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GAC Chair Carroll seeks more than status quo

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."

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Seminary offer specialty programs to meet needs, attract students

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.

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Endowment-driven seminaries seek to secure future despite poor economy

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."

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Moderator shares her joys and concerns for PC(USA)

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.

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Council to consider fee on restricted giving

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.

Voices

The Gift of Theological EducationL Learning to Read before Learning to Talk

Deep in the South Georgia forests, perched up on the fender of a Ford tractor at eight years of age, I was surprised when Henry slammed it to a halt. Moving carefully, he took his single-shot .22 rifle from where it had been stowed behind his seat and fired a bullet through the brain of the largest rattlesnake that I had ever seen. We carried the dead snake with us back to the house, where Henry, the plantation superintendent, proceeded to skin it and cut off its rattles for all to see.

Voices

Paul and Theological Education for Mission Funding

In the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) we are short on members but still have substantial funds for mission. Churches in the "Two-Third’s World" have greater and greater numbers of people but are short on funds for ministry. How can we best become partners in mission? Surely some special "theological education" is required.

Short-term mission trips are a popular form of ministry that bring different parts of the body of Christ together.

Voices

A Strategic Business Plan for Placing the Best Minds in Pulpits

Recently a religious fortnightly heralded a certain conservative school’s organized deployment of its best M.A. graduates into prestigious philosophy programs nationally and internationally. From there, earned doctorates in hand, these same students are assisted into the academy becoming leaders in the current revival of metaphysics, philosophy of religion, business ethics and philosophical theology.

Voices

Remembering and Re-membering an Essential Ecosystem

Let me begin with an act of memory.

I remember — I’ve not just read about, but I remember — a time in the life of the American mainline church when there was a vital understanding of, and deep confidence in, the language of vocation. I can actually diagram the way in which, at various junctures, this language got spoken in practical ways, to the end that a whole churchly ecosystem participated in the discernment and encouragement of my own sense of vocation.

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Transylvania Presbytery reprimands former seminary president for sexual misconduct

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.

Voices

What would ewe do?

For a number of years in the 1960s my missionary father-in-law sponsored a small program for theological students of Haile Selassie University in Addis Ababa. His primary purpose was to provide room and board for 30 young men who had no money and no scholarship support for the summer months. The secondary purpose was to provide instruction in Bible and theology. The tertiary purpose was to provide American Presbyterians with an unpaid Christian evangelistic opportunity overseas.

Editorials

Can God Do Anything?

It was June 1979. Fresh out of seminary, I had accepted a call to three small churches that were yoked together in east central Missouri. I was one of seven persons who were to appear before the Examinations Committee of Missouri Union Presbytery, all of whom were daring to enter the high calling of being a pastor to God's people. Each of us entered the room, one at a time, to be examined separately. We engaged in trivial conversation to ease the tension, listening for any clues from the closed doors of what might lie ahead of us.

Voices

Treating the Symptoms

Everyone, even those least familiar with medicine, knows that, in most cases, treating symptoms is a vain pursuit if the actual disease is ignored. No amount of Tylenol will conquer a serious bacterial infection; it will only give temporary relief for the suffering associated with it. Ignore the disease long enough, and death, even from some minor infections, is possible.

Book Reviews

Grace: A Memoir

By Mary Cartledgehayes
Crown. 2003. 203 pp. $23. ISBN 0-609-60834-7

— Review by Mary Lib Phipps, Cary, N.C.

Grace is an exciting story of the path one woman chose at a point in her life when it was neither easy nor logical. Mary Cartledgehayes shares an honest and beautifully expressed impression of a few different, yet exhilarating, years in her life.

Book Reviews

Teaching Preaching: Isaac Rufus Clark and Black Sacred Rhetoric

By Katie Geneva Cannon

Continuum. 2002. 184 pp. $24.95. ISBN 0-8264-1441-9

— Review by Lonnie J. Oliver, College Park, Ga.

Teaching Preaching is a creative, fresh approach to teaching and learning preaching form a perspective that integrates the Word of God with everyday challenges and opportunities. The book's style helps the reader to affirm the African experience in America through sound theology and with a clear methodology.

Voices

A Ministry of Writing

When word came to me that Robert Bullock was retiring as The Outlook’s editor, I realized that I had been the beneficiary of the skills of four Outlook editors who gave their lives to a ministry of writing. I speak of Aubrey Brown, George Laird Hunt, and the present retiring incumbent who is storing away his sharp pen and bold blue pencil in order to move on to other things. I mention with reverence the quiet and commanding figure of Ernest Trice Thompson, who was my teacher, and whose influence gave The Outlook its particular sheen.

Editorials

Riveted Together

Like dozens of men and women before me, I now have the privilege of wearing the moderator’s cross. Most Presbyterians know the story behind the cross — the vision and the generosity of H. Ray Anderson of Fourth church in Chicago, who purchased the crosses on the Island of Iona in 1948.

Voices

Foundation Continues to Serve the Entire Church

I want to express my personal appreciation for Jennifer Files’ attention to the Presbyterian Foundation, a unique and important entity of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) . As a current member of the board of trustees of the foundation, I add the following comments.

As members of the church, we have been and are being greatly blessed by the foundation. For more than 200 years, Presbyterians have entrusted gifts, in large and small amounts, to the foundation's care and management.

Voices

Foundation Should ‘Serve the Church in all its Work’

Upon my departure in April, 1999, after six years as President and CEO of the Foundation, I made a commitment to myself to continue to love the Presbyterian Church and the foundation — and to keep my mouth shut! Like many, I had seen the examples of hangers-on who, after leaving full-time involvement in an organization, continued to make their "contribution" by meddling, without responsibility or accountability for the performance, or even for what they said.

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Task force considers different ways of making decisions

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.

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Non-Anglo members give their point of view

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.

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