PORTLAND — Think of Neapolitan ice cream. A stripe of outrage (an old evangelical specialty). A stripe of good news (always a pleasure). A stripe of intense confusion.
Three flavors side by side, ending up all mixed together. That’s pretty much the taste of the Presbyterian Coalition’s recent national gathering here Oct. 6-8, where everything got talked about, from leaving the denomination to godly visions, and nothing got decided.
PORTLAND — Bob Howard used to think the right thing to do was to stick around, to try to change the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) from within. Now he thinks that’s wrong, that it’s time to admit that the denomination can’t be fixed, that the wide Presbyterian family can never agree about theology and that it’s time to split it up. He calls it "gracious separation."
MONTREAT, N.C. — Moving quickly and with great waving of orange and blue cards, the General Assembly Council polished up its lists of "key areas of focus" on which it wants the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) to concentrate its work over the next two years.
"So what is the answer, Lucy?" is the response I receive when folks learn I spent a three-month sabbatical (Winter 2003) at the Presbyterian Center in Louisville exploring this topic with Marcia Clark Myers of Churchwide Personnel Services and Jack Marcum of Research Services. The answer: "Both!"
Before addressing the issues surrounding the availability of clergy, one must first look at the number of congregations and members to be served. The statistics are somewhat startling.
MONTREAT, N.C. — The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) needs to do a better selling job to convince congregations to give money to the denomination with no strings attached — and to make the case that it causes problems when 70 percent of the money comes in with restrictions on how it can be spent.
MONTREAT, N.C. — Near the close of its meeting here Saturday, the General Assembly Council received a presentation regarding the PC(USA)’s response to the recommendations of the Independent Committee of Inquiry, which investigated allegations of physical and sexual abuse involving the children of missionaries in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and determined there is "overwhelming" evidence that one charismatic, well-respected Presbyterian missionary, who is now dead, sexually abused at least 22 girls and women over nearly a 40-year period, both in Africa and in the United States, from 1946 through 1985.
MONTREAT, N.C. — The hope is that by the time they leave this weekend, the General Assembly Council will have set some priorities around which the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) budget for 2005 and 2006 will be built.
The details of the budget won’t come until next year — including decisions, if it comes to that, of what jobs and programs might need to be cut.
MONTREAT, N.C. — One of the jobs the General Assembly Council has at its September meeting is to start working on priorities for the two-year budget, the budget for 2005 and 2006, which must be approved by the General Assembly in Richmond next summer. As part of that process, council members spent some time talking in small groups about their dreams for what the denomination might look like in 10 years.
MONTREAT, N.C. — Faced with a blast of criticism and the possibility that angry Presbyterians might stop giving money to the denomination altogether, John Detterick, executive director of the General Assembly Council, said he wants the council to delay acting on a proposal to start assessing a 5 percent administrative fee for restricted donations given to the denomination.
Editor's Note — This report was prepared by the Office of Theological Education of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
Recent economic events have had a major impact on Presbyterian theological institutions. Many seminaries have been affected by falling markets, because they are heavily dependent on endowment and other invested assets. As President Thomas Gillespie of Princeton Seminary explains, "Endowment plays a more critical role in theological education than it does in the funding of colleges and universities, which are largely tuition driven."
MONTREAT, N.C. – She calls them joys and concerns.
Things she’s seen and heard as she travels to Presbyterian churches, things that excite her and give her hope, things that have given her some pangs.
Susan Andrews, moderator of the 215th General Assembly, talked to the General Assembly Council Sept. 24 about what she’s noticed so far, based on her first four months on the job and talking to everyone from the national staff of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) to the faithful in some of the smallest churches.
MONTREAT, N.C. — Vernon Carroll, chair of the General Assembly Council, has a vision for what that group can be, for how it can lead the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) And it’s not, Carroll says, that "we’re just custodians trying to maintain the status quo."
MONTREAT, N.C. — When folks are out trying to raise money for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), one of the selling points they sometimes use is that all of the money given will go for a particular cause — to help hungry people in a particular part of the world, or the victims of a hurricane or drought or some other natural disaster.
The University of Dubuque Seminary, in the heartland of the country, offers programs both in rural ministry and in the church and technology, tying theology to the land and to the wireless world.
