DALLAS, Texas — Addressing the speculation that the newly formed Fellowship Community was merely a way to keep Presbyterians for Renewal (PFR) going, Paul Detterman said, “No, not at all.”
He was speaking at the launch of the new Fellowship Community, created from merging the Fellowship of Presbyterians and PFR.
The launch was held during the 2014 National Gathering of ECO: A Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians and the FOP, August 18-19 in Dallas.
“PFR was created at a different time in a different church,” said Detterman. “PFR ran its course.”
Detterman, who was the executive director of PFR and the FOP, will also be the executive director of the Community. The PFR staff will also transition over to the new organization, which officially will begin Jan. 1, 2015. PFR will cease to exist the day before.
“We are working to build a community within a denomination,” he said, adding that the name Fellowship Community “tells you what we are striving for.”
There must be a sense of call in order to have a community, said Detterman, “because a group of people in same room do not make a community. … A community that functions the way we want must start with your sense of call of a child of Christ.”
A hand-out at the meeting said that the Fellowship Community plans to serves its members by:
- “A network of Abbots— volunteers who will serve as ‘pastors’ of pastors and other leaders, providing accountability, prayer and a relational portal into a larger community of support;
- “The 2 or 3 Network — a redesigned focus on smaller membership congregations; encouraging, connecting and developing leadership; helping them joyfully embrace the unique opportunities small congregations have for 21th century ministry;
- “Mission Affinity Groups — connecting the sessions and pastors of congregations of all sizes who affirm the Fellowship Covenant and essential tenets as they pursue their missional calling;
- “Studies, devotionals, etc. for spiritual formation, theological education, worship and missional nurture;
- “Regional events for prayer, worship and spiritual/missional growth, offered on a regular basis.”
“We are excited about this,” he said, continuing that work is still begin done to put all the pieces together.
Detterman said that as the leadership works continues to work out the details, “people are saying ‘Wow,’ can we actually live together that way in the PCUSA? We can actually stay in, not just because we are stuck?”
The PCUSA’s PMA Executive Director Linda Valentine speaks at the launch of the Fellowship Community.
During the introduction of the Fellowship Community, Detterman called on the Presbyterian Church (USA)’s Mission Agency Executive Director Linda Valentine to address the group.
After she mentioned the names of several denominational staff people who were attending the gathering – Roger Dermody, Charles Wiley, Vera White, Claire Davis – Valentine said that “We are the Presbyterian Mission Agency, and we are here for you.”
She made it clear that as PCUSA staff, “We are not commissioners to the General Assembly. We are the PMA and we carry out the work of the church and serve the whole church. … We are here to represent the whole church.”
She highlighted several ministries of the PMA including Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, the Young Adult Volunteers program, 1001 Worshiping Communities and the curriculum produced by the denomination.
Detterman told those attending the meeting to “love on the Louisville staff, because they are in an incredibly difficult position … Love on the executive presbyters who are here.”
He also spoke of the Fellowship Community’s “dual focus” of staying in and reaching out, because “we feel that this is tremendously important.”
Paul Detterman introduces the Fellowship Community.
Detterman then turned his focus to funding the new organization. “We need to ask you to help us.” Stating that there wasn’t a “big church” funding this effort, he said that “we are going on faith for this movement.”
He asked those gathered to consider supporting the Fellowship Community “without subtracting from your church and other missions it is supporting …We’re not asking you to detract from anything you are doing right now, but to go one step forward.”
The Fellowship Community is seeking to raise $200,000 by the end of October, 2014, said Detterman. The projected budget for the 2015 fiscal year is $400,000-450,000.
Detterman stressed that the Community was being created “not because we want to perpetuate an organization … It isn’t because we want to perpetuate a heritage. It isn’t because anything that did or didn’t happen. We feel God is leading us to a different place.”
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Presbyterian Church (USA)’s Mission Agency Executive Director Linda Valentine: “We are here to represent the whole church”
You know as much as I really want to believe that…………………
I’m sure Rev. Detterman and his colleagues in this new group are very fine people but they are wasting their time and the Lord’s money. Nothing they do will prevent the PC(USA) from continuing to shrink to a membership of 1 million or less (down from a peak of 4.3 million) at which point it will be only vaguely Christian and situated on the far left wing fringe of Presbyterianism. Moreover this venture indicates a weak grasp of PC(USA) history. When the first woman was ordained 40 years ago this year, progressives offered glib assurances that women’s ordination would always remain a matter of individual church discretion. But liberalism has always had an ugly underbelly of coercion and it was just a matter of time before the issue evolved from discretion to coercion. Similarly it’s just a matter of time before gay marriage in a shrunken, exclusively progressive PC(USA) evolves from discretion to coercion. These good folks also fail to grasp that beyond a certain tipping point, diversity of belief renders a denomination’s message to the world so garbled and contradictory as to be incoherent. History will show that the Presbyterians who made the wisest moves during this era were those who realigned themselves away from the PC(USA) so everyone across the spectrum could pursue the great commission more effectively because they became unfettered by bickering with each other.
