Task force member raises ‘integrity’ question about those defying church law
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, February 23, 2004
DALLAS – At the tail end of three presentations on ordination by members of the Theological Task Force on Peace, Purity and Unity – none dealing directly with today’s heated debate over the ordination of practicing homosexuals – W. Stacy Johnson dropped a bolt from the blue.
“The integrity issue,” Johnson began, stopping short of a full sentence. “What do you do when you have a congregation that changes the ordination vows on their own, which is happening in the Presbyterian Church? I have heard a lot of liberals say to conservatives, ‘How dare you break fellowship.’ In fact, changing the ordination vows is a break in integrity.”
Johnson, an associate professor of systematic theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, made that comment in the context of his suggestion that Reformed confessions generally feature two dimensions that are pertinent to ordination: doctrine and quality of church life.
But he said he would also include “integrity” and “catechical,” the latter involving training in basic Presbyterian beliefs.
No one responded directly to Johnson’s integrity statement. Barbara Wheeler, president of Auburn Theological Seminary in New York, offered the first response – which didn’t seem to address the issue Johnson raised.
“Stacy illustrated what I want to say,” she said. “I think we ought to be very clear that we are not an ordination task force … to untangle all of the issues. We need to ask the question about ordination or other issues … [but] every interesting issue that affects ordination is not on our plate.”
Scott Anderson, executive director of the Wisconsin Council of Churches, also responded to the integrity issue without commenting on the open violation of ordination law in the denomination. “Do we expect officers to be ‘better’ members? How does the Reformed doctrine of sin enter into a discussion of people who need to be better?”
And John Wilkinson, pastor of Third Presbyterian Church in Rochester, N.Y., offered a response that veered into the national debate among Episcopalians because of their selection of a bishop who left his wife and family to live with a homosexual partner.
“One of the ecclesiastical issues I can’t understand is why a bishop is causing all of this problem and the priesthood didn’t,” Wilkinson said. “What is driving the conflict for us?”
Wheeler, Anderson, who is a self-acknowledged homosexual, and Wilkinson have all worked to repeal the constitutional “fidelity/chastity” ordination requirement in the Book of Order of the Presbyterian Church (USA).
The task force spent the large part of two days talking about ordination during its meeting in Dallas Feb. 18-20.
Three members of the panel made presentations. John “Mike” Loudon, pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Lakeland, Fla., led a Bible study on ordination; Sarah Grace Sanderson-Doughty, pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Lowville, N.Y., addressed the theological basis for ordination; and Gary Demarest of Pasadena, Calif., co-moderator of the task force and a retired Presbyterian minister, talked about Presbyterian polity and practice.
Loudon’s presentation
“The subject for this morning’s session is ordination,” said Loudon, whose congregation is affiliated with the Confessing Church Movement Within the Presbyterian Church (USA). “This has polarized this denomination. We have gone to war over such issues as ‘Can women be ordained? Can homosexuals? Can heterosexuals not in chastity or marriage?'”
While several members of the task force have openly expressed their opposition to trying toreach any detailed agreement on the ordination controversy, Loudon reminded the panel that, “All of us are here because of the ordination issue. There are a number of mandates, but I think we all know the one that led the Generate Assembly” to establish the task force to consider Christology, Biblical authority, the ordination issue and power.
Loudon’s interactive Bible study did not deal with Scripture about homosexuality. Instead, it focused on Old Testament and New Testament passages that seemed to involve some act of ordination or consecration of church leaders.
From these, he drew a number of observations, such as:
- 1 Timothy 5:22, “Do not be hasty in laying on hands.” “That sounds like something out of the Book of Order,” Loudon said.
- The reference to a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation” in Exodus 19.6. “This sounds like the whole nation is set apart to be priests.”
- The consecration of Aaron and his sons in Exodus 28:1-5, which focuses on “anointing, ordaining and consecrating … and investing the priest with holy power and authority.”
- Leviticus 8, which emphasizes the “perpetuity” of ordination so that “no one might intrude into that perpetual appoint. Priesthood is not from human beings, but from God.”