Both San Francisco and Princeton seminaries have programs focused on spirituality and young people — recognizing, perhaps, that the music and preferences and questioning of teen-agers and young adults signal both a real hunger for God and a desire for things in churches to change, not later, but now.
It is difficult, in the comfort of an America of Wal-Marts and democracy, to imagine what life is like in other parts of the world. But each year, some of the mission co-workers for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) gather for a Sharing Conference, in which they talk about their work, their calling, their difficulties and joys.
LOUISVILLE — John M. Mulder, who resigned last fall - citing poor health - after serving 21 years as president of Louisville Seminary, has been temporarily excluded from the practice of ordained ministry because of sexual misconduct.
Transylvania Presbytery, of which Mulder is a member, met Tuesday, Sept. 16, and decided to suspend him for 14 months from the practice of ordained ministry. Mulder had self-accused himself of sexual misconduct to the presbytery.
In his study, Three Centuries of Presbyterians along the Potomac (1989), William E. Thompson sites 1774 remark of Nicholas Cresswell of Alexandria, Va.: "Went to a Presbyterian Meeting. They are a set of rebellious scoundrels, nothing but political discourses instead of religious lectures." Of course, those were rebellious years. The Spirit of ’76 was in the air.
George F. Barber III, a Presbyterian elder from Memphis, Tenn., has been named as the next president of Montreat Conference Center, according to a Montreat news release. Montreat's board of directors elected Barber during a called telephone conference on Sept. 5. He assumes his new role effective Sept. 22.
CHICAGO -- When some task force members read the histories of the battles of the Presbyterian church in the 1920s, they found it fascinating -- getting caught up in the stories of political maneuvering, of big personalities and the clash of theological views, of how a divided church found a way to move forward.
CHICAGO -- The idea that white people tend do things a certain way -- and that that might not be the only way or even the best way -- is something people who are used to doing things in that way can be slow to consider.
So the Theological Task Force on Peace, Unity and Purity in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) spent some time at its recent meeting listening to some of its members who are people of color talk about how things are done in their cultures, to see what they might learn. Here's some of what those people had to say.
CHICAGO -- Some folks see "peace, unity and purity" in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) as a matter of doctrine or discipline -- making sure the church is doing the right thing on some controversial issue. At the most recent meeting of the Theological Task Force on Peace, Unity and Purity in the PC(USA), however, there were suggestions that, both theologically and historically, it's about a lot more than that. In short, it's less about what the PC(USA) decides to do to resolve one of these messes. It's a lot more about God.
CHICAGO -- When John Wilkinson, a pastor and ardent amateur church historian, looks back to those days, to the photographs of sober and well-starched Presbyterian men who fought so hard over what they believed (another pastor, Gary Demarest, joked that it looked like they never, ever took off their suits and ties), Wilkinson says it all seems to him "evocatively familiar" of what's happening in the church now.
CHICAGO -- Washing feet -- an intimate connection, one kneeling in service, the other accepting the kindness -- isn't something a lot of white, orderly, well-to-do Presbyterians are comfortable with.
But Jesus washed the feet of his disciples in the 13th chapter of John's gospel, as a way of saying goodbye before he was killed, and told them he expected them to do the same for one another. And that idea -- kneeling in service to others, accepting their hospitality in return, and being intimately connected, eye to eye and touch to touch -- can bring a new way of looking at people with whom one shares faith but may differ strongly in ideas.
LOUISVILLE -- It wasn't wild fun -- it took hours of talking and sometimes wading waist-deep through parliamentary muck. But this was a chance for young people from the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) to say what they think about issues in the world and in the church. They prayed before the most controversial votes, sometimes listening in silence for the voice of God. And unlike when the grownups do it, some of the teenagers stood on top of the tables waving their paddles when they were ready to vote.
After they moved to California in 1997, Pat and Gil Field shopped around for a church for three years, not caring what denomination it was but wanting, in Pat’s words, a church "where people weren’t dead in their seats."
But week after week, "we were just coming out of churches really empty, and not feeling fulfilled," she said. For a while, they held Sunday school in their backyard, "which we jokingly called First Church of the Gazebo."
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