Panel members coaching each other on questions

Panel members coaching each other on questions

By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, January 16, 2006

How others are
answering the questions

• Web-based Calvinist groups raises seven questions for consideration by local church sessions.

• Overture unanimously approved by the Presbytery of Mississippi offers rationale for its proposal that General Assembly modify the task force report.

• Representatives of renewal organizations in the PCUSA, saying they were accepting the invitation of the task force to study and respond to the report, issued a critique signed by more than 400 Presbyterians.

• Presbyterians For Renewal issued a proposed Authoritative Interpretation titled “On Being Called to Covenant Community: Rightly Interpreting G-6.0108.”

• The Presbyterian Forum responds to the task force’s Recommendation # 5 that would give ordaining bodies the right to decide whether the “fidelity/chastity” ordination standard in the Book of Order is required for candidates for office.

• Presbyterian Lay Committee’s analysis of the task force report.

• An evaluation of the task force’s final report by Dr. Robert A.J. Gagnon, a professor at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.

• A detailed theological analysis of the task force’s report, Given and Sent in One Love: The True Church of Jesus Christ, a book by Presbyterian ministers-scholars Gerrit Scott Dawson and Mark R. Patterson.

• Presbyterian Reformed Ministries International has produced a video series (CDs or cassettes) on the task force report, including a study guide and a copy of Given and Sent in One Love: The True Church of Jesus Christ.

• In response to the task force report and past or pending actions in other mainline Protestant denominations, the Association for Church renewal issued a statement about the mainline “third way” policy to embrace homosexual acts.

ATLANTA – Members of the Theological Task Force on Peace, Unity and Purity have come up with a list of 32 questions and shared among themselves how they might answer them to put their best spin on the issues arising from their final report.

The questions represented an expansion of what one member of the panel, Barbara Wheeler, president of Auburn Theological Seminary, had jotted down during her presentations to presbyteries.

While foraging from their experiences in meetings with presbyteries and other Presbyterian groups, other members expanded Wheeler’s list from 27 to 32. A portion of their meeting in Atlanta Jan. 11-13 was devoted to task force members coaching each other on how to answer them.

While task force members criticized some of the critiques of their report as “misconceptions” and “inaccuracies,” they did not respond directly to those questions. Nor did they concede that critiques of their report included plausible arguments.

The questions that the task force is preparing for are:

1. How is what the report proposes in Recommendation 5 different from “local option?”

2. Does this mean that each presbytery/session sets its own standards and that anything goes?

3. Doesn’t this recommendation sacrifice purity and truth to unity?

4. Doesn’t this recommendation sacrifice justice to unity?

5. How can a national standard not be “essential?”

6. What are the essentials of Reformed faith and practice?

7. Who has the final authority to decide what is essential? Does the final decision rest with the General Assembly Permanent Judicial Commission? Can it overturn what a lower body deems essential?

8. If so, will there be many more judicial cases?

9. How does a scruple apply to behavior?

10. How does a scruple apply when we no longer have subscriptionism?

11. If this report is accepted, will gays and lesbians be ordained in the PCUSA?

12. If this report is accepted, will “practicing” gays and lesbians be ordained in the PCUSA?

13. If this report is accepted, does this mean that GLBT persons will be subject to witch hunts and judicial challenges?

14. If the report is accepted, will rigorous exams with hard questions really be conducted?

15. How will the exams work out? What will they look like?

16. If the report is accepted, will there be increased conflict at the local level?

17. If the report is accepted, could clergy ordained in one presbytery be prevented from transferring to another?

18. If the report is accepted, will the range of differences between presbyteries increase? Will we have two different churches, “red” and “blue” in the same denomination?

19. Will the report cause schism?

20. Isn’t the case that Recommendation 5 changes the constitution and, if so, shouldn’t the presbyteries vote on it?

21. How can the recommendations work in groups that do not, like the task force, have time and resources for discernment?

22. What is discernment? What does it look like and how is it done?

23. How can congregations use it? Presbyteries? The General Assembly?

24. What resources are available to help groups do discernment?

25. Are you proposing that the Book of Order do away with Roberts Rules of Order?

26. Why did liberal members of the task force agree to Recommendation 6?

27. Why did conservative members of the task force agree to Recommendation 5?

28. Why did the task force not recommend that G-6.0106b be deleted?

29. Does Recommendation 6 mean that the task force affirms G-6.0106b?

30. Will the General Assembly use any of the “alternative” methods suggested in the report?

31. Will the fighting about G-6.0106b resume soon after this report is accepted?

32. If G-6.0106b is eventually deleted, will this report protect those who still think that gays and lesbians should not be ordained?