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216th GA to receive per capita option

LOUISVILLE – What per capita rate will the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) set for 2005 and 2006? Well, that all depends.

The proposal on the table is to offer the General Assembly two options for a per capita rate, and to let the Assembly decide.

The first option would set a rate of $5.46 per active member for 2005 – five cents less than the rate for this year – then to raise it to $5.56, a boost of 10 cents per member from the current rate, for 2006.

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Budget cuts remain in background as GAC starts winter session

LOUISVLLE — The big tiger, another round of budget cuts for the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), stayed mostly out of sight as the General Assembly Council opened its winter meeting here Tuesday, Feb. 10. The cat hasn’t disappeared, but the denomination’s leadership is hoping to talk later this week more about the big picture — a "mission work plan" that lays out the vision for what kind of things should get money and what should not — and less about the hard dollars involved.

Voices

The Grand Old Pledge

On the Supreme Court's docket for the current session is a review of the Ninth Circuit Court's judgment of the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. If that phrase is removed, it would return to the version I memorized in public school. During World War II no one complained about a deficiency in the 29 words we voluntarily repeated during our daily flag raisings. Our generation swelled with patriotic pride and could hardly wait to enlist in our armed services to help topple those totalitarian regimes intent on conquering other European or Asian nations.

Editorials

Responsible Connectionalism: Following the Money

Please don't call me contentious. Don't call me disloyal. I'm just confused over the conviction deeply held by some of my dearest friends about their right to withhold or redirect funds that normally would go to the denomination. What I hear them saying is that the church courts have affirmed our legal right — which is accorded us by our polity ...which is based upon our theology — which issues from our God-endowed freedom — to determine where our money goes. Where all of our money goes.

Voices

Righteous Judgment

Surely by now it is clear that we are standing under the judgment of God. Nothing else could account for the precipitous and calamitous decline of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) over the last 40 years. And while we stand under the judgment of God, this indeed is our only hope: the judgment of God is righteous.

Voices

Gibson’s ‘Passion’ is a missed opportunity

Mel Gibson's labor of faith is not a popcorn and candy movie. It's gruesome, it's brutal, it's bloody, and it's sobering. For the faithful, it's a stark reminder of just how much Jesus sacrificed, and at what great cost our redemption has been paid.

"The Passion of the Christ" depicts the last 12 hours of the life of Jesus of Nazareth (played by Jim Cavaziel), from the arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane to the tomb.

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Presbytery to consider controversial recommendation for dissenting church

The disputes in Cincinnati presbytery regarding Mount Auburn church — a congregation whose session has said it cannot comply with the policy of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) regarding the ordination of gays and lesbians — are far from over.

Last summer, Mount Auburn’s pastor, Stephen Van Kuiken, lost his ordination after he refused to stop performing same-sex union ceremonies.

Voices

Beyond Liberal or Conservative

As a Presbyterian who claims but also hopes to transcend the label "liberal," I was heartened by The Outlook's reports (Nov. 3) of two addresses offered at the recent Presbyterian Coalition Gathering in Oregon. Jin Kim, newly-elected board president of Presbyterian's for Renewal, challenged his audience to look forward to a more racially/ethnically inclusive church, not backward to the supposed glory days of our 1950s segregated congregations.

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Contentious meeting of presbytery does not validate Williamson’s ministry

ASHEVILLE, N.C. — After a long, contentious, messy meeting — the kind where people roared down disapproval from the balcony when they didn’t like what they’d just heard — Western North Carolina Presbytery voted 150-106 Saturday night to declare that Parker Williamson, chief executive officer of the Presbyterian Lay Committee and editor-in-chief of the Layman, does not have a ministry that is validated by the presbytery.

Voices

Machen and the Presbyterian Predicament

As Western North Carolina Presbytery prepares to vote Jan. 31 on a recommendation not to revalidate the ministry of Parker Williamson with the Presbyerian Lay Committee, the present struggle for the soul of the Presbyterian Church is looking like a replay of the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the 1920s. If the editor of The Layman eventually loses his ordination because of his encouragement to sessions to withhold per capita contributions, the decision would mirror the 1935 defrocking of J. Gresham Machen by New Brunswick Presbytery over his leadership of an independent mission board that appeared, like the Layman, to threaten the purse of mother church.

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Conservative language removed from ‘Families’ paper

LOUISVILLE — Conservative support may start to erode away again from the controversial "Transforming Families" report — as the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy recently voted to take out of a draft language that spoke of some families being established "contrary to God’s will."