Declaring that “the model for ministry is Jesus,” Loudon used Mark 10:35-45 – a passage in which the disciples James and John ask Jesus to place them in high posts – as a disclaimer against seeing ordination as an event intended exclusively for power and influence.
In Scripture, he added, “ordination is not for the privileged … not about authority and power, but about service and love.”
He also noted that the Bible records times when Jesus commissioned disciples for ministry without any specific act of ordination.
Then he reviewed the major texts on elders and deacons – 1 Timothy 3:1013 and Titus 2:5-9. Those lists emphasize the character of church officers.
“When I read these passages, I feel like the guy who is playing cards with Doc Holiday. If that’s it, I’m out. Of course, we remind ourselves that we are covered by the blood, which, of course, is true. None of us is worthy. For some strange reason, God has called some of us and gifted some of us for service as ordained officers.”
After discussing some of the Scriptural passages in breakout groups, members of the panel returned to give some of their own impressions. They included:
Sarah Grace Sanderson Doughty, pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Lowville, N.Y.: “There are high standards, a responsibility to carry a witness to the world about what Christianity is.”
Barbara Everitt Bryant, an elder who served as director of the U.S. Bureau of Census under former President George H. Bush: The Biblical qualities for elders set “exemplary standards … that were pretty timeless ones.”
Mark Achtemeier, an associate professor of theology at Dubuque Theological Seminary, lifted out one verse – 1 Tim. 4:10, “For to this end, we both labor and suffer reproach, because we trust in the living God, who is the Savior of all men, especially of those who believe.” “I don’t get the impression that all hope is lost outside of the bounds of the church,” Achtemeier said.
In response to the Mark 10:35-45 passage about James and John seeking places of privilege in Christ’s kingdom, Frances Taylor Gench, a professor of Bible at Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, said, “I decided this was not the most flattering picture of Christian leadership.” The passage also suggests, she added, “some foreordination of who will sit in leadership.”
John Wilkinson commented on 1 Corinthians 12, the list of charismatic gifts ranging from prophesy to tongues. “What it says of Christian leadership is that because we are members we are automatically leaders.”
Vicky Curtiss, co-pastor of Collegiate Presbyterian Church in Ames, Iowa, talked about 1 Peter 5 and said she was struck by the fact that church leaders will suffer, “though there is a little bit of description about how one should function, like feed the flock, hold fast, also by remembering your brothers and sisters who also suffer.”
Joan Merritt, an elder who is a member of Newport Presbyterian Church in Bellevue, Wash., concluded from the text in Hebrews 13 that the “qualities of being a leader are almost actually doable.” She summarized those qualities as mutual life, hospitality to strangers, faithful in relationships, imitate leaders, offering a sacrifice of praise to God, relying on God’s grace, not being greedy for money, sharing what you have, and obeying leaders. But, she concluded, “There is no word on how this happens.”
Lonnie Oliver, pastor of the New Life Presbyterian Church in Atlanta and the only African-American member of the task force, concluded from John 21 that “leadership is based on loving Jesus … by providing care and nurture … risk-taking.”
Wheeler responded to Ephesians 4:1-16 and said it could provide a new ordination question: “Will you lead a life worthy of the calling you have been called to … in all humbleness, patience and forbearance?” “We’re chosen, she said. “This is a gift. We are all chosen.” Noting that the passage promotes unity and calls for maturity, she did not mention a key and, some would say timely, passage that says the church “should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting.”
Theological basis for ordination
Sanderson-Doughty led the discussion on the theological basis for ordination. She focused on “Calvin’s ordering of the ministry that influences our understanding of the ministry.”
For John Calvin, she said, there were two principal marks of the church. She quoted from Calvin’s Institutes on the Christian Religion: “Wherever we see the word of God purely preached and heard, and the sacraments administered according to Christ’s institution, there it is not to be doubted, a church of God exists.”
She noted that the Scots Confession, the oldest Reformed confession in the PCUSA’s Book of Confessions, also marked the church by those two criteria, but added “ecclesiastical discipline uprightly administered, as God’s Word prescribes, whereby vice is repressed and virtue nourished.”
