LOUISVILLE, Ky. — A letter written to accompany the Confession of Belhar declares it to be a “word from God” in the first paragraph, thereby raising the confession to the level of canonical, instead of being what it is – the word of men.
Written by the Special Committee on the Belhar Confession, the 3,131-word accompanying letter, along with the 1,171-word confession, is being recommended for approval by the 221st General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA).
If the confession is approved by the assembly, ratified by two-thirds of the presbyteries, and approved by the 2016 General Assembly, the Belhar Confession will be included in the denomination’s Book of Confessions.
“The Accompanying Letter to the Confession of Belhar from the 221st General Assembly (2014) of the Presbyterian Church (USA)” (see page 8 of the pdf file) has been recommended for adoption by the assembly as “a statement reflecting the confession, conviction and rationale of the PCUSA based on the implications of this confession for our life and ministry as a Reformed and Presbyterian community in 21st century North America.”
The General Assembly also is asked to commend the letter to PCUSA congregations and presbyteries as they consider adding the confession to the denomination’s Book of Confessions.
This is the second try to get the confession into the denomination’s Book of Confessions. The 220th General Assembly in 2012 voted to send the Belhar Confession to the presbyteries for ratification, and while it did get a majority of votes, it did not get the required two-thirds approval.
Cliff Kirkpatrick
In his recent presentation to the Presbyterian Mission Agency Board, “Why Belhar? Why now,” Clifton Kirkpatrick, co-moderator of the Special Committee on the Belhar Confession and former stated clerk of the PCUSA, said that “the Belhar Confession is indeed God’s word to the PCUSA for such a time as this.”
Kirkpatrick said the committee has recommended that the 221st General Assembly do four things:
1. Approve the inclusion of the Belhar Confession in the Book of Confessions.
2. Adopt the accompanying letter. Kirkpatrick said that when the Belhar Confession was first adopted by the South African church, the accompanying letter was also adopted.
The letter spoke of “what the church failed to do and what it will do,” said Kirkpatrick. “Our committee has also written an accompanying letter, which really does talk about the context of our church and why it’s important.”
3. Call on the church to have a year-long study of the Belhar Confession and its two accompanying letters, said Kirkpatrick, “using the study guides we have produced. The reason it was voted down before was that people weren’t familiar with it.”
A web site — www.pcusa.org/belhar — has been launched with resources for the church-wide study process. It includes a design for workshops, videos, testimonials and a frequently asked questions section.
“There is no absence of material to study this,” said Kirkpatrick.
4. Dismiss the committee with thanks.
A message to the church
Kirkpatrick said that the Belhar Confession was adopted in South Africa by what he called “the colored church” in 1986. With riots in the streets, he said, “that church took a prophetic stand with a message — not so much to society — but to the church itself.”
The letter that accompanied the confession stated, among other things, that:
- The gospel was at risk
- An un-Christian ideology of racial separation infected the church and the nation.
- It was a cry from the heart based on the truth of Scripture.
Kirkpatrick declared that racism is still alive in the PCUSA:
- Sunday morning at 11 a.m. is still the most segregated hour of the week
- PCUSA and leadership at all levels is still an overwhelmingly white church in a multi-cultural society.
Kirkpatrick said that when the Belhar failed to get the support it needed from presbyteries to be included in the Book of Confessions following the last General Assembly, he was embarrassed and made a commitment to himself, that if Belhar ever came back up again, “I would be in the middle of it.”
Unity, reconciliation and justice
Kirkpatrick declared that there are three fundamental calls to the church — the call to unity, reconciliation and justice.
He compared the first paragraph of the accompanying letter to an executive summary of the entire document. It reads:
The Presbyterian Church (USA) is again facing a critical time in its history. We are rent apart by division and schism, we have yet to confront directly and confess the racism that has been a significant force in our own history, and we have shown a failure of resolve to make courageous stands for justice. We believe that the Confession of Belhar, a profound statement on unity, reconciliation, and justice in the church, comes to us as a word from God for this particular time and place for the PCUSA.
The last sentence of that paragraph elevates the Confession of Belhar to canonical status. The current confessional standard of the PCUSA regards the Bible alone as the Word of God. The accompanying letter in support of Belhar espouses a different theology, one that suggests that God’s Word is not fully revealed in the Bible, nor finally revealed in the person of Jesus, but continues in new revelations today.
That theology is necessary to undergird the arguments of those who want the church to progress in its thinking on moral issues. Kirkpatrick is a member of the board of the Covenant Network of Presbyterians, a group that advocates for the full inclusion of lesbians, gays, bisexual, transgender and queer people into the life of the PCUSA and also supports same-sex marriage in the denomination.
While the Belhar Confession speaks to the issue of racial justice, the accompanying letter written by the Special Committee not surprisingly brings human sexuality into the mix.
In its section on unity, the letter states that “beyond the issues of race and class, Presbyterians in the United States of America have, from the beginning, been troubled by differing theological world views and practices. We have been willing to divide over and over again … For the last quarter of the 20th century, the Presbyterian church has argued and divided over human sexuality and how to read its Scriptures in these matters. Once again the reality of diversity has threatened to divide us so that the visible unity of the church now hangs by a slender thread. We believe that the PCUSA needs to be called to the unity taught and proclaimed in the Confession of Belhar.”
Speaking of reconciliation, the letter reads in part, “as God’s reconciled people we have promised not to break the covenant in which we are bound through the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. At reunion we attempted to create the PCUSA as a reunited church in the absence of confessing the sin that had created our original division. In the last several decades, we in the Presbyterian Church (USA) have become increasingly separated into different political, economic and theological camps. More than ever, we need to be claimed by the gospel of God’s reconciling love. This gospel allows believers to come together, knowing that we have more in common that unites us, than what divides us.”
