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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.

Uncategorized

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.

Uncategorized

Work runs deeper than finding the answers to specific issues

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.

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Task force considers church’s historical handling of tough issues

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.

Uncategorized

Meaning of foot-washing passage stirs discussion among Task Force members

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.

Editorials

New Beginnings 3: Recoving from Blindness

On the road with God’s Presbyterian people, who are called today to recover their reason for being, their sense of mission, we begin with the recovery of sight — the gift of God.

Jesus’ healing of the blind in the Gospels always points to the fact that blindness — spiritual blindness — is a pervasive reality in the community of God’s people. Only Christ, through the Holy Spirit, can open the eyes long since closed to the light of God’s divine activity. We cannot open our own eyes through our own efforts.

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Youth affirm call of homosexuals to ministry, but also say it’s time to emphasize other issues

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.

Uncategorized

Churches awash in a growing tide of people attend, but don’t join

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."

Voices

The Myth of an Independent Judiciary

As disputes in our denomination are wending their way through the judicial system, there are frequent expressions of confidence in the "independent judiciary" to resolve the disputes in progress and to help us escape some of our most pressing difficulties. It would appear that this notion has its origin in the system of governments in the United States, where there is a "separation of powers."

Book Reviews

Ministry Loves Company: A Survival Guide for Pastors

By John T. Galloway Jr.

WJKP. 2003. 168 pp. Pb. $16.95. ISBN 0-664-22584-5

— Review by John D. Dalles, Longwood, Fla.

Want a long conversation with a venerable pastor reflecting on 37 years of ministry, innovative mission and congregational renewal? It's here in John Galloway's Ministry Loves Company. This is theoretical and practical advice on how congregations work and how pastors can help them work better without losing their religion.

Editorials

New Beginnings 2: Biblical Foundations

Last week it was suggested that one way to honor the 20th anniversary of Presbyterian re-union in Atlanta in 1983 is to measure hopes against realities in this initial period, and to look forward to what may lie ahead — under the title “New Beginnings.”

Reformed Presbyterian Christians always begin their reflections with the scriptural foundation — indeed, the lens through which experience must always be evaluated.

Voices

Conservative groups receive more money; large donors’ identities are still kept secret

Conservative Presbyterian special interest groups tend to have deeper pockets than liberal ones — although who’s giving the money often isn’t being revealed.

This year, for the first time, groups that wanted to rent display space in the Exhibit Hall at the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), held May 24-31 in Denver, were required by the Assembly to submit financial disclosure forms — Internal Revenue Service Form 990s, which the federal government requires nonprofit groups with incomes over certain thresholds to file.

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