Qualification for leadership is not instantaneous, she added, again quoting Calvin: “We see how God, who could in a moment perfect his own, nevertheless desires them to grow up into manhood solely under the education of the church.”
“While today, we think of discipline as a matter of punishment and judgment, our tradition suggests discipline is primarily a matter of accountability, a call to reconciliation,” she said.
She said Calvin ordered his ministry out of his ecclesiology to “ensure the proper proclamation of the Word and the administration of the Sacraments in perpetuity … Because the church has a specific and important function to fulfill, offices are established to ensure its fulfillment. One of the most essential functions assigned to the order of ministry is teaching.”
Calvin led the church in Geneva with four offices: teacher or professor, teaching elder (pastor), ruling elder and deacon. After leading the task force through three lists of church offices and/or gifts (Ephesians 4, 1 Corinthians 12 and Romans 12), Sanderson-Doughty drew up a list four times as long as the four offices in Calvin’s time or the three in the PCUSA today (teaching elder, ruling elder and deacon).
“Which of these are reflected in our ordered ministry?” she asked “There’s a lot of flexibility for how people might have ordered ministry.”
Achtemeier said he found it interesting that the Presbyterian Church (USA) no longer considers seminary professorships as church offices. He also argued that Calvin had remarkably little to say about ordination standards.
Ordination – Polity and Practice
Demarest’s presentation on the polity and practice of ordination took note of how ordination issues have changed over the course of American Presbyterianism – and some of the problems that have evolved during that transition.
During his years in the ministry, Demarest said he had seen five changes in ordination questions, beginning with predecessor Northern and Southern denominations before the reunion of those two wings of Presbyterians into the Presbyterian Church (USA) in 1983. The questions have not been changed since then.
In the first Form of Government for Presbyterians in America (1788), there were only four questions:
- 1. Do you believe the Scriptures, of the old and new testament, to be the word of God, the only infallible rule of faith and practice?
- 2. Do you sincerely receive and adopt the confession of faith of this church, as containing the system of doctrine taught in the holy scriptures?
- 3. Do you promise to study the peace, unity, and purity of the church?
- 4. Do you promise to submit yourself, in the Lord, to the government of this Presbytery, or of any other Presbytery in the bounds of which you may be?
By 1886, the number of questions had been expanded to eight. Among the noteworthy changes:
- Rather than “submit” to the church’s government, candidates were asked, “Do you approve of the government and the discipline of the Presbyterian Church in these United States.”
- Rather than simply “study the peace, unity, and purity of the church,” they were asked: “Do you promise to be zealous and faithful in maintaining the truths of the gospel and the peace and purity of the Church, whatever persecution or opposition may arise unto you on the account.” “Unity” was noticeably absent.
- The list included a character question, asking candidates if they would be “endeavoring to adorn the profession of the gospel by your conversation, and walking with exemplary piety before the flock over which God shall make you overseer?”
There were several major changes in questions for candidates in connection with the Northern mainline denomination’s adoption of the Confession of 1967 and a new list of ordination questions.
Some of those changes effectively downplayed Scripture – which the Confession called the “words of men” – and raised up a Jesus who was above Scripture and not necessarily in agreement with it.
Finally, in 1983, the newly formed Presbyterian Church (USA) approved nine questions for candidates, including:
- “Do you accept the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be, by the Holy Spirit, the unique and authoritative witness to Jesus Christ in the Church universal, and by the Holy Spirit God’s word to you?”
Candidates were no longer to view Scripture as “the only infallible rule of faith and practice.” Scripture could therefore be judged by subjective standards.
Demarest noted that ordination standards have changed as well as the questions. The PCUSA now allows – and encourages – the ordination of women in all offices. Congregations that have not ordained women as elders or deacons can be disciplined. The standards no longer forbid the ordination of Presbyterians – male or female – who have been divorced.
“To our generation has been given the challenge of living within the body of Christ with increasin