In its third section – Justice – the letter states that, “While the Confession of Belhar arose from the struggle of South African Christians to give witness to the Gospel amidst the injustice of apartheid, we are also being called to give witness in the face of injustice here among us in the U.S.A. We see that injustice in the faces of thousands of First Nation peoples who still live in dire poverty on reservations; in young African American men who are incarcerated disproportionate to their percentage of the population; in the ‘legal limbo’ status of immigrants, and in both native born Latinos who are subject to question in virtually every quarter of the nation; in public policies such as ‘stop and frisk’ and ‘stand your ground’ that put poor, black and brown young men at risk in the public square.”
The PCUSA, the letter continues “confesses its commitment to God and to the Biblical principles of unity, justice and reconciliation because in times like these in which we live, we need to remind ourselves and others of our discipleship to Christ and follow God’s mission in the world.”
Ending his presentation, Kirkpatrick quoted Jim Wilson, a member of the Committee of the Office of the General Assembly, who said, “Belhar describes the church I would like to belong to.”
“Well, it does for me too,” said Kirkpatrick. “A church centered in unity, justice and reconciliation.”
9 Comments. Leave new
Like most things pushed by activists in our denomination, the campaign to approve Belhar is accompanied by hectoring language, an oversimplified description of current events, a sense of panic, and poor theology. And, Belhar will be pushed at us over and over again (with predictable support from various former Moderators and other ecclesiastical establishment figures) until we approve it. It is tiresome, IMO.
The Belhar confession was recently inserted into a service at the church of which I used to be a member, by the associate pastor as a conclusion to her sermon. The confession was not titled in the bulletin; I’m guessing that was deliberate, to reduce the chance that a few members of the congregation might recognize the name and object to the use of the confession. But I recognized the words, and quietly left the sanctuary before the confession was read, so as not to be a part of it.
It seems the PCUSA is a church “reconciled, always reconciling”; after all, “reconciliation” was a main theme of the Confession of 1967. To hear Mr. Kirkpatrick, you’d think there had been no change in racial attitudes in the US in the 47 years since that controversial confession. Perhaps some readers of The Layman agree with him. But I’m guessing most don’t, and most see very little similarity between the United States of 2014 and South Africa during apartheid.
Again?!!!…. With all the due respect…the PCUSA is just spinning its wheels. People in said denomination are very smart, they are not blind…they know and realize that the intention of approving this confession has nothing to do with racial justice, within said denomination. How much time, effort, talents, money has it taken already and how much more will it take to enter into this “battle.”? It is yet one more distraction that keeps people from keeping their eyes on Christ and truly doing His will. I pray that our Heavenly Father bless His children within the PCUSA and give them clarity to do what is right in the eyes of God.
Yet the PCUSA thinks it’s OK to kill unborn babies. How do we “reconcile” that?
Paula:
Thank you for alerting us to this. I continue to stand by what I wrote about it last time around:
http://layman.wpengine.com/news50c3/
Don’t you love it when a leader in our denomination makes such a statement?
“Kirkpatrick declared that racism is still alive in the PCUSA:
Sunday morning at 11 a.m. is still the most segregated hour of the week
PCUSA and leadership at all levels is still an overwhelmingly white church in a multi-cultural society.”
The congregation I serves sits in the middle of a population of about 10,000. 99.9% is Caucasian. Within that population resides about 5 African Americans, and 10 Hispanics. 1 of the 5 and 5 of the 10 are members of this church. The 1 is an officer, and 1 of the 5 is employed as our Christian educator. Yet he labels us all as “racist.”
Maybe TE Kirkpatrick needs to step out of the way and let a theologically conservative multi-cultural individual chair his pet project which he so passionately wants “…be in the middle of…”
Kirkpatrick did state that, “the Belhar Confession is indeed God’s word to the PCUSA for such a time as this.” But then to argue that this is akin to “raising the confession to the level of canonical, instead of being what it is – the word of men” – borders on the moronic. The Layman, even if it disagrees with the inclusion of Belhar, should be above such sloppy logic.
So Clifton Kirkpatrick declares that the PCUSA ought to be “A church centered in unity, justice and reconciliation”?
It seems to me that every one of those goals is subsidiary to the primary goal of being centered in Jesus Christ. If we all center in Jesus Christ, we will have unity in Christ, not unity in, well, unity for unity’s sake. If we have the mind of Christ, we will seek godly justice, not the “justice” claimed by some political band and foisted on the church as its supposed purpose. If we center on Jesus Christ, we will have the most important reconciliation–with God–which will lead to us being reconciled in Christ to one another.
For far too long, the PCUSA has focused on secular, feel-good goals, goals that Rotary or Soroptimists or Young Socialists could just as easily make their center. But when a denomination lowers its sights toward such secular pursuits, it leaves out God, who ought to be at the very center of everything.
For too many years, Kirkpatrick presided over a wrong-headed church, headed in God-forgetting and increasingly God-defying directions. The energy of the denomination was wasted on questionable things that weren’t God things. What is left is a weak and stumbling organization that has no idea what it is supposed to do, and so wastes its energy and capital on secondary and tertiary enterprises.
Kirkpatrick’s successor, Gradye Parsons, has already ruled (at the 2012 General Assembly) that the confessions of the church are basically useless for Presbyterian polity since there are many of them and they supposedly contradict each other. So why the big push to add another confession–a troubling and tangential one at that?
The Confession of 1967 already powerfully speaks against racism. Thus no need for redundancy there. But Belhar can be stretched to try to justify the unjustifiable for Christians: same-sex sexual practice. That’s the bottom line.
Oh great. Another confession. How about we fulfill those we already have? Too late?