Hey Paul, got a question for you. Are you still enrolled in the Board of Pensions healthcare plan? Are all those in FOP still enrolled in the same group healthcare plan? If so, how do they reconcile with funding same gender benefits;
The same way that they reconcile funding for abortions.
There was a move about a year ago from the BoP asking churches if they would support a separation of funding as they currently do with abortion. Many churches responded to that with a firm yes.
Frankly, if your church is in the PC(USA) you have no choice in this matter. You are required to pay into the BoP for your pastor’s pension and health care.
What I see the Fellowship Community doing is providing a place where orthodox congregations of the “Split Ps”, that is the PC(USA), EPC, ECO, RPCNA, and so on, can come together to work missionally, provide support and accountability.
JIm, while many are ‘realigning’ many congregations are not in friendly territory. In some presbyteries, even a suggestion that a Session was thinking about discussing moving to another denomination would result in an AC coming in to take over as Session, and the pastor being thrown out.
In other presbyteries, the cost of leaving would result in the church not having enough left over to cover salaries, or keep the lights on, let alone continue in its local mission.
I’m under no illusion that the ‘local option’ of SSM will eventually be Kenyonized to make it mandatory. That is when those churches who could not leave, will have to make a major decision to bite the bullet, and either disaffiliate (if legal in their state), or walk and leave the building.
Until that time however, having an organization that will provide some means of support for orthodox congregations, small churches (under the new 2or3 group that is the renamed ‘Wee Kirk” ministry), and individuals is a good thing.
I seriously doubt that those in the leadership of the Community think that they will be able to stop the overall loss of membership, there are too many false teachers at ‘progressive’ churches for those losses to stop. People will leave if they are not being fed.
I do think the Community is more interesting in providing a safe place for orthodox congregations to connect with other orthodox congregations.
I’d give it about 5 years for PCUSA to fall to the one million mark. Congregations leaving where they can. Rapidly aging membership. Othodox believers will continue to walk away or be chased off. The rate of decline will continue to accelerate. It will be under 500,000 within 10 years.
Wolfhart Pannenberg, whose Systematic Theology has been ranked alongside of Barth’s Church Dogmatics and Paul Tillich’s Systematic Theology by leading American Theologians, reasoned that “If a church were to let itself be pushed to the point where it ceased to treat homosexual activity as a departure from the biblical norm, and recognized homosexual unions as a personal partnership of love equivalent to marriage, such a church would stand no longer on biblical ground but against the unequivocal witness of Scripture.” He continues “A church that took this step would cease to be the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was quite an active member of the Confessing Church of Germany and suffered later a martyr’s death under Hitler, warned: “If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction.” American evangelical Presbyterians, when launching the Confessing Church movement in the Presbyterian Church (USA), were not paying any attention to his insightful discussion as to the reasons why the German evangelical movement (that had produced The Theological Declaration of Barmen—which the Presbyterian Church (USA) has also adopted as one of its own confessions) failed. Incidentally, American evangelical Presbyterians will have to analyze the reasons why the G-6.0106b and other renewal movements were bound to fail from the beginning.
Calvin, who had to leave the Roman Church at age 25 to avoid losing his salvation, believed even later in his life that the Roman Church was not completely dead. While refusing to give the title of the church to the congregations of the Roman Church that was dying, he did not doubt the existence of churches among the papists. For Calvin some marks of the church still remained even when the whole Roman Church, and its congregations for that matter, lacked the lawful form of the church. For Calvin when and if the sum of necessary doctrines is overturned the death of the church follows. Although he never discussed the possibility of restoration for papal church (his theology leaves a room for this), I personally believe that they have been restored or reformed, at least centuries later. The present condition of the Roman Church seems to be much more alive than that of the Presbyterian Church (USA). As Calvin insisted at that time “the Lord wonderfully preserves in them a remnant of his people.”
I hope and pray that our Father in heaven will do the same for the PCUSA.
InKyu Park, honorably retired in the PCUSA
Thanks for your very thoughtful response, Reformed Catholic. So much better than much of the comments on this website which tend to be snarky and not particularly useful. There are two reasons why there’s not much need for this Fellowship Community to serve as a home for churches forced to remain in the PC(USA) because of the property issue:
1. Courts in half the states follow principles of trust law which doesn’t recognize the validity of the PC(USA)’s claim to own the property. Large, prominent Colonial Presbyterian in Kansas City, for example, left with its two valuable campuses (one on the Missouri side of Kansas City, the other on the Kansas side) with zero payment to the presbytery because courts in those two states refuse to recognize the trust clause. Presbyteries in those states will lose if they’re foolish enough to waste the Lord’s money on legal fees trying to take a departing church’s property.
