Congregation to vote May 1 on whether to leave PCUSA
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, April 22, 2005
Mark Slomka, pastor of Mount Soledad Presbyterian Church, notified The Layman Online Friday that the congregational meeting to vote on whether to leave the Presbyterian Church (USA) has been postponed from May 1, as reported earlier, to June 5.
The congregation of Mount Soledad Presbyterian Church in La Jolla, Calif., will vote on June 5 on whether to leave the Presbyterian Church (USA) and join the Foursquare Church, a denomination born out of a 1922 revival in Oakland that was led by famed evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson.
Mark Slomka, the pastor of the Mount Soledad, has already informed the 318-member congregation that “the time has come for me to leave the Presbyterian Church (USA).”
The Mount Soledad session voted 20-0 with two abstentions to propose that the congregation leave the PCUSA and become a Foursquare congregation, with Slomka as the pastor. The Presbytery of San Diego has appointed an informal committee to monitor the process, but has not named an administrative commission or made any initiative to take over the property of the church.
Slomka, a long-time friend of Jack Hayford of Van Nuys, Calif., a leading pastor in the Foursquare movement, decided to leave the PCUSA after disagreeing with a decision by the Presbytery of San Diego to extend the call of an interim pastor who gave unsatisfactory answers to questions about his beliefs.
Slomka later filed a complaint challenging the presbytery, but a presbytery investigating committee ruled that there was no justification for a trial. The committee did not explain why the presbytery’s decision was upheld, although one observer said that the candidate must have provided a clearer and more orthodox statement of faith to the investigating committee. San Diego Presbytery is considered one of the more orthodox presbyteries in the PCUSA.
Nonetheless, the issue prompted Slomka and others in the presbytery to develop their own list of “essential tenets” to ask candidates for ordination as pastors, elders and deacons. The presbytery approved that list, which basically restated the key theological points in chapter 2 of the PCUSA’s Book of Order.
“The Presbytery of San Diego voted to renew the contract of an interim pastor whose theological confession of faith essentially denies the biblical witness to Jesus Christ and therefore renders him unfit as a pastor whose mandate is a Gospel ministry that will proclaim without compromise the life, truth, and hope that is extended to all through the person, power, presence, and promise of Jesus – Who alone is fully God, truly Son, and only Savior,” Slomka said in a lengthy article on his own Web site.
Slomka said the presbytery’s action “created a crisis of conscience within me for several reasons:
- I am a member of the Presbytery that is testifying to this pastor’s credentials to serve and therefore I cannot separate myself from the vote.
- The ethos of our denomination is that God speaks through the voice of the majority and therefore once a vote is cast, it is the responsibility of the dissenting members to join the larger group as if they had been part of the majority in the first instance.
- I cannot recognize that God would lead a body to a decision that so clearly compromises the Word He has spoken to the Church through Scripture and reiterates through the Holy Spirit concerning Jesus.
- I cannot remain indecisive, indifferent, or abstain before any theological confession that compromises or obscures His Incarnation, repudiates His substitutionary atonement, and minimizes the certainty that salvation comes only through Him.
- I cannot pastor you, or anyone else, with integrity if I remain passive and silent. My conscience, before God and you, would condemn me.”
Slomka’s posting reviewed the process by which he, and possibly the congregation, would become part of the Foursquare movement.
On April 1, Mount Soledad began a four-week series for the congregation, including statements by the elders and advisory council, an overview on church government and theology and “a celebration of vision, values, and opportunity before us.”
The final meeting will be held on May 1, when, following a question-and-answer session, members of the congregation will vote on whether to “seek the presbytery’s release to join Pastor Mark in fellowship with the Foursquare Church.”
The presbytery will have representatives at the meeting.
Mount Soledad, a member of the Confessing Church Movement within the Presbyterian Church (USA), is an unabashedly evangelical church with an emphasis on contemporary worship. According to denominational data for the year 2003, the congregationed attracts more people for worship (357) than it had members (318). The average per-member gift in 2003 was $2,849 – one of the highest figures in the denomination.