PUP testifies before assembly committee
By Parker T. Williamson, The Layman Online, June 17, 2006
217th General Assembly
Birmingham, Ala.BIRMINGHAM — For the second time in two days, members of the General Assembly Task Force on Peace, Unity and Purity (PUP) attempted to sell their controversial report to General Assembly commissioners, this time to the Assembly Committee on Ecclesiology, a gauntlet through which the report must pass on its way to the floor of the denomination’s highest governing body. Their testimony was largely a repeat of a four-hour “pre-assembly,” breakfast-through-lunch pep rally that several hundred commissioners attended yesterday.
PUP co-moderator Gary Demarest reminded the committee that his group had been brought together “after decades of intense conflict in this denomination.” He said the church is “weary of party strife and winner-take-all resolutions of issues that only generate more conflict.” He described the task force’s job as an attempt to discover “ways for the church to live more faithfully with on-going differences.”
PUP co-moderator Jenny Stoner reported that the task force had taken their report to some 135 presbyteries and other governing bodies, plus seminaries and congregations. Stoner claimed that the task force was diverse, yet unanimously united behind its report. She credited the group’s process and “tools for discernment” as reasons for its unanimity.
PUP member Mike Loudon claimed that the report’s theological reflection “affirms core Christian and Reformed beliefs” that led the members to commit to their “first and primary recommendation:” “Let the PCUSA stay together; let’s not split.”
Loudon said that a major breakthrough in the members’ relationships occurred when each of them was led to “repent of our sins against each other.” He said that everyone concluded that those with whom they disagree “are Reformed Christians, not heretics,” and that issues over which they disagree “do not break neatly into yes-or-no, for-or-against categories.” This theme was repeated frequently by task force members, namely, that the controversial issues confronting Presbyterians are “complex,” and require fluid, rather than rigid approaches toward mutual understanding.
Loudon defended the task force’s “scrupling” proposal in which standards that have been adopted by the whole church could be called “nonessential” by those governing bodies that did not wish to apply them. He said that declaring a scruple (an exception) to one of the denomination’s standards was consistent with Presbyterian polity since 1729, and that it “balances church-wide standards and the exercise of individual conscience.” This procedure “is not a polity tweak,” he said.
PUP member Barbara Wheeler came out swinging against those who have voiced opposition to the report. Echoing her colleague Mark Achtemeier’s attack the previous day on unnamed Presbyterians who “demonize” those with whom they disagree, Wheeler targeted “special interest groups” whom she said “have a vested interest in keeping the church in a combat mode.” “Most of the vehement opposition to the task force report comes either directly from these interest groups or is based on materials that they produced,” she said.
Wheeler urged commissioners to “wrest control of the church’s agenda” from these small groups whose activities are splintering the denomination. “Should lobbyists determine the future of the church of Jesus Christ?” she asked. “We hope that you will join the task force in trying to mold a future in which, for all Presbyterians, the primary affinity group within the Christian family is the Presbyterian Church (USA).”