2. I’m no expert on Presbyterian polity but it’s my understanding that the General Assembly has directed presbyteries to adopt gracious dismissal policies. If a presbytery swooped in to take over a church and fire the pastor for an offense no worse than considering departure, there must be some relief in Presbyterian polity for the church. As these realignments play out, the combination of presbyteries in states where the trust clause is unenforceable plus presbyteries which have adopted gracious dismissal policies means that the number of harsh, mean-spirited presbyteries will thankfully remain a small minority.
I suspect this Fellowship Community will have a relatively short life for two reasons: (1) its churches will quickly tire of sitting in presbytery meetings observing how isolated and anachronistic they are becoming in their own denomination; (2) its churches will soon envy the comity and missional effectiveness of churches which went to the EPC, ECO, PCA and they will do whatever they have to do to join them.
Jim,
On your points:
1. Yes, there are many states that have followed the Supreme Court’s ruling in Jones, that non-hierarchical denominations church property suits must be decided by using the standard principles of trust law.
However, in other states, such as California, the judge (or judges) were swayed by briefs that attempted to show that the PC(USA) (along with other non-hierarchical denominations such as the Episcopal Church (TEC) ) were indeed hierarchical. In Texas, where the Supreme Court there is ready to (or has) ruled in favor of standard principles, TEC has appealed to the SCOTUS to overturn. Indeed, the PC(USA) and other leftist denominations have filed an amicus briefs in support of the TEC appeal. While there are a majority of states that follow neutral principles of trust law, until SCOTUS rules definitively, not all churches will be able to leave with property. Which leads to your number 2.
2. Yes, the 2010 GA voted to have (I’m not so sure that its required) the Presbyteries create a Gracious Dismissal policy for departing churches to follow. In some areas, the policy was quite gracious, in others simply Draconian. Then the San Francisco appeal to the GAPJC about the dismissal policy not taking into account the ‘value of property’ (always about money it seems).
Now every Presbytery commission that is in talks with a church desiring to leave, must show that they took the value of the property into account when determining a ranso, er, donation to the Presbytery upon leaving. Which is why you hear of Menlo Park’s multi-million dollar payment, and other churches paying five or six figures payments.
As you can see, leaving is not as cut and dried as you think.
As far as the Fellowship Community leading a short life, I’m not so sure. It will continue the wee kirk mission, it will bring together churches from all reformed denominations to work together, those churches that are in a hostile presbytery will simply withdraw from their connection with presbytery, hold back per capita, and eventually either move to another denomination with or without property. However, they will have the support of other orthodox brethren in whatever they do.
All good insights, Reformed Catholic. It’s obvious that you’re following these issues quite closely. My guess is that SCOTUS isn’t going to take any of these church property cases and leave the issue to continue to be settled by state courts. SCOTUS refused to hear the most highly publicized case in the Episcopalian denomination (TEC) between the diocese and Falls Church Episcopal in Virginia, a large church in the Washington, D.C. area with such a rich history that it counts George Washington as an early member of its vestry. So if I’m right, PC(USA) churches in half the states will continue to be blissfully free to leave with little or no consequence.
Moreover I suspect that most presbyteries will continue to be influenced by the financial disaster in TEC which has been strictly enforcing its trust clause. TEC dioceses won’t even talk with departing churches about the property, giving them only two options of surrendering the property voluntarily or going to court. In the last five years TEC has spent $30 million on legal fees, insurance/maintenance/utilities on empty buildings and new congregation subsidies where TEC tries to save face by starting a tiny, successor congregation in the building.
And things have not turned out well for presbyteries which have mimicked the harsh tactics of TEC. The Louisiana Presbytery spent more than $100,000 on legal fees trying to take the property of tiny, 22-member Carrollton Presbyterian. The judge was so outraged by the presbytery’s tactics that she ordered the presbytery to pay the church’s legal fees as well, a very rare sanction in civil litigation. Moreover leaders in Louisville aren’t going to want to continue suffering the embarrassment of speaking out on peace and justice issues in troubled places around the world while declining to speak out on the harsh, unjust tactics of their own presbyteries. There’s only so much humiliation a denomination can suffer which is shrinking as quickly as the PC(USA).
With the PC(USA) shrinking at an accelerated rate, Marvin, it has become great sport to speculate as to when the last PC(USA) Presbyterian will turn out the lights. But the PC(USA) will never disappear completely because of its great wealth. The Presbyterian Foundation, only one PC(USA) entity, distributes $50-60 million each year to mission and that’s just the interest earned on the assets. Eventually the PC(USA) will resemble a once prominent PC(USA) church in downtown Philadelphia. A well-paid minister bravely preached to an empty sanctuary in that church for years because the income from the endowment kept the doors open and the lights on. Eventually the PC(USA) will shrink to a hollow shell of its former self living off the accumulated wealth of its forebears who mistakenly believed that bequeathing their money to the PC(USA) would advance the cause of Jesus in American life and culture. The church/foundation world is full of heavily endowed institutions which carry on quite nicely while no longer coming even close to pursuing the mission set out by their original benefactors.
When the gays file law suits against pcusa churches that refuse to perform marriages, hopefully, eyes will be opened. It is IF this will happen but When.