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Implementing the Task Force recommendations: looking ahead

Let's pretend we jump ahead a year.

Let's pretend the 2006 General Assembly has already met, and it has done exactly what the Theological Task Force on the Peace, Unity and Purity of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has asked it to do. So how will things in the church be different?

That's a question many in the church are trying to figure out -- they're trying to parse the report and figure out how the landscape of the PC(USA) would change if the task force recommendations were to prevail. That's difficult, because the task force report is not simple -- it's full of complicated, interlocking parts.

And, not surprisingly, different folks come up with different answers.

Some contend that the task force is basically recommending local option in practice if not in technical fact -- that if the recommendations are approved, some sessions and presbyteries will routinely ordain and install sexually-active gays and lesbians even though the PC(USA)'s ordination standards, which limit ordination to those who practice chastity if they're single or fidelity if they're married, would not themselves change.

Others disagree. They say it's close to miraculous that such a diverse 20-member task force could, after several years of difficult work, reach a unanimous recommendation with no minority report -- and they commend the task force for asking the PC(USA) to set aside some if its divisive ways and to return to a sense of balance, based on historic Presbyterian principles.

Book of Order references

The Task Force recommendations reference a part of the Book of Order, specifically a portion of chapter six, "The Church and its Officers." The complete text is available at www.pcusa.org/oga/constitution.htm.

Task Force: Balance, discernment are goals for PC(USA) future

CHICAGO -- The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) should enter a "season of discernment," in which its ordination standards should not change, but local governing bodies should determine whether candidates for ordination have departed from those ordination standards -- and whether a departure in a particular case "constitutes a failure to adhere to the essentials of Reformed faith and polity."

The Theological Task Force on the Peace, Unity and Purity of the PC(USA) approved that recommendation unanimously on August 25, after three and a half years of intensive work and with several of its members expressing joy in the outcome and a certainty, as Sarah Grace Sanderson-Doughty put it, that "we are being incredibly faithful to Christ and to one another."

The task force says the most important of its seven recommendations, the one from which all the others flow, is that Presbyterians learn to live in harmony with one another and "to avoid division into separate denominations."

The task force contends that it's not advocating "local option" regarding ordaining gays and lesbians, because the denomination's national ordination standards -- limiting ordination to those who practice chastity if they're single or fidelity if they're married -- would remain in effect. To adopt local option would be a distinct change, "and it would be un-Presbyterian," the report states.

Instead, the task force says it's returning to historic traditions of Presbyterian life and trying to restore a balance that hasn't always existed in the denomination's recent conflicted days.

Church leaders condemn Pat Robertson’s call for Chavez assassination

(ENI) Christian leaders representing both conservative and liberal constituencies have lambasted Christian minister/broadcaster Pat Robertson for calling for the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

Robertson's call "is appalling to the point of disbelief," National Council of Churches general secretary Robert Edgar said on Aug. 23 following Robertson's statement, delivered on the Christian Broadcast Network.

"We have the ability to take him [Chavez] out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability,'" Robertson, a former Republican Party presidential candidate, said on his Aug. 22 television show, The 700 Club, of the Venezuelan president, who has often been at loggerheads with the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush. "We don't need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong arm dictator," Robertson said. "'It's a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with."'

Israel’s Supreme Court approves destruction of synagogues

(RNS) Israel's Supreme Court ruled Aug. 23 that all synagogues in the now-vacated Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip and northern West Bank should be destroyed, but that everything portable be relocated to Israel.

The court was responding to a petition by Jewish settlers who objected to the government's plan to destroy all Jewish religious institutions -- 30 synagogues as well as eight yeshivas and seminaries -- in Gaza. The destruction would be part of the government's withdrawal of residents and troops from 21 settlements in Gaza and four in the northern West Bank.

Summer heat, circumstances complicate migrant situation; Volunteers arrested

It has been, in a terrible way, a remarkable summer.

The heat in the states along the U.S.-Mexico border has been uncaring, unceasing, record-breaking. The summer monsoons, which typically arrive in early July and bring some water and some relief, came late to Arizona this year, prolonging the difficulty.

Still, the people streamed north from Mexico and Central America, crossing the sand in the baking heat, some with their children, some traveling with no family, some just teenagers, trying to walk their way, against the law, towards a better way of life.