Editorials

Ministry of Fear

Across the denomination there is much interest concerning Western North Carolina Presbytery's Jan. 31 meeting, when the peers of Presbyterian Layman editor-in-chief and CEO Parker Williamson will consider a recommendation that his ministry with the Lay Committee not be revalidated.

Voices

Comments on Amendment 03-G

With other news and controversial issues taking up much space in Presbyterian publications, I would like to call our attention to one of the amendments that is being sent down for vote by presbyteries. Amendment 03-G will require a minister or church employee to be placed on immediate administrative leave as soon as a sexual misconduct complaint is filed with the clerk of the governing body when the issue involves someone under 18 years or who is mentally unable to make decisions for him/herself.

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Mission search brings Alabama church into contact with Cambodian willage

So how did a church from Trussville, Alabama — a pretty typical Presbyterian congregation, fairly small, more one-tone than ethnically diverse — end up dedicated heart-and-soul to an impoverished village in Cambodia?

John Buckingham, a retired physician and elder from the church, calls it a miracle. Sovanna Thach, a Cambodian refugee who survived the killing fields and never intended to go back, said, "I don’t know how to describe it. It amazes me, amazes me ... The Lord, He never abandoned me."

Voices

Response to ‘De-Triumphalizing the Gospel’

I read with interest William H. Harter’s guest viewpoint entitled, De-Triumphalizing the Gospel. I commend him for his efforts both to be a Christian friend to Jewish persons and to humbly recognize that Gentile Christians have been grafted into Israel. However, I find myself disagreeing with him in his assertions that Christians should not seek to evangelize Jews and that trust in Jesus as Messiah, for a Jew, is apparently not a completion of what God always intended for Jews.

Editorials

Equitable

While attending a preaching conference in Atlanta last year, I had the opportunity to visit the Ebeneezer Baptist Church and the National Park Service grounds that are dedicated to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s memory. Yet as I strolled through the streets there and gazed at the adjacent neighborhood, I was forced to wonder: Had Dr. King’s dream truly come to fruition?

Voices

De-Triumphalizing the Gospel

The serious problem posed by denominational funding of the Avodat Israel congregation in Philadelphia Presbytery has significance far beyond what Harold Kurtz describes as a "splash" (in "De-Westernizing the Gospel").

This congregation understands itself as part of the self-described "Messianic Jewish" movement. This nomenclature is distressing and demeaning to Jews because messianism has always been and continues to be central to Jewish self-understanding as well as to Christian.

Outlook Features

Earning hope

These are cynical times, and this is supposed to be a season of hope.

We have the president of the United States flying off in fierce secrecy at Thanksgiving to greet the American troops in Iraq — an unabashedly Hollywood patriotic moment — followed almost immediately by more deaths of more soldiers far from home.

Voices

Easter at Christmas

Christmas is both "the best of times" and "the worst of times." It is best when its spirit kindles the light of Christ’s compassion and love in the hearts of believers. It is worst when it brings to mind the loneliness, melancholy and sorrow that is felt by all who grieve their losses, unable to touch the hands and faces of those whom they once loved. It is worst, too, for those whose life at the margins, in deprivation, impoverishment and disenfranchisement, casts a long shadow upon the future.

Voices

Fudging Christmas

Being now among their number, I am nevertheless not especially fond of old people. That is, I object mightily to church activities that separate the old from the young, the married from the single, the male from the female. Naturally, if the church camp has only one shower, segregation delivers the U.S. Male from strain to eye and whiplash to the neck. However, in general segregation is a bad idea because families, including the family of God, are by nature, and by nature's God, multigenerational.

Book Reviews

The Spirit of Adoption: At Home in God’s Family

By Jeanne Stevenson-Moessner
WJKP. 2003. 134 pp. Pb. $14.95.

— Review by Stephen R. Montgomery, Memphis, Tenn.
It has become a cliché in book reviews to state that "this is a book that should be on every pastor’s bookshelf and every church library." In the case of Jeanne Stevenson-Moessner’s The Spirit of Adoption: At Home in God’s Family, the cliché rings true.

Uncategorized

If Joseph and Mary knocked on your door, what would you do?

If Joseph and Mary were to knock on the door tonight — ragged, weary, hungry strangers knocking on your door, asking for a place to sleep — what would you say? Would you open the door to people you did not know? Turn them away? Or would you be out shopping or racking up more time at work, so you wouldn’t even hear the knock?

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