The difficulties continue at First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood, a large and well-known California congregation that's been locked in recent months in a painful internal struggle.
On Sept. 29, the session of Hollywood church asked for the resignations of pastor Alan Meenan and associate pastor David Manock, and called for a congregational meeting to discuss the matter on October 9.
That followed months of controversy within the congregation. Last May, the Presbytery of the Pacific appointed an administrative commission to oversee the church and put Meenan and Manock on paid administrative leave.
For Presbyterians whose lives were turned upside down by Hurricane Katrina, the next few months will bring -- who knows what?
Homes are gone, sanctuaries soaked, records destroyed, jobs lost, connections broken. Churches where people gathered Sunday after Sunday to praise God are dark. Decisions are being made, family by family, person by person, whether to come back and rebuild or start over somewhere else.
And it's not clear whether some churches will ever recover -- especially those that were small and vulnerable to begin with.
John Spaulding, a retired minister, has served in recent years as supply pastor for two Louisiana congregations -- Carolyn Park in Arabi and Gheens church, a French-speaking Cajun congregation of about 50 in Lafourche parish.
Speaking from a hotel room near Dallas, where he's been staying since he evacuated right ahead of Katrina, Spaulding said Carolyn Park is in St. Bernard parish, "which was really devastated. I have not been able to make contact with those people at all."
Many in the church were elderly, Spaulding said. The congregation had declined from 200 to about 40, and "we've been trying to turn the corner on that and we have, very slowly. We were moving in that direction . . . We had such great plans before the hurricane."
But what lies ahead now, he doesn't know. There's no weekly collection and the budget was shaky before the storm. Spaulding wants to be a spiritual support for his people, but he can't find them.
Summer 2005 was a time of finishing work commitments, selling the house, family visits, packing--and looking ahead to three years in Lahore, Pakistan, for Marianne Vermeer, Robert Johnson and their two sons, Nathan, 12, and Peter, 7.
They are newly-named mission co-workers with the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) for three years working at Forman Christian College in Lahore. Marianne will be an executive assistant to the principal (president) of Forman, Dr. Peter Armacost. Robert will be teaching at Forman and working with the Presbyterian Church of Pakistan in their seminary.
How does a couple decide to follow such an undertaking, such a calling?
Both Marianne and Robert were mature believers open to different possibilities for their work. She has an M.A. in business and higher education and had experience in administration on an executive level, operating until recently her own consulting firm. Robert recently completed Ph.D. work in history and theology at Union Theological Seminary-PSCE in Richmond. "Our skills were suited to Forman," she says.
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