What U.S.-Mexico border policy should be is a matter of much passionate debate -- it won't be resolved in one long hot summer. But while the discussions over immigration policy continue, the flow of immigrants continues too, despite the best efforts of the U.S. Border Patrol. Humanitarian groups with deep involvement from some border- state Presbyterians are determined to show the face of God in the midst of all of this.

Transforming journeys

It is fall again. Storytellers from short-term mission trips are making their way around the Santa Barbara Presbytery. They "come and tell" at congregations around the presbytery perhaps because they were simply willing to go on one of the five IMPACT trips this year; and because their stories are full of fresh truth about their transformational experiences.

IMPACT, International Mission Project and Cross Cultural Training, is a mission-sending ministry of the Santa Barbara Presbytery. Since 1993, more than 300 people from the presbytery have been sent to serve in 12 countries. One of the reasons, perhaps, for the continued success of the ministry is that participants (from age 15 to 79) have returned to tell, teach, share their stories within their churches and from church to church. They are living letters to the people who sent them out--their children, parents, brothers, sisters and friends. They speak to good listeners!

IMPACT is relational, cross-cultural, built for individual and corporate learning. Twenty-four of the 32 churches in the Santa Barbara Presbytery have sent people on IMPACT journeys. These churches not only support the ministry and the participants but provide council members, pastors and presbytery staff for support, guidance and teaching. Participants leaving for summer trips are commissioned each summer at a presbytery worship. Congregations experience not only the fresh testimonies, but also the benefit of the renewed connections to other churches in the Presbytery. And of course, the new stories are an added invitation each year to people thinking about taking the next step, to go on an international, cross-cultural mission.

“Do you have a dream?’

Sometimes a dream is not a nightmare; it is a message from God that is received waking or sleeping and you cannot mistake it. Paul had a dream when he was asleep that he should go to Macedonia. It was so vivid and the voice of the man so urgent asking him to come over and help the Greeks that he got passage on a boat next morning (Acts 16:6-10). Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream when he was wide awake. God showed him that his children could be free and that people should not be judged by the color of their skin. It changed his whole life.

Do you have a dream for your church or presbytery? Is there a strong sense that God wants something done and that it cannot wait?

I have a dream for the church that is absolutely compelling. How it can be accomplished I do not know. My simple efforts to begin its realization have met with failure but I cannot give it up. *

It is a plain vision of Presbyterians and peacemaking.

Torrance honored in Lebanon, Scotland ceremonies

Iain R. Torrance, president of Princeton Theological Seminary, was the honored speaker at the Baccalaureate Service marking the 50th anniversary of Haigazian University in Beirut, Lebanon June 26. Both the University of Aberdeen and St. Andrews University in Scotland also awarded him the honorary Doctor of Divinity degree at their summer graduation ceremonies.

Torrance preached at Haigazian's Baccalaureate Service, held in the First Armenian Church in Beirut, for the university's class of 2005. In his sermon, titled "Hope in the New World," he called Haigazian, an Armenian institution, "a beacon for hope and reconstruction in Lebanon as it stands at the threshold of a new stage in its history." The university was founded as a creative response to the genocide of Armenians in Turkey by those who had escaped, "carrying their vision and faith with them," Torrance said.

MRTI designates five companies for dialogue, possible divestment

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) has named five companies in which it's considering divesting because of those firms' involvements in Israel -- involvement that a church committee contends contributes to the "ongoing violence that plagues Israel and Palestine."

During its meeting in Seattle on Aug. 5, the PC(USA)'s Mission Responsibility Through Investment committee (MRTI) named five companies -- Caterpillar, Motorola, ITT Industries, United Technologies and Citigroup -- it alleges have direct links to the violence, after considering a range of companies in which the church has investments and looking in detail at the business practices of each involving the Middle East.

Presbyterian mission work: What does the future hold?

The question of how American Presbyterians do mission work in an era of globalization -- and what those in declining mainline denominations in the U.S. can learn from the faithful in the rest of the world -- is very much on the minds of some in the church these days.

Among the questions being asked:

• What changes should American churches be making in the way they approach international mission?

• What lessons can be learned from the tremendous growth of the Christian church in parts of the southern hemisphere, and from the mission efforts initiated by churches from other countries?

• What are the implications of the trend for congregations and individual Presbyterians to be involved directly in mission work?

• What do young adults bring to the mix -- what excites them and what aren't they willing to tolerate?

Presbyterians are likely to be deep in conversation about this throughout the fall, in part through two upcoming conferences focused on global mission challenges.